.
2/4/15, "Southern California Edison IT workers 'beyond furious' over H-1B replacements," Patrick Thibodeau, computerworld.com
"Information technology workers at Southern California Edison (SCE) are
being laid off and replaced by workers from India. Some employees are
training their H-1B visa holding replacements, and many have already
lost their jobs.
The employees are upset and say they can't understand how H-1B guest workers can be used to replace them.
The
IT organization's "transition effort" is expected to result in about
400 layoffs, with "another 100 or so employees leaving voluntarily," SCE
said in a statement. The "transition," which began in August, will be
completed by the end of March, the company said.
"They
are bringing in people with a couple of years' experience to replace us
and then we have to train them," said one longtime IT worker. "It's
demoralizing and in a way I kind of felt betrayed by the company."
SCE,
Southern California's largest utility, has confirmed the layoffs and
the hiring of Infosys, based in Bangalore, and Tata Consultancy Services
(TCS) in Mumbai. They are two of the largest users of H-1B visas.
The
utility has a large IT department. In 2012, before any layoffs, it had
about 1,800 employees, plus an additional 1,500 contract workers.
Computerworld interviewed, separately, four affected SCE IT employees. They agreed to talk on the condition that their names not be used.
The IT employees at SCE are "beyond furious," said a second IT worker.
The
H-1B program "was supposed to be for projects and jobs that American
workers could not fill," this worker said. "But we're doing our job.
It's not like they are bringing in these guys for new positions that
nobody can fill.
"Not one of these jobs being filled by India was a job that an Edison employee wasn't already performing," he said.
SCE
said the transition to Infosys and Tata "will lead to enhancements that
deliver faster and more efficient tools and applications for services
that customers rely on. Through outsourcing, SCE's information
technology organization will adopt a proven business strategy commonly
and successfully used by top U.S. companies that SCE benchmarks
against."
The employees say that some of SCE's U.S.
workers have been training their replacements, either in person in SCE's
IT offices or over Web sessions with workers in India. The IT workers
say the Indian tech workers do not have the skill levels of the people
they are replacing.
The SCE outsourcing "is one more
case, in a long line of them, of injustice where American workers are
being replaced by H-1Bs," said Ron Hira, a public policy professor at
Howard University, and a researcher on offshore outsourcing. "Adding to
the injustice, American workers are being forced to do 'knowledge
transfer,' an ugly euphemism for being forced to train their foreign
replacements.
Americans should be outraged that most of our politicians
have sat idly by while outsourcing firms have hijacked the guest worker
programs."
"The majority of the H-1B program is now being used to
replace Americans and facilitate the offshoring of high wage jobs," Hira
said.
SCE said Infosys and Tata were selected through a
competitive process that began "with eight potential vendors, some of
them United States-based.
"The decision made to contract
with Infosys and TCS was made following vendor site visits, some in
India, and in-depth reviews of prospective vendors' operations," the
utility said.
SCE employees said that since August, when the layoffs began,
the composition of the IT workplace began to change. "I see a lot of
Indian people walking the halls, and less Americans," said a third IT
worker interviewed.
Employee observations of an
increasing number of foreign workers in their workplace is backed up by
U.S. Labor Department filings. Employers have to file wage data of
foreign workers and their workplace location with federal authorities in
a form called a Labor Condition Application (LCA). In Irwindale,
California, where SCE runs a major part of its IT operations, the two
offshore companies had as many as 180 LCAs, and in a random check of
these applications, every address matched an SCE location.
Displaced
IT workers have long protested and complained about the use of H-1B
workers, but they are overshadowed by large tech companies that lead
H-1B lobbying efforts in Washington. IT workers are also effectively
silenced through severance agreements that include non-disparagement
clauses and confidentiality provisions, as well as fears that public
complaining may hurt re-employment prospects.
Replacing
U.S. workers with H-1B workers violates the spirit if not the letter of
the law. Hira pointed out that as a part of the application process to
obtain H-1B approval from the Labor Department, an employer is required
to attest to the following: "Working Conditions: The employer attests
that H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 foreign workers in the named occupation will not
adversely affect the working conditions of workers similarly employed."
This statement is in Form 9035CP of the LCA.
Further, Hira noted that the Labor Department states,
"The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires that the hiring of a
foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working
conditions of U.S. workers comparably employed.
"The SCE
case is clearly one where the hiring of the H-1B is adversely affecting
the wages and working conditions of American workers," Hira said. "There
isn't a clearer cut case of adverse impacts - the American worker is
losing his job to an H-1B." Hira believes that the U.S. Secretary of
Labor has the authority to investigate these cases.
The
use of H-1B workers has other implications as well. They are mostly
young, under 35 years of age, according to government data, and the SCE
workers interviewed said many older workers were being laid off. H-1B
workers are also overwhelmingly male. The IEEE has estimated that as
many as 85% are males.
Although H-1B workers have to be
paid prevailing wages, a data analysis of wages that Hira conducted
found that H-1B workers cost employers less. The national median wage
for an Infosys worker over a recent three-year period was $60,000 per
year and for Tata it was $64,900, he said.
These are figures that are
lower than what appear in salary surveys, including Computerworld's annual survey.
H-1B workers employed by offshore outsourcing companies are less likely
to become permanent residents. Infosys sponsored only 2% of its workers
for permanent U.S. residency over a three-year period and Tata, none,
he said.
Northeast Utilities in Connecticut
last year made a similar decision to SCE's and brought in foreign
contractors on visas. More than 200 U.S. IT workers lost their jobs.
Some
of the SCE employees say the outsourcing move is linked to a 2012
report that found fault with the IT management culture. The report, by a
consulting firm's incident management team, followed a December 2011 shooting,
where an employee fatally shot two IT managers and wounded two other
workers before taking his own life. The gunman worked in the IT
department.
The consultants interviewed IT workers who told them that
some managers were "autocratic, authoritarian and draconian in their
approach." Full-time employees complained of working excessive hours,
including weekends and holidays. The report said that "these difficult
and exhausting conditions are reportedly having adverse consequences on
employees health, including increased stress and irritability."
Prior to the outsourcing agreements, the SCE employees said there were a series of layoffs, including managers.
SCE
said it is helping affected employees with severance, and other
benefits, including "job fairs and other possible opportunities with
other organizations within SCE."
"SCE does not take this action lightly and it is assisting employees through this difficult period," the utility said.
But
the third employee interviewed said it did not appear that the company
was interested in keeping any of the IT workers targeted for layoffs,
and they weren't being offered the chance to apply for other jobs. "They
just want to get rid of us and clean house," said this IT worker, who
now worries about keeping her home." via Levin twitter
.
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