General Electric (GE) workers in upstate New York are asking President Trump to intervene in shutting down an outsourcing scheme that would send work overseas to Poland.
As Breitbart News reported, Trump rebuked officials at the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) for their scheme to force about 200 American TVA workers out of their jobs in order to outsource that work to imported foreign H-1B visa workers.
The federally-owned TVA had contracted with outsourcing firms like Capgemini, CGI, and Accenture to transfer the U.S. jobs to the H-1B visa workers.
In response, Trump fired TVA Chair Skip Thompson, signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to ensure they are not displacing American workers, and got the TVA to reportedly end their outsourcing scheme that had been in the works.
Now, GE workers in Schenectady, New York are asking Trump to intervene in their case where they say GE is expected to outsource the building of three power plant generators — meant for the TVA — to Poland, according to the New York Post:
A worker at the plant told The Post “I almost spit my coffee out” while reading about what Trump did to TVA leaders for outsourcing tech jobs.
“He’s a hero in this building,” said the worker, who asked not to be named. “Our plea is please do not send more of our work overseas.”
Many workers at the factory, located northwest of Albany near the Mohawk River, are the second or third generations of their families to work there. They say the economic effects of COVID-19 sharply reduced new orders, and they need all the business they can get to avoid deep layoffs.
TVA officials said they have spoken with White House officials about reviewing federal contracts to make sure that American workers are not being displaced by outsourcing plans.
A spokesperson for the GE workers’ local union told the Post that they want Trump to order that generators for TVA be made in the United States, ending plans for three of six generators to be made in Poland by GE rather than at the Schenectady plant.
Outsourcing U.S. jobs to foreign H-1B visa workers is only the first step in the outsourcing-offshoring business model that has been used by multinational corporations with little to no government repercussions.
After fired Americans train their foreign replacements, the work eventually moves overseas entirely with the help of outsourcing firms often based in India. Corporations have been able to avoid blame by claiming they did not outsource the work, but rather the firm they contracted.
There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News. More than 85,000 Americans annually potentially lose their jobs to foreign labor through the H-1B visa program.
Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.
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