Cognizant Discriminated Against Non-Indian Workers, US Jury Says (bloomberg.com) 66
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:3, Insightful)
Re:A path forward (Score:4, 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"....
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.
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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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Have you been listening to the Right recently? Does White Nationalism ring a bell?
Re: A path forward (Score:2, Insightful)
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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 are projecting your own personality flaws upon others. It takes courage to stand to genocidal hate mob today, and cowards are universally hiding within that crowd. In your crowd.
Your racist view is mainstream. There are countless papers touting how evil whiteness is. And it's been that way long before fake, long debunked studies by McKinsey promoted the idea that it makes economic sense, at which point your hate mob was unleashed on countless innocent people, destroying their lives forever.
I linked abov
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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
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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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> 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:5, 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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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)
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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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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.
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.
Import the third world (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: Import the third world (Score:3)
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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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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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.
Kindly, (Score:1)
do the needful. Rest is fine.
Self-evident Untruth (Score:3)
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.
No brainer. Cost is everything. (Score:4, 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
Discrimination against low-caste people (Score:1)
is an issue in Indian companies and by Indian managers in general.
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!"
This isn't uncommon (Score:3)
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"?
I'm more tolerant of h1b programs (Score:1)
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.
I never worked FOR Cognizant... (Score:4, 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.
A simple solution (Score:2)
Um, yeah (Score:2)
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.