India’s TCS Faces U.S. Trial in Anti-American Bias Case

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-27/india-s-tcs-faces-u-s-trial-in-anti-american-bias-case

by rainhacker • 9 years ago

105 93 9 years ago

Simple rule: At least 50% of your domestic workers need to be citizens or green card holders.

ardit33• 9 years ago

Make that 75%..... Sort by the highest salaries, give the visa to the actual employee so they are not tied to a employer..etc...

Little things that can make the program better, and avoid the current abuse from some the bodyshops, and make it work for actual real talent/great engineers

surferbayarea10• 9 years ago

won't you want to factor by cost of living/geography/state taxes etc? 100k in Austin is very different from 100k in SF. It is quite hard to come up with an actual mathematical formula that can be used. I can sympathize with the law makers who are in charge of actually coming up with a concrete real formula.

vostok2• 9 years ago

Why should a company be forced to hire subpar employees? If jobs are the issue then we can just have a jobs program run by the government. Let's let businesses do what they're good at.

Unless the visa cap changes, we should just give visas to the 65k most highly paid workers. If you're in those top 65k then the US probably really needs you. Don't tie the visa to a particular employer and give people time to find a new job.

Location and industry are irrelevant.

If you're providing enough value to a company that they're willing to pay you that much then who cares if you're in San Francisco or Detroit.

If you're providing enough value that a company is willing to pay you that much then who cares if you're a manager, a software developer, or a sales person.

If nobody is willing to pay you that much then the market has spoken. We can have other visa programs for artists and other people whose work might not be as valuable.

sytelus• 9 years ago

Selecting highest paid H1Bs is actually not a good idea. Assume you ar doing startup for 3D printer and you found this genius young guy in UK who knows how to write firmwares for it. Being a startup you can't pay a lot of base salary and this is a rare skill to find good people in this area. Even though talent is right in front of you which can make or break your startup, your hands will be tied up by the law. Hope you get the idea... Sorting applications by pay will mean that only top 5-10 companies will benefit from global pool of talent and that would put their competitors even further out from competing.

jitix• 9 years ago

I disagree.

Simple rule: Don’t allow visas for client projects. If companies need people let them hire directly at market rates.

It’s weird that you work with organization A and your paycheck comes from organization B.

tootie• 9 years ago

It still boils down to cost. Recruitment and retention costs money. There are plenty of companies out there whose sole business is managing a rolodex of freelancers and sponsoring visas where necessary. They wouldn't exist if companies wanted to do this themselves.

sage76• 9 years ago

Or, just pass HR 392, which will lift country caps for green cards. That ends the endless green card wait, and people get job mobility.

knowThySelfx5• 9 years ago

It's really simple, these companies are using cheap labour while making a huge profit in dollars. They can under quote other companies because of this. Taking in natives mean pay has to be high.

murukesh_s2• 9 years ago

Not just the pay, H1b employees need to stick around as it's difficult to shift to another company, especially if they are processing green card. Also they tend to work longer hours, as I have seen personally, though that doesn't necessarily produce more quality, but most of the corporates who hire from TCS or other outsourcing firms want 24/7 routine jobs like production support, junior developers or testing. Even for development they use the same stack for decades so there is pretty much nothing more to build or learn, but minor patches and fixes here and there, which is barely interesting for anyone other than who want to stick around for the lack of other opportunities..

p.s. I am from India and have worked in U.S for couple of months for a large bank.

knowThySelfx5• 9 years ago

Yeah, its like a glorified sweatshop. Is it any wonder that these companies don't get any respect.

ajmurmann2• 9 years ago

I think the H1B restrictions you touch on are a big part of the problem. If it was easy for H1B holders to change employers the market would be allowed to correct this. The H1B holders could demand market rate and proper treatment. Right now it's completely distorted.

innagadadavida• 9 years ago

Don’t let your disgruntled self make generalizations about everybody else. I’m curious what the justice department finds out. In America the law is supreme so just wait for it to conclude instead of making baseless statements in a public form.

mavelikara5• 9 years ago

Taking in natives mean pay has to be high.

More than pay, it is the "culture fit" that these companies seem to care more for.

The business model of these companies involve getting most of the work done in India. For that to work, one needs phone calls at odd hours. An Indian employee will be more willing to accommodate these demands to attend work-related calls at odd hours.

