Breitbart reports Carnival Cruise Line workers in Florida, California and Washington State were told they will be terminated on February 3rd and must train their foreign replacements. Carnival denies the workers’ claims but the company admitted it is shifting technology operations to Capgemini, a French firm that has helped U.S. companies import thousands of guest workers to fill middle-class jobs.
One technology worker who spent 20 years in the industry said the fact that this news “comes merely a few weeks before Christmas… makes the decision that much harder. My coworkers are worried about their families, their health insurance and whether they will be able to find work after they train their foreign replacement. The atmosphere at work is extremely somber. I am stressed and worried and my coworkers feel the same.”
200 to 300 workers must decide by December 19th whether they will take jobs with Capgemini to train their foreign replacements. They are not guaranteed work thereafter.
Attorney Sara Blackwell, who runs the organization Protect U.S. Workers, told Breitbart “The purpose of this decision is to lower labor costs by exploiting the workers in India. The IT work of Carnival at the end of this business model will be conducted mostly by Indians in India with a wage that is repugnant and working conditions that are unacceptable and not permitted in the United States… As a result, American lives are destroyed and families will have a very different Christmas holiday than expected.”
Breitbart notes Carnival’s plan fits “the anti-American worker business model of outsourcing U.S. jobs to imported foreign labor…[This] has taken place at companies such as Siemens, Disney, Fossil Inc., Southern California Edison, Xerox, Northeast Utilities, and Abbott Labs. The salary-slashing business model is made possible by federal cheap-labor outsourcing programs, which are strongly supported by Wall Street because they convert suburban white-collar salaries into investors’ capital gains.”
Blackwell, who has represented Disney IT workers in a similar terminate-and-replace scheme, filed a lawsuit this week on behalf of 30 employees alleging discrimination on the basis of national origin. She said the group "lost their jobs when their jobs were outsourced to contracting companies. And those companies brought in mostly, or virtually all, non-American… workers" from India.
One worker in the group said "It was unfathomable for me to think that this would happen -- that people would be physically replaced by workers who just came in from offshore and were now here in person to replace us. It was completely shocking."
Read more in Breitbart News and Computerworld.
