Cognizant Discriminated Against Non-Indian Workers, US Jury Says (bloomberg.com) 104
IT services and consulting company Cognizant engaged in a pattern of discriminatory conduct toward non-Indian workers and should pay punitive damages to compensate employees who suffered harm, a US jury found. From a report: The verdict came after the IT firm failed to persuade a Los Angeles federal judge last month to toss a 2017 job bias class-action lawsuit when a previous trial ended with a deadlocked jury. A Cognizant spokesperson said the company is disappointed with the verdict and plans to appeal. "We provide equal employment opportunities for all employees and have built a diverse and inclusive workplace that promotes a culture of belonging in which all employees feel valued, are engaged and have the opportunity to develop and succeed," Jeff DeMarrais said in an emailed statement.
Bloomberg News reported in July that the Teaneck, New Jersey-based company was among a handful of outsourcing firms exploiting loopholes in the H1-B visa lottery system. The company defended its practices, saying it's fully compliant with US laws on the visa process. Cognizant also said that in recent years it has increased its US hiring and reduced its dependence on the H1-B program.
Bloomberg News reported in July that the Teaneck, New Jersey-based company was among a handful of outsourcing firms exploiting loopholes in the H1-B visa lottery system. The company defended its practices, saying it's fully compliant with US laws on the visa process. Cognizant also said that in recent years it has increased its US hiring and reduced its dependence on the H1-B program.
A path forward (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:A path forward (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds like a great solution if the only thing that matters is the ability to answer questions in a written form. I believe that is rarely the case though, and it shouldn't be, unless you want a bunch of people who love to be technically correct but are impossible to work with.
It also assumes that there is no implicit bias in the questions, or in their interpretation, which I don't think matches reality. It's like AI models reproducing the bias from their training data.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea. I just think it would be naive to see it as a silver bullet that solves bias.
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One issue with blind hiring is that subjective perceptions of communication skills and likeability are important in many, perhaps most fields. A paper qualified engineer who can't get along with - and therefore make the customer happy at the client site - is not going to last.
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Well, most of the US is "right to work"...and you can fire and replace anyone without cause....so, if they don't work out....you can them and replace them.
Make a probation period upon hire to make sure they "fit"....
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Well, most of the US is "right to work"...and you can fire and replace anyone without cause....so, if they don't work out....you can them and replace them.
Make a probation period upon hire to make sure they "fit"....
It costs a lot of money to hire someone. A probationary period limits some expenses and liabilities but you still lose money onboarding them, even minimally training them, then you'll likely have to go through the hiring process again. It makes more sense to make sure you're hiring someone who is a good fit.
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In my world (military contracting) bringing a person on site that doesn't fit qualifications or doesn't please the customer has a cost that can't be expressed cleanly in dollars and cents. It is in the damaged reputation of the contractor and its project management.
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In my world (military contracting) bringing a person on site that doesn't fit qualifications or doesn't please the customer has a cost that can't be expressed cleanly in dollars and cents. It is in the damaged reputation of the contractor and its project management.
Exactly, you have a lot of additional costs like reputational cost and even the opportunity cost of hiring someone else that might have been a better fit.
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You're thinking of at-will employment, where the employer and employee can unilaterally end the employment with or without cause, within certain limits.
Right to work has to do with being able to be hired in a union shop without joining the union. Employees do not get union protections, but neither are they required to pay union dues.
Most places have proba
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I stand corrected....I guess not enough caffeine this morning....
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> Make a probation period upon hire to make sure they "fit"....
This merely kicks the lawsuit down the road one step. Instead of "bias in hiring", it becomes "bias in retention".
Re:A path forward (Score:5, Informative)
The lawsuit wasn't even about hiring, it was about the hostile work environment and firing. HR hired some token whites and females and threw them into a work environment with way above average levels of racism and misogynism for the expected results.
It would take a lot more beatings for Indian dominated companies/departments to shape up. Statistically significantly more than native majority, but that would also imply racism in the minds of idiots, so they can countersue and stay more racist. Ahhh the great melting pot of diversity combined with civil rights, it just works ... for lawyers.
