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University of California IT Workers Replaced By Offshore Outsourcing Firm To File Discrimination Lawsuit (computerworld.com) 326

Posted by BeauHD from the find-and-replace dept.
The IT workers from the University of California's San Francisco campus who were replaced by an offshore outsourcing firm late last year intend to file a lawsuit challenging their dismissal. "It will allege that the tech workers at the university's San Francisco campus were victims of age and national origin discrimination," reports Computerworld. From the report: The IT employees lost their jobs in February after the university hired India-based IT services firm HCL. Approximately 50 full-time university employees lost their jobs, but another 30 contractor positions were cut as well. "To take a workforce that is overwhelmingly over the age of 40 and replace them with folks who are mainly in their 20s -- early 20s, in fact -- we think is age discrimination," said the IT employees' attorney, Randall Strauss, of Gwilliam Ivary Chiosso Cavalli & Brewer. The national origin discrimination claim is the result of taking a workforce "that reflects the diversity of California" and is summarily let go and is "replaced with people who come from one particular part of the world," said Strauss. The lawsuit will be filed in Alameda County Superior Court.
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University of California IT Workers Replaced By Offshore Outsourcing Firm To File Discrimination Lawsuit More

University of California IT Workers Replaced By Offshore Outsourcing Firm To File Discrimination Lawsuit

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  • And yet... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by msauve ( 701917 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:18PM (#54316617)
    It's quite obvious that the reason was to lower costs, not because they specifically wanted younger workers from some foreign land. That's not age or national origin discrimination. The only argument to make it so would be if they failed to offer the previous employees an opportunity to keep their jobs, but at pay competitive with the new employees.

    And they almost certainly didn't make that offer, so here's a sincere wish of good luck with the lawsuit.

    • That's actually debateable (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:27PM (#54316653)
      the CEOs of the outsourcing firms have been caught a few times complaining about lazy Americans. And frankly he's right. By Indian or Chinese standards our 50-60 hour work weeks make us lazy. The H1-Bs I know regularly put in 80 hour work weeks. They're young and disposable but they don't care because currency exchange means they're earning a fortune working here. Best case they get a greencard and start doing the 50-60 hr work weeks of Americans, worst case they go back home flush with cash.

      The moral? You can't compete with India. You can't compete with a country that has a literal cast system and effective slavery for millions of their citizens. End the H1-B program. Start calling your congressman/woman/thing and ask them why they haven't ended the program. There are other programs for rural doctors. The program is for replacing Americans. Call your congressman and ask. Remind them you and your family and your friends won't be voting for them in their primary. Make sure you say primary. They've gerrymandered the districts. After their Primary they'll win. But they're vulnerable in the primary.

      • Re:That's actually debateable (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:24PM (#54316913)

        I am an American. I work in Mainland China. I have worked in Dubai with a mostly Indian staff. I actually work with many nationalities, and I am connect to many organizations just like mine. That means, the company I work at, is connected regionally in China to at least 30 others that are collaborating. Each collaborative partner has a similar structure with a few western staff mixed with Chinese staff. In every case, without exception, we out perform the Chinese staff 3-1 and sometimes 4-1 in terms of work hours and project completion. I do work 60-70 hours to finish a project, a Chinese colleague will not do that without pressure from 3-4 higher level people. They have to be coerced.

        A Chinese colleague will be at work for 40 hours a week; but in an 8 hour day they only work about 5 hours. The rest is invested in the social expectations, eating, napping, etc. Many will have 5-7 out of office tea/coffee breaks. One of our division leaders complains because 50% of her staff use the bathroom every 20-30 minutes due to the massive amount of liquids they intake.

        These behaviors are all fine, as they are culturally expected and acceptable. For me, these behaviors are not expected and my supervisors are not Chinese so I cannot indulge in the down time. This same behavior is observable and testable in every company in Shanghai. Some "start-up" spaces in Shanghai are very cool and fully open from the street. When you look in during the day, many people will be asleep. This does not mean they might not invent something amazing, or they lack intelligence, but at 10:00 am seeing a start-up asleep, and then leaving at 5:00 pm always surprises me.

        I do make more money than most of my counterparts, and I knew the situation before arriving. I took the job because it allows me to work on really interesting things, invest 2-3 years maximum and then move to something new, and make more of a living than I could in the USA. The output from western staff is high, but we turn over quickly, so the HR investment is not too excessive.

