A jury in California rejected claims that Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. has discriminated for years against American workers in favor of staffing its US offices with Indians. The verdict is a major victory for the Indian outsourcing industry, whose business model depends heavily on exporting Indian engineers to the US A federal jury in Oakland, California, sided Wednesday with TCS against four former employees who claimed they’d been sidelined and fired because they aren’t South Asian. The case was the first of several accusing India’s big IT firms of hiring bias in the US to go to trial. HCL Technologies Ltd., Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd. face similar claims. This is a shot in the arm for the industry, which has not seen anything positive come out on the US visa regulation front for some years, said Anurag Rana. The trial cast a spotlight on work-visa programs that companies use to bring overseas workers to the US, a practice President Donald Trump has criticized in his protectionist push. TCS, Asia’s largest outsourcer, and rivals Infosys and Wipro have all been squeezed by the Trump administration to hire more Americans on US soil. TCS attorneys argued the company had no incentive to discriminate, having spent millions of dollars on building a local talent pool in the US Employees were terminated because they were unwilling to move to cities in the US where TCS needed more engineers, the company said. We have always maintained the claims made in this case were baseless and we are gratified that the jury agreed, Ben Trounson, a spokesman for TCS, said in an emailed statement after the verdict. The decisions we make about the hiring and retention of employees are based purely on their abilities and fit to serve our clients’ specific needs.
Jury finds TCS not guilty of anti-American bias in staffing its US offices
