Indians prefer to hire their own, this is very well known. And because this can’t even be discussed honestly, US corporations are powerless against this preferential treatment.
If we're giving anecdotes, I'll dish out some too. Maybe you're getting at something - communities looking out for their kind. It might be seen as good or bad depending on the situation. I've seen academic research labs that are heavy on certain ethnicities. I've seen heavy tilt of Chinese students with a Chinese PI, similarly for Iranian, Turkish. Heck, I've seen silicon valley teams that are Indian heavy, Turkish heavy, Filipino heavy.
I've worked at Silicon Valley startups that were that way. I remember thinking this is really odd how high the concentration was (probably about 70% Indian). Didn't really bother me because it was a great team and honestly one of the best companies I worked at.
It didn't really seem like they discriminated in hiring and I never felt discriminated against at work. It was just that coworkers referred people they already knew.
>The American workers say that India’s Tata Consultancy Services illegally discriminated against them based on their race and age, firing them
Question to the Americans: if in the US you don't need a reason to fire someone, how can you prove the company was discriminating you when they fired you if they didn't give a reason.
> In their complaints, the former employees cite comments that TCS’s global human resources head Milind Lakkad made in an interview with Indian media last year. He said TCS is trying to reduce the number of Americans it employs in the U.S. and would like to provide more opportunities to Indians there, according to the report.
> One former worker said in a complaint that TCS human-resources staff told employees in an all-hands meeting that the company planned to use money saved by closing down a unit that employed many of the American workers to provide jobs to more Indian nationals in the U.S.
> in the US you don't need a reason to fire someone
That's not quite what "at will employment" in the US actually means. What it means is that an employer can fire you at any time for any reason that isn't an unlawful reason. It doesn't mean the employer doesn't have to give a reason at all, or that the employer can simply refuse to give a reason if questioned, particularly if there is an allegation that the firing was for an unlawful reason.
I always called it "being Tata'ed". I know multiple people that have had to train their direct replacement at TCS. The trick is, the companies subcontract whole functions to Tata who are then free to hire H1Bs that then aren't "direct replacements" for the former employee.
Well first of all, for protected groups, you don't need to prove the reason, you need to prove "disparate impact". Don't need intent.
And even when you need intent, these people are like people who do insider trading. They tend to leave a trail. They think they're smart. Then they talk in detail about the crimes they are doing in logged chat rooms. It's hilarious.
Because there usually is in fact a reason and just because they did not disclose it to you does not mean the reason does not exist and it does not mean that it won't/can't be found via subpoena/deposition.
I'm genuinely curious why a company would go out of their way to fire Americans in America...to hire folks on temporary visas. If you're going to do the first part, why not just hire people in the countries they are from? I understand the article says the folks on the visas are able to be paid less, but isn't the H1-B process long, complicated, expensive, and somewhat unpredictable? Surely it's cheaper to just outsource the work. Hell, it's probably cheaper to outsource the work and fly the folks to America for a few days every now and then to meet with clients.
I don't have strong feelings about what they should do, it just seems like what they're doing isn't really in anyone's interest. What am I missing?
You've a lot less negotiation power as your visa is tied to your job, so you get paid less. You have to leave the country after 30 days if you loose your job and don't get another one.
So if you're keen to move up the US, H1B sounds amazing but then you are in quite a vulnerable position.
It is about control. I worked with India-based engineers writing IoT C++ on deadline (alongside a US team) at 5 PM ET. They had already put in 8 hours by the time I woke up. Total madness and abuse, in my opinion.
I left because the management team clearly valued control over competence. Every person in management either was a (white) connected executive salesperson or a member of the CEO's family.
H1B is pretty straightforward and cheap: it's about $5K, most of which are lawyer fees, if you have a law firm signed up for mass processing you get wholesale discount. And it's only unpredictable for an individual, for an employer who submits thousands of applications the laws of statistics make it pretty reliable, if the approval rate is 34.5% then out of 1000 applications you will get 345 +/- few approvals.
And outsourcing does not work for these companies as their business is putting bodies into chairs on their customer's site.
Paywall, but it is clear that companies are literally starving for cheap labor. They are willing to do anything, including bringing over workers on potentially inappropriate visas ( I am not a lawyer, just what I have seen).
Honestly I am surprised that they didn’t just hire directly in India.
If the people predicting re-onshoring of production are correct (same people are predicting generally the collapse of China from demographics, which is a tad dramatic), companies need to get used to paying more for labor.
Globalization is coming to an end. An unparalleled period of worldwide navigational stability and political stability enabled indirect access to labor markets of a vastly larger size. Why is that? Because the USA is increasingly not seeing value as the world's police, because increasing totalitarian aggression from China/Russia, from inevitable stress due to climate change.
