A jury sided with information-technology outsourcing giant Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. Wednesday in an employment discrimination lawsuit alleging the company discriminated against non-South Asian workers.
The lawsuit, launched in 2015, alleged that the Mumbai-based conglomerate discriminated against non-South Asian employees. Workers who brought the class-action lawsuit alleged that non-South Asian workers were 13 times more likely to be fired by the company.
The nine-member jury in federal court in Oakland unanimously ruled that the company “did not discriminate on the base of race or national origin,” said attorney Terry Garnett with the law firm Loeb & Loeb, which represented Tata.
Daniel Kotchen, the plaintiff’s lead lawyer, could not immediately be reached for comment. Earlier this month, he told jurors that, “Locals are being fired at a strikingly higher rate,” according to a report from Bloomberg.
The complaint was originally brought by Steven Heldt, a white IT worker who was fired by Tata. In his complaint, Heldt claimed that about 95 percent of Tata’s 14,000 U.S. workers were of South Asian descent, primarily Indian. The company — the second largest employer of workers on H-1B visas — had $19 billion in revenue in the past fiscal year, according to Bloomberg
H-1B visas are intended to help companies bring in high-skilled foreign workers. In fiscal year 2017, Tata was approved for 14,697 H-1B visas with an average salary of $73,505, according to government data.
Attorney Michelle La Mar, also with Loeb & Loeb, said the company had increased its U.S. hiring by 400 percent between 2011 and 2017, and that foreign workers are needed to maintain growth.
“There wasn’t any preference for foreign workers,” Le Mar said. “It is a model of growth, and growth in the U.S., and we know that there’s a STEM shortage here and that’s not a secret.”
The attorneys said that today about 42 percent of Tata’s U.S. workforce is made of up American workers.
President Donald Trump’s administration has been cracking down on H-1B use, which many Silicon Valley tech companies rely on. The administration is planning to modify the visa lottery to favor more highly-educated workers. And it is expected to eliminate work authorization for the spouses of H-1B visa holders by the end of the year.
