News Disney foreign worker program

[rainforests1]

Disney turns heads with foreign worker program - Orlando Sentinel
Immoral and I believe illegal.

 

[Second Summer]

Disney turns heads with foreign worker program - Orlando Sentinel
Immoral and I believe illegal.

That article appears to be behind a pay wall. Or at least I can't view it from where I am.

 

[KLS52]

Same for me.

 

[Calliegirl]

That article appears to be behind a pay wall. Or at least I can't view it from where I am.

Same for me.

You can just throw in an email address to register, you don't have to verify it.

Hira said he made a Freedom of Information Act request for the wages of the employees of the outsourcing firm used by Disney. The median was about $62,000.
But he says he spoke to a laid-off Disney employee who was making about $100,000.

There had been plenty of other cases of companies laying off workers — and in even higher numbers than the 250 Disney let go.
A power company in southern California. Watch maker Fossil in Texas. Harley Davidson.
But there's something about a 40ish man at the happiest place on Earth losing his six-figure salary to a 20-something from India who will do the job for a lot less that is particularly jarring.

The whole image disrupts the idea that Disney is one of the nation's most muscular job creators. The company is the largest employer in Central Florida with 74,000 people.
And CEO Bob Iger serves on President Obama's Export Council, which is focused on expanding job opportunities for Americans.
Disney says it has created nearly 30,000 jobs in the U.S. during the past decade.
While the company cut 250 jobs and outsourced those duties to a contractor, it notes that its internal IT department will grow by 70 positions and that it's currently recruiting for about 100 roles.

As a college educated, minimum wage worker who is struggling to pay $500 in rent, I find it hard to identify with people making six figures and feel much sympathy. I would be thrilled with a job that paid half that.

I'm sure some of those people actually worked their way up and deserve those types of wages, but in my experience of knowing some of those highly paid people, they didn't earn it.

When it's taking jobs away from the lower class, struggling daily to eat group, then I'll get upset.

Also, that's just an opinion post, not an article.

 

[Andy_T]

More from the article.

That's the way some Disney employees felt when they were asked to train foreign workers, apparently flown in from India, to become their younger and cheaper replacements.

"I just couldn't believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly," one former worker, who wasn't named and is now unemployed, told The New York Times. "It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can't grasp it."

A Times report last week detailed the situation at Disney and other companies where positions are outsourced to companies that hire foreign workers who come to the United States on H-1B visas.

That particular visa is often described as a way to employ foreign workers when companies can't find enough skilled Americans to do the work.

It seems the specific problem is not that the jobs will go to people in a foreign country, but rather that those people from India would be flown in to the US to work there. I definitely understand that this is hopefully not what the people inventing this kind of visa were thinking about.

We have a similar challenge in Europe.

With the addition of the latest countries to the European Union, it is now possible for a person from the former Eastern Block countries like Czech, Slovak Republic, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania or similar to simply pack their things, move to Germany and apply for a job there.

And there is no really compelling reason that can explain why it should be logical or acceptable that the average wage of a janitor in Germany (EUR 1340/month) is higher than that of university professor in Poland (EUR 1150/month), considering the vastly different requirements of the job. Mind you, I simply selected the job of janitor as it is one of the lowest paying jobs in Germany.

I am working together with professional contractors in Romania, who are fluent in German and English, who are doing as good a job as people in the same industry (IT consulting and programming) in Germany, but who earn vastly less in Romania (So far, the costs of living in Romania are also still much lower). Now, both countries do belong to the European union, and people in Germany, Austria, France, the UK holding high-paying jobs (myself included) can only count themselves lucky that most people in those new European countries like their own countries too much to consider the move.