Uniting the country, one PR disaster at a time
Hat tip to my old pal Hank for catching this interesting little nugget. Even amid the Manichean political divisions, gridlock, and paralysis that have been gripping US society in recent years, seems there’s at least one no-no that unites all sides of the American ideological spectrum in outrage and revulsion. The New York Times recently put up a much-shared investigative reporting piece by Julia Preston on the heavily criticized practice of replacing American workers with overseas imports on the H-1B visa by many American companies, adding insult to injury by requiring the laid-off workers to train their replacements. (Disney was highlighted though Southern California Edison, several tech and banking firms and Fossil, a Texas watchmaker, are also giving their PR managers ulcers right now.) The H-1B was designed to bring in overseas workers to fill mission-critical positions for which there clearly weren’t Americans with the training and skills to meet essential needs. Ah, but roads to hell, good intentions and whatnot... As the article (and many other media reports, based on what was on the car radio last night) made clear, the visa program has been leading to abuses of the cheap labor variety, with loopholes used to oust and supplant American workers in favor of cheaper hires from abroad. Needless to say, not the original idea with the visa.
Even needlesser to say (someday that’ll be an actual idiom, goshdarnit), it’s raised the ire of just about everyone. And as my eagle-eyed pal Hank took note, Hell seems to be freezing over, since sites strongly associated with (what’s identified as) the American Left -- Daily Kos (and the NYT comments page itself) among them -- as well as the American Right -- Free Republic, Breitbart, American Thinker among others -- have joined forces to thrash the associated companies and call for boycotts. My oh my, methinks when you can get both DKos and Breitbart to agree on, well, just about anything, that’s a sign you’ve really stepped in it. Based on the radio report last night, seems like just about every non-ideological, non-partisan group is also pretty ticked off about this, including immigrant advocacy groups who are livid at the exploitation and abuse of imported workers (often from India) on the H-1B -- which is held by the employer rather than the immigrant -- for low wages and often grueling conditions.Â
Maybe the most amusing aspect of this brouhaha for the more cynically-minded is the hoisted-on-their-own-petard element for whatever managers and execs thought this was a good idea. This is light-years beyond the “penny wise and pound foolish” meme -- this has the whiff of “karma’s just nabbed some awfully big fish.” The companies involved (maybe) shaved a small chunk of their labor costs by axing the American workers from their payrolls and replacing with overseas recruits. (And apparently -- no expertise claimed here, just what the radio-quoted experts were saying -- even this is debatable, since any cost savings are often eaten up by accumulated technical errors and security breaches due to the loss of the experienced American workforce.) Yet in return, they’ve been met with what can only be called an epic public relations disaster. Particularly in discretionary industries like entertainment, the angry public responses and calls to boycott (apparently repeated ad infinitum on Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, here on Tumblr and across social media) have real teeth. So in saving what amounts to pennies with the H-1B replacements, the respective departments in these firms have probably cost their companies potentially billions in lost revenue, not to mention permanent damage from the loss of public trust, brand cachet, and respect. An object lesson, I suppose one could say, in bean-counting short-term expenses while ignoring (or downplaying) the human element and basic dignity of the workers: Karma really can have a wicked sense of humor sometimes.
