Looks like there is trouble brewing in the ‘Mouse House’; the entertainment giant Walt Disney has laid off over 250 employees and replaced them with Indians holding H1-B visas, raising new questions on how outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas to bring immigrants into technology jobs in the US.
According to sources close to the development, the jobs which have been filled by immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers were hired by an Indian outsourcing firm. For three months, Disney employees were asked to train the very people who took their jobs.
The layoff comes amid the continued debate over immigration reform in the US as the temporary work visas are at the centre of a fierce debate in Congress over whether they complement American workers or displace them.
The H1-B visa programme has come under the scanner for being used to bring in immigrants to do the work of Americans for less money, with laid-off American workers having to train their replacements, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
The layoff caused huge resentment among the Disney employees, who said they were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.
“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” the report quoted a former Disney worker as saying. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”
The report added that Disney executives said the layoffs were part of a re-organisation, and that the company opened more positions than it eliminated.
“But the layoffs at Disney and at other companies… are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the US,” it said.
H-1B immigrants work for less than American tech workers. The savings have been 25 per cent to 49 per cent in recent cases, according to a few reports. “But Disney directly employs fewer than 10 H-1B workers, executives said, and has not been prominent in visa lobbying,” the report quoted officials of the organisation as saying.
Many American companies use H-1B visas to bring in small numbers of foreigners for jobs demanding specialised skills but for years, most top recipients of the visas have been outsourcing or consulting firms based in India, or their American subsidiaries, that import workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units and to cut costs.
Several companies, including Southern California Edison, have used outsourcing companies to replace their American workers. Several of the outsourcing firms – Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and HCL America and others – were among the top companies to receive H-1B visas.
Some of the laid off employees, like those who were laid off in 2013 by Northeast Utilities, were forced to sign agreements to not publicly criticise the company as part of their severance packages. At Disney, of those fired, 120 found new jobs within the company, about 40 retired or left before the end of the transition period and another 90 did not find jobs within Disney.
