University of California IT Workers Replaced By Offshore Outsourcing Firm To File Discrimination Lawsuit (computerworld.com)

The IT workers from the University of California's San Francisco campus who were replaced by an offshore outsourcing firm late last year intend to file a lawsuit challenging their dismissal. "It will allege that the tech workers at the university's San Francisco campus were victims of age and national origin discrimination," reports Computerworld. From the report: The IT employees lost their jobs in February after the university hired India-based IT services firm HCL. Approximately 50 full-time university employees lost their jobs, but another 30 contractor positions were cut as well. "To take a workforce that is overwhelmingly over the age of 40 and replace them with folks who are mainly in their 20s -- early 20s, in fact -- we think is age discrimination," said the IT employees' attorney, Randall Strauss, of Gwilliam Ivary Chiosso Cavalli & Brewer. The national origin discrimination claim is the result of taking a workforce "that reflects the diversity of California" and is summarily let go and is "replaced with people who come from one particular part of the world," said Strauss. The lawsuit will be filed in Alameda County Superior Court.

Comments

And yet...

[msauve]

It's quite obvious that the reason was to lower costs, not because they specifically wanted younger workers from some foreign land. That's not age or national origin discrimination. The only argument to make it so would be if they failed to offer the previous employees an opportunity to keep their jobs, but at pay competitive with the new employees.

And they almost certainly didn't make that offer, so here's a sincere wish of good luck with the lawsuit.

Re:And yet...

[raftpeople]

The interesting thing is that a defense of "lower costs" becomes a problem if the new workers are H1B.

Re:And yet...

[stephanruby]

Better change the age discrimination laws then.

Because letting go of older more experienced workers because they're too expensive and replacing them with younger newer workers because they're cheaper is actually illegal in the US.

Re:And yet...

[JWW]

Yep. Is this the same UC that squirreled away $175 million into a secret account?....

Re:Fiduciary duty

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you claiming that the high cost of college is due to the burdensome salaries of the IT staff?

Re:Fiduciary duty

[lupinetine2896]

I agree, outsource all the professors and facilities staff too. Even cheaper, no buildings or classes. Best value: $20 gets your name printed on the degree of your choice. I mean, it's cheaper, they'd be doing their fiduciary duty, and the student gets a degree. Learning is, at best, ancillary to the sober work of cutting costs.

Trump fix?

[manu0601]

We recently heard president Trump signed an executive order to harden foreign worker's visa rules. Does that case means it was a failure? Or were the visas obtained before the new rules?

Re:Trump fix?

[rossz]

This happened before Trump took office. Also, it's an offshoring firm, so visas are needed for the vast majority of the workers.

Re:Trump fix?

[chuckugly]

I don't think an offshore outsourcing solution would involve visas.

That's actually debateable

[rsilvergun]

the CEOs of the outsourcing firms have been caught a few times complaining about lazy Americans. And frankly he's right. By Indian or Chinese standards our 50-60 hour work weeks make us lazy. The H1-Bs I know regularly put in 80 hour work weeks. They're young and disposable but they don't care because currency exchange means they're earning a fortune working here. Best case they get a greencard and start doing the 50-60 hr work weeks of Americans, worst case they go back home flush with cash.

The moral? You can't compete with India. You can't compete with a country that has a literal cast system and effective slavery for millions of their citizens. End the H1-B program. Start calling your congressman/woman/thing and ask them why they haven't ended the program. There are other programs for rural doctors. The program is for replacing Americans. Call your congressman and ask. Remind them you and your family and your friends won't be voting for them in their primary. Make sure you say primary. They've gerrymandered the districts. After their Primary they'll win. But they're vulnerable in the primary.

Re:That's actually debateable

[Anonymous Coward]

I am an American. I work in Mainland China. I have worked in Dubai with a mostly Indian staff. I actually work with many nationalities, and I am connect to many organizations just like mine. That means, the company I work at, is connected regionally in China to at least 30 others that are collaborating. Each collaborative partner has a similar structure with a few western staff mixed with Chinese staff. In every case, without exception, we out perform the Chinese staff 3-1 and sometimes 4-1 in terms of work hours and project completion. I do work 60-70 hours to finish a project, a Chinese colleague will not do that without pressure from 3-4 higher level people. They have to be coerced.

