IT Workers at Walt Disney World

[mrte62]

At the end of October, IT employees at Walt Disney Parks and Resorts were called, one-by-one, into conference rooms to receive notice of their layoffs. Multiple conference rooms had been set aside for this purpose, and in each room an executive read from a script informing the worker that their last day would be Jan. 30, 2015.

Some workers left the rooms crying; others appeared shocked. This went on all day. As each employee received a call to go to a conference room, others in the office looked up sometimes with pained expressions. One IT worker recalls a co-worker mouthing "no" as he walked by on the way to a conference room.

What follows is a story of competing narratives about the restructuring of Disney's global IT operations of its parks and resorts division. But the focus is on the role of H-1B workers. Use of visa workers in a layoff is a public policy issue, particularly for Disney.

Disney CEO Bob Iger is one of eight co-chairs of the Partnership for a New American Economy, a leading group advocating for an increase in the H-1B visa cap. Last Friday, this partnership was a sponsor of an H-1B briefing at the U.S. Capitol for congressional staffers. The briefing was closed to the press.

One of the briefing documents handed out at the congressional forum made this claim: "H-1B workers complement - instead of displace - U.S. Workers." It explains that as employers use foreign workers to fill "more technical and low-level jobs, firms are able to expand" and allow U.S. workers "to assume managerial and leadership positions."


The document was obtained by Norman Matloff, a computer science professor at the University of California at Davis and a longtime critic of the H-1B program. He posted it on his blog.

Disney says its restructuring wasn't about displacing workers, but was intended to shift more IT resources to projects involving innovation. That involves hiring many new people to fill new roles. Prior to the reorganization, 28% of Disney's IT staff were in roles focused on new capabilities; after this reorganization, that figure was 65%, a source at Disney said.

"We have restructured our global technology organization to significantly increase our cast member focus on future innovation and new capabilities, and are continuing to work with leading technical firms to maintain our existing systems as needed," Jacquee Wahler, a Walt Disney World spokesperson, said in a statement.

Disney officials did not want to comment about the situation beyond that statement.

From the perspective of five laid-off Disney IT workers, all of whom agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, Disney cut well-paid and longtime staff members, some who had been previously singled out for excellence, as it shifted work to contractors. These contractors used foreign labor, mostly from India. The laid-off workers believe the primary motivation behind Disney's action was cost-cutting.

"Some of these folks were literally flown in the day before to take over the exact same job I was doing," said one of the IT workers who lost his job. He trained his replacement and is angry over the fact he had to train someone from India "on site, in our country."

Disney officials promised new job opportunities as a result of the restructuring, and employees marked for termination were encouraged to apply for those positions. But the workers interviewed said they knew of few co-workers who had landed one of the new jobs.

Employees said the original number of workers laid off back in October was more than several hundred. But the Disney source put that number lower, saying approximately 135 IT workers lost their jobs.

Disney has long used contractors at its IT operations in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., at a building called "Team Disney." Workers on visas were likely in use well before the restructuring. But in the period after the October layoff notifications, IT workers said they observed a marked increase in people they believe were new to the U.S.

It's difficult to determine how many H-1B workers, L-1 visa workers or contractor workers generally, were at this Disney site. Only a couple of workers asked the contractors where they lived or if they were on a visa. It was an awkward conversation and generally avoided. But one observation all of the workers recounted was the widespread use of Hindi.

Several of these workers, in interviews, said they didn't want to appear as xenophobic, but couldn't help but to observe, as one did, that "there were times when I didn't hear English spoken" in the hallways. As the layoff date neared, "I really felt like a foreigner in that building," the worker said.

In the Team Disney office, two of the contractors, HCL and Cognizant, had, in total, about 65 Labor Conditional Applications on file in the past year, according to records by MyVisaJobs.com for just that site. But there were other contractors working at Disney, as well, and it's unknown whether temporary workers on L-1 visas were used.

Disney Parks and Resort CIO Tilak Mandadi, in a leaked memo shared Nov. 10 to the IT staff, described the planned transition, told about the posting of new roles and explained the goal to deliver new capability. Disney's culture is to refer to employees as cast members.

The CIO wrote in part: "To enable a majority of our team to shift focus to new capabilities, we have executed five new managed services agreements to support testing services and application maintenance. Last week, we began working with both our internal subject matter experts and the suppliers to start transition planning for these agreements. We expect knowledge transfer to start later this month and last through January. Those Cast Members who are involved will be contacted in the next several weeks."

