Prepare For Your Newest Reason For Getting Laid Off, America: You Just Got Insourced!

Well, it's finally happening to non-Poors too: high-income IT workers are now being replaced by Indian workers who will agree to work for less pay and no benefits. Welcome to the future, where the only jobs left will be upper upper management, service, and court jester crap (i.e., Louis C.K., Lady Gaga, Girltalk, etc).

ON JAN. 14, 2010, senior executives at Molina Healthcare in Long Beach, Calif., called their staff together for a somber meeting. The company had done poorly the previous quarter, they announced. Dozens of people in the IT department would have to be let go.

What the fired employees didn’t know was that the previous day, the US Department of Labor had approved applications for 40 temporary workers from India to be placed at Molina, through a company called Cognizant.

The fired employees — all US citizens or green card holders — were earning an average of $75,000 a year, plus benefits; the new workers, brought on H-1B visas, earned $50,000, with no benefits, according to a lawsuit filed by the ex-employees. The lawsuit alleges that Molina was flush with cash at the time, and that the real reason employees were fired was their nationality.

If the fired employees are trying to achieve protections under Title VII, which (among other things) bars workplace discrimination, they will have their work cut out for them. We are bloggers, not lawyers, so correct us if we are wrong, but we are under the impressions that Title VII protections are only extended to members of a "protected class" of people who have historically been the victims of discrimination. Are American workers a "protected class"? Yes, of course they are, but not the kind of protected class that counts for the purposes of Title VII. If the employees are going to sue for discrimination based on nationality, that probably won't work either since the court has not sided with, for example, Persians or Iraqis who claimed they were subjected to discrimination because of their nationality -- not race, but nationality.

And more things to correct us on if we are wrong: we thought that firing people and replacing them with people who work for less is part of something called "capitalism." So these IT takers should just go out and be MAKERS and then everything will work out for them, this is how capitalism works, we thought everyone knew that.

H-1B visas, which allow immigrants who are sponsored by their employers to work in the United States for a limited term, have become ground zero in the looming battle in Congress over the complex issue of immigration reform. Supporters of the program argue the US economy badly needs more high-tech workers from overseas. Americans aren’t studying enough math and science, the argument goes, so we must look elsewhere to grow our economy

[...]

But if these workers have such superior abilities, why not make it easier for them to become Americans? Why bring them here on temporary H-1B visas that keep them chained to the company that sponsored them for years?

The reason that many employers use H-1B visas is not because of foreign workers’ special skills, but because these workers come relatively cheap.

Why NOT keep them chained to the company that sponsored them for years? See, this is why we (and the nice lady who wrote the Op-Ed from which we are quoting, probably) are not the CEOs of high-tech companies that make lots of money: we have crazy ideas about the value of work, and the fact that the private sector should maybe be responsible for training their OWN employees instead of making the entire public school system into a sort of trade school program to churn out workers that fit their exact specifications. But that is why we are "TAKERS," not "MAKERS" probably, in late-stage capitalist America.

 [Boston Globe]