Cognizant, an Indian-led broker of tech labor and one of the largest users of the H-1B program, has secured a mistrial after being sued on the grounds that when it lays off workers it is much more likely (8.4 times) to inflict this on non-South Asians rather than on South Asians or Indians.
And who are the “non South Asians” who are being discriminated against? They are mostly U.S. citizens, though that is hardly clear from the reporting by Law360.
According to the news service:
Philip Johnson [a researcher] testified [for] ... a certified class of roughly 2,200 former Cognizant employees who allege the company overwhelmingly favors South Asians of Indian descent by involuntarily terminating an inordinate amount of non-South Asians placed on the company’s wait list, or “bench” once their project was completed.
Usually discrimination law suits deal with hiring, rather than firing. One such suit filed seven years ago dealt with Cognizant’s nation-of-origin hiring practices within the H-1B system where employers are free to hire from anywhere in the world, but have no (apparent) obligations to be fair. In our account at the time we noted that there were eight labor brokers, all with Indian roots, in 2015, involved in the case.
Their H-1B hiring practices data showed that Cognizant had more approved petitions than any others (15,680) and that the percentage of Indians hired was higher than that of the other seven, at a hard-to-equal 99.6 percent!
So Cognizant has been accused of employment bias at both ends of the employment spectrum, hiring and firing.
This case, now six years old, is in the federal court room in California of pro-immigrant judge Dolly Gee, daughter of Chinese immigrants and an Obama appointee, who is well known for her Flores decision, which held that illegal-alien children could be held in custody for only 20 days, seriously handicapping enforcement efforts.
The persistent D.C. law firm Kotchen and Low, whose efforts along these lines have been reported earlier, represents the American workers.
Two (out of eight) jurors agreed with Cognizant after several days of deliberation; a new date for another trial has not yet been set.