India’s largest IT outsourcing company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) is slated to go on trial on Monday, 5 November in California over racial discrimination claims by American workers.
WHAT’S THE CASE ABOUT
In 2014, Brian Buchanan, an employee of utilities major South California Edison (SCE), along with Christopher Slaight, Seyed Amir Masoudi and Nobel Mandili filed a class action suit alleging TCS was favouring visa-ready individuals and benched expats who were predominantly South Asians, according to a report by The Times of India.
SCE had informed Buchanan that 400 of his co-workers would be terminated and replaced by TCS employees.
WHAT FOLLOWED
TCS got some relief in August this year after a federal judge agreed to bifurcate the claims of Buchanan from those of plaintiffs with whom the IT giant had signed mutual arbitration agreements. In 2015, TCS asked all new employees hired in the US to sign such agreements.
WHAT BACKS THE CLAIMS
The jury hearing the case is expected to be shown 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. According to a Bloomberg report, the complaint states since 2011, the company fired 12.6 percent of its non-South Asian workers in the US, compared with less than 1 percent of its South Asian employees.
Besides, TCS is not the only Indian IT company facing discrimination charges. Daniel Kotchen, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the aim of the litigation is to stop outsourcing firms from violating US anti-discrimination laws. Kotchen’s firm is suing a half dozen other outsourcing firms over alleged discrimination, including Infosys and Wipro.
As recently as in September this year, yet another trio – Darryl Stacy, Donald Stephen Bradley and Hesham Hafez – alleged that TCS prefers to bring in employees on visas even when there are trained US citizens and further discriminates when it hires locally by preferring Indians and South Asians, reported Economic Times.
(With inputs from The Times of India, The Economic Times and Bloomberg)
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