IT Worker's Lawsuit Accuses Tata of Discrimination

dcblogs writes An IT worker is accusing Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of discriminating against American workers and favoring "South Asians" in hiring and promotion. It's backing up its complaint, in part, with numbers. The lawsuit, filed this week in federal court in San Francisco, claims that 95% of the 14,000 people Tata employs in the U.S. are South Asian or mostly Indian. It says this practice has created a "grossly disproportionate workforce." India-based Tata achieves its "discriminatory goals" in at least three ways, the lawsuit alleges. First, the company hires large numbers of H-1B workers. Over from 2011 to 2013, Tata sponsored nearly 21,000 new H-1B visas, all primarily Indian workers, according to the lawsuit's count. Second, when Tata hires locally, "such persons are still disproportionately South Asian," and, third, for the "relatively few non-South Asians workers that Tata hires," it disfavors them in placement, promotion and termination decisions.

Comments

First Experience With Tata

[Kagato]

My first experience with them was back in 1999. They came into our office saying they could provide programmers at 60% of the cost of the existing contractors. Even less if we were willing to hire a woman.

Re:First Experience With Tata

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't speak to Tata, but I have worked with teams who were receiving outsourced projects (they were in India), with Indian developers working for customers in Boston, and with Indian developers and QA from an Indian firm in Ottawa, plus sundry individuals on other projects over the last 15-20 years.

I have found them a fairly mixed bag. Some had English challenges which made communication difficult. That was amplified by their tendency to claim they understood everything even when they did not. There was also a cultural (corporate or national I'm not sure) where, when asked when something could be ready, they'd identify a date that they couldn't meet (and that those of us posing the question were pretty sure they couldn't meet). We ended up having to allocate twice the time they allowed or more. From a QC perspective, we often had bugs entered with "X doesn't work" without detail of how this notion was arrived at, without the QC having read the spec to see (in many cases) that this was "as designed", or without having repeated the test in different respects to be sure the feature was truly broken, etc.

In my general experience, there were some top notch people there as well. Those ones were smart but were humble enough to not worry about asking a question if they had one (and I never bit off heads when questions were asked). Some of the smartest, without a doubt, and the most willing to learn and not try to just claim a knowledge they hadn't bothered to study deeply, were the female employees.

On one project, the smartest person on the team was the female QC in India. She was constantly talked over by the males on the team who knew less than she did. I think there's a culture of chauvanism in operation in parts of India, even in tech. We found we often were further ahead to skip talking to her in group teleconferences with her and the males on the team and just talk to her separately - she didn't report bugs that weren't, did identify the surrounding circumstances and edge cases that were related, documented things well, and if she wasn't sure if it was a bug, she asked for some insight into how the system worked and then used that knowledge subsequently. I wish she'd been local because I'd have recommended hiring her for the long term.

I have run across some managers who were with our Indian partners and I found them to be too willing to say yes to things they could not deliver and then full of excuses when they could not. They didn't seem to understand we had some idea of what was actually doable and how long it should take and promising incredibly unlikely speed meant we didn't believe them (and it turned out to be right as they often did a half-assed job of testing in those cases).

I like working with Indians generally. They've all been nice folk, even the ones that I thought were too busy trying to look smart and in the know to actually ask the questions they needed to know to learn what they needed to learn. The only things I didn't like were the sly/oily managers trying to sell us BS and call it broccoli and the chauvanistic behaviour shown towards female Indian IT workers.

Yep.

[thermowax]

The comments below that article are interesting, and they- as well as the article- mirror my experience exactly.

I used to work for a domestic (US) majority (65%+) Indian company. Not small, at least 5,000 people. The CEO and CFO were Indian, and the rest followed. Not knowing their H1-B figures, I distinctly got the impression they were using the place for an immigration/sponsorship factory for their friends, extended family, caste, whatever. Management? Virtually 100% Indian. Layoffs? Huh, no Indians in that round, either. It was pretty obvious how non-Indians were treated like crap, but no one was in a law-suitin' mood because this was just after the dot-bomb crash and tech jobs weren't falling off the trees anymore. I realize everyone is an individual, blah, blah, but it seems endemic to native Indian culture that if you're not Indian you ain't shit.

I'm probably going to get yelled at for saying this, but the thing that pissed me off the most- another cultural thing- is that they weren't interested in working together (amongst themselves or with non-Indians) to find the best solution to a problem. Technical discussions always degenerated into dick waving arguments. They were more interested in getting *their* solution jammed through for a personal victory than the greater good. It was disgusting.

The root problem is the body shop mentality

[ErichTheRed]

I work for a specialty IT services firm. The company is European, I'm an American. Even though we do a lot of the same services that Tata, CSC, Wipro and the others do, the company is single-industry focused and therefore most of our employees have some clue what they're doing. The discrimination claim is going to be nearly impossible to prove unless there's a real smoking gun hanging out there

The problem with IT services is that when a company outsources their IT, a new layer of abstraction is created between them and their systems. That layer also needs to make money. I know there are MBA accounting tricks that make this arrangement look better on paper, but the reality is that the outsourcing costs more in real dollars and time lost than the company could save by doing it in house. These IT services firms want the maximum profit from the arrangement, so they bill like crazy, and are constantly testing ways to provide the absolute lowest level of service they can get away with. In the case of, say, IBM or Accenture, this is done by swapping the labor out to whatever country is cheapest that year, and only keeping project managers and absolutely key people in high-cost countries. In the case of Tata or Infosys, that's accomplished by a mix of H-1B sponsorships and doing the work in India. The result is very clear, and has been for years -- unless the IT services company is willing to leave some money on the table and someone with a clue at the customer, the customer will get the minimum service level that won't breach the contract, and pay more for bad work product. The problem, like I said, lies in the MBA accounting tricks that make this look like a good idea.

That said, we have the same problem in our company, but not to the same extent as the complaint alleges. All the top leadership is European, it's been that way for quite a while, and the company is very Euro-centric. What we don't have is what this guy is describing -- our engineering group isn't given crap work assignments, etc. But, I highly doubt anyone from the US could move beyond the VP level. That's fine by me, because I have no ambition to do that. What the lawsuit alleges is that there's no opportunity at the lower ranks either.

The thing I worry about for the future is firms like Tata squeezing out the entry-level IT jobs that allow IT professionals the ability to learn and grow into better IT jobs. It's not about the people's national origin -- my job involves working with a worldwide group of employees and customers, and there are great, fair and abysmal examples of IT professionals in all countries, all races, etc. Culture can be a problem, especially in mono-culture firms. The root problem is that if someone can make more money as a...whatever...instead of an entry level IT tech, then there will be no more job/career progression for anyone, and the domestic job market in IT will stagnate.

Re:Isn't Cheaper, the American Dream?

[Mr. Freeman]

There are a fuckload of comments here that are making similar errors. It's a grammatical wasteland (more so than usual).

I wouldn't be surprised if the company mentioned by OP got a bunch of their workers, particularly the ones located outside of the US, to jump on here and try and help defend them.