        I have seen projects Chinese staff have let linger for 1-2 years, and I was able to finish them in a month. They have very little sense of urgency because they value their families and non-work life more than the work life. There are exceptions. Mainland Chinese who have the true entrepreneurial drive work circles around their peers, collect invest rapidly, and build businesses rapidly. They will always become the big fish very quickly, and people will follow them in sheer amazement.

        I am in Mainland China, my experiences in Hong Kong are quiet the opposite, but the wages there for local workers are higher than the mainland, so there are less people like me doing these jobs. Not all Chinese people are the same, and expectations from country to country are very different.

        Dubai was much worse than China. I have to say I witnessed work culture there that was destructive. People literally watching things melt down at 3:45 PM and going home at 4:00 PM because they were allowed.

        I could never do anything like that, and I was always the one putting the stress on myself to stay and fix things. The waste and abuse of resources was rampant, and like China, the re-work rate on many projects would be 100%.

        I watched facility construction, destruction, and re-construction too often, and could never understand the complete lack of ownership or pride in a project. These were engineers who were actually making a high salary and often out ranked me. However, again, Americans often ended up leading projects that were new and required aggressive strategies, self motivation, and hours of overtime. Had the company set the expectation that everyone needed to be self-motivated problem solvers, I would say only the western staff would have been able to meet that standard. More often than not, the expectation for the non-western staff was they were waiting to be "told", and anyone making a request had to do so through the proper channel. There was no teamwork really unless a western pers

        • but in an 8 hour day they only work about 5 hours.

          Coincidentally, that's about the amount of effective hours you could expect from just about anyone. I think I read some study on that some time ago. People don't seem to be made to work for 8 hours at a 100% productivity utilization.

          • Manual-labor jobs they can. Office jobs require some downtime to refactor, and the 8-hour work day theoretically lets you mix that in so you can optimize it.

            The more-scientific approach I've seen is to schedule high-effort, complex work in the mid-morning and around 2-5pm, with low-effort work put between 1pm and 3pm. The slump cripples your ability to perform productively, and so spending that time returning calls, checking e-mail, writing changelogs, and so forth lets your brain relax and recover so yo

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by trevc ( 1471197 )
          You seem to think that how many hours you work is directly related to the quality of the work you put out. I feel sorry for you. Get a life!

      • the CEOs of the outsourcing firms have been caught a few times complaining about lazy Americans.

        Gosh, it's not like they have any incentive to portray American workers as lazy, right? So surely it MUST be true.

      • I would but my congressman ran unopposed in the primary AND the general election!

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        the CEOs of the outsourcing firms have been caught a few times complaining about lazy Americans. And frankly he's right. By Indian or Chinese standards our 50-60 hour work weeks make us lazy. The H1-Bs I know regularly put in 80 hour work weeks. They're young and disposable but they don't care because currency exchange means they're earning a fortune working here. Best case they get a greencard and start doing the 50-60 hr work weeks of Americans, worst case they go back home flush with cash.

        The moral? You can't compete with India. You can't compete with a country that has a literal cast system and effective slavery for millions of their citizens. End the H1-B program. Start calling your congressman/woman/thing and ask them why they haven't ended the program. There are other programs for rural doctors. The program is for replacing Americans. Call your congressman and ask. Remind them you and your family and your friends won't be voting for them in their primary. Make sure you say primary. They've gerrymandered the districts. After their Primary they'll win. But they're vulnerable in the primary.

        Most of this post is completely incorrect. The rest is only partially incorrect.

        First things first, the decision to outsource is never about quality or performance, it's always 100% about money.

        Secondly, its not the "exchange rate" that makes working overseas attractive, its the disparity of income. The exchange rate just denotes how many rupees you get for dollars, income disparity is what makes you get more money per hour.

        Thirdly, 12 hour working days are rare, its mostly 8 hour shifts, especiall

      • The H1Bs put in 80 hour work weeks not because they want to, but because they have to. If they don't, they're ass is on the first plane back to India, because their H1B sponsorship ends. Corporations can do this because the law lets them; plus, there is an almost endless supply of new H1Bs willing to take their place.
      • "You can't compete with India."

        Sure "you" can. I used to work at a company that offshored a portion of its tech work to India. On average, the projects in India had a burn-rate of 2/5 (two fifths) of the U.S. burn rate.

        The schedule? Five halves (5/2) or *worse* of the duration of a similar U.S. schedule. It was a total washout, or worse, to send the work offshore.

        YMMV, and all, but the idea that a caste system causes a winning situation is false.

