6 ms·

In Turnabout, Disney Cancels Tech Worker Layoffs

67 points by jonburs 11y ago

lmg643 11y ago
This doesn't seem like great reporting - largely unrelated to the Orlando event that triggered the NYT article. This worker's blog seemed pretty insightful: https://plus.google.com/+KeithBarrett/posts/PWA6BXs7dbS https://plus.google.com/+KeithBarrett/posts/PWA6BXs7dbS Taking his comment about revenue focused technology being developed in that office, it doesn't seem like it was a smart business move to lose the experience of the staff they had in place already.
learc83 11y ago
H-1Bs are supposed to be used to fill jobs for which qualified Americans can't be found, but to get around this, Disney lays off workers and brings in a consultancy to take over. The consultancy employs the H-1B workers, not Disney. There are so many loopholes that it seems like the only solutions are to either create a well funded agency/department to oversee this, or to increase the price far enough that H-1Bs are only viable as a last resort.
- protomyth 11y ago
  In my wildest dreams, I wish the tax system would allow the deduction of salaries and benefits payed to citizens but not to foreign workers. That would change the incentive for companies. Or, add a tax on foreign workers to help pay unemployment for citizens.
  - sremani 11y ago
    they already do collect medicare and social security from foreign workers.
    - daurnimator 11y ago
      You can get it back when you turn 65.
      - mahyarm 11y ago
        No you cannot, unless you have been paying into the system for 10 years. If you have, then you probably have a green card by then. If not, you should get one anyway since you've spent a decade of your life in the country that your pretty much american by that point. Legally and paying a lot of taxes. You would never get medicare treatment as only an H1-B worker, since if your unemployed, you cannot stay in the country long enough to be able to use medicare benefits much. So you effectively pay at %12 tax on your income that you will never see the benefits of unless you immigrate.
        daurnimator 11y ago
        > No you cannot, unless you have been paying into the system for 10 years. Ah yeah; But IIRC, there are some reciprocating treaties that let me get my money out? This mentions that for australians it is reduced to 18 months: https://www.dss.gov.au/about-the-department/international/international-social-security-agreements/current-international-social-security-agreements/factsheet-social-security-agreement-between-australia-and-the-united-states-of-america https://www.dss.gov.au/about-the-department/international/in...
    - protomyth 11y ago
      I want the company that receives the H1B to pay an addition tax on the salary that goes to unemployment. It needs to be something above an beyond what is payed for a citizen. After all, the H1B is supposed to have skills that the local workers don't and thus should be worth the extra money.
      - saool 11y ago
        Unless you are tarring ships, you mean paid, not payed. As an H1-B holder you have to jump through many hoops, including constant attention to your command of the language. How does it feel to be judged? :) More importantly, why would you expect more from a foreign applicant that from a local? The point is there shouldn't be discrimination, in either way. H1-Bs are for specialty occupations that are in high demand to begin with. Not sure what encourages you to be more catholic than the Pope.
        protomyth 11y ago
        > Unless you are tarring ships, you mean paid, not payed. > As an H1-B holder you have to jump through many hoops, including constant attention to your command of the language. How does it feel to be judged? :) I never brought up language issues, that is your hang-up and a distraction from my point. Further, if you think everyone isn't judged, then you are just loopy. > More importantly, why would you expect more from a foreign applicant that from a local? Because that is the stated legal purpose of the H1B program. It says that H1B workers have skills that the local programmers do not. > The point is there shouldn't be discrimination, in either way. In personal dealings, here we are talking about a government's responsibility to its citizens. > H1-Bs are for specialty occupations that are in high demand to begin with. If Disney decides to fire all its IT workers and replace them with contracted H1Bs then I would say the law failed. The purpose of the law is to fill knowledge gaps not add labor to the market. > Not sure what encourages you to be more catholic than the Pope. The law states the purpose.
        saool 11y ago
        Your whole premise is, and I quote, "H1B is supposed to have skills that the local workers don't and thus should be worth the extra money." That's false. I think you are mistaken about what an H1-B visa is: it's a temporary, non-immigrant visa that allows people with specialty occupations (and thus in high demand) to work for 6 years in the States. The skill condition (as determined by a LCA application) to get one is not that you should have extraordinary skills the locals don't (That would be an O-1 visa, or an EB-1), but rather that you have the skills and the degree, and that your employer is willing to compensate you as well as they would compensate a local. If you don't believe me, here's a link to USCIS: http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupation/understanding-h-1b-requirements http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupatio... I won't deny that there's abuse by big corporations using H1-Bs to hire people that look like seniors but are really junior in skill, but it's cause they skirt the law and have gotten away with it so far. I see no sanctions to Infosys or Tata for selling people with say, Junior Engineer skill as Seniors, but what I see lots of hate towards the H1-B workers. If Disney fired the senior IT guys and replaced them with recent graduates, told them to train them, it would be the exact same situation, only we wouldn't be hearing "they took our jobs". So as with everything in this country, the suits fuck the little guy over and the little guy blames the neighbor.
- untog 11y ago
  It doesn't actually seem that complicated - just stipulate that H1B workers must work on site, for the company they are employed for, not as a contractor. Obviously that would need enforcement, but they already do checkups on some of these things, and if they're paired with high enough fines these outsourcing firms won't risk it.
  - sremani 11y ago
    Follow the money, the US corporations are at least in their mind are saving a lot of operational cost with Outsourcing, so they do lobby for H1B workers of outsourced company to work in their campuses. Its not a coincidence that decades of Visa abuse is ignored, there are bigger forces than these outsourcing companies namely, the chamber of commerce et al.
- xienze 11y ago
