I just read a link within the article supplied by CAR:
They (the laid off employees) said only a handful of those laid off were moved directly by Disney to other company jobs. The rest were left to compete for positions through Disney job websites. Despite the company’s figures, few people they knew had been hired, they said, and then often at a lower pay level. No one was offered retraining, they said. One former worker, a 57-year-old man with more than 10 years at Disney, displayed a list of 18 jobs in the company he had applied for. He had not had more than an initial conversation on any one, he said.
Disney “made the difficult decision to eliminate certain positions, including yours,” as a result of “the transition of your work to a managed service provider,” said a contract presented to employees on the day the layoffs were announced. It offered a “stay bonus” of 10 percent of severance pay if they remained for 90 days. But the bonus was contingent on “the continued satisfactory performance of your job duties.” For many, that involved training a replacement. Young immigrants from India took the seats at their computer stations.
“The first 30 days was all capturing what I did,” said the American in his 40s, who worked 10 years at Disney. “The next 30 days, they worked side by side with me, and the last 30 days, they took over my job completely.” To receive his severance bonus, he said, “I had to make sure they were doing my job correctly.”
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. . . .
(parenthesized material mine)
This is disgusting to me. In CA, weekly UI benefits are equal to 1/13 of 62.5% of one’s highest quarter’s pay in the past 18 months, IIRC and is not subject to state income tax. With a layoff letter in hand, a CA-based employee would not have to stay behind and train their replacement. They could elect to leave at or before the time their “replacement” arrived and not make it easy for their employer to replace them seamlessly and be unequivocally eligible for UI.
If they stayed behind to train their new (foreign) “charge,” the Disney layoffs were eligible for full pay for three months plus a 10% “bonus” (minus taxes) IF their (H1b) trainee was performing their job competently at the end of the 3-month training period.
That’s nothing to write home about. That’s not even as much as UI and Disney’s “internal job lure” to the laid off employees was a farce. I don’t know about FL but in CA, this would have been a bad deal for the longtime displaced employee and a waste of their time when they could have been actively looking FT for a new job 3 months earlier while still having uncollected UI benefits to fall back on.
I don’t understand how these employees fell for Disney’s dangling mini-carrot. Perhaps FL’s UI benefits aren’t adequate.