A Chinese colleague will be at work for 40 hours a week; but in an 8 hour day they only work about 5 hours. The rest is invested in the social expectations, eating, napping, etc. Many will have 5-7 out of office tea/coffee breaks. One of our division leaders complains because 50% of her staff use the bathroom every 20-30 minutes due to the massive amount of liquids they intake.

These behaviors are all fine, as they are culturally expected and acceptable. For me, these behaviors are not expected and my supervisors are not Chinese so I cannot indulge in the down time. This same behavior is observable and testable in every company in Shanghai. Some "start-up" spaces in Shanghai are very cool and fully open from the street. When you look in during the day, many people will be asleep. This does not mean they might not invent something amazing, or they lack intelligence, but at 10:00 am seeing a start-up asleep, and then leaving at 5:00 pm always surprises me.

I do make more money than most of my counterparts, and I knew the situation before arriving. I took the job because it allows me to work on really interesting things, invest 2-3 years maximum and then move to something new, and make more of a living than I could in the USA. The output from western staff is high, but we turn over quickly, so the HR investment is not too excessive.

I have seen projects Chinese staff have let linger for 1-2 years, and I was able to finish them in a month. They have very little sense of urgency because they value their families and non-work life more than the work life. There are exceptions. Mainland Chinese who have the true entrepreneurial drive work circles around their peers, collect invest rapidly, and build businesses rapidly. They will always become the big fish very quickly, and people will follow them in sheer amazement.

I am in Mainland China, my experiences in Hong Kong are quiet the opposite, but the wages there for local workers are higher than the mainland, so there are less people like me doing these jobs. Not all Chinese people are the same, and expectations from country to country are very different.

Dubai was much worse than China. I have to say I witnessed work culture there that was destructive. People literally watching things melt down at 3:45 PM and going home at 4:00 PM because they were allowed.

I could never do anything like that, and I was always the one putting the stress on myself to stay and fix things. The waste and abuse of resources was rampant, and like China, the re-work rate on many projects would be 100%.

I watched facility construction, destruction, and re-construction too often, and could never understand the complete lack of ownership or pride in a project. These were engineers who were actually making a high salary and often out ranked me. However, again, Americans often ended up leading projects that were new and required aggressive strategies, self motivation, and hours of overtime. Had the company set the expectation that everyone needed to be self-motivated problem solvers, I would say only the western staff would have been able to meet that standard. More often than not, the expectation for the non-western staff was they were waiting to be "told", and anyone making a request had to do so through the proper channel. There was no teamwork really unless a western pers

Re:That's actually debateable

[K. S. Kyosuke]

but in an 8 hour day they only work about 5 hours.

Coincidentally, that's about the amount of effective hours you could expect from just about anyone. I think I read some study on that some time ago. People don't seem to be made to work for 8 hours at a 100% productivity utilization.

Re:That's actually debateable

[mjwx]

the CEOs of the outsourcing firms have been caught a few times complaining about lazy Americans. And frankly he's right. By Indian or Chinese standards our 50-60 hour work weeks make us lazy. The H1-Bs I know regularly put in 80 hour work weeks. They're young and disposable but they don't care because currency exchange means they're earning a fortune working here. Best case they get a greencard and start doing the 50-60 hr work weeks of Americans, worst case they go back home flush with cash.

The moral? You can't compete with India. You can't compete with a country that has a literal cast system and effective slavery for millions of their citizens. End the H1-B program. Start calling your congressman/woman/thing and ask them why they haven't ended the program. There are other programs for rural doctors. The program is for replacing Americans. Call your congressman and ask. Remind them you and your family and your friends won't be voting for them in their primary. Make sure you say primary. They've gerrymandered the districts. After their Primary they'll win. But they're vulnerable in the primary.

Most of this post is completely incorrect. The rest is only partially incorrect.

First things first, the decision to outsource is never about quality or performance, it's always 100% about money.

