My Position On The Disney Layoffs

This is easily gamed by creating "new" positions with trivially different responsibilities than the old positions you want to get rid of. Now you don't have an established salary history to work with. That's on top of having H1B's by the shorthairs because its so difficult for them to switch jobs, thus the 60+ workweek the domestic workers rightfully balked at is achievable by cost-cutting managers.

That's on top of what Disney did, which was just outsource an entire department to a provider, which side-steps all the paltry protections in the H1B program.

>The majority of H1-B recipients these days are foreign nationals who attended American universities, often with masters degrees. Those are the kinds of foreign nationals we want participating in the US economy.

Frankly, in IT/CS a lot of higher degrees are little more than adult daycare. If you can't figure out how to code via a 4 year degree then another 2 ain't helping you. Even if Disney got MS holders because their workforce needed MS's for some weird reason, which sounds highly questionable to me, some nerds straight out of school aren't going to do a good job running operations with zero professional experience and 10 hours of training from the previous guy. Its clear they did this not for better outcomes but for cost savings.

Its likely an H1B has an undergrad degree for a foreign university that's little more than a diploma mill anyway.

Its hilarious that we bemoan the lack of people, especially women, in STEM, when many STEM jobs can be eliminated with the blessing of the federal government via whats essentially bought and paid-for legislation by large companies looking to cut IT costs. No wonder law school enrollments and finance higher ed degrees have been so high. The smart guys, and women in general apparently, know tech is a ripoff precisely because of shit like H1B's stealing their jobs. Lets stop excusing the H1B program. Its designed to take American jobs from Americans and everyone knows it.

How so? The idea of comparative advantage is that one country has a market, another, the means to provide for that market and you facilitate this 'trade'. India, China, pretty much most countries have plenty of top notch talent that cannot be satiated by opportunities within their own countries. These are not necessarily geniuses, but most high-performing highly skilled workers qualify. The satisfaction that these highly talented folks seek is often provided only in the US. For a moment, set aside the notion that people want to work in the US for greenbacks. This is only partially true, in my experience. Most friends and colleagues I know want to immigrate because their jobs are higher quality, as is the work culture, etc.

US provides the (job) market for top talent, China, India, Europe, etc. supply the talent.

Protectionism in this situation is just the act of putting ill-conceived roadblocks in this 'trade'. No one is asking for open borders, just a fair system where this 'trade' can be carried on smoothly.

Many large and profitable companies find themselves in the position of systematically paying high wages for objectively mediocre employees, a situation that accreted over time. They may not have always been overpaid, just that over time their value and performance has become decoupled from their wages. If you've ever worked at old behemoth companies, they often have entire divisions full of employees that could be accurately described this way but the business is profitable enough overall to absorb paying large groups of people that do not produce much value. This is a management failure to the extent they allowed value and talent to become decoupled from wages over time.

So how does a company correct this so that pay more accurately reflects talent and value created? Asking employees to take a pay cut to reflect their market value is not feasible, particularly if the company is profitable. In these cases, paying the "prevailing wage" to H1b employees to do the same job on a wholesale basis is actually cheaper than the status quo and much easier than suddenly requiring existing employees to have pay that reflects their market value when the entire business unit is systematically overpaying for value.

Outsourcing of business units is often about clearing out deadwood divisions where few people have performed to their wage in ages. It is an unfortunate and real problem. It isn't just overseas either, I've seen this done entirely within the US many times. There is no easy way to re-couple wages and performance for a big organization when they have been allowed to drift apart for years so most companies opt for a complete reboot.