One of the laid off workers believed there were other ways for Disney to achieve its goals.

"There is no need to have any type of foreigners, boots on the ground, augmenting any type of perceived technological gap," said one worker. "We don't have one, first off."

Workers can be trained, because "once you are in the system and you are a learner, you are a learner for life in IT. You are going to constantly learn."

Kim Berry, president of the Programmer's Guild, said that "Congress should protect American workers by mandating that positions can only be filled by H-1B workers when no qualified American - at any wage - can be found to fill the position."

The use of H-1B workers to displace U.S. workers is getting more attention in Congress. In response to Southern California Edison's use of foreign labor, 10 U.S. senators recently asked three federal agencies to investigate H-1B use. But one agency, the U.S. Department of Labor, wrote back last week and told the lawmakers that large H-1B using firms "are not prohibited from displacing U.S. workers" as long as they meet certain conditions, such as paying each H-1B worker at least $60,000 a year.

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[Butters]

And every time you experience a glitch in disneys system this is what we have to thank for it.

[Hammer]

This actually very common in most technology companies (I work in IT). I know many companies with a large percentage of contract workers, most who are H-1B workers. People on both sides of the aisle in Congress aren't willing to lose the financial backing of these corporations to change it.

[RunDMV]

Its bad enough when you squeeze your customers for every last penny. but, doing that to loyal employees is just wrong.

[Mrs Bus Driver]

Makes me think about selling my DVC membership. Might be time to start voting with my $$'s.

[SteveO]

Ok this all strikes me as a big bad bummer. And I'm in IT so it hurts me down to my core. While so many Americans are out of work or underemployed, Disney outsources IT? Ick.

[Mrs Bus Driver]

Isn't Disney supposed to be a family friendly company? What about the families of their employees? For a company that makes ridiculous amounts of profit, whose corporate heads live like billionaire kings, who then go and fire the very people that got them there. So much greed, I just don't understand it. These people have so much money they can't possibly spend it all yet they will fire good people to make their bottom line look a little better. Why? Just how big of a house do they need, owning how many things will satisfy them. I sometimes wonder if corporate executives in this country aren't just a bit insane. stepping down off my soapbox now

[baldburke]

Disney is no different than any other company in this aspect in that they are mindful of the bottom line.

[Biggeek]

I have been an IT professional for nearly 30 years working at everything from small manufacturing companies through Big 5 Consulting firms. I'm NOT defending the outsourcing.. I personally had two positions go offshore.. but that it is not actually the real issue here.

What actually strikes me about this article is how far behind 'The times" Disney is if they are just now beginning to fight through the Layoff / Visa issues. Most of the industry began fighting through those challenges more than ten years ago. For the most part a large portion of companies have worked through that and found an acceptable balance.. and in many cases it really was that entry personnel (those that excelled) rose to the top into other more complex and managerial roles.

The same thing happened in the 70s-80s with manufacturing jobs moving off shore to cheaper labor markets. This pushed many manual labor jobs into engineering and managerial roles then too..

The immaturity of what they are going through here is indicative of how conservative the Parks / Resorts org in Disney really is... and THAT is more likely the reason for the scalability issues and outages/lack of foresight we experience daily with Disney. They're playing catch up to industry. If this was all settled 5-7 years ago like most, they would have laid MDE onto a stable mature infrastructure with well trained personnel running it.

This is a (lack of) leadership issue that that originated 10 years ago.. but took until now to feel the ramifications.

[AgentC]

This actually very common in most technology companies (I work in IT). I know many companies with a large percentage of contract workers, most who are H-1B workers. People on both sides of the aisle in Congress aren't willing to lose the financial backing of these corporations to change it.

This. And even in non IT companies. I work on projects for a financial company. When I started the entire IT staff for our department was onshore. Now we have 3 core state side resources but the majority are off shore.

[firefan43]

Ive seen this before. It pretty much *****. And I hate to say it, but where I have seen this happen...it hasnt worked out well.

[Tekneek]

Disney is a business, and a ruthless one at that. They are ruthless with their employees, just like they are with their vendors and their customers. It is what it is.

[Angryduck]

This is one of those polarizing topics.

Is someone unhappy that Disney treated it's employees like this and want them to treat their cast better than just laying them off like that?

Is a person happy that less contractors are going to be used and that they will use in house, actual cast members now?