As regulation around H-1B and similar work visas tighten, Indian outsourcers are trying to hire people of Indian origin who have green cards or are American citizens. I know from a handful of acquaintances that these employees are paid well - hence my thesis that it really isn't about the money.

knowThySelfx5• 9 years ago

Hiring Green card holders or Indian's of American citizenship is a different matter. They aren't gonna work for the salary of an Indian citizen on H1B. The equation changes there.

I agree, there could be a cultural angle. But I don't think that is the main reason.

avasylev• 9 years ago

Employing a few citizens/green card holders, doesn't mean it's not about money - it just to satisfy regulations, so you can keep getting h1b's approved. Most of outsourcing companies now moved to having small offices in US. 5%-10% are employed in US, while the rest is outsources, such models with few employees onsite just helps to outsource more.

djsumdog• 9 years ago

I had a short TCS contract once. I remember the background on my badge was green to indicate I was a US citizen. It was for an ITAR regulated project, so we were only allowed to talk about it with other US citizens. It was also just a software licensing server, which shows just how stupid ITAR is.

raverbashing• 9 years ago

And 5 technical people, 2 projects managers and 6 digits to install a server that could be done in 30min by someone in house?

surferbayarea10• 9 years ago

Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple have thousands of job openings and are desperate to hire more talent. They will happily interview anyone(from US, India, China, heck Syria) if the person is qualified. So this is just xenophobia(surprising to see such thinking in comments here on HN). The effect though is that top valley companies have already instituted a policy to stop hiring fresh-grad H1bs to avoid risk.

While so far, places like silicon valley have been unique in being centers of innovation, this will change. Till just a couple decades ago, you literally had to be physically in the office to work on a database server etc. Within a generation or so, the advantage of physically being in silicon valley will be immaterial.

seanmcdirmid5• 9 years ago

Google, Microsoft, Apple aren’t Indian body shops. Not many of us think the former are abusing H1Bs like the latter.

surferbayarea10• 9 years ago

In that case the solution would have been simple - just ban the top-10 in this list that are in consulting: https://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2017-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.asp...

Unfortunately, this is a political issue. Eq the changes proposed in http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-ho... will affect more than 10% of current employees at Google, Apple, Microsoft. Note - you cannot just fire these 10% employees and replace them with another warm body.

I agree with you that the abuse is being done by a few companies(some of which are Indian - Infosys/TCS, others American - eq IBM/Accenture, French - Capgemini). However, the "solutions" that have already been executed by the current administration are aimed at appeasing the economically disadvantaged section of American society. The reason for rising unemployment is not foreigners stealing American jobs, it is driven by economic disparity and in some ways an artifact of how technology innovation disproportionately benefits the few. Throw out all 100% H1bs and other foreign workers and it will not move the unemployment index at all.

PS: Reflect on the bias underlying your comment re:Indians. If you actually look at the data, you will see the companies abusing the system are not just Indian, but American, French, European as well.

code4tee• 9 years ago

Sorry, but there’s a massive difference between when Apple, Google etc hires an H1-B and when someone like TCS does. Very different jobs and very different reasons for using the visa.

whack• 9 years ago

"Buchanan claims that at a job fair organized for the employees losing their jobs, the South Asian TCS regional manager was dismissive of his interest in a position."

"TCS argued Buchanan ... didn’t attend any of the town hall meetings he was invited to during the Edison transition to learn about open positions with TCS and how to apply for them -- and he didn’t apply for a specific job"

I have no experience whatsoever with TCS, so I have no idea if there's any merit to these accusations. But guy-at-job-fair-was-not-nice-to-me hardly makes for a compelling discrimination argument. I've heard far worse stories from women and people-of-color interviewing at most American companies.

sremani2• 9 years ago

The point is, part of the deal was that worthy individual would have a shot at being recruited instead of completely let go and TCS did not make a good faith effort as part of the deal, and the deal was for the optics. This is not a white or black thing as you are trying to interject race into this. Its more like, if I hire from India I do not have to pay "premium", that is the part of the discrimination. Even if Mr.Buchanan was Black Transgender Women with two kittens, he would not have a shot, the point is the he never had a shot at being re-employed under the new structure.

tejaswiy• 9 years ago

Your argument would be correct if no American from the company was re-hired by TCS which I don't think is the case.

