Former Workers Drop Discrimination Lawsuit Against Disney Over H-1B Visa Issue

Former Disney employees, who had sued the firm in 2015, accusing it of discrimination for replacing them with H-1B visa holders, announced on May 9 that they are dropping the lawsuit, ABC 7 reported.

“We have lost. Unfortunately, we lost because it’s legal,” said Sara Blackwell, the U.S. attorney who had filed a lawsuit representing 250 Disney IT workers, according to Channel News 8.

“As we have said all along, these lawsuits were completely baseless,” a Disney spokeswoman was quoted as saying by Channel News 8 after the lawsuit was dropped.

The discrimination lawsuit filed in the U.S. federal and state court claimed that Disney terminated the jobs of these IT employees and replaced them with new workers from other countries. The terminated employees were given 90 days to train the new workers — who were foreign nationals using H-1B visas — or else lose eligibility for bonuses or severance packages, CNN reported.

Disney used a business model that is a common practice among companies throughout the United States, Blackwell said, according to ABC 7. Even though Florida is a right-to-work state that does not allow companies to terminate a person’s employment based on criteria such as nationality, businesses generally manage to get around that, Blackwell added.

She explained that following the firing of 250 workers, their replacements were not employed by Disney. The employment was instead contracted through a different company, so what these businesses are doing is legal.

“The week of Halloween 2014, the rug was ripped out from underneath me. And then they had the foreign replacements come sit at my desk to train. We are not asking for money. We are asking for the hemorrhaging of American jobs to stop,” former employee Mary Poorman was quoted as saying by News Channel 8.

Disney’s former workers now say that they would continue to fight for the rights of the American employees. Blackwell, however, said that to prevent this from occurring, the law will have to be altered.

“You cannot win a lawsuit against them because this is a legal way of doing business. And if you are outraged, then you need to do something about it. This is what President Trump spoke,” said Blackwell, as per reports, while referring to the steps promised by U.S. President Donald Trump to American workers during his election campaign.