Florida Rail Company Laying Off American Workers, Sending Jobs to Outsourcing Firm

Fresh engineering recruits training at Tata Consultancy Services training center in Trivan
Namas Bhojani/Bloomberg News

A transportation company based in Jacksonville, Florida, is laying off its American Information Technology (IT) employees and sending the jobs to an India-based outsourcing firm.

This month, CSX Corp. announced it would be laying off about 137 of its Florida-based IT employees as part of a contract with India’s outsourcing firm Tata Consulting Services.

Though executives said some IT employees will be offered jobs at Tata, the move is part of a larger outsourcing-offshoring business model. Often, laid-off American workers are punted to outsourcing firms based in India only to have their pay and benefits drastically cut and, eventually, be laid off and replaced with H-1B foreign visa workers.

Those laid-off Americans often have to train their foreign replacements and the job is later moved to India altogether where salaries are far less costly than in the U.S.

“As a result of this change, 137 CSX technology employees in maintenance and support roles will be transitioning from CSX employment and many impacted employees have an opportunity to join TCS and continue to provide support services to our company,” an email sent by CSX Corp. executives, reviewed by the Jacksonville Daily Record, states.

Kevin Lynn of U.S. Tech Workers, which represents laid-off Americans who have had their jobs outsourced and offshored, told Breitbart News that the IT employees have been reluctant to “organize and fight back.”

“After the CSX tech employees have transferred their knowledge to H-1B visa workers here in the U.S. and workers in India, they will be quietly moved out the door in a similar fashion to SoCal Edison employees after they were rebadged to [Tata Consulting Services],” Lynn said, referencing the case out of California where hundreds of Americans were laid off and forced to train their H-1B foreign visa worker replacements.

Industry insiders posted on online message boards that they expect the jobs to be fully offshored to India in the near future.

“Typically, if American jobs are going to Tata, they’re going to India, and Americans will be out of work. That’s Tata’s specialty – exporting US jobs to India, typically in IT,” one commenter wrote.

“As someone who works in IT, these sorts of cuts strike close to home and getting your job outsourced is always a fear…” another commenter wrote.

In fiscal year 2021, the top six H-1B visa employers — Cognizant, Amazon, Tata Consulting Services, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook — sought to outsource nearly 57,000 American tech jobs to foreign H-1B visa workers primarily from India and China.

For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment.

Nearly all of H-1B visa reforms imposed by former President Donald Trump have been reversed by President Joe Biden. Last year, for example, Biden allowed corporations who had been denied foreign H-1B visa workers by the Trump administration to reapply.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here

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