Three American workers are alleging that American fashion house Ralph Lauren shipped their company’s IT jobs from Lyndhurst, New Jersey to India.
In a petition to the Department of Labor, laid off Ralph Lauren employees Enrique Rollano, Pancreas Yeddanapally and Carmencita Vallejo, all Americans, say their jobs were stripped from them due to free trade policies and outsourcing by the company.
“Roles and assignments have been slowly but increasingly transferred to India,” the document states.
“Ralph Lauren Sales and Profit have decreased tremendously (ex. Stock price in 2012 was roughly $145/share versus May, 2017 at $66/share),” the petition continues. “In order to reduce overhead and increase profit, employees were laid-off including employees from the Lyndhurst NJ IT (Information Technology) department. Assignments continued to be given and transferred to consulting companies onsite and offshore to save on taxes (Social Security, Medicare and State Unemployment), Insurance (health care & basic life) and labor costs.”
Outsourcing expert John Miano, a fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart Texas that normally American workers in the manufacturing industry file petitions to the Department of Labor asking to be eligible for re-training programs after they’ve been displaced by outsourcing and offshoring.
But, the petition by the former Ralph Lauren employees portray an outsourcing business model that is no longer confined to giant tech corporations and manufacturing companies.
As Breitbart Texas previously reported, the elite fashion industry has taken full advantage of the H-1B visa, where hundreds of thousands of foreign workers are brought in to take American jobs, and free trade deals that have allowed for unfettered outsourcing.
The fashion industry is heavily paired up with the open borders lobby to make sure foreign worker flows to the U.S. and outsourcing can continue, untouched.
For example, Michael Kors hired Fragomen, Del Rey, Bernsen & Loewy LLP, the leading open borders law firm that regularly lobbies for increased legal immigration levels and higher numbers of foreign guest workers entering the U.S. who take jobs from American workers.
Over the past two decades, fashion manufacturing jobs in the U.S. have declined by more than 80 percent, dropping from about 900,000 jobs in 1990 to just 150,000 jobs in 2011, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
Just two years after the federal government enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), companies laid off a total of 706 American workers from fashion manufacturing jobs in the U.S., with 67,511 workers initially filing for unemployment. Between 1996 and 2011, companies laid off an average of 323 American workers every year in the fashion manufacturing industry.
In that same period, American workers in textile mills suffered an average of 200 layoffs per year. In 1996, some 1,040 American workers in the clothing, textile, and leather manufacturing industry were fired from their jobs
John Binder is a contributor for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.