Disney’s Wild IT Ride

http://aknextphase.com/disneys-wild-it-ride/

The Timeline

In a nutshell, here’s the timeline of what happened:

October 2014: 250 employees in the IT department at Disney Parks and Resorts in Orlando, FL were told that their jobs were being transferred to workers from India brought in by an outsourcing firm using H-1B visas. As a condition for receiving severance pay and a measly four months of unemployment insurance, they had to train their replacements. That meant sitting with them every day, teaching their jobs to people who were far less qualified and experienced than the Disney employees.

January 30, 2015: The New York Times runs an article, “Pink Slips at Disney, but First Training Replacements” by Julia Preston that “outs” Disney’s callous and miserly action to millions of Disney theme parks customers. A furor ensues.

April 29, 2015: Computerworld publishes Senior Editor Patrick Thibodeau’s article, “A restructuring and H-iB use affect the Magic Kingdom’s IT operations,” on the Parks and Resorts layoff. Negative publicity and social media follows.

Late May, 2015: Disney lays off 35 technology employees at their ABC Television Group in New York City and Burbank, CA. These people were also forced to train their replacements, immigrants brought in by an outsourcing company using H-1B visas. Their last day was scheduled to be July 31.

June 11, 2015: Disney/ABC Television Group cancels plans to lay off the New York and Burbank employees.

June 19, 2015: Mr. Thibodeau (@DCgov) reports in @Computerworld that Disney/ABC Television Group has reversed its decision and rescinded the layoffs, granting a “reprieve” to the 35 affected employees.

July 2015: The U.S. Department of Labor begins investigating Disney—and the labor contractor HCL America—in response to complaints filed by several of the Orlando workers who had lost their jobs in the January layoff.

There’s nothing like shining a light on abuse and the negative publicity for @DisneyParks in all of this has been significant. It has not been enough, however for Disney to cancel the layoffs in Orlando and rehire the employees it discarded there in favor of cheaper immigrant labor. To find out what that felt like, you can read a first-hand account from a Displaced Disney Cast member on Breitbart B.

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Robert Iger, Disney’s CEO is a co-chair (along with Michael Bloomberg and Rupert Murdoch) of the Partnership For a New American Economy, a group that supports immigration reform. (BTW: Mr. Iger makes $46,000,000 a year.)

The organization promotes tripling the current 85,000 available H-1B visas under a program called “I-Squared” that was introduced by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT). With this kind of reform, we won’t get a new economy. We’ll get a lot more pink slips for Americans in STEM jobs.

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