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American IT Workers Increasingly Alleging Discrimination
An anonymous reader writes: Some U.S. IT workers who have been replaced with H-1B contractors are alleging discrimination and are going to court. They are doing so in increasing numbers. There are at least seven IT workers at Disney who are pursuing, or plan to pursue, federal and state discrimination administrative complaints over their layoffs. Separately, there are ongoing court cases alleging discrimination against two of the largest India-based IT services firms, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services. There may also be federal interest in examining the issue.
Fighting this battle piecemeal is a losing proposition.
"But Your Honor, we didn't get any applicants to our job posting for a minimum-wage principal engineer... We had no choice but to use H1Bs to fill this critical position!"
Here's my experience with Infosys: Their tactic is to always be the lowest bidder. When they get the contract, the staff they send generally is untrained with many of them learning the skills they need on the job on the client's dime. We had a contract with a client and were replaced by Infosys. So we had to hand over all of our functions to them; it was apparent that only one person in a team of 12 had the skills to do the job. After a year, the client fired them and came to us. But they wanted Infosys rates; we declined.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I interviewed with 2 companies last year that were very up front about my being mid-40's was a problem. In one company, 5 of the 7 people I talked to brought it up and a couple clearly had problems with it. The recruiter that flew me out congratulated me on putting up with it - what an asshat.
Over 40 in IT, hold on to the job you got because the next one won't hire anyone over 40.
Dear Feds,
Please to do the needful.
I've worked with at least two employers where an indian (sorry, not intended to be racist but they were both indian), person from an agency who was converted to perm was put in place in a hiring position and then every single hire afterwards was indian, and exclusively from the contract agency that placed the individual.
I am aware that there are also incentives for these individuals, and that their relationships with the contracting firms are ongoing.
It's so obvious that I can't imagine it's not a known quantity.
It's not really racial discrimination, it's just a moderately biased business practice.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
Hiring a specific sub-sect of human because they can be paid less is more than discriminatory. It's unethical.
Multi-national companies are *not* American companies and they have no allegiance to America or its citizens. Their ethics are not your ethics. They see "shareholder value" as the highest ethic. To them, national boundaries are a hindrance to maximizing shareholder value.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
I really like working in IT - it's good to have a job where you're using your brain every day instead of just churning out reports or something similar. The major complaints I have are:
- Age discrimination -- I haven't been looking for work lately, but I'm sure getting more paranoid about keeping a job when I see stories of people who are basically unhireable after 40. I just crossed that magic threshhold and although I have tons of experience and a solid reputation behind me, I do worry about companies just not even bothering to interview me because of a stupid set of unfounded beliefs.
- Work visa program abuses -- I have absolutely no problem with companies using H-1B, L-1 or other visas to bring in super-intelligent people who are providing a key service to the company. I have a big problem with Tata, Infosys, Accenture, IBM, HP, etc. using them to bring in a cheap run-of-the-mill developer, DBA or sysadmin who could easily have been sourced locally if the company would pay reasonable rates.
- Clueless employers -- This isn't something easy to solve, but outside of Silicon Valley and extremely high-tech or enlightened companies, IT is considered a janitorial-level service. This is why the Tatas and Infosys's of the world are called in. Everywhere I've worked that has done this has had IT productivity slow to a crawl because of change management paperwork, dealing with absolutely clueless remote employees and other factors.
The only long term solution I see is a guild system...heaven forbid you call it a union in front of Libertarian IT workers. If we want a career that continues to pay off and be enjoyable to work in, education has to be standardized in at least the fundamental level, and a career progression needs to be put in place. We need to fund some lobbyists to give Congress the brown paper bags full of money they need to pass limits on work visa programs, and most importantly it needs to be done as a group. Doctors have the AMA, and it keeps their salaries high by limiting the number of medical school graduates and lobbying for favorable insurance rules. Musicians, actors and writers have their guilds that ensure they don't get screwed by studios and keep getting royalties for their work. I just don't see why it's taking so long for people to realize they have no power against any of these forces we're seeing. No one is going to win an age discrimination suit against a corporation and their well-funded legal team. It's nice that people are trying, but it will never happen. At most they'll get a small payout and be blackballed from working in the industry ever again.
H1b employees also get displaced by TCS/Infosys. Their official policy is 85% offshore and 15% on shore employees. The onshore 15% exists mostly for co-ordination. An H1b employee's CTC is always higher by at least by 1.5x times to locals. Recently my friend who is on h1b was forced to look for another h1b sponsor because the company A signed a partnership agreement with TCS. TCS provided 3 sysadmins for his replacement but they were not upto the mark as expected by A because TCS's sysadmin's won't know scripting. This H1b guy was forced to train the TCS guys(10 of them) in perl scripting. He did that too but then they quit TCS for better salary and work hours. A new PM from TCS would come onshore every 1.5 to 2 years and he would question why they are employing a h1b guy for 2x the cost of an L1B. In the mean time the h1b guy's extension process etc. would be delayed. He used to be in lot of stress, they would still be search for an replacement and apply for the extension on the last week/day of original h1b expiry and then too they will provide 1 yr extension. Frustrated he quit for another company B. The same story has started to repeat at company B now. There is another category of visas called L1A and L1B(intra company transfer visa) where prevailing wages doesn't have to be shown and qualifications are not a factor. Almost 95% of the TCS onsite guys had either L1A or L1B and they were getting 60k for a 110k job position and their taxes found some loop hole and they were hardly paying any taxes, that is around 4k. The h1b guy was getting 85k and his vendor the rest. CTC was around 140k to the company. L1A visa is also eligible for immediate green card processing under "multinational manager"(eb1) category. The master degree H1b guys on an average wait for 10 years(talking Indian), the bachelor degree holders wait for 20 or more years. L1A guys just 3 to 6 months. For a foreign student he has to become a scientist(Phd + papers etc) to qualify for the equivalent category as "multinational manager". Some "multinational managers" are just 10+3(diploma) qualified. Last year there were around 500 eb1 gc applications(search 485 inventory on google). This year already 13000 eb1 applications have been received. H1b guys are under the Eb2 and Eb3 green card quotas. So companies have figured out the L1 loop hole and bringing in the 15% onsite workers as managers. That explains the huge jump in eb1 category. So the foreign scientists/Phds are unhappy too. The L1As get green cards in 6 months and then are not counted as foreign workers, qualifying the company as less than 30% dependent on foreign workers. Thus they import for L1As. So I would say, the anger is misdirected towards H1b instead of L1x visas.
The concept behind the H1-B program sounds reasonable. Bring in highly skilled experts from overseas that we can't find here. However, since it's now been thoroughly demostrated that:
1) Employers can't be trusted to act ethically and honor both the letter and spirit of the law, and
2) The government has been steadfastly failing to monitor the program and enforce the rules
The entire program needs to be scrapped. No H1-Bs, period. We apparently can't handle it, so employers need to find the talent here, or do without (or, you know, invest in employee development/training again).
What do you think of the idea of mandating that workers on H1B must be paid at least 3% higher salary than domestic workers - just to offset things affiliated with relocation costs. This would get rid of the motivation to import foreigners for no other reason than finding someone that will work for less, and could motivate the companies to invest in training the employees they have in the skills they need.