Re:A path forward - goes on elsewhere too (Score:4, Interesting)
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Saw this in grad school when a prof just out and told a friend "you're lazy, all the Indian students are in the lab until 2am so why do you go home so early?" Never mind that the Indian students were all jittery and on the verge of a breakdown. That prof was strongly disliked by the rest of the faculty, and much of the university as well, and didn't last too long. (ie, he would take books from the bookstore without paying, until he was banned from the store)
I've met some Indian coworkers who've said they'
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Unfortunately in many cases it's de-facto and even de-jure illegal: Blind hiring.
Blind hiring is not illegal. In fact, blind hiring is what is needed if people are so concerned about getting the most qualified person. Since any evidence of race, age, etc are not known, the only thing to go on are the person's qualfications.
The problem is, blind hiring increases diversity and since diversity is a naughty word, companies don't want to use it.
Have someone interview the candidate and ask the same questions
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Re: A path forward (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A path forward (Score:4, Insightful)
There is no study. They'll never respond with anything. Cowards generally don't. They just like lying because it makes them feel good.
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You didn't supply anything about your claim
And excellence is concentrated in a very homogenous group of people.
Why can't you back up your claim Luckyo?
You study is irrelevant to that claim. How could "white guilt, or white superiority" possibly have any affect if nobody knows the race of the applicants...you're just posting gibberish again. At least you didn't try your usual go to, and pretend entropy was somehow relevant here.
I haven't had coffee = short and blunt.
The homogenous part was a part of what the studies were asserting. Not something claimed by Luckyo
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I didn't reference a study (as most social sciences studies do not replicate = are false, for example McKinsey series of studies that DEI is good for income, where they do not prove any such thing but are often cited as proving that). I referenced the fact that critical race theorists and other originators of DEI policies openly state that merit is a function of whiteness.
Just go to google scholar and search for "whiteness and merit". You'll find hundreds upon thousands of papers on the subject. It's mainst
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It is interesting that this is a matter of discussion, when this is, as you state, accepted information.
The literature itself will serve as a better introduction to the premises under which things like affirmative action were proposed. The rocks they all ran up against are people's perceptions of inequity in the solutions themselves.
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Actually "the rocks they run into" are the exact same rocks that this same ideology ran into in USSR and in PRC. That people are inherently different, and highly motivated by being able to get ahead of other people. And when you equalize outcomes regardless of merit, i.e. aim for equity, you heavily demotivate people who are actually capable.
Because achieving equity is only a problem worth solving for communists. Normal people who aren't a part of the single most genocidal religious movement humanity has ev
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Some of the rocks were people's perceptions. Some were due to crazy attempts to force the issue. Many HR departments turned the intent of Affirmative Action ,where given 2 otherwise equal candidates, the minority candidate would be chosen, on it's head and set up quotas. The courts and media didn't help when any deviation from the racial make-up of the GENERAL POPULATION was taken as a sign of bias in hiring.
Of course, those real concerns fed back into the perceptual concerns. Then to make it all worse, gen
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Re:A path forward (Score:4, Informative)
I'm flabbergasted that you got a positive moderation for mentioning the elephant in the room about DEI.
It's intrinsically, inherently - by intentional design - racist against whites because it's foundational principle is that merit-based anything is racist. It assumes that women and "minority" races can't have merit, simply because whites excel in a merit based system.
Unbelievable.
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> I don't hire white men because I don't want a bunch of lazy whiners who feel entitled to a position just because of the color of their skin. That's an HR incident waiting to happen.
Your racist and sexist hiring practices are definitely an opportunity for an HR incident waiting to happen.
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Re:A path forward (Score:4, Informative)
That McKinsey study just keeps being resurrected as a shambling zombie for DEI zealots.
Hint: That study has been long disproven. For example: https://econjwatch.org/File+do... [econjwatch.org]
Please stop spamming this flat earth grade study as if it's real. Thank you.
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And this is the very reason, whenever possible, I don't hire white men because I don't want a bunch of lazy whiners who feel entitled to a position just because of the color of their skin. That's an HR incident waiting to happen.
So, you are a self-fulling moron to the very problem you think you are solving? amazing.
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And this is the very reason, whenever possible, I don't hire white men because I don't want a bunch of lazy whiners who feel entitled to a position just because of the color of their skin. That's an HR incident waiting to happen.
Wait... are you serious? This isn't some kind of misguided troll? You literally judge people based on their skin and gender? Being an a person of ambiguous racial appearance I always find it odd when people try to paint an entire race as being of one personality. It's like they have some sort of distorted view on life that doesn't allow them to see how hypocritical they are.
Well... good luck with that attitude...
