Deja Vu All Over Again: Former American Employees Accuse TCS of Firing Them for Lower-paid Indian H-1B Visa Workers
- At least 22 Caucasians, Asian-Americans and Hispanic Americans have filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that the firm has discriminated against them based on their race and age.
A group of American professionals is accusing Indian outsourcing giant Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) of firing them on short notice and filling many of their roles with workers from India on H1-B visas. At least 22 former TCS employees have filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that the firm has discriminated against them “based on their race and age, firing them and shifting some of their work to lower-paid Indian immigrants on temporary work visas,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
While “companies often conduct layoffs that affect workers with more seniority,” the Journal noted that the former employees say “TCS broke the law by targeting them based on protected characteristics of age and race and demonstrated preferential treatment to Indian workers in the U.S. on the coveted visas.”
The American employees are “Caucasians, Asian-Americans, and Hispanic Americans,” and worked in finance, operations, and supply-chain management, the report said, citing the complaint. “They range in age from their 40s to their 60s and living in more than a dozen U.S. states,” while “many have master’s of business administration or other advanced degrees,” the Journal added.
They accuse TCS of being “abruptly taken off projects last year, despite years of positive reviews and often bonuses for their work for clients,” They also cite “comments that TCS’s global human resources head Milind Lakkad made in an interview with Indian media last year,” the Journal reported. “He said TCS is trying to reduce the number of Americans it employs in the U.S. and would like to provide more opportunities to Indians there,” according to the report.
Meanwhile, in an email sent to the Journal, the TCS called allegations that it “engages in unlawful discrimination as meritless and misleading.” The company has “a strong track record of being an equal opportunity employer in the U.S., imbibing the highest levels of integrity and values in our operations,” the statement said, according to the Journal.
The Journal also noted that “the complaints revive questions about how Indian IT companies use H-1B visas.” These visas, which are designed for skilled foreign workers, “have for years led to concerns that Americans are being displaced by cheaper foreign workers with lesser qualifications,” the report said. Companies apply for visas on behalf of workers and aren’t required to demonstrate that Americans with those skills are unavailable.
However, this is not the first time that TCS has been accused of discrimination. The Indian IT services firm “faced a similar case in 2015,” Business Insider reported, “in which the jury gave a clean chit to the firm in its decision in 2018. The same year, three TCS employees filed a case against the firm in Oakland, California. A nine-member jury unanimously passed a verdict in favor of TCS. Four years later, in 2022, TCS “received partial relief in a similar case filed in a New Jersey Court,” the Business Insider report said.