California judge says TCS will have to defend itself in 2015 discrimination case

Indian tech giant Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. (TCS) will be defending itself against a lawsuit filed by a worker alleging bias against native workers.  On Wednesday, the company faced a court defeat after a federal judge in Oakland, California, gave the green signal to proceed on a 2015 lawsuit filed against the multinational company, Bloomberg reported.

Additionally, “the judge also expanded the case into a class action on behalf of American workers who lost their jobs at TCS offices in the U.S. because they hadn’t been assigned to any of its clients,” according to the report.

The 2015 lawsuit was filed by a worker who said he had to face “substantial anti-American sentiment” and was fired after 20 months although he had 20 years’ experience.  Later, he was made lead plaintiff by two other men.

READ: Former employee Steven Heldt files lawsuit against TCS for discrimination against non-South Asians (April 16, 2015)

Another worker, Brian Buchanan, said he was removed from his job position in another company after his work was outsourced to TCS and he was asked to stay for a few months to train his Indian replacements. He added that during a job fair held for the fired employees, a South Asian TCS manager was “dismissive of his interest in a position,” the article said.

READ: Infosys, TCS and Wipro will hire locally in US as H-1B visa rules are tightened (November 28, 2016)

TCS is one of the leading companies that hire foreign workers through the H-1B program. This year, however, the company filed far less H-1B petitions than it did in 2015. Apparently, more scrutiny, tougher visa requirements and Trump administration’s agenda to push for lesser foreign workers led to some drop in the number of H-1B applications filed by some of the big Indian IT companies.

“We have significantly ramped it (local hiring) up in the last couple of years, replicating many of the programmes that have worked very well for us in India, such as partnering academic institutions and engaging with high school students,” TCS EVP Human Resources Ajoy Mukherjee said in the company’s annual report, Times of India reported in June.

READ: TCS bags $ 2.25-billion outsourcing contract from Nielsen (December 22, 2017)

“All this is helping us bring down our dependence on work visas. In 2016 and again this year, we have applied for only a third of the visas we had applied for in 2015,” Mukherjee had added.

(This post has been updated.)