Secondly, its not the "exchange rate" that makes working overseas attractive, its the disparity of income. The exchange rate just denotes how many rupees you get for dollars, income disparity is what makes you get more money per hour.

Thirdly, 12 hour working days are rare, its mostly 8 hour shifts, especially for western companies that are subject to laws back home even though the labour is outsourced. As another poster explained, the culture of long hours with Asian companies tends to be more about social rules than work. A Japanese employee might be at work for 12 hours, but thats all about appearance, they have to look like a hard worker by arriving before the boss and leaving after the boss. They don't get any extra work done, a lot of the time they are napping or socialising. This is a common theme across Asia.

In my experience, Indians buck the trend of Asian culture. Most Asian (especially the Chinese) don't like it when the Gwailo demonstrates they know more, so the appearance of knowledge is more important than the knowledge itself. The Indians are the opposite. I once had to run training in Singapore, the ethnic Chinese attended, but never participated. They didn't ask questions or interact much, to do so would have lost them face in front of their colleges. The ethnic Indians on the other hand never stopped with questions. At one point I had to ask them to write them down as I didn't have time to answer them all tonight.

The reason so much outsourcing ends up in India is because they are happy to work under western managers.

Of course with all races, you get the full spectrum from idiot to genius, western, Asian or otherwise, however only certain cultures have a compunction against learning or thinking outside the box. With Indians, you get two types of body shops, cheap ones that employ anyone with an IT cert so they get all the ones that paid for their certs and are pretty much useless. The second kind employs the Indians that are moderately competent, these guys actually earned their grades and are good at performing routine tasks but don't expect much in the way of creativity, the downside of this is that you pay more, probably about the same as hiring flunkies in the US. Those Indians that are actually as good as good western IT workers... We'll they're your colleges. Indians who are a good enough can generally get out of India of their own accord. Most end up in the UK or Australia as India is part of the Commonwealth of Nations which makes it easier to get a visa. Really good Indians will have worked all around the world.

Re:That's actually debateable

[cashman73]

The H1Bs put in 80 hour work weeks not because they want to, but because they have to. If they don't, they're ass is on the first plane back to India, because their H1B sponsorship ends. Corporations can do this because the law lets them; plus, there is an almost endless supply of new H1Bs willing to take their place.

Re:Fiduciary duty

[fluffernutter]

You are underscoring the very heart of this issue. Why is only one industry a candidate for this legal replacement? H-!B should be open to all professions or not at all. Also there should be a set amount of H-!Bs available at every salary level, including executive/administrative.

Re:Fiduciary duty

[fluffernutter]

For that matter, if a university could be entirely staffed by a team from India and run at half the cost, isn't it that university's fiduciary duty to change out its entire staff?

Financial punishments are not enough

[zerofoo]

The law prohibits using the H-1B visa to replace American workers with foreign workers.

Put a few decision makers in prison and watch how fast this stops.

I know you're just trolling

[rsilvergun]

but it's not poor Indians coming over here. It's their middle class. Somebody might read your BS comment and think there's something to it and that would be worse than useless. You're not hurting Indian tech workers by making them stay in India. Not very much anyway. Now, that's not to say their country isn't a hell hole that could use improvement. But the thing is, let _them_ fix it. Not because I'm being as ass, but because they're their countries Middle Class. They're the only ones with any power to effect change. The poor can't. It's all they can do to survive (many don't). The rich won't. They like slave labor. That leaves the Middle Class. They have a responsibility to their country and right now they're shirking it.

Re:I know you're just trolling

[rsilvergun]

Just call me a Nazi already and Godwin the bloody thread why don't you? Opps, just did it myself.

Re:I know you're just trolling

[computational super]

You're arguing with a paid Tata consulting shill (and maybe a bot).

Re:Inherent contradictions within leftist ideals.

