A lawyer for a group of former Disney World employees has dropped their lawsuit regarding a discrimination case against the theme park.
The announcement came Wednesday after years of court battles.
In 2016, a group of former IT employees filed a discrimination lawsuit in federal and state court, claiming Disney fired and replaced them with new employees from overseas that they had to train in the USA on work visas for 90 days to do their jobs.
“The week of Halloween 2014, the rug was ripped out from underneath me,” former employee Mary Poorman said, in tears. “And then they had the foreign replacements come sit at my desk to train.”
The Sarasota lawyer, Sara Blackwell, claimed the company outsourced and replaced workers with less costly foreign ones using H-1B visas.
Blackwell calls the practice discrimination and a legal loophole, but acknowledged it is a battle she will not win.
“We lost because what Disney did was legal,” Blackwell said.
Blackwell and the fired employees said Wednesday they plan to continue to advocate for reform of the H-1B Visa program.
“We are not asking for money. We are asking for the hemorrhaging of American jobs to stop,” Poorman said.
A Disney Spokesperson sent this statement:
“As we have said all along, these lawsuits were completely baseless.”