  The other trick is to run job ads with impossible requirements (10+ years of Node.js, etc.) and hey, what do you know, we just don't have the skills required in this country!
  - kenrikm 11y ago
    I recall back in 2010 I saw job postings looking for a minimum 5 years experience writing iOS Apps. Never mind that the iOS SDK was only two years old at that point. #sigh
    - raverbashing 11y ago
      A lot of those is "job openings" that translate seniority to years of experience So the recruiter inputs "wants senior node.js dev" and the software outputs "10+ years Node.js"
- bsder 11y ago
  The solution is for H1-B workers to auto-convert to a green card after 12 months. Period. The company has 12 months to complete a security check and has to fund it itself. Now, if the company really needs a worker brought in on an H1-B, they will be very happy and the H1-B queue will continuously clear itself. However, if all they want is an indentured servant, that will get quashed when the green card arrives. Everybody wins--except for companies who abuse the H1-B program. Which is almost all of them. Which is why you never hear this solution.
  - rtpg 11y ago
    Exactly. The primary issue with H-1B is that it's attached to the company. As a nation, it's in our interest to pull in people with (supposedly) unique skills, and to incentivize them staying in the country. If the visa is not attached to the company, then the wage deflation effect will be much more minor. After all, the visa holder could just go to the company next door and get a higher wage if the initial company tries to pay too low a salary.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    Not everyone ones: American citizens who compete with immigrants for jobs. Or H1B immigrant's compete for overall quota spots with other immigrants, so those lose.
    - bsder 11y ago
      I compete with H1-Bs every day. I don't have a problem competing with the ones who have green cards since their salary isn't artificially deflated. I do have a problem competing with an H1-B who is 40% of my salary and is stuck that way for 5+ years (even if an H1-B is hired at mostly market rate--the lack of raise in a hot sector drops their relative salary very quickly).
  - kansface 11y ago
    Won't companies just fire the H1-Bs before the year is up and keep the treadmill rolling?
- tsotha 11y ago
  The H-1B visa should be eliminated. It's been nothing but a scam from the start. If there's a demand for a certain type of skill high wages will attract people to the field.
  - jahewson 11y ago
    High wages are not enough. It takes time to train people. It can take years. Demand for experienced workers can't be satisfied with newly trained workers. Demand for skilled workers can very easily exceed their supply. A good example of this problem currently is nurses in the Bay Area. They are very well paid however there is still a shortage because there isn't enough teaching available. The teachers are of course experienced nurses, so there's no way to increase the supply of teachers without further reducing the supply of nurses. So while supply and demand will solve them problem eventually, you might have to wait 20 years and in the world of business someone else is going to eat your lunch during that time.
    - RhodesianHunter 11y ago
      Very well paid is relative, especially when you factor in the cost of living somewhere like the Bay Area. I personally know several experienced nurses who would happily move if it meant increasing their overall standard of living. It's always about salary. The shortage of nurses could be easily filled if they were raised. Instead hospitals prefer to cut it close, running borderline unsafe units on busy days
    - tsotha 11y ago
      Twenty years? No way. Maybe five or ten years for something like nursing. Programmers can learn a language in a few months and become professionally proficient in two years or so. It's a lot closer to factory work than rocket science. Beyond that there are a bunch of 50+ year old guys with perfectly good skills who can't get jobs because they don't fit the common (erroneous) mental picture of a software developer. There's no shortage of IT people in the US and never has been.
      - 11y ago
- danmaz74 11y ago
  A simple enough solution is to require H-1B to be given only if the salary is X% above the industry average for the position. Then companies will only use them for people whose skills are actually difficult to find in the USA. Edit: wording
  - dagw 11y ago
    That would just lead to employers redefining which "industry" a particular position is in.
    - danmaz74 11y ago
      It's the whole company that operates in a given industry, not the particular position. If you're a software consulting company, you can't say you want a visa for a farming position...
      - jklein11 11y ago
        But you could create a "farming division" which then loans that employee to the software consulting division :)
      - dagw 11y ago
        Very few companies operate only within one industry
protomyth 11y ago
Thinking about it, perhaps some fine Congress Person could add a line to the H1B regulations that specifically states that an H1B cannot be billed out to other parties.
Animats 11y ago
"The Labor Department said last week that it had opened an investigation into two outsourcing companies, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys..." Disney was using both. And suddenly, Disney management decides that maybe violating labor law isn't such a good idea. The US has reasonably good labor laws, but weak enforcement and too-small penalties.
jamhan 11y ago
Now if only the Australian government would follow suit and follow through with investigations of similar practices here. Abuse of "skilled immigration" 457 visas is rampant.
rbanffy 11y ago
I am more than a bit shocked. Of course I assumed there would be some abuse of H1B visas, but I never imagined a company would give the workers being displaced proof of such abuse.
6stringmerc 11y ago
Let me get this straight - just as soon as the Department of Justice opens an investigation into the two major consultancies, Tata and Infosys, Disney decides to walk-back its plan of layoffs and replacement? At the end of the day, I'm sure this will get swept under the rug and nobody in an Executive position - at any company (Tata, Infosys, Southern Cal Edison, Fossil, Disney, etc) - will actually face prosecution as an individual for manipulating / corrupting the system. However, there may be a job or two lost in shuffling around in order to sign a declaration that "We admit no wrongdoing and promise not to do it again" which ties up the investigation and puts a bow on it. Case closed. Yet another metaphorical example of how the top tier of "business leaders" and decision makers pander to the top tier of the richest individuals ("investors") and have absolutely no disincentive to continually gutting the middle class and young generation of US Citizen workers who are ridiculously underemployed at this time.

