'You're fired!': 'Skilled' worker visa program abuses workers and their replacements alike.

• Author: Jaffe, Sarah

Stuart Zwicke lasted eight years in the information technology department at Molina Healthcare of New Mexico, in Albuquerque, where he watched everyone on his original team let go.

"I did not apply to Molina," he says. "They reached out to me because of my job skills and technical skills. They brought me in to design and build their data center, the heartbeat of the entire company here in New Mexico."

The data center was miles from the company's main headquarters in Long Beach, California, and Zwicke and two others were the only ones working there. Instead of bringing in permanent help, he said, the company would rotate in groups of workers for a week or so at a time, to be trained at the center.

"I would tell my senior management, 'We have a really big problem here,'" Zwicke says. "At the time I was a senior administrator, and these guys didn't have the basic 101 skill set. We did everything we could, we were doing eighty-, ninety-hour weeks and trying to groom them as we went along."

The workers, Zwicke learned, were brought in by a contractor, Cognizant, on H-1B guest worker visas, supposedly issued for workers with specialized skills. But Zwicke says that, in fact, the new workers made his job harder. He'd ask to see the resumes for workers he was training, to gauge their skill levels, but says all he received were assurances that the workers were qualified.

Back in Long Beach, in 2010, eighteen workers in the company's information technology department were laid off. According to attorney James Otto, who filed suit on behalf of those eighteen workers, the company turned around and brought in forty new workers via Cognizant. The employees who'd been let go had made an average of $75,000 a year; the guest workers would be paid much less, and receive no benefits.

"They'd say this is cost-effective, this is the way it is, get with the program or else," says Zwicke, a combat veteran who, in August, after his second heart attack, was also let go. (Otto has filed a discrimination complaint on Zwicke's behalf.)

To Otto, who also represents workers at Disney who were laid off and then required to train their replacements, the process of replacing American workers with H-1B temporary hires through companies like Cognizant is part of the further commodification of labor.

"Disney just doesn't care about people, that's the bottom line, which is funny for Disney because that's the business they're in," Otto says. "Everybody they replaced was highly skilled, highly productive, and highly regarded because each one of them had performance evaluations for several years running that said they were exceptional."

Otto has also filed a lawsuit on behalf of Yelena Kutepova, who worked in the information technology department at the Screen Actors Guild Producers Pension and Health Plans since 1998. As she recalls, "My reviews were excellent, I was very professional." But she was surrounded by guest workers, some of whom would go back home after their visa ended, only to return again and again.

In 2012...