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Unfortunately in many cases it's de-facto and even de-jure illegal: Blind hiring.
Blind hiring is not illegal. In fact, blind hiring is what is needed if people are so concerned about getting the most qualified person. Since any evidence of race, age, etc are not known, the only thing to go on are the person's qualfications.
The problem is, blind hiring increases diversity and since diversity is a naughty word, companies don't want to use it.
Have someone interview the candidate and ask the same questions to each one.
How do you think interviews are done now? Do you think random questions are asked of different people? The entire point of an interview is to ask the same questions so each candidate can be judged against one another.
True, however who gets picked for the interview is a very different matter. That process can be fraught with biases. CVs being thrown out because of an ethnic sounding name, so on and so forth.
I'm a dual national (UK and AU) and have worked in both countries. Australia is super strict over blind hiring, you only really get one personal question during the application process and I think it might be a legal requirement (are you Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander), aside from that almost nothing. UK is t
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Say I need to hire an engineer who will help my company grow into the future. Do I hire the 70 year old or the 30 year old?
Say I need to hire a social worker to assist with maternity issues. Do I hire the man or the woman? Suppose it is in a predominately African-American region, do I hire the white or the African-American?
Suppose I want to hire someone who will handle customer relations with people in a foreign country. Do I hire an immigrant from that country or some white dude who has never left middle A
Re: A path forward (Score:2)
Re:A path forward (Score:4, Insightful)
Say I need to hire an engineer who will help my company grow into the future. Do I hire the 70 year old or the 30 year old?
The 70 year old is more likely to have seen the issues that will limit future growth, whereas the 30-year old may not have this level of wisdom. The 70-year old may recognize and help you avoid the paths to bankruptcy.
It's not as simple a decision as you might think.
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Interviews don't work that way.
If they did, we would not need to do them at all.
get rid of H1B job locks or make the min pay be li (Score:2)
get rid of H1B job locks or make the min pay be like at least $80K+COL
Re: A path forward (Score:2)
There is a very simple way to avoid bias in hiring; to give the most qualified person the job regardless of sex, race, creed, age, or other mostly irrelevant criteria. Unfortunately in many cases it's de-facto and even de-jure illegal
Give? OK communist. Why should I give the most expensive employee a job?
Whether we value something by how much work it takes or by how good it is, either way doesn't mean you can force me to buy the most expensive things.
That's the issue with H1B. We say it's for hiring the best, if you can't find talent domestically you can bring someone in. The reality is someone with temporary and conditional legal status is at a disadvantage in our system and isn't valued the same as someone else with the exact same ski
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Unfortunately, these kind of practices only help a little bit. They don't help much. There is SO MUCH bias backed in CV, and phrasing of questions.
If you give me CVs of people with names, photo, and gender stripped. You probably can still guess ethnicity or country of origin for internationals.
I was responsible for a hiring last Spring. We had a set of questions and midway during the interview season, we realized that one of the question was phrased in a way that made ALL applicants from an east-asian cultu
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Well, part of working successfully in the US, is based on communication skills....if these applicants can't understand how we commonly converse in the US, then that is a valid screening method...it would cause problems with them working with the rest of the US tea
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There is a very simple way to avoid bias in hiring; to give the most qualified person the job regardless of sex, race, creed, age, or other mostly irrelevant criteria. Unfortunately in many cases it's de-facto and even de-jure illegal: Blind hiring. Have someone interview the candidate and ask the same questions to each one. Have a completely different person view the answers listed as "candidate 1, candidate 2, candidate 3" along with the resumes. It's the best possible match to ML King Jr.'s dream.
This doesn't work for two reasons.
One type of bias is based on human prejudice. Those same human interviewers or reviewers would exhibit the same biases in any tweaked scheme.
The second bias is stochastic. Introducing more humans, splitting their roles, or any other tweak that keeps humans in the loop won't address this bias.
Re: A path forward (Score:2)
I'm not anti-Imigrant.
That said, these Indian companies take huge advantage of h1-b. It was "specifically" never meant to replace American workers with cheaper foreign labor but that's exactly what it has become in IT. It was meant for only very "high skilled" workers that we were short on. There was a minimum pay rate set in 1989 that has NEVER been raised.
It used to be compromised of people from all over the world but it's almost all Indian now, thanks to a significant amount of fraud (it's well document
So many (Score:2)
Surprised this isn't about TCS.
