Disney Celebrates Its Most Profitable Year of All Time … By Replacing Long-Term Employees with Immigrant Workers

Disney owns Pixar, Marvel, and Star Wars. So it’s obviously crushing it these days. According to recent reports, its profits last year were $7.5 billion and its CEO Bob Iger was paid about $46 million. All of that is good and fine, even great.

But Disney was apparently not satisfied. So they started replacing long-term employees by hiring immigrant workers with short-term H-1B work visas. And what’s worse, Disney had their soon-to-be-former full-time employees train their own replacements as their last duty on the job. This is bottom line thinking at its ugliest:

What motivates a company to replace its American workers with H-1B guestworkers? One word: Profit. H-1B guestworkers are cheaper than American workers and don’t have much bargaining power, and any company would be foolish not to take advantage of this highly lucrative business model that has been inadvertently created by Congress and multiple presidential administrations.  Of course, this business model is paid for by destroying the livelihoods and dignity of tens of thousands of American workers. The costs are also borne by American taxpayers, through foregone tax revenue and the additional social services that need to be provided for those newly unemployed American workers. . . .

It’s important to point out that Disney is not an outlier, it’s the norm. Loopholes in the H-1B program make it irresistible to corporations, whose sole goal has become to maximize profits and shareholder value. Appealing to patriotism, corporate social responsibility, or even a sense of moral decency is a fool’s game. If you don’t believe me, look no further than Disney, which brags about its awards for its corporate social responsibility.

It may be true that civil government regulations and intrusions are creating the H-1B loophole in the first place. And unions aren’t helping to keep American workers competitive either. But that really isn’t any excuse for this behavior. There is more to good business than squeezing every cent out of the bottom line. And no matter how tempting it is for a company to get a few more short-term dollars, a good name is worth far more.

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