As a patriotic and proud citizen of the United States, I have a story to share that has not only impacted my family, hundreds of colleagues, but also current and future United States workers…
As I watched the grim faced Disney Executive, it was obvious that bad news was going to be delivered. The dead silence was broken when the Disney Executive made a harsh announcement. All of you in this room will be losing your jobs in the next 90 days. Your last day of employment for this company will be January 30, 2015. Your jobs have been given over to a foreign workforce. In the meantime you will be training your replacements until your jobs are 100 percent transferred over to them and if you don’t cooperate you will not receive any severance pay. Also, if we don’t feel confident that we have captured everything that you do we can, at our discretion, keep you longer than the 90 days until we have captured everything that you do with this job. Don’t discuss this meeting with anybody else in the company. Everybody in the room was appalled at the message. I was completely silent thinking how this was going to affect my coworkers and how I was going to break the news to my wife and children back at home as I was the only person in my home with a steady job. How would I pay for all the expenses that go along with a home, a wife, and children?
As of January 31, 2015, I would be living on unemployment payments. Health care, along with other employee benefits, would be gone. The good life was soon to vanish as soon as the foreign workers took over my job. The sleepless nights were just starting for me as I felt the pressure of providing for my family with food, shelter, utilities, autos, health insurance, and child day care. My coworkers and I felt extremely betrayed by Walt Disney World, a company for which we had worked so hard.
After having worked grueling on call shifts, hundreds of middle of the night and weekends work sessions in addition to a barrage of problem phone calls around the clock for many years, they were going to simply throw us out for their financial benefit. One glimmer of hope from the Disney executive was that many new Disney jobs were going to be created and these jobs would not be as dull and repetitive as our current jobs were and that no net loss of jobs was going to happen. Disney Cast Members who had survived and were not invited to this doomful meeting wondered what happened inside the closed door meeting. Some of those in the meeting had tears streaming down their faces, others had completely broken down and were crying out loud and one was murmuring “no, this can’t be” as they were marched out of the room.
The very next week our office environment started to change dramatically. A huge influx of foreign workers from South Asia started to arrive at numerous buildings on the Disney Orlando campus in very large numbers. A foreign language was suddenly being spoken throughout the building hallways. Everywhere I went, including the company cafeteria, the composition of the company changed so much in the period of only a week.
The first 30 days was focused on capturing all that I did with my job. We started getting mandatory meeting invitations for “KT” or “Knowledge Transfer” sessions showing on our calendars. The daily sessions involved us training our foreign replacements for several hours. We all felt humiliated when the foreign workers sat next to us and watched everything that we did…
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