Slashdot Mirror
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.
Corporations are people to, and they speak; how?
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.
Not that Tata isn't crooked but I wouldn't be surprised if the number of western programmers applying was lower too. Seriously, if you've worked with Indians before, why would you even consider a workplace that was stuffed with them?
get rid of the H-1B job lock and set a high min wage for them maybe with X2 OT (or ever higher min wage) at 60-80+ hours a week. Then the issue will go away.
We are getting undercut by those wanting to live the same life as us. What these people don't understand is that they are lowering said life style. As an entry to mid level technology person I would be concerned because you are being undercut by people possibly as competent as you minus communication skills. Experienced technology people usually have an edge due to their emersion into the North American corporate culture as well as their generally better communication skills. Keep in mind that I'm generalizing but doing so based on personal experience.
Nature's pillows.
The United States is an exception in caring about racial discrimination in the world. This seems to surprise many Americans.
It does not work — despite decades of efforts, Blacks and womyn still earn less than others — for whatever reasons.
It causes ugly discrimination of other kinds — with government contracts officially favoring womyn-run businesses and colleges openly penalizing certain races.
It costs businesses billions to avoid such lawsuits, and millions more in damages and fees when the avoidance-efforts fail. And not just businesses — government agencies too pay (with our monies) to avoid being sued. Even worse, the prosecutions by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are of the "guilty until proven innocent" variety, with most targets agreeing to settle because the Executive can run them out of business before Judiciary gets to even hear the accusations.
And finally, even if it weren't for the failures and abuses, the whole idea is immoral, because it seeks to punish thoughtcrimes — one is guilty, because one had (or is suspected of having had) certain illegal thoughts.
Can we just stop this nonsense? If Tata — or anyone — want to discriminate, let them...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Just another speed bump on the race to the bottom.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
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.
It was called the Equal OPPORTUNITY Commission.
It's not that you have a right to employment. You have, in the US, a right to an equal opportunity.
Yeah, I know. That too.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Unions stand up for union dues. They don't give a shit about you beyond that.
The "actual law" often says that discrimination is behavior towards a member of a legally recognized minority on the basis of their membership in said legally minority. Of course it varies state to state and between municipalities, but that's usually the language of it. It's only the general, unwritten interpretation that provides the vague assurances of "racial discrimination is illegal" or "gender discrimination is illegal" or similar nice-sounding definitions.
Unfortunately, 'male' and 'white' are not legally recognized minorities, so by many actual, written laws, you cannot discriminate against someone if you disadvantage them because they are either white, or male, in the same way that it's not discrimination if you only hire the deaf over the non-hearing-disabled.
The same is true of the legal definition of rape in some states; rape is only defined as a male penetrating a female. All other combinations (man/man, female/female, female on man) is considered a lesser form of sexual assault. In these places, a female can never be charged with rape.
get rid of the H-1B job lock and set a high min wage for them maybe with X2 OT (or ever higher min wage) at 60-80+ hours a week. Then the issue will go away.
What! Are you crazy or something man?!? You can't do that, Zuckerberg, Gates and the Chamber of Commerce wouldn't have it!
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
> and people say unions are bad this is what happens when we don't have unions to stand up for workers rights! ... from where I'm from, union is so powerful that they could dictate the outcome of elections. That's how they justify their existence -- have pet politicians who listen to them if they want to get elected.
Yes, we need unions to stand up for the union officials and to justify their existence. Don't believe me
Accenture? You dodged a bullet.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
win/win? win/win means it is a win for both sides, not a win for one side 2x.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
And somebody finally said it out loud.
Sent from my ENIAC
I'm assuming that the suit really means "against white people" (race is a protected class), and we just got a bad summary, as usual.
"National origin" is also a protected class. You can't legally discriminate against someone just because they are, or are not, an immigrant, or are, or are not, an immigrant from a particular country. There is an exception when the government mandates US citizens for national security reasons, like TSA inspectors.
I was a local hire at TATA (TCS) doing software work at Apple... Treated me well enough, however I quickly came to realize there was little chance for advancement / promotion in that track. So I found another job, where the bias was going more in my favor. The racial preference at TCS in the US would be more "awful" if it wasn't just a small coin balancing a big stack of the opposite bias elsewhere in the industry.
- Holy crap, I've got MOD points! Who thought that was a good idea.
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.
I started with experience in both networking and database management. I had only basic Perl and BASH experience and two quarters worth of community college VB classes. They of course assigned me to Java development assignment. Where the best Java Dev I was onboarded with, he went to work on a DB project even though he didn't even what it means to normalize a database.
Over the course of two years with the company (including 3 months of technical recruiting) I would see this pattern over and over again. There was anecdotal evidence from many people with similar experience.
Long story short, I am glad to be gone. Given their promotion model, I could see it being near impossible to get promoted with TCS, but most of that is because they are such a flat company. I don't think it has as much to do with bias. It is just that the talented staff bleeds off to find real work that employs their skills and the remainder are all that is left to promote.
throw the baby out. The bathwater is cold
The courts haven't always upheld that type of thinking. I forget the details, but there was a case in the mid-west US where caucasians had become the minority in an area and tried to make use of a "school choice" law to choose their children's school that was intended to send kids in poverty stricken areas to the "better" schools in more affluent areas. The court basically told them they couldn't claim to be minorities even though they were the actual minority in their district.
