Company TCS and Wipro Are Coming under Increasing Fire on Age-based lay-offs.
Two of the biggest Indian information technology services firms including Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Wipro are currently in the middle of a tempest of controversy after grave claims were leveled against their workforce cut down procedures. There are numerous allegations and legal documents of these industry giants being selectively firing their workers aged 40 and over. The accusations indicate a strategic attempt to oust the experienced, better paid professionals with younger and cheaper talents to reduce the expenses. These allegations have been raised in different quarters even former workers in the United States and labor unions in India. The firms have strongly refuted such allegations, indicating that their employment and dismissal of employees is purely on performance and business interests.
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Claims of Systematic Discrimination in the Workplace by the Older Workers.
The gist of the debate is that age is turning out to be a key factor in layoff in these technological companies. It has been claimed by the former employees that even after serving several years and performing very well in the company, they were suddenly dismissed when they had reached a specific age group. Plaintiffs in judicial action against the companies in the US courts have claimed that the companies have been focusing on engaging freshers or younger employees on visas who can be remunerated very low wages. Such law suits argue that the age discrimination is usually under the guise of the restructuring being mentioned by the companies.
A certain case against TCS in the United States, called Devorin v. Tata Consultancy Services, expressly charges the company with terminating non-South Asian employees aged above 40. The alleged victim in the case asserts that older Americans were fired whereas younger Indian nationals holding H-1B visa were not terminated and were recruited to occupy the same or similar positions. This has made the companies not only to be accused to be discriminating due to their age but also to be evading local labor protections by using the visa programs. According to the complainants, such a trend is statistically significant and cannot be attributed to the chance or random performance variations.
On the same note, Wipro is undergoing legal issues that resonates these sentiments. One case relatively recent, Palani Karupaiyan v. In Wipro Ltd, older candidates are accused of being denied employment or retention by the company based on their age and health conditions. According to the plaintiff in this case, the firm has been accused of developing a hostile working environment among older employees, and favouring younger employees in terms of offering them software engineering jobs. These personal struggles have been converged into a wider story that the traditional pyramid structure of the Indian IT industry, which is highly dependent on a high number of junior laborers, is finding new aggressive implementation against mid-level and senior professionals.
Labor Unions Interfere with Formal Complaints.
The violence extends beyond the fighting on the legal front in the West, but has also brought about massive mobilization of workers unions in India. One of the influential unions that have been vocal in its opposition to what it calls illegal layoffs is the Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES), a union that represents IT workers. NITES has also sent official letters to the Ministry of Labour and Employment, and demanded that the government intervene immediately. The union alleges that it has been getting hundreds of complaints that employees claim they were being coerced to step down under the risk of getting fired.
As NITES President Harpreet Singh Saluja explains, the trend of involuntary attrition is especially harmful to those employees who had a 10-20-year experience. These mid-to-senior professionals have to be in a precarious situation, since they are deemed to be too costly to be employed at the junior level, yet they are being beaten out of leadership career ladders. The union claims that the HR departments are employing manipulative actions, including placing employees under Performance Improvement Plans (PIP) that have unrealistic targets, to create reasons to fire them. This enables the companies to assert that the exits are performance-related instead of layoffs, which will not incur any legal cost related to mass reduction.
Inquiries by EEOC in the US.
The seriousness of the situation has increased as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) of the US is inquiry of the recruitment and sacking pattern of these companies. The EEOC is the federal agency that enforces the laws which can be used to prohibit the discrimination in the workplace. A study conducted by such an organization shows that there is a level of credibility that is satisfactory to warrant an official evaluation of the complaints. Bloomberg reports and The Wire coverage have indicated that EEOC is investigating claims that TCS and other Indian IT giants have been involved in a trend of discrimination against employees who are not Indian and older employees.
Should the EEOC identify any evidence of a systemic discrimination, it may result in huge fines, and an enforceable change in the corporate policy. The investigation is on the issue of whether the excessive use of the H-1B visa program by the companies is unknowingly or knowingly denying the older US workers a fair deal. Opponents of the outsourcing model have consistently stated that the visa program is been exploited to bring in cheap labor as opposed to closing actual skills gaps. The ongoing research studies are examining the possibility of whether this economic model is being perpetuated at the expense of contravening the rights of the safeguarded age groups.
Corporate Defensive and Government reactions.
Both Wipro and TCS have been denying these increasing allegations. The representatives of the companies have always said that they are equal opportunity employers and they strictly follow the laws of all countries where they are operating. TCS has called the discrimination allegations as being meritless and misguided and said that their workforce is always dependent on merit and the changing needs of their clients. They claim that age is not the most important currency in a fast changing technology world since skill relevance is the main priority.
