The McClatchy Company, which owns around 30 newspapers in the U.S., has signed a contract with Wipro, an India-based IT provider, and will be following the trend of laying off around 150 American IT employees, after they have completed training their foreign replacements. The company sent a letter to all of its IT employees in March telling them know that the replacement process will take place, many of the IT workers have been with the company for 10 years or more.
"The are basically firing me and hiring a foreign worker to do my job at less than half the rate they were paying me," said one IT employee. "They really couldn't find American workers to do this job? Seriously? I am angry as hell."
"There is something wrong with the system and the laws that allow these kind of things," said the second IT worker. "I understand that cutting costs is important for a company in deep trouble like McClatchy, but bringing underpaid workers from India to replace American workers is just crossing the line."
One employee said that the foreign replacements have already started arriving and that the “knowledge transfer” is already beginning.
This is part of the growing trend of replacing American workers with cheaper foreign labor and companies such as Disney and Abbott Laboratories also forced their American employees to train their foreign replacements in order to receive their severance package.
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.
A company whose workforce is composed of 15% or more of H-1B workers is supposed to try and recruit U.S. workers and not displace American workers. Yet, a company can be exempted from this rule if they pay the H-1B visa holder $60,000, a much lower wage than most IT workers receive.
The McClatchy company’s spokeswoman said the company has refused to comment on the layoffs.
You can read more at Computerworld.com.