SoCal Edison To Replace Hundreds Of Employees With Immigrants

by JASmius



I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Barack Obama's amnesty push is a huge back-stab to Big Labor, and they're starting to figure it out:

Southern California Edison's plans to lay off hundreds of employees and hire foreign workers instead is coming under attack from lawmakers in Congress and local unions.

On Tuesday, more than three hundred members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers rallied in Irvine in support of their fellow Edison employees and protested what they say are unfair labor practices.

Meanwhile, members of Congress are upset about reports that Edison is laying off workers in favor of bringing in cheaper labor from overseas under the controversial H-1B visa program. The visas are intended to bring in skilled and educated foreign workers....

The Southland's largest utility said it is laying off about 400 information technology employees, with an additional hundred leaving voluntarily. The layoffs are necessary, the company said, to stay competitive. [emphasis added]

Which, actually, is, or out to be, Southern California Edison's get-out-of-jail-free card.  This is the Obamaconomy, remember?  An engineered permanent economic depression.  And we're talking about California, the spirital home of hardcore Obamunism.  The wonder isn't that SoCal Edison is trying desperately to control its labor costs, but that they're still in business at all.

And notice the perverse incentives that the Obama Regime has created, in order to scapegoat "big businesses" just like SCE:

Scott Wetch, a Sacramento lobbyist for several locals of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, said Edison is “systematically outsourcing jobs.” “As people come over on H-1B visas, they literally lay off other people at the Irvine tech center,” Wetch said.

He said the timing is especially bad coming on the heels of Edison winning a legal settlement at the California Public Utilities Commission. The settlement allows it to collect $3.3 billion from ratepayers and $1.4 billion from shareholders to fund the cost of closing the San Onofre nuclear power plant near San Clemente.

“It’s all part of the same narrative,” said Wetch, adding that legislation in response to the layoffs is already in the works in Sacramento. “They are bringing in cheaper labor … and sticking it to ratepayers.”

As opposed to Sacramento forcing them into eventual bankruptcy, thus sticking it to ratepayers, AND taxpayers, and pretty much everybody in Southern California.  Otherwise known as "economic justice".

And all of it incentivized and astroglided by Barack Obama's open borders insanity.  Discourage U.S. businesses from hiring and retaining American workers, encourage U.S. businesses to fire American workers and hire "foreign workers," and illegal ones, where at all possible.

All together now: USA!  USA!  USA!....

Some congressional Republicans have noticed, at least tangentially:

Several lawmakers also lambasted the utility.

Representative Darrell Issa, a Republican from Vista, said Edison is “merely replacing current workers with lower-paid counterparts.”

“This appears to be an example of precisely what the H-1B visa is not intended to be: a program to simply replace American workers en masse with cheap labor from overseas,” he said in a statement.

Senator Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) said the Edison layoffs are part of a growing trend of companies that use H-1B visas to bring in foreign workers for jobs that could be filled by Americans.

“You come in on the H-1B visa program for the sole purpose of taking a job,” Sessions said in a speech on the Senate floor last week. “They come solely for a limited period of time to take a job, and they work for less pay too often.”

Less pay than the feds and state governments and Big Labor unions are forcing them to pay, which is garishly above where the market itself would set wages.  Maybe if we could get back to some actual, honest-to-goodness capitalism in this country, as well as deporting illegals and resume controlling the borders, we could get these perverse incentives off of their head and back on their feet.

But I guess that would be "unAmerican," now wouldn't it?