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Former Infosys Recruiter Says He Was Told Not To Hire US Workers

Posted by Soulskill on from the operating-on-a-limited-cheeseburger-budget dept.

dcblogs writes: A lawsuit by four IT workers alleging that outsourcing firm Infosys favored hiring Indian workers over U.S. workers now includes an account from a former Infosys recruiter about the alleged practice. It includes accounts by Samuel Marrero, who worked in Infosys's talent acquisition unit from 2011 until May 2013, of meetings with executives at the India-based IT services firm. Marrero and other recruiters "frequently complained" to higher-ups at Infosys during these weekly calls that many of the highly qualified American candidates they had presented were being rejected in favor of Indian prospects. In response to one of these complaints, Infosys' global enterprise lead allegedly said, "Americans don't know $#!%," according to the lawsuit. Infosys has denied allegations that it discriminates.

9 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Well duh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's an outsourcing firm. Of course they'll prefer candidates from India. That's kind of the point. Americans can't compete in that arena.

    1. Re:Well duh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      In this case "can't" means not allowed to compete because they are discriminated against based on geography.

      Fux'd that fer ya

    2. Re:Well duh. by pointbeing · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Actually, no... They are discriminated against based on salary expectations.

      This. This right here.

      I'm an American working for an Indian IT company in a middle management position. The company for which I work seems to believe that employee attrition is cost of doing business and although I'm compensated fairly (which was a pretty good trick all by itself), the majority of my peers and subordinates are not. I wouldn't blame any of them for leaving. If my company hadn't made things right with me I'd have left a year and a half ago.

      Most companies based in India don't pay anywhere near market; that's how they win contracts. Sad to say, but the customer gets what he pays for; if you want to outsource and want American workers the customer has to be prepared to pay the price. There is one client at this location that requires their service desk to be all native speakers; since this will be staffed with all US employees they're gonna pay more than if the company had outsourced some or all of that service desk to India.

      High employee attrition appears to be an acceptable business risk to most of these companies.

      --
      we see things not as as they are, but as we are.
      -- anais nin
    3. Re:Well duh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Well, mostly the hand-wringing self-loathing guilt-tripped ultra left wingnuts who believe white people are intrinsically evil. The rest of us understand that human nature is human nature.

    4. Re:Well duh. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      This exactly describes the situation in our company. The Indians have no initiative, no desire to learn things off the clock. They ignore production alerts until they pile up and then look for somebody else to blame. They ignore everything. They are uncreative and cannot come up with any solution to save their lives. I have had to deal with this in various companies over the last 15 years. They are just stupid and useless. They all want us to believe that Indians are smart but where is the evidence? If you research it, you discover that Indians universities are rife with cheating and when they come to universities in the US, they are terrible cheaters.
      In short, that is the Indian way and that is one reason that India itself is such a total shithole.

      In NYC, we had a terrible problem with Indians in that they never flushed their own toilets and often pissed on the toilet seats, as if they were high caste and expected someone else to do it. Their code was just as sloppy and slapdash. Every company I have worked for eventually gets the picture that they are terrible workers, stupid and not worth even the piddling money they earn. I have been gratified to see them driven out of every company I work for. It's a damned relief.

  2. Re:Corporate Malfeasance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Unfortunately, we can't just kill Infosys because they are a foreign corporation based in India. But we can damn well kick them out, and we probably should.

    Cancel their H1B's and 90+% of their workforce (i.e., income) disappears. I'm not sure any company could survive an overnight 90% drop in revenue.

  3. Harley-Davidson laid off 125 Americans. by Animats · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Harley-Davidson laid off 125 Americans and replaced them with people on H-1 visas from Infosys. H-D's biker customers aren't going to like this once the word gets out.

  4. Re:Corporate Malfeasance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Let's not pretend this is about racism. It's about salary, and geographically-aligned economic flow. When an American company operating on American soil hires a foreigner, it's bad for America as a whole and it widens the American wealth gap. There is almost no argument against this.

    White people being discriminated against have little to complain about, I get that - however this is about American citizens being discriminated against in favor of non-citizens. It's that simple.

    I'm not even an American but I at least try to understand the issues.

  5. Re:Corporate Malfeasance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    White people being discriminated against have little to complain about"

    And why is that, exactly? What part of this particular race discrimination makes it magically acceptable?

    Is it just because whites have been in the majority in America? What happens when they aren't?
    Was it OK for blacks to be discriminated against during apartheid in South Africa? THEY were in the majority at the time.

    What makes this racism harmless, just because it's directed at whites?

    I thought we were looking for equality in society, not for a chance to drag down the latest group to reach the top of the totem pole.