People like to hire others like them, it's sort of a natural occurence. However it's illegal in many places.
I remember one multinational company where we had offices in California, and one Indian woman applied for an internal job and was rejected because she did not speak Vietnamese and thus wouldn't fit in with the small QA group. I told her to take the case straight to HR because that was blatantly against all company policies, and our official language for communications had always been English and all of the rest of the buildings all spoke English. But she did not want to cause a scene and just accepted it. I know that if management had heard of this case that they would have been shown the door before the day was out. The ultimate reason for this was certainly that the group was all Vietnamese, they were very comfortable never talking to anyone outside of the insular clique, and did not want anyone coming in that make them uncomfortable. But it ignored the fact that any one of them could be transfered at any time or that they were deliberately ignoring company rules and the law.
Things like this just open the door for more discrimination, as in we won't hire old people because they just don't understand modern memes, black people will stand out too much in the company photos, women are going to be taking off time to get married or have babies, etc. So you sort of need to have laws to enforce non discrimination or it takes over due to human nature and the built in us-versus-them instinct.
Worked with them at Motorola. All non-Indian contracts were not renewed. Friends who were employed by Motorola said we were replaced by them. Was very informative when on mandatory 50+ user HR training calls, the presenters had to be reminded to speak in English for the two non-Indians on the call. How do I know we were the only ones? They asked us to speak up if we needed english.
You've never belonged to a Union, have you? Go ask the AMA and the Bar how much Their dues are worth.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I suggest you give this paper (http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663.pdf) a read.
This was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and it was an analysis of the studies on the employment effects of minimum wages.
From the abstract:
A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically
significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the
papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment
effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries. Two other important conclusions
emerge from our review. First, we see very few - if any - studies that provide convincing evidence
of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the
broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment
effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming
evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.
Look at the top 10 H1B sponsors. Must be a coincidence that, in any given year, the majority of companies are based in India.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
I was a member of the AFL-CIO, so, yes.. I have belonged to a union. I had no choice since to work at that company you had to join the union. Although we could opt out, we would still have had to pay dues, which is part of my reasoning that they really care a lot about dues and not much else. In fact, the only time we ever heard from them was when they were announcing that dues were rising. The only people in tech that I have ever heard talking about unions are those that barely hanging onto their jobs. The talented folks that can do the work can do a fine job negotiating wages and benefits and workplace safety and such all on their own.
Easier- require the job be independently categorized (prevents high end programmers listed as "janitorial staff") and the pay rate has to be set at 150% of the current median pay for the area for a US worker in that position. And THEN they must list that job exactly as categorized for US workers to have the opportunity to apply for- reviewed by the H1b oversight to ensure if there are qualified applicants that they are made an offer at the 150% rate. THEN- if there are really no qualified US applicants- the oversight will review the qualifications of who they bring in and ensure they actually meet those requirements. if they are willing to accept a lesser applicant- they must review US applicants and see if any meet those lowered standards.
It is not immediate, it is economic growth. Every time the minimum goes up the economy gets a boost which leads to more jobs. That growth stagnates and declines when inflation overtakes the gains. Inflation has shown NO change to its rate of growth in relation to minimum wage hikes. Ever. it grows whether or not wages keep up- but the economy suffers if wages do not keep up.
http://www.dol.gov/minwage/myt...
http://www.cepr.net/documents/...
way to stereotype all unions there. While some, or even many, but not all of them.
So.... #NotAllUnions ???
This is Tata's entire business model. They don't even try to be subtle.
Oh bullshit. If there's no right to employment then how do we have the responsibility to pay in order to live? You can either give people a right to employment and a right to be able to support themselves, or you have to give people a responsibility to pay for those who are denied work. You can't have it both ways. I prefer the former, although there are arguments for the latter as well. But this attitude that we can refuse to employ people and then get upset when they can't afford to live is just asinine.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
It is different, because of the official governmental support worker-unions enjoy — instead of being treated with the anti-trust laws, like any other entity working to raise the prices of what its members are selling.
Except, unlike a group of producers acting in concert to exert market power; an employer still has many other options for labor. They can outsource, refuse to sign a contract and bring in replacements, move to another non-union location; unlike a monopoly where there is no other source of the product. Granted, those are not easy things to do but hey still are viable competitors to a union workforce. The government has intervened in the workplace in many ways, sometimes to the workers favor (unions, labor laws) and other times to the employers (non-competes, right to work laws,letting bankruptcy abrogate contracts and pension liabilities).
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
For Companies yes. That is why they want more H1-B's to drive wages down to slave wages an help line the pockets of executives. I think companies should have to pay monetary penalties for every H1-B they hire.
My last company I was asked to help my boss write a job description targeted to a specific persons resume - it was a person from India with an H1-B. The person was "submitted" by another person in the company that was an H1-B. I informed my boss that by law he had to look for an American Candidate first. He told me that if an American candidate fit the job description he would hire them. When the job description is tailored to a specific persons resume the chances of someone else fitting it are slim. Been there, done that. I told my boss I could not with a clear conscious help him do something so underhanded. I immediately started looking for another job and found one and started my new job within 4 weeks. I couldn't work for a slimy company like that. Granted anymore, just about every company is becoming slimy.....
The Truth is a Virus!!!