There was also demographic bulges from the boomers in this period, compounded with both-parents/partners work that also increased the labor supply.
Re-onshoring manufacturing, combined with the demographic bombs in China, Korea, Germany, Russia and the lesser demographic shrinks virtually everywhere else will mean that labor supply will decrease, and companies better get used to paying the worker bees more and the financial wizard CEOs less.
You know, unless AI and Robotics waves their magic wand, but even then ... things are going to change.
Hot take, solving housing prices on the west coast would provide a huge boost to the US economy. The nightmare that city councils in the Bay Area and the Seattle metro have caused are detrimental to America as a whole.
If they discriminated based on age and race, that's problematic, but if they selected on some other justifiable measure and it created this result then it's no different from any company having fewer women engineers than engineers who are men.
Skilled immigration policy very typically targets skills shortages where they cannot be recruited domestically. Simply firing a workforce to get those same skills cheaper, which is what is happening here, is a terrible move for a countries workforce.
- Wages wind up going backwards.
- Wages fail to keep up with inflation meaning lower discretionary expenditure flowing into the economy.
- You wind increasing involuntary unemployment.
- With rises in involuntary unemployment you wind up increasing crime, from petty theft through to more major crime.
- With lower returns to economy on an individual basis you economically have less to invest in things like health, education, infrastructure, creation of export businesses on a per individual basis, despite growing GDP. You've created a hole but made it look like growth.
You don't need to go full domestic industry protectionism to avert the above, but you absolutely should not be firing an existing skilled domestic workforce with the explicit intent to replace them with skilled immigration if you want to perform better as an economy.
Because individual businesses can and will try to exploit the issue, this is why it should be regulated. To fail to do so hurts the economy at large when you are not filling a genuine skills shortage.
The H1-B program allows a large number of people into the US, and frankly they vary a ton in how 'skilled' they are. Some are super-smart, some are mediocre, some are just bad. This really confounds the human tendency to make simplistic snap judgements about things.
From my experience, the best H1-Bs go to the FAANGs (or whatever we're calling them these days). The middle of the pack go to consulting companies like Accenture or Wipro. And the subpar ones are C2C consultants for dodgy sweatshops, the kind who fill our inboxes with their 'hotlists' (if you know then you know). While most of them got a STEM Master's here in the US, if you look at the resumes of the weaker ones it's generally from some college you've literally never heard of- Northern North Dakota State or something. I would imagine that they're basically running a borderline diploma mill that's profiting off of foreign families who hope their child will get a Green Card
This isn't a question pro/against immigration, this is a question of did Tata break existing laws protecting domestic labor.
> If anything, we should change the law to encourage much more high-skill immigration.
I don't think any reasonable person would argue argue against importing highly skilled laborers to increase GDP per capita, that is, to fill a genuine labor shortage that domestic supply cannot fill within a reasonable span of time.
Maybe the company simply prefers to hire Indians better cultural fit etc. this is one of the main things considered when making a hiring decision. Will this person get on well with the team, be productive etc.
> Maybe the company simply prefers to hire Indians better
That completely ignored the fact that they went out of their way to fire the American employees. If what you're saying was a reasonable answer they wouldn't have hired Americans in the first place.
[+] [-] ein0p|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] faeriechangling|1 year ago|reply
Why not treat this any differently than Whites preferring to hire their own?
[+] [-] agustamir|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bcheung|1 year ago|reply
I've worked at Silicon Valley startups that were that way. I remember thinking this is really odd how high the concentration was (probably about 70% Indian). Didn't really bother me because it was a great team and honestly one of the best companies I worked at.
It didn't really seem like they discriminated in hiring and I never felt discriminated against at work. It was just that coworkers referred people they already knew.
[+] [-] mupuff1234|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] syndicatedjelly|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] feyman_r|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Rinzler89|1 year ago|reply
Question to the Americans: if in the US you don't need a reason to fire someone, how can you prove the company was discriminating you when they fired you if they didn't give a reason.
[+] [-] ryandrake|1 year ago|reply
> In their complaints, the former employees cite comments that TCS’s global human resources head Milind Lakkad made in an interview with Indian media last year. He said TCS is trying to reduce the number of Americans it employs in the U.S. and would like to provide more opportunities to Indians there, according to the report.
> One former worker said in a complaint that TCS human-resources staff told employees in an all-hands meeting that the company planned to use money saved by closing down a unit that employed many of the American workers to provide jobs to more Indian nationals in the U.S.