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL. Which school did you go to and did you bother to pay attention? Your entire comment is a straw man argument devoid of evidence and lacking in coherence. You say leftist without first defining what you consider to be "left". Is left of george washington leftist? Is left of Reagan leftist? If you want to make a point, please learn to write or did you skip English class in college? You do realize there's no such thing as "leftist", since there is no monolithic group of people that believe in exactly the same thing. Just like there isn't a "rightist" group. Are you using the term "leftist" to mean anyone that doesn't agree with you is "leftist"? What if you're left of someone else, does that make you "leftist". Or is your complain too many people are "self entitled" lazy jerks, who feel they're owed stuff because they are special creatures gifted to the planet? What do you define as lazy? Is working 100hrs a week at 3 jobs the threshold of "hard working." Is a banker that works 40 hours a week and goes to his Yacht on the weekend hard working? It's pretty challenging to make any sense of what you wrote, since it looks like flame bait. Speaking for myself, I am not leftist or rightist. I'm a humanitarian first. Meaning I put humans first. I define humans as someone that is open minded, compassionate, stands up for justice, helps those in need and speaks up against injustice. Individuals that chase greed and fore sake others aren't human in my definition. I define those as toxins in society. Toxins poison the community and destroys the nation from the inside out. The toxin isn't money either, it's the individuals that think firing 30 people to give themselves a bigger bonus is good. It's individuals that create structured securities like mortgage-backed securities using mortgages they knew would default. It's individuals that sold those securities, while buying insurance form AIG to make sure they don't loose any money when it all falls apart.

questionable

[superwiz]

HCL may be India-based, but it's going to be hard to prove that this is offshoring. HCL has a lot of US operations. It's practically a subsidiary of Microsoft in the US, in fact. They definitely employ a lot of people in the US. So they may be able to pass it off as simply outsourcing rather than offshoring of their operations. It's going to come down to personal accounts of who were the replacements whom the laid-off workers were training. If they are US residents, this isn't likely to go anywhere.

Re:questionable

[superwiz]

Just saw that they were also going for age discrimination. This should be a much easier to prove. I am not sure why IT workers don't sue for age discrimination more often, actually. It's rampant.

Re:questionable

[swb]

A lot of It workers are white males, and making any discrimination claim as a white male is challenging, especially if you're only in your early 50s. You can expect low unemployment figures and high salaries to be trotted out as examples of how you're not really a member of an at-risk class.

What I'd wager is intrinsic to the problem of age discrimination is that older workers often have family commitments, and when combined with spouses working at similar professional careers and children, leads to an apparent decline in workplace engagement. The older employee is less able to devote their lives to the job (learning new tech for free in their own time, or at least less of this, working overtime hours, short-notice travel, etc).

IMHO, it's less "age discrimination" than "life situation discrimination". Younger employees living in rental housing without spouses or children are just more competitive in the workplace because they have nothing to do but work.

I don't really know how you fix it, either. In an ideal world, I'd presume that the *society* would recognize that children come from parents and parents need to engage in their families to produce productive, well-educated children, and that workers of parenting age are going to be less engaged. Thus, labor would be structured in a way that doesn't penalize this kind of natural life cycle.

They forgot the first rule of outsourcing

[Trogre]

The first rule of outsourcing:

Don't.

LOL

[ArchieBunker]

You think the cost savings was passed onto the students? Oh that's a good one.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course not. With the money saved, they can hire another diversity coordinator.

Re:Fiduciary duty

[rtb61]

Don't like what the University of California is doing, no problem, bag it, rag on it, grind it's reputation to dust. The charge to much, their degrees are shit, the professors abuse students, the facilities are horrible, make them spend ten times as much as they saved on countering negative publicity. Hate what they did, let them feel that financial pain. Don't forget they have no pretty much abandoned to privacy of their students to a foreign contractor. Why would any business trust them with research when a foreign outsourcing contractor now controls access to those secrets. Doing research, a new thesis, a major book, well, now all you work is open to foreign entities, your secrets up for sale (don't think so, think how much they are worth and how much and underpaid H1B can sell the for, especially compared to the sub-standard wage). Research Universities want to open up the network security to foreign 'FOR PROFIT' entities, well, it's major emergency time to shift all the research, delete the data and all backups, otherwise you will see a foreign company suddenly releasing that research et al as their own.

