81–90 of 148 posts
"... and they routinely sacrificed personal time and freedoms to help make your experience in the parks what it was". Never do this unless its a startup you own. You get paid for X to do Y hours and nothing more. Anything more is volunteer work for a for-profit employer.
Some of the incentives I can think of:
* possibility of a promotion, raise, bonus
* profit-sharing plan
* employee stock ownership plan
What Disney has done is certainly reprehensible but fully legal (given the "contractor" loophole in the H1-B program). However the backlash is focusing on the "them foreigners taking our Jobs" aspect a bit too much. What should be troubling is the fact that someone in the Executive Suite contracted out important IT functions (such as these jobs were I am assuming). If the CIO/CTO etc are perfectly wiling to disrupt c…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>And I say this as a non-citizen working in the US. If you don't mind answering a question I've had about this process for a while, it'd be great. Does your contract end at some point? Do you have options to stay in the US employed by another company?
I'm an at-will employee, sponsored by my employer. I can transfer the visa to a new employer by resubmitting an LCA, but if I lose my job for whatever reason I have ten days to get a new job or I'm out of the country. Now... finding a job, getting an interview, having an offer made, accepting the offer, and getting the paperwork in? Good luck doing that in ten days.
We should remove the sponsorship restriction and simply allow foreign workers who earn a minimum threshold. This is how Singapore does it. It might be 50k. It might be 70k. It might depend on geography and/or a market rate.
Want to control the flow of immigration for certain jobs? Simply raise or lower the thresholds.
I want to live in a country based on merit based principals that attracts the smartest and most hardworking people from around the world and to provide them the opportunities to start their businesses here.
I don't want to live in a country that schemes with immigration lawyers to rig a system that screws over foreigners and citizens alike for the benefit consulting firms that like to exploit workers.
We all lose when we allow class based systems to fester in our society.
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> We do exist in a global economy and you must therefore compete globally. I completely agree, but that's not what the H1-B visa program does. It allows companies to lock in immigrant workers at a lower rate and little to no job mobility. From a companies standpoint it is obviously what they want - pay less, and job lock in! The fix for the H1-B is true immigration reform. We need to make it easy for people to come t…
Why do we need to make it easy for people to come take our jobs? Why would we do that?
Those are not your jobs, those are jobs for the take. If you don't like the situation maybe you should consider aligning your interest with the people that is in the same boat with you, not necessarily with the ones who happen to share your nationality.
"I'm sharing news about it because this experience has taught me the H-1b Visa program needs to change to protect others in the future." It's surprising to me that Disney was able to replace its local workforce by foreigners via H-1b visas, since I always thought that companies making use of this type of visa were required to prove that they would not be able to find an employee with the required qualifications in th…
I believe the author is simply mistaken that H1-Bs are the problem. H1-Bs are limited enough that they can't be responsible for the volume of outsourcing. They also carry salary parity requirements, and while H1-B holders rarely actually make market salary, the savings still aren't enough to prompt a wave of outsourcing. There was a problem at one time with H1-Bs, but the H1-B lottery has become so competitive that i…
Your problem is opportunity hungry people in developing nations who will do anything for whatever salary offered.
Every thing else is a side effect of this. Do you think cutting down on L1 visas will change anything at all? In an era of communication being super cheap, and means of collaboration getting better and better, you can regulate as much visas as you want, those jobs will continue to be outsourced. The cost benefit is simply too enormous.
"I'm sharing news about it because this experience has taught me the H-1b Visa program needs to change to protect others in the future." It's surprising to me that Disney was able to replace its local workforce by foreigners via H-1b visas, since I always thought that companies making use of this type of visa were required to prove that they would not be able to find an employee with the required qualifications in th…
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They hired them through a third-party, thus Disney had to justify nothing. Look at the list of H1B awards and you'll see the big body shops.
I am having trouble understanding your point and hoping you can clarify it. Disney contracted with this company to perform this action. Isn't Disney responsible for accepting these actions?
