Company Supplying Thousands of Tech Workers to Silicon Valley Discriminated Against Non-Indians, Jury Finds A company that supplies thousands of workers for Silicon Valley's technology industry and other Bay Area employers intentionally discriminated against non-Indian workers, a jury has found.
The jury verdict against Cognizant, founded in Chennai and now headquartered in New Jersey, came Friday in a class-action lawsuit that revolved around claims the firm abused the H-1B visa process. The visa is intended for workers with specialized skills, and Silicon Valley tech firms rely on it heavily to secure top talent and also to obtain workers for lower-level jobs via Cognizant and other staffing firms.
Three U.S.-born workers described in the lawsuit as "Caucasian" — Vartan Piroumian of California, Christy Palmer of Arizona and Edward Cox of Texas — sued Cognizant in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles in 2017. Another plaintiff described as Caucasian, Jean-Claude Franchitti, a green card holder from France, joined as a plaintiff later.
The lawsuit claimed Cognizant ousted many non-Indian workers by first taking them off projects and "benching" them without work, then keeping them benched until firing them in accordance with a company policy.
Federal government data show Cognizant obtains H-1B visas for hundreds of Indian citizens to work in Bay Area jobs per year, said Ron Hira, a Howard University professor who studies the visa and testified for the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. {snip}
The H-1B has become a political flashpoint. Critics point to abuses including replacement of U.S. workers by visa holders, while the tech industry lobbies to boost the annual cap on new visas past 85,000.
The most recent research, by the Bay Area Council, showed nearly 60,000 foreign citizens on the H-1B were approved to work for Bay Area companies in 2019. The vast majority are from India.
Because of Cognizant's preference for Indian workers, it seeks as many visas as possible, and the company has become a top recipient of H-1B visas by submitting visa applications tied to "jobs that do not exist," the lawsuit alleged.
Franchitti, with a PhD in computer science, was hired in 2007, and in his nine years at Cognizant as a director and executive, witnessed the company's preference for Indians on visas, the lawsuit claimed. When he secured new business for the company, his manager "would staff the client projects with visa-holding employees from India, rather than non-Indian members of Mr. Franchitti's group who were already in the U.S. and available for this work," the lawsuit alleged.
Franchitti was fired in 2016 after complaining repeatedly that he was being made to sign hundreds of fraudulent invitation letters supporting H-1B visa applications for jobs that didn't exist {snip}
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