Indian outsourcer Tata sued in Oakland over alleged bias against non-South Asians

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Workers in the United States for Indian information-technology outsourcing giant Tata Consultancy Services are 13 percent more likely to be fired if they’re not South Asian, according to the plaintiffs in a trial that started this week in federal court in Oakland.

 

“Locals are being fired at a strikingly higher rate,” Daniel Kotchen, the lead lawyer for the workers bringing the class-action suit, told a jury, according to a report from Bloomberg.

 

“You’ll hear from defendants that Americans are stupid and lazy. The truth is that people are threatened with retaliation if they reported discrimination.”

 

Tata Consultancy Services since 2011 has fired 12.6 percent of non-South Asian employees, compared to fewer than 1 percent of South Asians, the lawsuit alleged, according to the Bloomberg report.

 

Tata denies any illegal bias in its U.S. operations, and said in court filings that the white American former employee spearheading the lawsuit had been removed from a project and ultimately terminated because of “performance concerns,” Bloomberg reported.

 

The company said it couldn’t comment on the specifics of the litigation but believes its case is strong and that it will prevail in the trial, according to Bloomberg.

 

“Our success is based on our ability to provide the best talent available, both in the U.S. and globally, based purely on the individual’s specialized experience, skills and fit for each client’s specific needs,” a company spokesman told the news outlet, adding that Tata “strictly adheres to all federal and state equal employment opportunity laws and regulations.”

 

The lawsuit was filed in 2015 in U.S. District Court by Steven Heldt, a Caucasian IT worker who said he was employed for 20 months at Tata before he was fired. In his original complaint, Heldt said Mumbai-based Tata employed 14,000 people in the U.S.

 

Heldt claimed that about 95 percent of Tata’s U.S. workforce was of South Asian descent — mostly Indian — while people of South Asian descent made up only 1 percent to 2 percent of the U.S. population.

 

Tata’s most recent fiscal year saw it bring in $19 billion in revenue, most of it from the U.S., Bloomberg reported.

 

“The trial casts a spotlight on work-visa programs that companies use to bring overseas workers to the U.S., a practice President Donald Trump has criticized in his protectionist push,” Bloomberg reported.

 

Tata, which is Asia’s largest outsourcing firm, and rival IT staffing companies Infosys and Wipro “have all been squeezed by the Trump administration to hire more Americans on U.S. soil,” according to Bloomberg.

 

The plaintiffs’ lead lawyer, Kotchen, is suing several other outsourcing companies over alleged discrimination, including Infosys and Wipro, Bloomberg reported.

 

Tata is the second-highest user of the controversial H-1B visa, getting 14,697 of the work permits in 2017, federal government data show.

 

The Trump administration has been cracking down on the H-1B. Heavily relied upon by Silicon Valley tech giants, the visa is attacked by critics as a means of supplanting American workers with cheaper foreign labor.

 

The Trump administration plans to change the way the H-1B lottery is run to favor more highly educated workers. It also plans this month to strip the right to work from spouses of H-1B holders on track for a green card.

 

Compete America, a group representing companies including Google, Facebook, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Oracle, Salesforce, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and Walmart, plus outsourcing and consulting firms Accenture and Deloitte, said in a Nov. 1 letter to federal authorities that its members were reporting a “dramatic increase” in H-1B denials over the past 18 months.

 

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