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Or Wipro where non-Indian workers are replaced by lower cost and lower competence personnel typically within a year of a contract win.
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or HCL. or RAAS INFOTEK.
Import the third world (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Import the third world (Score:5, Insightful)
Not when you hand pick high quality talent from the third world. Not saying they are doing that in this case, but the US does have ways to bring in exceptional talent, and should encourage another nation's talented workers to come to the US.
Unfortunately, the current system tends to bring in mid to lower level talent at bargain prices.
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The current system makes visa holders far too dependent on sponsor companies to maintain their visa status. If you want top tier talent from other countries, they need more options than just one sponsor.
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Okay, what worker visa program would they use?
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It's not the H1B that locks holders to their current employers, instead there are two other factors:
1. Some H1B employers will require a punitive amount of compensation if the employee leaves.
2. Green card process requires employees to stay with one employer for a number of years.
If you have an H1B, there is nothing stopping another employer applying for a separate H1B for you. I know, because I did this.
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That may well be true, but all of those factors contribute to what is our current worker visa program.
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It's not the H1B that locks holders to their current employers, instead there are two other factors: 1. Some H1B employers will require a punitive amount of compensation if the employee leaves. 2. Green card process requires employees to stay with one employer for a number of years.
If you have an H1B, there is nothing stopping another employer applying for a separate H1B for you. I know, because I did this.
The main practical limitation is that you have to find a new employer before you leave your existing employer (because your right to remain in the U.S. ends 60 days after you leave your job), and that your new employer must be willing to deal with the I-129 paperwork on an ongoing basis. That is a barrier to movement, albeit not an insurmountable one by any means.
Having to compensate your employer for losses (e.g. if they paid $20,000 for you to move to the U.S., and you agreed in your contract to a minimu
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What needs to happen is to just do away with the H-1B program. By trying workers to employers, this creates an indentured servitude market.
Instead, if someone is so damn good that they get a job over US citizens, give them a permanent residency visa, with a path to citizenship. This way, if there is outstanding talent, they will be rewarded and not treated as slaves.
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Become the third world.
Yes, indeed [buzzfeednews.com].
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Capitalism racing to the bottom because only profits matter.
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Kindly, (Score:1)
do the needful. Rest is fine.
Self-evident Untruth (Score:5, Insightful)
We ... have built a diverse and inclusive workplace that promotes a culture of belonging ...
The very fact that employees brought this case shows that they did not.
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The fact that they have to say it out loud, and that they say it in such a marketing-speak way, also shows that they do not.
No brainer. Cost is everything. (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's be honest. South Asian contractors are way, way cheaper than their Western equivalents. Why? Because there are millions of them, and they live in a poverty-ridden country with a waleak currency and can accept rates that are a fraction of the minimum wage in developed countries and still survive.
Meanwhile, executives don't care about quality of work and about where the staff is from as long as it's cheap. Bottom line is everything.
The only answer to this problem is to legislate and to force companies to only employ local staff, who already live in the country the job is; to level the playing field for everyone.
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> Bottom line is everything.
>
> The only answer to this problem
Product liability protections, product warranty protections, corporate fraud protections - there are so many ways the corrupt legislature and judiciary protect corporate actors from quality failures and socialize the costs onto consumers in exchange for campaign donations.
Given all those reasons to not care about anything but the bottom line it's no surprise that they only do.
It doesn't have to be this way - end permanent corporations, j
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They have a strong in-group preference.
As soon as you get an Indian in a position where they can influence hiring, the entire deck of cards starts to shift: they do 'staffing cuts' and hire indians; or they just start replacing people with indians via triage and new positions. Usually it's their friends and relatives, and the quality of code goes down substantially. I've seen it kill a number of companies.
Discrimination against low-caste people (Score:1, Informative)
is an issue in Indian companies and by Indian managers in general.
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This seems the opposite of that. This company was sued for *favoring* people who were lower paid (and incidentally, Indian).
I love when companies talk like this. (Score:2)
"We did nothing wrong!" "Oh and if we did, which I'm not saying, rest assured we've changed our ways so the thing we didn't do won't happen again."
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"I mean... never happens for the first time!"
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I think the common differentiation is "Dot" or "Feather"....
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I'm pretty sure the "non-Indians" referenced here are people who are not from...India. This story isn't about indigenous Americans.
