Oakland, CA, July 24, 2017 – In their briefing in support of their motion for class certification, including in a sur-surreply filed on July 24, 2017, Plaintiffs presented evidence that Tata Consultancy, Ltd. has a common practice or policy of discriminating in favor of Indians and South Asians.
Plaintiffs argued that Tata has explicit instructions favoring the hiring of South Asian employees over any other race. For example, Tata has a written policy to “map” visa ready individuals in India to “onsite opportunities” in the U.S., regardless of their qualifications. In addition, numerous jobs in the U.S. are explicitly earmarked for “expats” and “visa ready” individuals over “locals.”
Tata has a strikingly disproportionate U.S. workforce. From 2011 through 2016, Tata’s U.S. workforce was “between 76.3 and 89% expats” with over 99% of the expats being from India. One human resources employee at Tata estimated that Tata hires “90% Indian males and 10% All Others.” Tata’s head of human resources for North American recognized that Tata was not “supposed to be hiring” such a disproportionate percentage of Indian men and suggested mitigating the imbalance by implementing a quota system (that was not adopted):
We should discuss whether having 30% of all the management/supervisory positions … in an ISU in the USA … filled with non Indian males should be a set goal for the USA …. That 30% can be made up of all the categories that we are suppose[d] to be hiring: white males, white females, African American males, African American females, Hispanic males, Hispanic females[,] Indian females …. That still would leave 70% of the management positions to be filled by Expat and Local Indian males, which would still make them the significant majority.
Plaintiffs’ motion for class certification is scheduled for oral argument on September 5, 2017.