Who is really to blame?
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: The blow by blow account of a veteran American IT professional with two decades of work experience, who was fired from his job at Disney, in Florida, and replaced with a worker from India provided by Infosys whom he helped train “with a good attitude” and videotaped “knowledge transfer sessions”- to get a severance package – and as narrated to the Daily Caller, makes for distressing reading.
It’s obvious that something is terribly wrong with American corporate culture and policies which inflict this kind of mental cruelty to long-standing employees who have helped build the company, with no regard to the harm they do to the individual.
A pink slip one fine day, and shown the door, is shocking enough. Firing employees en masse, making them sick to the core of their stomach and soul for 90 days, forcing them to smile, and act with bonhomie (did Disney appoint managers to check ‘good attitude’, courtesy, and smiles?), as they ease a foreign worker into their cubicle, sounds harrowing, wrong. And anybody who did avail of that carrot of a severance package did it only for their and their family’s sustenance. Egos be damned.
In the case of the Disney worker who narrated his ordeal to the Daily Caller, he had only recently been given the highest rating at a performance review, given a raise. When he walked into a meeting last October, he expected a promotion. Instead, he was given a 90-day termination notice, with the provision that he train his replacement worker from India. Disney outsourced their IT operations to Infosys. Just a week or two before the mass firings, Disney announced record-breaking profits for the company.
The worker recounted how the Disney office was inundated with workers from India, most of whom were fresh out of college. In the first phase, the foreign worker sat next to the American worker in “knowledge transfer sessions,” and videotaped everything they said and did, and then reviewed the tapes with the American worker to ensure accuracy.
In the second phase, the guest worker began working alongside the American worker, who was supposed to oversee and critique them. And in the last 30 days the guest worker completely took over the American worker’s job, while the American worker sat by and watched, tasked only with keeping them from making serious mistakes.
“It was really, extremely uncomfortable,” the ex-employee said, to the Daily Caller. “You’re thinking ‘I can’t believe that I’ve worked this many years for this company, and I’ve worked these crazy on-call hours, and I’ve worked in the middle of the night on all these projects, and they’re just replacing me with somebody from India. And then that person is in the same room with you.”
On their last day of employment, he and the other replaced workers were asked to turn over their badges, their Disney season passes, their laptops and then asked to leave.
“It was just a complete shock that you could do that in this country,” he said, revealing that his lawyer plans to file a class action lawsuit soon against Disney. “I’m a really patriotic person, and I just can’t see more people suffer because of this. It’s just so humiliating and so anti-American. It’s just, it’s just terrible. It’s just awful.”
He added: “There’s not a shortage of IT workers but all the jobs are vanishing. “I’m completely, completely disenfranchised by IT. I want to have nothing to do with it now. I’m doing my best to get out of it, because there is no future in IT. I would never recommend it to my children.”
He also adds: “I can see how we do need people coming into our country that want to come here and build a life, and have a family here, and stay here for the long run, and bring things into our country we don’t have. But this is clearly not the case whatsoever. This is purely a cost cutting measure, and it benefits the companies, and hurts our country and hurts our workers.”
The question is: who is to blame for the mass firings at Disney and the poor treatment of their workers? Is it Disney? Is it corporate greed? Infosys? Is it the foreign workers from India? Is it the US government and their policies of outsourcing?
Read a story in The American Bazaar of workers fired at Disney:
It’s a difficult question to answer. But one thing is for sure. Infosys and the Indian workers who replaced those unfortunate and aggrieved American employees at Disney are not to be blamed either.
What needs to be ensured is that American workers are not replaced with ‘cheap, foreign labor’ as many experts talk about. That policy has to come from Capitol Hill, Congress. And when it comes to ‘cheap labor’ it’s not the workers who emigrate to the US on H-1B visas or those who get H-1B visas after studying at American colleges and universities on F1 student visas, who are the culprits. There are only 85,000 of those H-1B visas annually, including the 20,000 reserved for foreign graduates, every year. A lottery is held to determine who gets those visas, many aspirants don’t.
A lot of those H-1B visas go to also workers who are hired in non-IT fields. Those visas also come with the provision that no American worker should be replaced when somebody is hored on that particular visa. The salary paid to those who are hired on H-1B visas are on par or more than what is the prevailing wage in the industry.
The culprit and perhaps the reason why American workers in companies like Disney, Fossil and Southern California Edison are replaced with Indian workers and they forced to train them too, perhaps is the L visas, which evades all the mandatory rules laid out for the H-1B visas, and companies like Infosys, Wipro and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), to name the top three IT service firms in India, use to place temporary workers in America, at wages which they themselves determine – and is more to the standards of the Indian IT industry.
These Indian workers on L visas could be termed like termites who eat away slowly at American jobs and way of life, but again, are they really to blame? If corporate companies in America, with the backing of the US government, who do not want to be seen as protectionist, give them an opportunity, of course, they will avail of it.
If indeed, the workers at Disney and Southern California Edison were replaced by H-1B workers, then it’s wrong and unlawful; the companies should be fined and punished. If they were replaced by workers on L visas, then it’s a growing menace that needs to be curbed.
Recently, president Barack Obama indicated that he will expand provisions to ease rules for the IT industry, in countries like India and China, to be able to send more IT workers to do jobs in the US. Despite claims to the contrary – one of them being that more workers would add jobs down the road, it could spell doom for many more American IT workers, who would surely be replaced with cheap labor from countries like India, who might come on L visas, given the shortage of H-1B visas.
The recent recession taught corporate America not to burden its payroll with excess employees. The good thing is that with corporate America being watchful of hiring, indulging in cost trimming even when profits are high, there’s little chance of another big downturn in the economy.
At the same time, corporate America has to also adhere by some rules when it comes to treatment of its employees. What has happened at places like Disney is wrong to the core.
But the irony of it all is that in 10 years’ time, the grouse of American workers likely won’t be against foreign workers. It would be against robots, Artificial Intelligence, who would eat away jobs with scant regard or respect.
Whom do you blame then?
(Sujeet Rajan is the Editor-in-Chief of The American Bazaar)
3 Comments
I really don’t see how it makes sense to have any immigration when real wages and consumer confidence are so low. This is based on the poorly reasoned theoretical framework that the point of law is to maximize GDP without regard to the wealth of the majority of the people. This is morally wrong. The only reason to have a democratic capitalism is to increase happiness for the most people. What paid off politicians and the megacorps are essentially saying now, is “Let them eat cake”.
easy question: the voters are to blame — they elect pro-outsourcing politicians
as for the ‘robots’ — somebody will have to design/program/maintain the robots — and those jobs will all be done by foreigners
Great article. The richer Disney gets, the less they remember Walt.