Americans: Digging Their Own Grave

The world’s largest drug company, Pfizer, is allegedly bringing in foreign workers on H-1B visa’s to be trained by the American workers that they will eventually replace, according to, Conn.-based newspaper The Day.

The company is trying to scale back its annual operating costs by $4 billion in an effort to improve revenues after a few ill-advised investments in prescription drugs never hit the market. Just last year the company cut 11,000 jobs, now it appears it is looking to outsource roughly 1,000 IT jobs.

According to The Day, the American Pfizer employees were not informed of the plan, but a whisper campaign has been going on at the company for some time. The paper also uncovered an internal company memo titled "Evaluating Options: Moving IT Services to Low-Cost Locations."

It appears that that low cost location is India, as that is where most of the H-1B visa workers have hailed from. The use of H-1B visa’s for the India employees could become a source of controversy as well. By law, the H-1B visa is supposed to be used for foreign workers taking jobs that could not be filled by Americans, which is clearly not the case in this instance.

Despite the dire state of the economy, Pfizer still managed to rake in $2.28 billion in the third quarter in the recession-proof prescription drug market. Being that the company is still extremely profitable even in times of such hardship for other companies, many are viewing this possible new outsourcing policy by Pfizer as nothing more than greed.

"It's not surprising to have a company bring in [workers on] H-1B or L-1 visas to transition that work to companies like Infosys and Satya, which are classified as H-1B-dependent because more than 15 percent of their work forces here are on visas," Ron Hira, assistant professor of public policy at Rochester Institute of Technology and co-author of "Outsourcing America." "Still, you shouldn't have to dig your own grave by bringing in someone on an H-1B and training them to do your job."

Source The Day:

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