Twenty-three former IT employees at Disney are preparing to sue the company, having been replaced by foreign workers on H-1B visas, according to a report from Computer World.
The former employees have filed complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) alleging that they are victims of national origin discrimination. The EEOC will investigate can bring its own lawsuit or issue a right-to-sue letter.
Sara Blackwell, the Florida attorney representing the former Disney workers, appeared on Sirius XM’s Breitbart News Daily and discussed the problem of H-1B visas.
“Right now all of the technology jobs, 90 percent of them are being filtered to H-1B visa holders here and then off-shoring to other countries” said Blackwell.”Knowledge transfer is what we’re doing.”
Blackwell also argued that H-1b visas are being abused:
The purpose of H-1B is if there is no qualified American then the H-1B person can come over and fill that position because we need them. Well, there are qualified Americans because they’re being fired, but guess what, if this keeps going there aren’t going to be any qualified Americans because we’re training all our knowledge — sending it overseas and we’re training all the H1B workers here and we’re not giving Americans the opportunity to make a decent wage or have a job so America has no future in technology, at this point.
Leo Perrero, one of the former Disney workers, told Breitbart News Daily how he was laid off even after receiving a great performance review.
“We thought we were being called into a last minute meeting for pats on the back and bonuses but it turned out to be the complete opposite. We were called into a room of about two dozen people to be told we had to train our foreign replacements and if we didn’t, we wouldn’t get a bonus.”
“Essentially I was given 90 days notice to train my foreign replacement. This person was flown in just days before this whole thing happened,”
The issue of H-1b visa hasn’t gained much attention in the presidential campaign, but it’s an issue that’s supported by Florida Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio. According to Computer World:
One potential result of a Disney legal fight is to keep the visa-related displacement issue alive during the presidential race. The Disney workers affected were based in the Orlando area, in the home state of presidential candidate Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, a leading proponent of increasing the visa cap.
Rubio is a co-sponsor of the legislation, the I-Square bill, which would raise the H-1B’s annual base cap of 65,000 to 195,000 and eliminate any cap on people who earn advanced degrees at U.S. universities. Rubio, in remarks at the most recent debate earlier this month, said he wanted any firm that abused the program barred from it. But he didn’t offer any specifics about what constitutes abuse and how it would be enforced.
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