      • If they really have such a "cast" system, couldn't they easily address the complaints of unfair foreign competition by something like this:

        Programmer = (American) IndianProgrammer;

        ?

    • Re:And yet... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by raftpeople ( 844215 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:34PM (#54316681)
      The interesting thing is that a defense of "lower costs" becomes a problem if the new workers are H1B.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msauve ( 701917 )
        Unless the summary is very wrong (and it may well be), "offshore outsourcing" and "plan to move work offshore" in no way implies the workers are coming to the US to do their work. Quite the opposite.

    • Better change the age discrimination laws then.

      Because letting go of older more experienced workers because they're too expensive and replacing them with younger newer workers because they're cheaper is actually illegal in the US.

  • Trump fix? (Score:3)

    by manu0601 ( 2221348 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:22PM (#54316637)
    We recently heard president Trump signed an executive order to harden foreign worker's visa rules. Does that case means it was a failure? Or were the visas obtained before the new rules?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by rossz ( 67331 )

      This happened before Trump took office. Also, it's an offshoring firm, so visas are needed for the vast majority of the workers.

    • I don't think an offshore outsourcing solution would involve visas.
    • if he was serious he would have rescinded the Obama Executive Order allowing spouses of H1-Bs to work in America signed in 2015. Trump could do that today. The fact that he hasn't isn't an oversight. He's just telling people what they want to hear, but in the end he will side with big business because he's one of them. Always was.
      • "...Executive Order allowing spouses of H1-Bs to work in America signed in 2015."

        Given that the U.S. has H1-B workers, that's actually an allowance that I support. I'd rather that the U.S. limited the number of fundamental H1-Bs in the first place. The thing with the spouses is just compassionate noise, IMO.

        At one point, Trump was proposing an H1-B process that would prioritize the highest-paid H1-B positions. That would support businesses' claims that they "need H1-Bs in order to get skilled workers
        • (replying to my own post, to finish this thought)

          At one point, Trump was proposing an H1-B process that would prioritize the highest-paid H1-B positions. That would support businesses' claims that they "need H1-Bs in order to get skilled workers". If the workers are needed that badly, then pay them well.

          Conversely, if businesses are just trying to find cheap labor with H1-Bs, then those cheap H1-Bs go to the bottom of the pile, never to see the light of day. Mathematically, this is how an H1-B skilled-lab

    • Two different issues. These people are offshore and won't need ANY American visas.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @07:56PM (#54316779)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • questionable (Score:5, Insightful)

    by superwiz ( 655733 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:18PM (#54316873) Journal
    HCL may be India-based, but it's going to be hard to prove that this is offshoring. HCL has a lot of US operations. It's practically a subsidiary of Microsoft in the US, in fact. They definitely employ a lot of people in the US. So they may be able to pass it off as simply outsourcing rather than offshoring of their operations. It's going to come down to personal accounts of who were the replacements whom the laid-off workers were training. If they are US residents, this isn't likely to go anywhere.

    • Re:questionable (Score:5, Interesting)

      by superwiz ( 655733 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:20PM (#54316891) Journal
      Just saw that they were also going for age discrimination. This should be a much easier to prove. I am not sure why IT workers don't sue for age discrimination more often, actually. It's rampant.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Khyber ( 864651 )

        " I am not sure why IT workers don't sue for age discrimination more often, actually. It's rampant."

        The majority of us with the balls to sue can't because - get this - the limit for age discrimination is 40+, not say 21+, as it should be.

      • Re:questionable (Score:4, Interesting)

        by swb ( 14022 ) on Friday April 28, 2017 @06:44AM (#54318519)

        A lot of It workers are white males, and making any discrimination claim as a white male is challenging, especially if you're only in your early 50s. You can expect low unemployment figures and high salaries to be trotted out as examples of how you're not really a member of an at-risk class.

        What I'd wager is intrinsic to the problem of age discrimination is that older workers often have family commitments, and when combined with spouses working at similar professional careers and children, leads to an apparent decline in workplace engagement. The older employee is less able to devote their lives to the job (learning new tech for free in their own time, or at least less of this, working overtime hours, short-notice travel, etc).

        IMHO, it's less "age discrimination" than "life situation discrimination". Younger employees living in rental housing without spouses or children are just more competitive in the workplace because they have nothing to do but work.

