‘Knowledge Transfer’ is the new horror term in corporate America.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: If Americans thought a foreign worker on a visa takes away an American job, they are mistaken. Make that jobs, as in dozens of jobs.
Recently, there were appalling reports of workers laid off at Walt Disney Company and Southern California Edison, some of whom may have lifelong trauma from having to train a replacement worker from India to take his or her job. The workers were told that refusing to train the worker from India would mean being fired on the spot, with no severance package. Some of those laid off workers have filed discrimination suits.
Now comes more news of the new form of ‘outsourcing invasion’ by tech India: ‘knowledge transfer’.
The New York Times reported that the latest victims of this unique form of outsourcing to India through ‘knowledge transfer’ is Toys “R” Us, based in Wayne, New Jersey, and the New York Life Insurance Company.
The Times report detailed how a visa worker from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) sat with an accountant at Toys “R” Us, in Wayne, for a month, learnt the job of issuing payments for toys sold in company’s stores, by recording every minute detail, including taking snapshots, and then sent that as a manual to her headquarters in Bengaluru.
In all, 8 workers from TCS studied the jobs of 67 people, mainly in accounting. They then returned to India to train TCS workers to take over and perform those jobs there. The Toys “R” Us employees in New Jersey, many of whom had been at the company more than a decade, were laid off.
Toys “R” Us employs about 33,000 people in the United States.
Some workers at New York Life had a similar experience.
Accountants at New York Life were the first to be let go after a contract with Accenture. The Times reported that the company’s accountants found out only by accident — when Accenture managers in India mistakenly sent out a group email with a full outsourcing plan — that the Indian workers they had been training for several weeks would be taking their jobs back to India.
The company plans to cut about 300 positions, including up to one-fifth of its 1,400 technology workers, as well as some financial accountants.
The Times report noted another recent instance of ‘knowledge transfer’ to India.
At Cengage Learning, an educational publisher, about 30 accountants in Ohio and Kentucky were laid off on September 11, after they spent five months training Indian workers from Cognizant, another outsourcing giant. The temporary workers and the jobs went back to India.
Here’s the irony: many of the workers at these American corporations who are getting laid off through these ‘knowledge transfer’ system are immigrants themselves, including from India, who came on F1 student visa, H-1B and L1 work visas, and became permanent residents.
Indian tech companies, it seems, have found a way around the annual limit of 85,000 H-1B visas and its tricky lottery system, to entrench themselves in corporate America.