[+] [-] pdonis|1 year ago|reply
That's not quite what "at will employment" in the US actually means. What it means is that an employer can fire you at any time for any reason that isn't an unlawful reason. It doesn't mean the employer doesn't have to give a reason at all, or that the employer can simply refuse to give a reason if questioned, particularly if there is an allegation that the firing was for an unlawful reason.
[+] [-] ja27|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rufus_foreman|1 year ago|reply
And even when you need intent, these people are like people who do insider trading. They tend to leave a trail. They think they're smart. Then they talk in detail about the crimes they are doing in logged chat rooms. It's hilarious.
[+] [-] mjh2539|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] georgeplusplus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] idiotsecant|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bparsons|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] CharlesW|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bastawhiz|1 year ago|reply
I don't have strong feelings about what they should do, it just seems like what they're doing isn't really in anyone's interest. What am I missing?
[+] [-] throwaway1o24|1 year ago|reply
So if you're keen to move up the US, H1B sounds amazing but then you are in quite a vulnerable position.
[+] [-] basicallybones|1 year ago|reply
I left because the management team clearly valued control over competence. Every person in management either was a (white) connected executive salesperson or a member of the CEO's family.
[+] [-] pandaman|1 year ago|reply
And outsourcing does not work for these companies as their business is putting bodies into chairs on their customer's site.
[+] [-] bluedino|1 year ago|reply
Where I work about half of our contractors come in through TCS.
[+] [-] rqtwteye|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] m1117|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sumedh|1 year ago|reply
Probably an Industry lobbyist came up with that rule so that employees have to depend on the company.
[+] [-] pylua|1 year ago|reply
Honestly I am surprised that they didn’t just hire directly in India.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|1 year ago|reply
Globalization is coming to an end. An unparalleled period of worldwide navigational stability and political stability enabled indirect access to labor markets of a vastly larger size. Why is that? Because the USA is increasingly not seeing value as the world's police, because increasing totalitarian aggression from China/Russia, from inevitable stress due to climate change.
There was also demographic bulges from the boomers in this period, compounded with both-parents/partners work that also increased the labor supply.
Re-onshoring manufacturing, combined with the demographic bombs in China, Korea, Germany, Russia and the lesser demographic shrinks virtually everywhere else will mean that labor supply will decrease, and companies better get used to paying the worker bees more and the financial wizard CEOs less.
You know, unless AI and Robotics waves their magic wand, but even then ... things are going to change.
[+] [-] com2kid|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway5959|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] renewiltord|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ushtaritk421|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] anakaine|1 year ago|reply
- Wages wind up going backwards.
- Wages fail to keep up with inflation meaning lower discretionary expenditure flowing into the economy.
- You wind increasing involuntary unemployment.
- With rises in involuntary unemployment you wind up increasing crime, from petty theft through to more major crime.
- With lower returns to economy on an individual basis you economically have less to invest in things like health, education, infrastructure, creation of export businesses on a per individual basis, despite growing GDP. You've created a hole but made it look like growth.
You don't need to go full domestic industry protectionism to avert the above, but you absolutely should not be firing an existing skilled domestic workforce with the explicit intent to replace them with skilled immigration if you want to perform better as an economy.
Because individual businesses can and will try to exploit the issue, this is why it should be regulated. To fail to do so hurts the economy at large when you are not filling a genuine skills shortage.
[+] [-] hash872|1 year ago|reply
From my experience, the best H1-Bs go to the FAANGs (or whatever we're calling them these days). The middle of the pack go to consulting companies like Accenture or Wipro. And the subpar ones are C2C consultants for dodgy sweatshops, the kind who fill our inboxes with their 'hotlists' (if you know then you know). While most of them got a STEM Master's here in the US, if you look at the resumes of the weaker ones it's generally from some college you've literally never heard of- Northern North Dakota State or something. I would imagine that they're basically running a borderline diploma mill that's profiting off of foreign families who hope their child will get a Green Card
[+] [-] engineer_22|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ametrau|1 year ago|reply
The problem is, Indians can’t create an America. What they create is an India, and they will, inevitably, in America also. And that’s a shame.
[+] [-] imacomputer|1 year ago|reply
> If anything, we should change the law to encourage much more high-skill immigration.
I don't think any reasonable person would argue argue against importing highly skilled laborers to increase GDP per capita, that is, to fill a genuine labor shortage that domestic supply cannot fill within a reasonable span of time.
[+] [-] iorrus|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] bastawhiz|1 year ago|reply
That completely ignored the fact that they went out of their way to fire the American employees. If what you're saying was a reasonable answer they wouldn't have hired Americans in the first place.
[+] [-] ametrau|1 year ago|reply