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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Gov’t-Owned TVA Fires Workers, Makes Them Train Foreign Replacements

‘We recognize that participating in the knowledge transfer process is difficult for many of you, but we are counting on your continued professionalism…’

Govt-Owned TVA Fires Workers, Makes Them Train Foreign Replacements
Tennessee Valley Authority / IMAGE: Youtube

(Michael Barnes, Liberty Headlines) Private-sector globalist corporations have been outsourcing American jobs and using crony visa programs to undercut domestic workers for decades.

Now, the federal government is doing the same.

While unemployment skyrockets due to the Wuhan virus pandemic, the Tennessee Valley Authority has announced plans to outsource 20 percent of its high-skilled tech workforce to Capgemini, CGI and Accenture—global mega-companies based in France, Canada and Ireland.

The TVA is a storied “New Deal” project that was originally intended to create jobs and supply electricity to the economically impoverished South during the Great Depression. It’s thrived for nearly a century and is now the nation’s largest government-owned power provider.

But at least 120 employees have been notified that they will be terminated in the coming months, and another 100 workers are expected to be let go to make room for more foreign workers.

Worse, the TVA employees—many of whom are engineers and technology professionals—will be expected to train their replacements before being fired.

“We recognize that participating in the knowledge transfer process is difficult for many of you, but we are counting on your continued professionalism to make the transition to our new operating model a successful one for TVA,” wrote Jeremy Fisher, TVA’s vice president and chief information officer in an email to staff on April 21.

The layoffs aren’t an issue of competence, according to TVA spokesman Jim Hopson.

“Our workers absolutely can do the work, can do it well, and we’ve all been trained in it,” he told the Intercept website on Wednesday. “It’s not an issue of qualification, it’s not an issue of quality of the work.”

Saving money isn’t the “primary reason,” either, Hopson said. Rather, the decision was based on a desire to “increase opportunity for innovation and expertise.”

Gay Henson, a TVA worker of 35 years, said the explanation doesn’t make a lot of sense.

“They’ve told us this is not about saving the money, but ‘leveraging the market,’” she said.

TVA asserts that the traditional notion of outsourcing jobs doesn’t apply given the jobs will remain in the U.S. and that the government-owned utility’s new globalist partners have subsidiary companies inside the country.

But that may be splitting hairs since the TVA’s foreign partners employ a substantial amount of cheap foreign workers both inside and outside the U.S., effectively circumventing American workers both at home and abroad.

The TVA signed a $15 million contract with Capgemini in September to revamp its software systems, which involves replacing longtime TVA employees. Capgemini also employs 100,000 workers based in India.

CGI and Accenture have similar business models and signed large contracts with TVA in April.

The scenario is not unique. In California, Pacific Gas and Electric laid off hundreds of workers in 2017, with foreign workers filling the positions at the California utility and in India. Disney has also laid off hundreds of high-skilled tech workers and replaced them with foreign guest workers on H-1B visas.

Conveniently, TVA recently increased its use of H-1B visas, which allows American companies to replace workers with foreign nationals with salaries starting at $60,000 a year.

Replacing high-skilled American workers with foreign non-citizens and using crony government visa programs to do it, is widely viewed as an affront to hard-working Americans. But until recently, the ruthless practice has been confined to the private sector.

Notably, TVA head Jeff Lyash is the highest-paid federal employee in the country at $8 million a year. President Donald Trump recently threatened to cut his salary.

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