Ex-staffer files class action lawsuit against HCL Tech for discrimination against Americans

An ex-employee of HCL Technologies in the United States has filed a class action complaint against the company, alleging that the IT major favours South Asians, mainly Indians, over Americans. 

Last week, California-based The Mercury News and the web portal law.com reported that Texas resident Reese Voll has filed a class action complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

Voll, who joined HCL Technologies in November 2014, has alleged in his complaint, a copy of which was provided by law.com, that HCL promoted and chose H-1B visa holders to work on projects, most of whom are Indians.                                         

At the time of publishing, HCL Technologies had not responded to a request for comment from Moneycontrol. 

Daniel Low, the attorney for Kotchen & Low who has filed the complaint, told Moneycontrol in an email response, "The key allegations are that HCL discriminates against non-South Asians in hiring, promotions and terminations in four ways."

These include using fraudulent H-1B visa applications to secure South Asian workers from overseas and giving preference to those workers ahead of American workers.

"HCL gives substantial preference to South Asian applicants when hiring for local positions in the US... HCL consistently promotes more South Asian employees than their non-South Asian counterparts... HCL benches and terminates non-South Asians at disproportionately higher rates. At least 70 percent of HCL’s employees are South Asian, despite South Asians making up about 12 percent of the US IT industry," Low added.

The complaint notes that HCL submits visa petitions for more positions than actually exist in the US subsidiary of the company. "This is to maximize its chances of securing the highest number of available H-1B visas from the lottery process. In this way, HCL has been able to secure visas for far more individuals than it actually has a present need for," the plaintiff Voll has alleged in the complaint.

Voll was initially part of HCL's contract with PepsiCo, and was put on bench or given unassigned project status in July 2016. When he told his superiors he was told he would be working on other projects as well, he was asked to contact human resources. 

As per HCL's policy, an employee is terminated after being on bench for 30 days. While some initial conversations to join a few projects happened, none fructified and Voll as asked to quit in August 2016. 

 Voll has further claimed that he applied for open job roles within HCL between 2016 and 2018 several times, but was not hired for any role in spite of being adequately qualified.

The Indian IT industry has been accused of misusing the H-1B work visas, the most popular route for IT employees to work in the US. 

 The industry has consistently denied this claim and all top four IT companies- Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys, HCL and Wipro- have spoken about hiring more Americans but the issue remains a thorny one with President Donald Trump's regime cracking down heavily on H-1B misuse by making the process more stringent and also increasing the number of checks.

Low said he has been involved in similar litigation against Infosys, TCS and US-based Cognizant.

Last year, a former employee of Infosys, Erin Green had filed a Green had filed a lawsuit alleging that Infosys favoured employees who are of South Asian, especially Indian descent.

Similarly, a federal judge in Oakland, California expanded  a 2015 case into a class action against TCS, on behalf of American workers who lost their jobs at TCS offices in the US because they hadn’t been assigned to any of its clients.

HCL Technologies has for long held that it does not depend on H-1B visas as much as before. 

The complaint says that HCL employees 12,000 people in the US, but received 10,432 new H-1B visas between 2015 and 2017.