Seventy-five American IT employees at Ohio-based Cengage Learning were recently told that they were being replaced by cheaper foreign workers, who the outgoing employees first had to train, reported Computer World.
Cengage, a multinational education content producer, told 75 of its tech workers in October that they would no longer have a job in January. As their time winds down, they have been directed to start training their replacements in person and via the Internet, and their work is being "shadowed" and recorded. Management warned the outgoing employees that if they talk to the media about their treatment, they would lose severance, according to Computer World.
Many of the replacement IT workers plan to telecommute and are thought to be based in India.
Cengage is just the latest company to engage in a highly lucrative business practice in which businesses bring in cheaper H-1B immigrant workers to substitute for American workers, who are then forced to provide training to their replacements before being fired, noted The Hill.
Other companies involved in the practice include Disney, Toys "R" Us, Southern California Edison, Pfizer, Fossil Group and Catalina Marketing, reported The Daily Caller.
"I think it's what's killing the American economy," one of the laid off Cengage workers told Computer World. "The middle class jobs are going away."
Tech companies often complain that there is a shortage of American high-tech worker, so the H-1B visa program is designed to help "employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States."
However, critics say that companies abuse the program in order to cut labor costs and save on taxes. Further, studies have shown that STEM employment averaged "only 105,000 jobs annually," while U.S.-born STEM graduates grew by an average of 115,000 a year. But still, the U.S. continued to admit that about 129,000 immigrants with STEM degrees between 2007 and 2012, which means "the number of new immigrants with STEM degrees admitted each year is by itself higher than the total growth in STEM employment," reported Breitbart.
