Disney proves trained workforce not the point. Businesses want H-1B visas and cheap imported labor, not job skills.

While republican politicians brag about training the unemployed and cutting off their food stamps and UC benefits, they're also cutting this well trained work force for cheap imported labor.

Would I kid you?

On the federal end of the GOP agenda is the ever present effort to import cheap labor, making some of this "job training" stuff worthless, by increasing the number of H-1B visas:

NY Times: About 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.

“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since his last day at Disney on Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”

Here's where the story is wrong, treating this like a "new" problem. If you look under my blog tab "Video History: failed Republican Policy" you'll find archived videos from 2003-2005 examining the same issues. Here's just one example:

It's not just at Disney:

But the layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the United States. 

According to federal guidelines, the visas are intended for foreigners with advanced science or computer skills to fill discrete positions when American workers with those skills cannot be found. Their use, the guidelines say, should not “adversely affect the wages and working conditions” of Americans. Because of legal loopholes, however, in practice, companies do not have to recruit American workers first or guarantee that Americans will not be displaced.

American Information Technology Graduates lose jobs to Guestworkers hired for less.

If you believe the industry, the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) labor market has a shortage of workers that qualify for the available jobs. The tech industry is begging for guest workers to fill that gap.

Don't believe them. This phony argument has been going on for years. Check out this Lou Dobbs report from around 2004-2005: 

But the Economic Policy Institute found proof the guest worker program, H-1B's, is a source of cheap labor that freezes out Americans.

Our examination of the IT labor market, guestworker flows, and the STEM education pipeline finds consistent and clear trends suggesting that the United States has more

than a sufficient supply of workers available to work in STEM occupations:

The number of U.S. graduates with STEM majors appears to be responsive to changes in employment levels and wages. For every two students with STEM degrees, only one is hired into a STEM job … colleges graduate 50 percent more students than are hired into those fields each year; of the computer science graduates not entering the IT workforce, 32 percent say it is because IT jobs are unavailable … These responses suggest that the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry. But employment and wage levels in IT jobs have been weak, trends that are not consistent with strong demand.

Wages have remained flat, with real wages hovering around their late 1990s levels … The annual inflows of guestworkers amount to one-third to one-half the number of all new IT job holders.

The data also strongly suggest that there is a robust supply of domestic workers available for the IT industry. The annual number of computer science graduates doubled between 1998 and 2004, and is currently over 50 percent higher than its 1998 level.

The implications of the data for enacting high-skill guestworker policy are clear: Immigration policies that facilitate large flows of guestworkers will supply labor at wages that are too low to induce significant increases in supply from the domestic workforce. 

Caterpillar to lay off 300 workers, all the while asking for H-1B work visas.

Even though Caterpillar is planning on laying off 300 workers, it's also trying to import cheaper workers on H-1B visas. 

jsonline: The chief executive at Caterpillar Inc. says he wants more visas for foreign engineers and a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants, even as the company plans temporary layoffs of up to 300 employees in South Milwaukee.

"Today, we (employers) have gaps in our workforce. We have trouble filling highly skilled positions like engineers and scientists. We also have trouble filling many lower-skilled positions," Doug Oberhelman, chairman and CEO of Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpilla.