Lawsuit by Americans: Outsourcing Firm ‘Cognizant’ Discriminates Against Whites

The multi-billion dollar outsourcing firm Cognizant discriminates against white American workers in favor of Indian nationals, a new lawsuit alleges.

A lawsuit has been brought by three former white American workers for the multinational corporation Cognizant, who say the outsourcing firm forced them out of their jobs in favor of Indian nationals, according to the Economic Times:

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., the biggest U.S. sponsor of H-1B visas for foreign information technology specialists, says a civil rights lawsuit accusing the firm of bias against workers who aren’t from India is all wrong.

Three former employees claim they were forced out of their jobs and replaced with “less qualified” South Asians after being poorly treated by their Indian supervisors and colleagues, given unjustifiably low performance ratings and denied promotions.

The company contends that what it’s accused of isn’t covered by federal civil rights law.

Within the H-1B visa outsourcing industry, young male Indian nationals are favored above any other cohort, according to research by the Center for Immigration Studies. Nearly 70 percent of all H-1B visa-holders are from India.

The lawsuit against Cognizant is just the latest in a string of accusations against multiple outsourcing firms — such as Tata Consulting Services, Infosys, and Capgemini — for not only sending Americans’ jobs overseas but replacing Americans with imported foreign nationals through the H-1B visa.

The firm’s outsourcing scheme includes contracting with U.S. multinational corporations, laying off American workers, and often forcing them to train their replacements who are foreign nationals that come to the country on the H-1B visa. Down the road, the job stripped from the American worker is often offshored to a foreign country altogether.

Every year, more than 100,000 foreign workers are brought to the U.S. on the H-1B visa and are allowed to stay for up to six years. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers are in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.

A similar lawsuit by a white American former employee of Infosys alleges similar practices in the outsourcing industry, where Indian nationals are favored.

As Breitbart News reported, the lawsuit claims:

Infosys maintains roughly 200,000 employees working in the United States. While roughly 1% of the U. S. population is of the South Asian race and national origin, roughly 93%-94% of Infosys’s United States workforce is of the South Asian national origin (primarily Indian). This disproportionately South Asian and Indian workforce, by race and national origin, is a result of Infosys’s intentional employment discrimination against individuals who are not South Asian, including discrimination in the hiring, promotion, compensation and termination of individuals. [Emphasis added]

Likewise, Tata Consulting Services (TCS) was hit with a lawsuit by laid-off American workers who say the outsourcing firm discriminates against U.S-born employees in favor of Indian nationals, Breitbart News reported at the time.

Brian Buchanan, one of the American workers suing TCS in the class-action suit, said he had nearly 30 years of experience in the Information Technology (IT) industry when he and roughly 400 American workers were laid off by Southern California Edison after TCS was contracted to outsource the Americans’ jobs to cheaper foreign workers.

The outsourcing industry’s use of the H-1B visa has led to mass displacement of American workers, a study by Center for Global Development previously detailed, with researchers admitting that American workers, because of the importation of foreign workers through the H-1B visa, have been displaced and forced to take jobs in non-computer science careers.

“The migration and rise in Indian exports induced a small number of US workers to switch to non-CS occupations, with distributional impacts,” the study states.

As Breitbart News reported, tech conglomerates like Amazon, Microsoft, and Apple hide their H-1B foreign worker hires through outsourcing firms like Cognizant, Tata, and Infosys. The practice allows the corporations to claim they are not undercutting or replacing American workers at extraordinary rates, as they simply contract the foreign workers through the outsourcing firms.

For instance, at Microsoft Corporation’s headquarters, 43 percent of the foreign H-1B workers were applied for through an outsourcing outfit, as well as 29 percent at eBay and 12 percent at Facebook’s respective home bases.