67 points by jonburs 11y ago

This doesn't seem like great reporting - largely unrelated to the Orlando event that triggered the NYT article. This worker's blog seemed pretty insightful: https://plus.google.com/+KeithBarrett/posts/PWA6BXs7dbS https://plus.google.com/+KeithBarrett/posts/PWA6BXs7dbS Taking his comment about revenue focused technology being developed in that office, it doesn't seem like it was a smart business move to lose the experience of the staff they had in place already.

learc83 11y ago

H-1Bs are supposed to be used to fill jobs for which qualified Americans can't be found, but to get around this, Disney lays off workers and brings in a consultancy to take over. The consultancy employs the H-1B workers, not Disney. There are so many loopholes that it seems like the only solutions are to either create a well funded agency/department to oversee this, or to increase the price far enough that H-1Bs are only viable as a last resort.

protomyth 11y ago
In my wildest dreams, I wish the tax system would allow the deduction of salaries and benefits payed to citizens but not to foreign workers. That would change the incentive for companies. Or, add a tax on foreign workers to help pay unemployment for citizens.
- sremani 11y ago
  they already do collect medicare and social security from foreign workers.
  - daurnimator 11y ago
    You can get it back when you turn 65.
    - mahyarm 11y ago
      No you cannot, unless you have been paying into the system for 10 years. If you have, then you probably have a green card by then. If not, you should get one anyway since you've spent a decade of your life in the country that your pretty much american by that point. Legally and paying a lot of taxes. You would never get medicare treatment as only an H1-B worker, since if your unemployed, you cannot stay in the country long enough to be able to use medicare benefits much. So you effectively pay at %12 tax on your income that you will never see the benefits of unless you immigrate.
      - daurnimator 11y ago
        > No you cannot, unless you have been paying into the system for 10 years. Ah yeah; But IIRC, there are some reciprocating treaties that let me get my money out? This mentions that for australians it is reduced to 18 months: https://www.dss.gov.au/about-the-department/international/international-social-security-agreements/current-international-social-security-agreements/factsheet-social-security-agreement-between-australia-and-the-united-states-of-america https://www.dss.gov.au/about-the-department/international/in...
  - protomyth 11y ago
    I want the company that receives the H1B to pay an addition tax on the salary that goes to unemployment. It needs to be something above an beyond what is payed for a citizen. After all, the H1B is supposed to have skills that the local workers don't and thus should be worth the extra money.
    - saool 11y ago
      Unless you are tarring ships, you mean paid, not payed. As an H1-B holder you have to jump through many hoops, including constant attention to your command of the language. How does it feel to be judged? :) More importantly, why would you expect more from a foreign applicant that from a local? The point is there shouldn't be discrimination, in either way. H1-Bs are for specialty occupations that are in high demand to begin with. Not sure what encourages you to be more catholic than the Pope.
      - protomyth 11y ago
        > Unless you are tarring ships, you mean paid, not payed. > As an H1-B holder you have to jump through many hoops, including constant attention to your command of the language. How does it feel to be judged? :) I never brought up language issues, that is your hang-up and a distraction from my point. Further, if you think everyone isn't judged, then you are just loopy. > More importantly, why would you expect more from a foreign applicant that from a local? Because that is the stated legal purpose of the H1B program. It says that H1B workers have skills that the local programmers do not. > The point is there shouldn't be discrimination, in either way. In personal dealings, here we are talking about a government's responsibility to its citizens. > H1-Bs are for specialty occupations that are in high demand to begin with. If Disney decides to fire all its IT workers and replace them with contracted H1Bs then I would say the law failed. The purpose of the law is to fill knowledge gaps not add labor to the market. > Not sure what encourages you to be more catholic than the Pope. The law states the purpose.
        saool 11y ago
        Your whole premise is, and I quote, "H1B is supposed to have skills that the local workers don't and thus should be worth the extra money." That's false. I think you are mistaken about what an H1-B visa is: it's a temporary, non-immigrant visa that allows people with specialty occupations (and thus in high demand) to work for 6 years in the States. The skill condition (as determined by a LCA application) to get one is not that you should have extraordinary skills the locals don't (That would be an O-1 visa, or an EB-1), but rather that you have the skills and the degree, and that your employer is willing to compensate you as well as they would compensate a local. If you don't believe me, here's a link to USCIS: http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupation/understanding-h-1b-requirements http://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupatio... I won't deny that there's abuse by big corporations using H1-Bs to hire people that look like seniors but are really junior in skill, but it's cause they skirt the law and have gotten away with it so far. I see no sanctions to Infosys or Tata for selling people with say, Junior Engineer skill as Seniors, but what I see lots of hate towards the H1-B workers. If Disney fired the senior IT guys and replaced them with recent graduates, told them to train them, it would be the exact same situation, only we wouldn't be hearing "they took our jobs". So as with everything in this country, the suits fuck the little guy over and the little guy blames the neighbor.