Are you happy that a different focus is being taken with this department and we hope something innovative and awesome will come out of it that leads to better experiences for everyone?

I daresay that something like this is so complicated, political and subjective that we cannot help but have different views.

Just some thoughts,

Duck.

[Lindsey]

My husband used to work for Disney in IT, and he worked in the Team Disney building. When the layoffs happened we heard about it right away. We still have friends at Disney, most of them in IT. When my husband still worked there, (10 years ago), Disney preferred to hire in-house when a higher position opened up, or hire someone who has worked within Disney before, and contract workers were only used for short-term projects. About 5 years after my husband left that started to change. First the hours got really long for IT workers, then bonuses were cut, then perks were cut, (like silver passes for your family), and then some layoffs started happening. My husband and I were considering moving back to Orlando, and work for Disney again, but our friends cautioned us not to. When this recent massive layoff happened we were stunned. We only have a couple of friends left at Disney now. Everyone we have spoken to has said that around 250 people were let go.

[Lindsey]

The New York Times published an article about this yesterday, (June 3rd), with more info. I've only posted a small snippet of it, if you want to read the full article do a quick Google search.

From The New York Times: In late November, this former employee received his annual performance review, which he provided to The New York Times. His supervisor, who was not aware the man was scheduled for layoff, wrote that because of his superior skills and “outstanding” work, he had saved the company thousands of dollars. The supervisor added that he was looking forward to another highly productive year of having the employee on the team.

The employee got a raise. His severance pay had to be recalculated to include it.

The former Disney employee who is 57 worked in project management and software development. His résumé lists a top-level skill certification and command of seven operating systems, 15 program languages and more than two dozen other applications and media.

“I was forced into early retirement,” he said. The timing was “horrible,” he said, because his wife recently had a medical emergency with expensive bills. Shut out of Disney, he is looking for a new job elsewhere.

Former employees said many immigrants who arrived were younger technicians with limited data skills who did not speak English fluently and had to be instructed in the basics of the work.

[Hammer]

As I said earlier in the thread, this is a common practice at many companies, not just Disney. I read the article and it makes it sound like Disney invented this practice. I know of H-1B workers being used by Disney for almost 3 years, as one of the H-1 workers who worked for me decided he hated the cold and asked to be transferred to Florida by his contract company. They put him at Disney.

It is definitely a slanted article.

[mrte62]

As I said earlier in the thread, this is a common practice at many companies, not just Disney. I read the article and it makes it sound like Disney invented this practice. I know of H-1B workers being used by Disney for almost 3 years, as one of the H-1 workers who worked for me decided he hated the cold and asked to be transferred to Florida by his contract company. They put him at Disney.

It is definitely a slanted article.

A slanted article? Just because other companies do something, does not make it right. Iger is one of the people leading the charge to increase the use of these visas under the premise that there are not enough skilled US workers to do the job. Disney brought in 250 people to replace skilled US workers for no other reason then to save money, not because the workers were not skilled.

Wow, just wow......

[Hammer]

A slanted article? Just because other companies do something, does not make it right. Iger is one of the people leading the charge to increase the use of these visas under the premise that there are not enough skilled US workers to do the job. Disney brought in 250 people to replace skilled US workers for no other reason then to save money, not because the workers were not skilled.

Wow, just wow......

As I said, many companies do this, including Disney's competition, and they have been doing it for far longer. Those CEOs are with Iger leading the charge as well. Of course it isn't right and I wasn't saying it was. I say the article is slanted because it mentions only Disney, where there are many other companies that do this as well and there wasn't any mention of them.

[FamilyBand1]

This *****. While not all those who were fired LOVED Disney, I imagine most of them did. Seems to me that working at Disney is just a little different than working elsewhere. Do you think the foreign employees have the same excitement working at Disney?
Are ticket prices going down, now that Disney is saving all this money? (...he said, fully loaded with sarcasm)

[mrte62]

As I said, many companies do this, including Disney's competition, and they have been doing it for far longer. Those CEOs are with Iger leading the charge as well. Of course it isn't right and I wasn't saying it was. I say the article is slanted because it mentions only Disney, where there are many other companies that do this as well and there wasn't any mention of them.

I respectfully disagree. While Disney may be doing what other companies are doing, the CEO is part of a group lobbying Congress to extend the visa program allegedly because of the lack of skilled US workers. As we know, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Train the people to take your job (and make sure they do a good job or no severance) is despicable at best .....