You want to know exactly how I would spy on a country, fill it full of espionage agents pretending to be cheap H1B labour, all operating independently upon seize opportunities as they come up and there will be major rewards for success (no comms leaks, no conspiracy links, just take your chances for major rewards, part ownership of the secrets obtained and passed on, and wow, is US security leaky as across the board and it is just starting to get really bad, some have been there for a quite a while, good luck). By secrets I mean every single kind, industrial, financial, extortion, everything of value and the agents work until they have build up sufficient 'er' investments to retire back home.

Trump is blowing smoke

[rsilvergun]

if he was serious he would have rescinded the Obama Executive Order allowing spouses of H1-Bs to work in America signed in 2015. Trump could do that today. The fact that he hasn't isn't an oversight. He's just telling people what they want to hear, but in the end he will side with big business because he's one of them. Always was.

Re:Fiduciary duty

[FictionPimp]

Yep, when I left a community college I got almost a 30k bump in salary for the exact same position. I lost great benefits and a fairly casual atmosphere, but it was worth it in the end.

Re: Inherent contradictions within leftist ideals.

[Type44Q]

Which school did you go to...

Strawman much?

Socially Shame the Management

[Anonymous Coward]

Going Anonymous because I am deep in the industry and don't need my name associated to this comment.

You are not going to beat these organizations in court and walk away with just compensation. The lawyers will win big and the workers will end up getting the equivalent of a coupon to Red Lobster out of the settlement. Their names are forever stuck in a Google search showing they sue employers.

If you really want to stop outsourcing in America, you need to socially punish the managers that advocate and those that are close to them (family and friends). Publish their names online with their Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin accounts. Inform their friends and family who are linked to them that it would be in their best interest to "unfriend/unfollow" them or they will be caught up in the social shaming for supporting the perpetrator. Faceless corporations and colleges are not replacing workers, human beings are. Identify those human beings and magnify their actions for the public to see. Pressure their relationships to follow suit or they will suffer the social shame as well. Make a personal cost for the activity at an individual level. (Rule #13)

Make the practice of screwing Americans hurt in the social arena in addition to having their family and friends shun them. If you really want to solve this overnight, hand over the names of Americans outsourcing jobs to H1-Bs to the weaponized autists of 4chan.

Re:Socially Shame the Management

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

... but forget social media. You need to hurt them in the hip pocket.

I would like to point out that it was social media that hurt United Airlines in the hip pocket, after they forcibly ejected that doctor from an airplane, and tried to blow it off like he was some unruly asshole. So, outing bad behaviors in public may help achieve the monetary effect.

Re:Inherent contradictions within leftist ideals.

[harperska]

The same thing can be said of conservatism, or libertarianism, or any political philosophy for that matter. Adherence to a political philosophy as ones primary approach to life is inherently rooted in emotion rather than logic regardless of the philosophy in question.

Your singling out of liberalism as the one philosophy as the only one rooted in emotion indicates a clear conservative bias on your part.

Re:Fiduciary duty

[thegarbz]

If there's only one thing certain in American education it's that costs of providing education and what students are paying aren't at all related.

Re:Age? Nationality? Race? and.... ?

[serviscope_minor]

Basically, yes your maths is wrong because you haven't done any. Compare how much the cost of university has risen compared to the increases in wages over the same time, say 10 or 20 years. Do that and you'll see that the cost of university has risen far, far faster.

Re:Fiduciary duty

[fluffernutter]

I"m not just talking about professors. I'm talking about support staff, people collecting the garbage, maintenance people, janitors, people working cash registers.. Outsource it all to H1B if you're going to outsource it. Because as a person in an industry that is outsourced, I am now at a disadvantage in the economy compared to everyone else I live with. Outsourcing everyone is the only way for me to have prices set at a fair level for myself now, because I must compete in the economy with people who are not outsourced.

