The US Department of Labor has accused US-based Oracle of discrimination against Indian, Asian and African Americans employees by paying lower wages of as much as 8% for comparable positions than white or non-Asians in the company.

While Oracle favoured Indian nationals in Asians to hire for product development roles, they were being discriminated in wages along with African nationals and Hispanics compared to whites in its US operations.

“It impermissibly denies equal employment opportunity to non-Asian applicants for employment, strongly preferring a workforce that it can later underpay. Once employed, women, Blacks, and Asians are systematically underpaid relative to their peers,” the office of the federal contract compliance programs of the US Department of labor said in its complaint. The complaint is against Oracle in the US and refers to investigations done at its headquarters in Redwood Shores.

The discrimination affected around 11,000 Asian nationals. Oracle had a programme to recruit engineers from campuses in India, it said.

Oracle is among the earliest US product firms to set up development centres in India. The country has the largest developer base for the business software firm in the world. Oracle India declined comment to the development.

The complaint said that non-white employees lost wages of around $ 400 million between January 2013 and December 2016.

In its proposed Second Amended Complaint against the software major, OFCCP claimed, citing the company’s data between January 2013 and December 2016, that discrimination of Asian, African American and female employees across Product Development and Support lines at Oracle has cost them $400 million in lost wages.

Kamal Karanth, co-founder, Xpheno, a Bengaluru-based staffing agency, says that societal biases of the past seem to have crept into the workplace in this case.

“It will take a significant amount of time and none of this can be wiped out in a single stroke,” he said. “These kinds of filings make people sit up and take notice”.