TCS sued by ex-US employee for hiring & placement ‘bias’

Tata Consultancy Services has been sued by a former American employee who accused the IT giant of “discriminating” against individuals who are not South Asians in hiring and job placement.

Steven Heldt alleges in a civil complaint filed in the US District Court in San Francisco that he experienced “substantial anti-American sentiment” and was fired by Tata Consultancy after working at several of the company’s US offices for 20 months because he was a Caucasian American. “Tata has engaged in a systematic, company-wide pattern and practice of discriminating in favour of South Asians and against individuals who are not South Asians in hiring, job placement, and termination,” Heldt said in his April 14 complaint. Tata is the only defendant.

Heldt accuses it of threefold discrimination: hiring 95 per cent of its workers, most of them from India, on H-1B, L-1 and B-1 visas; hiring a disproportionate number of local South Asian workers; and discriminating against non-South Asians in promotions and firings. Heldt says that Tata made more than $13 billion last fiscal year, more than half of it from North America, and the “vast majority” from the United States. Heldt, an Army veteran, claims that throughout his tenure with Tata, 99 per cent of its employees were South Asian; they were assigned more substantive work than he and were allowed to transfer to jobs in different business units, or “verticals.” Reacting to allegations, a Tata spokesman in an email said: “TCS is confident that Heldt’s allegations are baseless, and plans to vigorously defend itself against his claims.” “TCS is among the top job creators in the US within the IT services industry, and in the last year alone actively recruited more than 2,600 US hires, many of whom are working on technologies and systems that support critical client needs and help to drive America’s innovation economy,” WSJ quoted the spokesman as saying.