Senate Scrutiny for Laid-Off Workers Forced to Train Foreign Replacements

A bi-partisan group of U.S. Senators is demanding an investigation of Southern California Edison’s use of foreign workers on H1-B visas to replace American tech workers.

According to several former SoCal Edison workers, the company fired them and replaced them with contractors from foreign countries.  They claimed to receive severance, SoCal Edison forced them to train their replacements most of whom did not have the same level of skills as the Americans they were replacing.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) along with 8 other senators are asking the Attorney General, Homeland security and the Labor Department to investigate H1-B visa fraud.

“A number of U.S. employers, including some large, well-known, publicly-traded corporations, have reportedly laid off thousands of American workers and replaced them with H-1B visa holders,” the senators wrote.

Southern California Edison rose to prominence in the H1-B visa debate after the heartbreaking stories of American IT workers were exposed at a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month.

“We had no choice in this,” one anonymous worker who claimed to have been one of those let go from Southern California Edison, said in a letter. The worker described how when the two vendors were picked – Infosys and TCS, both major Indian companies – SCE employees were told to “sit with, video chat or do whatever was needed to teach them our systems.”

If they did not cooperate, according to the testimonial, “we would be fired and not receive a severance package.”

Another worker described this process as “humiliating.”

Companies claim they need H1-B visas to staff projects where no American can be found.

“By transitioning some IT operations to external vendors, along with SCE eliminating some customized functions it will no longer provide, the company will focus on making significant, strategic changes that can benefit our customers,” Southern California Edison’s emailed statement read.

But the senators, in their letter, raised several questions about how the replacements were being done. They said it appears the workers are often not employees of the U.S. company laying off workers – but are contractors working for foreign-owned IT consultants.

The H-1B program stipulates that applicants must have a valid “employer-employee relationship” – and the senators questioned whether that was the case here.

They also asked whether the companies “engaged in prohibited citizenship status discrimination” (against American citizens); and whether the visa petitions showed “any evidence of misrepresentation or fraud.”