An Indian-run outsourcing company used Congress’s H-1B visa-worker program to systematically discriminate against American college graduates, according to a class-action lawsuit filed in New Jersey.
The company, named Wipro, “operates under a general policy of discrimination in favor of [imported] South Asians and against [American] individuals who are not South Asian and not Indian,” says the lawsuit, which was filed in New Jersey.
Wipro has about 22 offices and 15,000 employees in the United States. The company’s revenues come from Fortune 500 companies who rent Wipro’s gig workers for software programming and other middle-class skilled jobs. Wipro’s customers, according to the lawsuit, included Mastercard, FedEx, Capital One banking, and Atlantic Richfield Company, an international oil company.
Wipro did not respond to questions from Breitbart News.
The lawsuit is asking for a judge’s approval to create a class-action lawsuit on behalf of Americans who were excluded from jobs, denied promotions, or were fired from Wipro.
Wipro is just one of many Indian firms that use H-1B, L-1, and B-1 visa workers to operate the U.S.-India Outsourcing Economy.
The outsourcing economy keeps roughly 1.5 million foreign white-collar workers in the United States, mostly via the H-1B program. The foreign population includes roughly 270,000 Chinese graduates and one million Indian graduates, despite the coronavirus shock that has pushed many American graduates out of jobs.
The outsourcing economy generates some $80 billion in revenue for Indian companies, Indian’s ambassador said in 2019.
U.S. companies are eager to tout payroll savings, in part because every dollar cut from salaries adds at least $10 to the company’s value on Wall Street.
The lawsuit says:
First, Wipro’s practice of relying on visa workers to staff U.S. positions results in available positions overwhelmingly going to visa holding South Asian and Indian individuals, to the exclusion of non-South Asian and non-Indian candidates. Second, Wipro’s employee allocation practices result in available positions overwhelmingly going to South Asian and Indian individuals, to the exclusion of non-South Asians and non-Indians, who are then terminated at disproportionate rates. Third, Wipro’s appraisal and promotion process results in South Asians and Indians receiving more promotions. Fourth, Wipro’s benching and termination practices result in South Asians and Indians receiving positions more frequently, while non-South Asians and non-Indians remain on the bench for longer periods, resulting in diminished career prospects and disproportionate terminations for these individuals. Finally, Wipro’s hiring and staffing decision-making process, as a whole, results in available positions overwhelmingly going to South Asians and Indians to the exclusion of non-South Asians and non-Indians.
The lawsuit cited the experience of four American professionals who were sidelined by the Indian managers in the United States:
in 2015, it became evident that Wipro was trying to get rid of Mr. [James] Gibbs. For instance, Mr. Rambhatla quadrupled Mr. Gibbs’ sales and margin quotas to levels that appeared unrealistic. Nevertheless, Mr. Gibbs was able to meet these quotas.
…
At the time he left Wipro, Mr. Gibbs was the only non-South Asian who reported directly to Mr. Rambhatla. Each of the other seven or eight non-South individuals who had previously reported to Mr. Rambhatla had been terminated or had quit. Each was replaced by a South Asian of Indian descent.
The lawsuit repeatedly notes that the favored Indian visa workers were far less skilled than the Americans, and sometimes hostile to American colleagues and customers:
For instance, Mr. [Ardeshir] Pezeshki observed that the vast majority of individuals selected for U.S. positions were South Asian. These individuals were often poorly skilled and unqualified for the positions, which created tension with Wipro’s clients. For example, based on Mr. Pezeshki’s observations, clients often had two complaints with Wipro: (1) a lack of skilled workers on projects and (2) poor quality of work. On one occasion, during a periodic sales conference, Mr. Pezeshki heard several South Asian individuals discussing a client who was upset with the lack of skilled resources on a project. One of the individuals, upon hearing about the client’s complaint, responded: “Fuck the Americans.”
Multiple lawsuits are being filed against the Indian companies for distribution, by lawyers at Kotchen & Low, and by James Otto. The federal and state governments have done very little to prevent Fortune 500 companies from using H-1Bs to sideline American graduates, aside from levying occasional fines.
However, President Donald Trump has directed his deputies to draft policies that would transfer jobs from visa workers back to Americans who have lost jobs in the coronavirus crash.
The outsourcing contracts to the Indians firms are often justified to Congress and to Wall Street experts as cost-saving measures. But the outsourcing contracts often contain hidden expenses, rewards wasteful featherbedding by Indian contractors, degrade software quality, and often alienate customers, U.S. managers and professionals tell Breitbart News.
U.S. executives strongly favor outsourcing because it makes work easier for CEOs and H.R. managers, the Americans say to Breitbart News. The Indian workforces are easy to hire and fire, they don’t complain to managers, they do not make professional arguments against executives’ decisions, and they allow kickbacks via India or ancillary U.S. businesses, the Americans say.
Indian managers have a hidden financial incentive to exclude Americans, Indian H-1B workers told Breitbart News.
Indian hiring managers will sell Americans’ jobs to Indians for $5,000 to $10,000, one Indian H-1B worker told Breitbart News. Honest Indian managers cannot stop the kickbacks, he said, because “you can’t survive — you will become a bottleneck in the chain. … [Senior managers] will fire you,’ he said.
In contrast, mid-level American managers do not sell jobs, he said, adding, “There are very few honest Indian managers — maybe one in a million. ”
The outsourcing business started in the 1990s, and it has helped push millions of American engineers, software programmers, and other experts out of their jobs and out of the task of developing the next generation of commercial, economy-boosting technology.
The bill for the investors’ outsourcing strategy is now being imposed on tens of millions of young Americans.
Silicon Valley CEOs are losing their fundamental competition against Chinese companies, said a February 27 article by Eric Schmidt, one of the former Silicon Valley chieftains who served as CEO of Google while the sector discarded its American professionals.
The Valley now needs a bailout from Washington, DC, he wrote in the New York Times — without noting the CEOs’ role in destroying innovation by hiring visa workers:
Important trends are not in our favor. America’s lead in artificial intelligence, for example, is precarious. A.I. will open new frontiers in everything from biotechnology to banking, and it is also a Defense Department priority. Leading the world in A.I. is essential to growing our economy and protecting our security. A recent study considering more than 100 metrics finds that the United States is well ahead of China today but will fall behind in five to 10 years. China also has almost twice as many supercomputers and about 15 times as many deployed 5G base stations as the United States. If current trends continue, China’s overall investments in research and development are expected to surpass those of the United States within 10 years, around the same time its economy is projected to become larger than ours.
The establishment U.S. media has failed to follow the huge impact of colleg graduate outsourcing on the U.S. economy and technology development, just as it failed to follow the transfer of the U.S manufacturing sector to China.
For example, a Los Angeles Times’ immigration reporter recently wrote, “research shows that immigrants typically don’t compete with U.S.-born workers for jobs, or lower their wages,” even though the entire sector exists to replace Americans with cheaper foreign rivals.
Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC, or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com.
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