untog 11y ago
It doesn't actually seem that complicated - just stipulate that H1B workers must work on site, for the company they are employed for, not as a contractor. Obviously that would need enforcement, but they already do checkups on some of these things, and if they're paired with high enough fines these outsourcing firms won't risk it.
- sremani 11y ago
  Follow the money, the US corporations are at least in their mind are saving a lot of operational cost with Outsourcing, so they do lobby for H1B workers of outsourced company to work in their campuses. Its not a coincidence that decades of Visa abuse is ignored, there are bigger forces than these outsourcing companies namely, the chamber of commerce et al.
xienze 11y ago
The other trick is to run job ads with impossible requirements (10+ years of Node.js, etc.) and hey, what do you know, we just don't have the skills required in this country!
- kenrikm 11y ago
  I recall back in 2010 I saw job postings looking for a minimum 5 years experience writing iOS Apps. Never mind that the iOS SDK was only two years old at that point. #sigh
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    A lot of those is "job openings" that translate seniority to years of experience So the recruiter inputs "wants senior node.js dev" and the software outputs "10+ years Node.js"
bsder 11y ago
The solution is for H1-B workers to auto-convert to a green card after 12 months. Period. The company has 12 months to complete a security check and has to fund it itself. Now, if the company really needs a worker brought in on an H1-B, they will be very happy and the H1-B queue will continuously clear itself. However, if all they want is an indentured servant, that will get quashed when the green card arrives. Everybody wins--except for companies who abuse the H1-B program. Which is almost all of them. Which is why you never hear this solution.
- rtpg 11y ago
  Exactly. The primary issue with H-1B is that it's attached to the company. As a nation, it's in our interest to pull in people with (supposedly) unique skills, and to incentivize them staying in the country. If the visa is not attached to the company, then the wage deflation effect will be much more minor. After all, the visa holder could just go to the company next door and get a higher wage if the initial company tries to pay too low a salary.
- gohrt 11y ago
  Not everyone ones: American citizens who compete with immigrants for jobs. Or H1B immigrant's compete for overall quota spots with other immigrants, so those lose.
  - bsder 11y ago
    I compete with H1-Bs every day. I don't have a problem competing with the ones who have green cards since their salary isn't artificially deflated. I do have a problem competing with an H1-B who is 40% of my salary and is stuck that way for 5+ years (even if an H1-B is hired at mostly market rate--the lack of raise in a hot sector drops their relative salary very quickly).
- kansface 11y ago
  Won't companies just fire the H1-Bs before the year is up and keep the treadmill rolling?
tsotha 11y ago
The H-1B visa should be eliminated. It's been nothing but a scam from the start. If there's a demand for a certain type of skill high wages will attract people to the field.
- jahewson 11y ago
  High wages are not enough. It takes time to train people. It can take years. Demand for experienced workers can't be satisfied with newly trained workers. Demand for skilled workers can very easily exceed their supply. A good example of this problem currently is nurses in the Bay Area. They are very well paid however there is still a shortage because there isn't enough teaching available. The teachers are of course experienced nurses, so there's no way to increase the supply of teachers without further reducing the supply of nurses. So while supply and demand will solve them problem eventually, you might have to wait 20 years and in the world of business someone else is going to eat your lunch during that time.
  - RhodesianHunter 11y ago
    Very well paid is relative, especially when you factor in the cost of living somewhere like the Bay Area. I personally know several experienced nurses who would happily move if it meant increasing their overall standard of living. It's always about salary. The shortage of nurses could be easily filled if they were raised. Instead hospitals prefer to cut it close, running borderline unsafe units on busy days
  - tsotha 11y ago
    Twenty years? No way. Maybe five or ten years for something like nursing. Programmers can learn a language in a few months and become professionally proficient in two years or so. It's a lot closer to factory work than rocket science. Beyond that there are a bunch of 50+ year old guys with perfectly good skills who can't get jobs because they don't fit the common (erroneous) mental picture of a software developer. There's no shortage of IT people in the US and never has been.
    - 11y ago
danmaz74 11y ago
A simple enough solution is to require H-1B to be given only if the salary is X% above the industry average for the position. Then companies will only use them for people whose skills are actually difficult to find in the USA. Edit: wording
- dagw 11y ago
  That would just lead to employers redefining which "industry" a particular position is in.
  - danmaz74 11y ago
    It's the whole company that operates in a given industry, not the particular position. If you're a software consulting company, you can't say you want a visa for a farming position...
    - jklein11 11y ago
      But you could create a "farming division" which then loans that employee to the software consulting division :)
    - dagw 11y ago
      Very few companies operate only within one industry