This isn't uncommon (Score:5, Insightful)
While here in the USA you hear about white nationalism, I have seen that many from the upper castes in India that are now here in the USA clearly show their racism, pushing to hiring as many from India as they can, and then being very abusive toward anyone not from India. The abuse isn't limited to women, or anything like that, but is clearly just anyone who isn't from India and who isn't in a position at or above where they are on the company org chart.
Note that this is NOT saying that everyone from India is like that, but there are many, and is a good reason to be concerned if you see someone from India who is in an executive position, because as I said, it isn't all that uncommon. The very idea of a caste system itself and that it still exists is probably a big part of the problem, because it affects how they look at others, "is this other person in a position above or below me"?
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I'm more tolerant of h1b programs (Score:4, Insightful)
Than the general audience here is, but contracting gigs should never be subject to "High value hires we can't find in the US"
Either the skill is rare and valuable enough for your company to hire abroad for, and you should want to lock in those rare skills with a full time position, or fungible commodities that can be replaced at a moment's notice with a contractor.
Not both. Both makes no goddamn sense.
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Seriously though, you have to admit that the likelihood of a non-resident contractor having a rare and valuable technical skill that nobody in the US has is vanishingly small.
Especially given what these companies actually do is no more than just banging out changes to corporate websites.It's not like they are doing anything technically novel and that there aren't a bazillion website programmers already in the US.
It's beyond time that these sweatshop companies got busted and forced to admit that the only val
I never worked FOR Cognizant... (Score:5, Interesting)
...but I did work WITH Cognizant on a mutual project. They were the most incompetent engineers I've ever run across.
It was a simple project, just a small web site launch. Windows server, .NET based CMS, and a MS SQL backend. Easy. It should have taken me a couple of hours at most. Cognizant, however, ran the client's network and wouldn't allow me direct access to the server. I had to coach their guys through the rollout. And that's fair enough; they had no reason to trust me. But, it turned out that I knew more about MSSQL than their "SQL expert", and I know just enough to run a small website CMS. I had to teach him how to restore a database and create SQL users.
The rollout took three days, finishing late on a Friday. I got a call early the next day from the so-called "SQL expert" while I was feeding my infant daughter. He had been messing around with the URL Rewrite module and broke the simple Regex statements, again, taking the site down, again. The guy was begging me to help him, so I sent him the correct Regex, which he couldn't install correctly. I had to call my company's account exec for the client to make Cognizant stop harassing me.
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I worked through Cognizant as an internal help desk rep for Faecebook a few years back. The Cog management style sure seemed focused on making busy work and delegating wholly management work to the team.
As FB's help desk reps, we were invited by the client, FB, to join internal chat rooms where other reps asked for help with issues. Our Cognizant mgt ordered us to read these groups but to never, ever post questions there because they were afraid our questions would betray how poor our training had been. The
A simple solution (Score:2)
Um, yeah (Score:3)
Bloomberg News reported in July that the Teaneck, New Jersey-based company was among a handful of outsourcing firms exploiting loopholes in the H1-B visa lottery system. The company defended its practices, saying it's fully compliant with US laws on the visa process.
Um, that's what exploiting loopholes means: you're compliant with the letter of the law whilst doing something that it wasn't really intended to do. If you weren't fully compliant then you wouldn't be exploiting a loophole, you'd just be breaking the law.
Ex Cog Worker here (Score:3)
I worked for Cognizant a few years ago. Fully-remote internal help desk rep for Faecebook. We were hired to work in the scenic Austin TX downtown office, but were switched to WFH due to COVID. Most of us quit later when they pushed to bring us BTO, but to a sterile office park leagues away in an adjacent county. I signed on so I could bike to work downtown, enjoy the culture vibe, and go for a relaxing ride around the lake after work.
All of the Cog company reps, leadership and my team's mgt. were Indian. They could have been racists, or they could have been a team of established associates.
We desk grunts were all local to Austin and looked like a diversity spread. It included a few people who didn't really seem to have tech/cs qualifications at all.
However, before that I'd worked for HCL, the Indian-dominated on-site tech provider at NXP semiconductor factory.
My on-site supervisor, who was Latin but could easily pass as Indian, recounted that he'd been invited to a meeting where he was the only non-Indian. Everyone was speaking English as it was their common language, so he had no trouble understanding. They were openly declaring that no non-Indians were going to get raises or promotions and laughing and joking about it. Pretty sure that was racist.