Outsourcing Firm Infosys Discriminates in Favor of Indians, Says Lawsuit

Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka
AFP

The multi-billion dollar outsourcing firm Infosys discriminates against whites and African-Americans while favoring Indian nationals, according to a former employee.

In a newly filed lawsuit against Infosys, former executive Erin Green, who worked at the outsourcing firm between 2011 and 2016, says the company favors Indian nationals over other racial groups:

Infosys maintains roughly 200,000 employees working in the United States. While roughly 1% of the U. S. population is of the South Asian race and national origin, roughly 93%-94% of Infosys’s United States workforce is of the South Asian national origin (primarily Indian). This disproportionately South Asian and Indian workforce, by race and national origin, is a result of Infosys’s intentional employment discrimination against individuals who are not South Asian, including discrimination in the hiring, promotion, compensation and termination of individuals.

While the lawsuit does not allege any specific abuses of the H-1B or L-1 visa, where hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals are allowed to enter the U.S. every year, Green does note that the visa was used to increase Infosys’ already large Indian workforce:

Infosys has gone to great lengths to obtain its primarily South Asian work force in the U. S., in particular by utilizing professional H-1B and L-1 work visas to bring South Asians (primarily Indians) into the United States to work in information technology (“IT”) consulting roles, as its IT consulting business model dictates, and other non-IT capacities, including to replace or supplant non-South Asians. Plaintiff’s career at Infosys exemplifies the systematic pattern of discrimination at Infosys.

White and black employees at Infosys, according to Green’s lawsuit, were hardly ever promoted and even had their evaluations downgraded compared to their Indian national counterparts.

When Green was transferred to work under Infosys global executive Vasudeva Nayak, he alleges that his evaluations of white and black employees were often overridden by Nayak:

In addition, Nayak consistently lowered performance evaluation scores that Plaintiff gave to white and black team members, thereby also eliminating any possibility of promotion for these employees. Non-Indian team members with even the highest possible ranking (1+) were not offered a promotion. On one occasion, Nayak lowered Plaintiff’s performance score that he had given to his subordinate black employee from a “1” to a “3” without any justification.

In a more specific case in 2015, Green claims Nayak “verbally assaulted and berated” his white subordinate during a conference call, bringing the woman to tears in front of fellow colleagues and Indian nationals employed at Infosys.

Within the H-1B visa industry, young, male Indian nationals are favored than any other cohort, according to research by the Center for Immigration Studies. Nearly 70 percent of all H-1B visa-holders are from India.

President Trump has specifically called out Infosys for its outsourcing business practices, Breitbart Texas reported. The White House’s statements about Infosys specifically noted the low salaries of alleged “high-skilled nonimmigrant workers” who come to the U.S. on the H-1B visa, especially when compared to that of the salaries of Americans working in Silicon Valley.

John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.

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