Two former IT employees at Walt Disney World in Orlando who were laid off after being forced to train their foreign replacements have filed federal lawsuits against the entertainment giant and two other companies, claiming a conspiracy to oust them in favor of cheaper labor brought about by abuse of the nation's H1-B visa system.
Leo Perrero and Dena Moore were two of the 250 Disney tech workers let go last year.
Attorney Sara Blackwell says the lawsuits, which claim class-action status, are meant to "kick [outsourcing companies] at their business model, to stop them from systemically abusing the immigration system," the
Orlando Sentinel reports.
HCL Inc. and Cognizant Technologies are the other two companies named in the suit.
An outsourcing firm in India shipped over 250 data technicians with temporary visas to replace American IT workers at Disney – including some who wound up with the humiliating task of training their replacements,
The New York Times reported last summer.
"I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly," one laid off worker told The Times. "It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it."
Attorney Blackwell in an
interview with Breitbart News said the two consulting firms named in the suits — HCL and Cognizant — are motivated by nothing more than "corporate greed."
Blackwell says the companies are required by law to attest that the foreign workers they provide to corporations will not "adversely affect the… conditions of workers similarly situated."
"Cognizant and HCL – their business model is to lie on these applications," she told Breitbart's Caroline May. "It’s their business model to falsify these documentations so they can contract hundreds of thousands of jobs with all these companies."
"Then these companies hire them to do exactly what they’re not supposed to do," take the place of "similarly situated" U.S. workers.
"I don’t have to be angry or cause drama," said plaintiff Moore, who had been with Disney for 10 years, the
Times reports. "But they are just doing things to save a buck, and it’s making Americans poor."
Citing the requirement that American employees are not to be adversely impacted by the importation of H1-B visa workers, Moore rhetorically asked, "Was I negatively affected?"
"Yeah, I was. I lost my job."
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