As the trend of replacing American workers with cheaper, foreign labor through H-1B visas continues to escalate, the New York Times has found some workers who are willing to speak out about how it affects their job opportunities and wages. In some cases, the American workers were forced to train their replacements for months in order to receive their severance pay when they were eventually laid off.
Many of the replaced workers have been afraid to speak out due to clauses in their severance agreements that prohibit them from speaking out against their former employers. When Marco Peña was told he was one of the 150 Abbott Laboratories that were being replaced with foreign H-1B workers he decided to not sign the nondisparagement agreement, a decision that cost him around $10,000 in severance pay.
“I just didn’t feel right about signing,” Peña said. “The clauses were pretty blanket. I felt like they were eroding my rights.”
At first Peña and the other workers were told that they would be forced to train their own replacements but after Sen. Durbin (D-Ill.) sent a letter to the CEO of Abbott Laboratories criticizing the layoffs the plans were changed so that the foreign workers were trained by staff that would remain employed at the company. However, one Abbott worker said he was forced to prepare a 90-page manual detailing his work in order tor receive his severance pay. He has a disabled child and needed the extended medical care attached to the nondisparagement agreement.
The worker, who asked to remain anonymous, spoke out about the experience and against the use of H-1B visas to replace American workers.
“I’ve been laid off before, I can understand that,” he said. “But these visas were meant to fill in gaps for resources that are hard to find. This time the company actually asked me to transfer my knowledge to somebody else. That changes the equation.”
Peña and 13 other of the laid off Abbott employees have filed federal claims against the company saying they were laid off and discriminated against due to their age and their American citizenship.
Peña is not the first to speak out, during a Senate Subcommittee hearing in March 2016 Leo Perrero, a former tech worker at Disney World, broke down when telling his emotional story of how it felt to sit there and train the person who is taking your job.
“I started to think what kind of American was I becoming? Was I going to become part of ruining our country by taking severance pay in exchange for training my foreign replacement? How many other American families would be affected by the same foreign worker that I trained?” Perrero said through tears.
Tech workers who were replaced at Eversource Energy put up an American flag on the desk of each American worker as they were replaced. A picture of the flags caught Sen. Blumenthal’s (D-Conn.) attention and he wrote a letter to the CEO that criticized the lay offs that were, “accomplished through apparent abuses of multiple nonimmigrant worker visa programs, including the H-1B program.”
Read more on this story at The New York Times.