I'm more worried about the overall trend

[ErichTheRed]

I've been working in IT for almost 20 years, and have been involved in offshorings a few times. I've fortunately been able to get other jobs after this happens, but I worry about the overall direction of the industry:

• - I worry about entry level IT jobs disappearing entirely or becoming so unattractive that no newbies want to join the profession. My life was a series of entry level IT jobs where I had enough responsibility and access to learn what I needed to learn at each stage. I imagine the same thing goes for programmers -- you don't let a total n00b make changes to your core application; you give them UI cleanup work or similar so they can learn. If all of those jobs go offshore or become minimum-wage level jobs, rational students aren't going to study CS or IT.
• - As a result of the first thing, I also worry about having fewer places to jump to. Usually, offshoring goes in cycles where a new CIO comes into town and declares he can save millions by cutting the in-house workforce. When the reality hits, the company either terminates the contract or lets it ride until the end, then starts in-housing everything again. Not every company is in phase on this cycle, so it's been relatively easy to find work when it's your company's turn -- just find one that either never jumped on the bandwagon or is coming back from it. If the newbie pipeline dries up, then offshore firms will be able to say "See? No one domestically wants these jobs" the same way migrant farm work is justified.

I feel really bad for the IT guys in this situation -- you join a public university system knowing you're not going to make a ton of money compared to the private sector. I know, because I know people who work in the SUNY system. They're trading off current salary for stability and a safe retirement, and are well aware of their choices. When you're midway through a career and are told that your public sector salary is still too high, that's a pretty big blow.

Re:Inherent contradictions within leftist ideals.

[dgatwood]

Here's what happened in about 150 years under "conservative" US government policies:

Grew from small, isolated, breakaway country to the richest, most powerful country on the planet, with the highest standard of living.

Here's what happened under "liberal" government policies:

• Declared our independence from Great Britain in the first place.

You have the right to be on Slashdot and argue about which ideology is better because of liberal policies.

Along the way, freed slaves and saw life expectancy become the highest in the world.

Lincoln was most assuredly not conservative. Republican, yes. Conservative, no. His policies resembled those of modern progressives more than modern conservatives, though even that is something of a stretch, because unlike 99% of modern politicians, Lincoln was actually a respectable statesman.

Contrast to what happened in "progressive"/socialist/liberal nations such as Venezuela, Greece, and the Soviet Union.

Progressive != socialist != liberal.

Additionally, Greece's problems stemmed from government overspending without enough taxation to cover the expenses. That's more similar to what Republicans do today than Democrats. And both Venezuela and Russia had problems where a few people at the top of the party essentially lived in luxury while the poor starved, which makes it more like a caste system than true socialism.

Besides, essentially zero modern progressives view socialism as the be-all and end-all of public policy, but rather as a useful tool to use in limited ways for the public good. That's radically different from a country that attempts to use pure socialism as its sole policy (which is exactly as foolish as using pure capitalism as the sole public policy).

Re: Inherent contradictions within leftist ideals.

[dunkelfalke]

The Soviet Union went from a country a century behind the developed world to launching the first man into space in just 45 years, despite it losing a fifth of its population and a large part of its infrastructure in a war of extermination. So much for that.

Re:Fiduciary duty

[fluffernutter]

But they live in the US under worse living conditions because they know it isn't permanent. Meanwhile on this side of the pond I have to support a family.

Re:Fiduciary duty

[swillden]

So, as I forgot to say, I agree with your solution to the issue as long as prices fall to global averages as well as salaries.

It will equalize globally. Places with low salaries and low cost of living will see both rise. Places with high salaries and high cost of living will see both fall. Standards of living will also equalize, which probably means those who currently have the highest standards will see theirs decline, though not nearly as much as the low standards of living will rise.

This has already happened quite a bit in India, and in China. Labor costs have risen substantially, and cost of living has increased, too. For that matter, the cost of many types of goods has fallen dramatically in the US. Basically anything that can be manufactured overseas and imported is significantly cheaper than it would be otherwise. Clothing, for example, costs less than half what it did, on an inflation-adjusted basis, than it did 30 years ago. Toys, electronics, also dramatically cheaper. In fact, strangely enough, most of those things are actually cheaper to buy in the US than they are to buy in the places they're made!

Note that this equalization won't happen instantly, or painlessly, and there will be winners and losers in the short term. But it's the right thing.