Wyeth Employee Balks At Outsourcing & Gets Fired
3 CommentsBy Ed Silverman // December 1st, 2008 // 8:20 am
That’s the allegation in a lawsuit filed last week by Laura Bedford, who was a senior administrative specialist and project coordinator at the time she was dismissed in June 2007. She had worked for the drugmaker since 1989.
Bedford charges that, in early 2007, Wyeth outsourced invoices to India, causing her “significant difficulties,” because the info coming from India was “always muddled and incomplete,” according to her suit, which was filed in federal court in Philadelphia (here it is).
Bedford subsequently complained that jobs should not be outsourced and that Wyeth was discriminating against US workers. On June 18, 2007, she alleges she was suspended, pending an investigation, because her personal mail was mixed with work mail. Her lawsuit then states she was fired for this reason on the same day, although male employees were not fired for “similar offenses.”
There is no additional info in the lawsuit about Bedford, her work responsibilities or the allegations made by Wyeth, but she is suing Wyeth for gender, national original and race discrimination, claiming she suffered retaliation. We await word from Wyeth and Bedford’s attorney. We will update you with any comments. UPDATE: A Wyeth spokesman says there is “no comment.”
PhD, FDA Reviewer
We have related problems at the FDA.
In some departments 90% of reviewers are foreign nationals when initially hired.
Individuals from one region in particular not only harass and discriminate against native born US citizens but also immigrants from other countries, and even those from their own country that they don’t like. This has caused a number of people to be forced into retirement or to otherwise leave. They also recruit others from their home country and get rewarded with recruitment bonuses. In one case one of these recruits is so bad that even though management has set things up with industry that we now only cut and paste from the submission into the review this individual doesn’t even cut and paste the right information. A secretary has even been hired from the same country using special hiring authorities that are supposed to be limited to highly trained scientists where we can’t find people in the US with the skills. Meanwhile African American males temps are used for the similar jobs in the same office and cannot get into a permanent position. The problem is so blatant that they’re called “the XXX mafia” (no insult to Italians intended), in fact a number of immigrants in the same department from the same country (and for every I know of are truly qualified) complain about them.
The 90% - 95% ratio in this particular department is then used for reverse discrimination purposes. This is easily done as the statistics are spread over nonscientific lower level employees, other divisions where it is mainly native US Caucasians, (e.g. medical reviewers) and managers who are hired directly from industry who are primarily non-minority. Thus it’s easy to discriminate in a division with 100 - 150 employees and not have the statistics out of wack for >2000 CDER employees.
FDA management has encouraged these practices as a way to wean out reviewers who go against drug companies. Management encourages comradery with these new foreign reviewers by special events etc. where older native reviewers are excluded by arranging them when the senior reviewers have previous commitments for training, meetings, or leave at these times. Anyone who says anything is called a saboteur and there are posters up to tell new reviewers to avoid anyone who is negative in anyway.
Many of Von Eschenbach’s new fellows are also from a particular country (which even businessweek has noted that businesses say is the worst country for corruption). I fear that this is intentional in order to train people so they may return to the home country and industry will have a cadre of trained scientists in a particular country who know the latest scientific techinques that they complain FDA isn’t up on.
It is one thing to have immigration when there is a true shortage and those individuals are here to help the country grow, and we should welcome them and not discriminate. It’s quite another to use tax dollars to discriminate and eliminate US citizens from jobs and to then use these guest workers to ship the high tech jobs we’re told will be the future overseas with taxpayer assistance.
Opinions are my own.
Justice in MI
Thanks for this summary, FDA Rev.. I am reminded of the French-Indian wars. Find a group of “natives” who will link up with your against their own competition - essentially, everyone else.
Indeed, this was pretty much a universal colonialist strategy. The Belgians elevated the Tutsis in Rwanda as “their people,” and part of that legacy was the Rwandan gencide in ‘94.
It would be interesting if some of the “mafia” realized all the ways they were being used and - despite local privilege - decided to talk back to the masters. House slaves sometimes do.
Justice in MI
p.s. That was just my opinion. I do not speak for the entire state of Michigan.