U.S. Workers Replaced — Again

One of the 180 information technology workers at Abbott Labs who will be dumped in favor of foreign replacements said Tuesday he sees a bleak future as an aging worker in a field under pressure from international competition.

The worker, who appeared anonymously on “The Laura Ingraham Show” so as not to jeopardize his severance benefits, said all he has ever done is work in the IT field.

“My prospects for the future aren’t very bright,” he said. “With the trend going on with all companies doing this, (and) the age that I have, there’s not too many places where I can go. It’s very hard to compete when it’s not on a level playing field in this game called globalization.”

Abbott Labs, an Illinois-based global health care company, informed workers in February that it had signed an agreement with an Indian IT services firm called Wipro. The American workers’ last day will be April 22. The company’s decision prompted a letter from Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., urging the firm to reconsider.

At least the Abbott workers will not have to train the foreign workers, as their counterparts at Walt Disney World were forced to do in 2014 as a condition of their severance. Still, the Abbott workers will join a growing list of American workers on the unemployment rolls because their employers were looking to cut costs with foreign labor.

The worker who spoke to Ingraham recalled that managers called employees into a series of one-on-one meetings to inform them of the decision.

“That’s when we were told our jobs were being, basically, eliminated,” he said. “But in reality, they’re actually being replaced.”

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Sara Blackwell, a Florida lawyer who runs ProtectUSWorkers.com and represents outsourced American workers, told Ingraham the corporations — even as they insist they need foreign workers to plug a skills gap — are bringing in employees on H-1B visas even as their U.S. employees are losing their jobs by the hundreds of thousands.

“They’re ruining the country,” she said.

Blackwell said the rights American workers have earned over the years — minimum wage, worker safety laws, etc. — are making them too costly compared to labor in countries that do not guarantee those rights.

“So, instead of protecting us all the way through the process, the government has decided, ‘You know what? I’d rather get the money that the corporations are paying me and the kickbacks than to protect American workers,’” she said. “‘Cause there is no one at all who knows what’s going on who can say that it is not anti-American.”