protomyth 11y ago

Thinking about it, perhaps some fine Congress Person could add a line to the H1B regulations that specifically states that an H1B cannot be billed out to other parties.

Animats 11y ago

"The Labor Department said last week that it had opened an investigation into two outsourcing companies, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys..." Disney was using both. And suddenly, Disney management decides that maybe violating labor law isn't such a good idea. The US has reasonably good labor laws, but weak enforcement and too-small penalties.

jamhan 11y ago

Now if only the Australian government would follow suit and follow through with investigations of similar practices here. Abuse of "skilled immigration" 457 visas is rampant.

rbanffy 11y ago

I am more than a bit shocked. Of course I assumed there would be some abuse of H1B visas, but I never imagined a company would give the workers being displaced proof of such abuse.

6stringmerc 11y ago

Let me get this straight - just as soon as the Department of Justice opens an investigation into the two major consultancies, Tata and Infosys, Disney decides to walk-back its plan of layoffs and replacement? At the end of the day, I'm sure this will get swept under the rug and nobody in an Executive position - at any company (Tata, Infosys, Southern Cal Edison, Fossil, Disney, etc) - will actually face prosecution as an individual for manipulating / corrupting the system. However, there may be a job or two lost in shuffling around in order to sign a declaration that "We admit no wrongdoing and promise not to do it again" which ties up the investigation and puts a bow on it. Case closed. Yet another metaphorical example of how the top tier of "business leaders" and decision makers pander to the top tier of the richest individuals ("investors") and have absolutely no disincentive to continually gutting the middle class and young generation of US Citizen workers who are ridiculously underemployed at this time.