HCL/Cognizant/Wipro/Tata/etc.: We offer an awesome IT work force for cheap.
Disney/American-company: Great. Of course, by this contract you accept full responsibility for making sure everything you do is legal.
HCL/Cognizant/Wipro/Tata/etc.: Naturally.
Reality steps in at this point. Various visas can be abused in the transaction. Unless there is national media attention like in this case, there is no pressure on the transaction to curb the abuses. The body shops don't care if one or a handful of citizens successfully complain and overturn their individual positions; these outsourcing+offshoring contracts are typically huge, and a few positions out of hundreds will not tank the deal. Even if abuse is uncovered (and lacking specific facts in even Disney's case, there is no telling if what happened actually would run afoul of any regulations), there are no interested parties with sufficiently deep pockets to judicially prosecute. Even if it was successfully prosecuted judicially, the fines are a slap on the wrist for the big body shops. Even if the case is big enough that the judiciary kicks over the case to the relevant executive agency(ies) for follow up, there is no incentive for the agency to enforce the regulations; the body shops are their biggest "customers". Diminishing volume by banning or restricting to a "sit up and take notice" level like 5% of historical grants, increases the agency's work load per granted visa. It is less effort for the agency to process fewer grants of big blocks of visas, so the big body shops are attractive grant targets for the federal agency's management. Even if the agency's management makes an exception to make its life harder for itself and decides to take action, its life doesn't just become operationally more difficult, but also politically, which can result in budget cuts in retaliation and rebound into more operational challenges.
The incentives are quite stacked against individual American workers without access to equivalent collectivized resources that corporations and syndicates have. This won't change until the cost of living in the US comes way down. The low-hanging fruit for US cost of living is real estate (not the buildings, the dirt), as that comprises a minimum of 30% of wages, and in expensive tech metro areas, closer to 50% of wages. That isn't likely to happen short of massive macroeconomic changes, so that is why I don't think this situation will change in the near to mid-term (4-5 decades) future, if ever.
I wonder if a Purchasing Power Parity (PPP)-based reciprocal visa exchange might help ameliorate the situation, at least for citizens who can work remotely. For X visas granted to a nation, that nation immediately grants X * PPP-factor resident visas with the same duration to a random lottery of Americans who sign up for it, with Americans displaced by an H1-B receiving priority. Make the identification of displaced workers by time not by job, to avoid companies gaming the system. If a company lays off a citizen within X time, and hires an H1-B into any position within the same time period, regardless of the H1-B's job position or geographic location, then that citizen is counted as displaced. If by PPP the median wage in the US is 10X over India, then for each H1-B granted India opens up 10 visas of the same duration for Americans by lottery (or give first dibs to anyone who is replaced by an H1-B). I don't see this really helping older American workers closer to retirement, but for the subset of the HN crowd who see a streamlined visa process to live in India while building out their MVP and getting revenue traction, taking the "living day-to-day" expenses portion of their seed funding and expanding it out 5-10X could be very attractive.
I usually don't comment on immigration policies because I'm a US citizen and have never been an immigrant worker, however I dont believe this affects the long term success or failure of the H1B visa program and nor should it. We do exist in a global economy and you must therefore compete globally. If a company feels that they can get equal talent to mine in another country for cheaper costs then so be it; I didn't do…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disney doesn't ask questions about how people are procured. From Disney's perspective, they're just hiring a company to take over technical operations and support. Technology is honestly not Disney's core competency, so it makes sense to outsource to someone who can do the same work with a lower cost base because it IS their core competency. They just have to sign a contract with Cognizant/Wipro/Infosys/etc that says…
I would somewhat disagree with the thought that technology is not Disney's core competency. Technology is a really, really big deal for Disney and has been for a long time. It is a major part of their day-to-day across the entire company and they are quite competent at it. They didn't hand these tasks over to someone else because they were somehow better at it or Disney's people were incompetent. I simply cannot beli…