Big win for TCS | US Jury clears IT major of anti-America bias
A jury in California rejected claims that Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) discriminated against American workers in favor of staffing its US offices with Indians.
A jury in California rejected claims that Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) discriminated against American workers in favor of staffing its US offices with Indians. The verdict is a major victory for TCS, whose business model depends heavily on exporting engineers to the US. A federal jury in Oakland, California, on Wednesday, sided with TCS against four ex-employees who claimed they’d been sidelined and fired because they aren’t South Asian.
The case was the first of several accusing India’s big IT firms of hiring bias in the US to go to trial. HCL, Infosys and Wipro face similar claims. “This is a shot in the arm for the industry, which has not seen anything positive come out on the US visa regulation front for some years,” said Anurag Rana, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence.
The trial cast a spotlight on work-visa programmes that companies use to bring overseas workers to the US, a practice president Donald Trump has criticized in his protectionist push. TCS, Asia’s largest outsourcer, and rivals Infosys and Wipro have all been squeezed by the Trump administration to hire more Americans on US soil.
The ex-employees who sued had accused TCS of a “systematic pattern and practice of discrimination” by favoring Indian ex-pats and visa-ready workers from India for US positions. That has resulted in a workforce that’s almost 80% South Asian, far greater than the 12% representation of South Asians in the US IT workforce, according to the complaint.
At trial, the plaintiffs cited statistical evidence that the odds of race and national origin not being a factor in TCS’s termination decisions are less than one in a billion. They said that since 2011, the company fired 12.6% of its non-South Asian workers in the US, compared with less than 1% of its South Asian employees.
TCS attorneys argued the company had no incentive to discriminate, having spent millions of dollars on building a local talent pool in the US. Employees were terminated because they were unwilling to move to cities in the US where TCS needed more engineers, the company said.
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