Outsourcing efforts at companies usually start with part of the workforce / couple of projects outsourced to a major outsourcer. This gives them partial insider information on the competence / political scenario / compensation in the company. I wouldn't be surprised if TCS worked with company management to figure out who would be retained based on these 3 variables and let others go without their fair shot even if they were qualified.

While this sucks for a candidate, I don't think you can allege discrimination based on this.

ascorbic• 9 years ago

If the problem is just that US employees demand higher pay, wouldn't a simpler (and legal) way of solving this for TCS would just be to offer a salary that they were planning to offer the Indian workers? If US workers are happy to work for that then fine; nobody loses out.

mc32• 9 years ago

It'll be more telling if of 400 laid-off employees a significant number applied and if they did, what percentage were hired by the consultancy. If very few were hired, it would raise the question why they would not be preferred candidates, given their job history.

walshemj3• 9 years ago

Or why the employees where not transferred to the new employer unless their role was redundant (note I say role here)

sidcool3• 9 years ago

This is pretty bad for Indian IT Industry. I would want companies like Flipkart etc. to represent the tech industry in India rather than TCS and Infosys.

Having said this, the American companies are equally at fault to exploit the system. There are a lot of complicit parties to this dysfunctional system.

unmole• 9 years ago

By companies like Flipkart, do you mean companies which have never turned a profit and are unlikely to do so anytime soon?

surferbayarea10• 9 years ago

https://a16z.com/2014/09/05/why-amazon-has-no-profits-and-wh...

madeofpalk• 9 years ago

Yes, just like all the other US tech startups/companies

sidcool3• 9 years ago

Like Amazon? Or Uber? Or many others?

known• 9 years ago

Nepotism runs strong in India. Nearly 85% of the country’s businesses are family-run, and Bollywood is dominated by just a few families. Even job-seekers with impressive resumes have to fall back on personal connections to find work.

https://qz.com/889524/the-us-says-oracle-is-encouraging-indi...

Annatar5• 9 years ago

Strongly reminds me of another country in central Europe. And not incidentally, that country is one of the poorest and least developed EU countries, where young qualified people are emigrating in droves.

Nepotism is an extremely destructive toxin to a country and her people.

hbarka2• 9 years ago

It’s too late. Been going on for the last 15 years and the ladder is already stacked with nepotism.

throwaway-h1b• 9 years ago

I've been in the US since 2008, and am still waiting for my green card because, well, I'm from India and on EB2. I wonder (perhaps due to my not understanding some aspect of all of this) why there isn't a distinction between H1Bs sponsored by companies that take on outsourced work and others. The Microsofts and Googles aren't the ones meeting out "sweatshop" treatment to its employees. Couldn't this problem be trivially solved by either denying or having a limit on the ability to sponsor H1B visas only for companies that take on outsourced work, or is "outsourced work" not a well defined thing?

happy-go-lucky2• 9 years ago

TCS, Asia’s largest software maker,

I'm wondering if that's a fact or just part of the news article.

sidcool3• 9 years ago

From a headcount and revenue perspective, it's true.

happy-go-lucky2• 9 years ago

OK, thank you for the enlightenment :)

fortythirteen• 9 years ago

There was a thread on reddit a little while back where a guy who claimed to be an American working for Infosys said he was often subjected to discriminatory talk, out in the open, by the majority of his coworkers. As in they would openly discuss such things in meetings.

It's human nature to group up by any perceivable similarity and view oneself as superior to those who are dissimilar. Add in the fact that these companies have a much higher margin with non-American employees and it's not hard to see the plaintiff's claims as plausible.

princetman• 9 years ago

“It's human nature to group up by any perceivable similarity and view oneself as superior to those who are dissimilar.”

Oh the irony here. On this particular topic, HN is an echo chamber.

rainhacker• 9 years ago

Why is the lawsuit against the outsourcing companies? American companies took decision to replace their employees with wokers from outsourcing firms. Companies like TCS and Infosys provide a service at a cost. They don't and can't dictate American firms to fire their people and use it's service.

India’s TCS Faces U.S. Trial in Anti-American Bias Case

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