        I don't really know how you fix it, either. In an ideal world, I'd presume that the *society* would recognize that children come from parents and parents need to engage in their families to produce productive, well-educated children, and that workers of parenting age are going to be less engaged. Thus, labor would be structured in a way that doesn't penalize this kind of natural life cycle.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ghoul ( 157158 )

          This can be fixed by making it mandatory for companies' to pay for daycare or provide onsite daycare. Also carve out an exception to the discrimination laws if companies want to structure your salary as Base+Family allowance which has amounts which increase with increase in family size . Also allow Housing allowances which the company can base on family size. All of these are allowed in Europe.
          But the fact of the matter is all the middle aged parent were young bachelors/spinsters at some point. They could h

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by swb ( 14022 )

            The problem is, nobody earns any serious saving money in their 20s. My savings were for shit until I was in my 30s and quite often drained with stupid shit like car repairs, apartment moves or other life situation stuff. I felt like I was doing well not running around with $5k in credit card debt.

            Plus today's 20-somethings are not just managing those expenses, but juggling $500 student loan payments.

            I just think it's weird how society shits on people who are otherwise responsible parents. Where do they t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by MobyDisk ( 75490 )

      It's practically a subsidiary of Microsoft in the US

      Huh? Or is this just anti-Microsoft fodder by trying to associate their names together?

      • Or is this just anti-Microsoft fodder by trying to associate their names together?

        How do you figure? HCL has 3 main locations here: https://www.hcltech.com/career... [hcltech.com]. And the one in Redmond is in the middle of MS campus. I don't see anything smearing about this. They are hiring in the US to do work in the US for a US company. What's the "fodder" part of it?

  • They forgot the first rule of outsourcing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Trogre ( 513942 ) on Thursday April 27, 2017 @08:19PM (#54316881) Homepage

    The first rule of outsourcing:

    Don't.

  • Socially Shame the Management (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 27, 2017 @09:15PM (#54317139)

    Going Anonymous because I am deep in the industry and don't need my name associated to this comment.

    You are not going to beat these organizations in court and walk away with just compensation. The lawyers will win big and the workers will end up getting the equivalent of a coupon to Red Lobster out of the settlement. Their names are forever stuck in a Google search showing they sue employers.

    If you really want to stop outsourcing in America, you need to socially punish the managers that advocate and those that are close to them (family and friends). Publish their names online with their Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, Instagram, and Linkedin accounts. Inform their friends and family who are linked to them that it would be in their best interest to "unfriend/unfollow" them or they will be caught up in the social shaming for supporting the perpetrator. Faceless corporations and colleges are not replacing workers, human beings are. Identify those human beings and magnify their actions for the public to see. Pressure their relationships to follow suit or they will suffer the social shame as well. Make a personal cost for the activity at an individual level. (Rule #13)

    Make the practice of screwing Americans hurt in the social arena in addition to having their family and friends shun them. If you really want to solve this overnight, hand over the names of Americans outsourcing jobs to H1-Bs to the weaponized autists of 4chan.

  • Let's just make it illegal to hire all foreign workers so that every one of our tech companies moves entirely overseas and takes every American tech job with it. Wait, making competition illegal isn't the solution then?
  • From the top does there exist hard evidence that only certain types of people, or races or age groups will be hired or is that simply an assumption? If I outsource blue jeans to a company in Burma am I under legal compulsion to be certain that they do not race or age discriminate? Is age or race discrimination legal in Burma? Can these employees find enough money to pay for that expensive and probably long lasting law suit? Is the outsourcing to a foreign corporation or an extension of the university.

  • I'm more worried about the overall trend (Score:3)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Friday April 28, 2017 @09:49AM (#54319351)

    I've been working in IT for almost 20 years, and have been involved in offshorings a few times. I've fortunately been able to get other jobs after this happens, but I worry about the overall direction of the industry:

    • - I worry about entry level IT jobs disappearing entirely or becoming so unattractive that no newbies want to join the profession. My life was a series of entry level IT jobs where I had enough responsibility and access to learn what I needed to learn at each stage. I imagine the same thing goes for programmers -- you don't let a total n00b make changes to your core application; you give them UI cleanup work or similar so they can learn. If all of those jobs go offshore or become minimum-wage level jobs, rational students aren't going to study CS or IT.
    • - As a result of the first thing, I also worry about having fewer places to jump to. Usually, offshoring goes in cycles where a new CIO comes into town and declares he can save millions by cutting the in-house workforce. When the reality hits, the company either terminates the contract or lets it ride until the end, then starts in-housing everything again. Not every company is in phase on this cycle, so it's been relatively easy to find work when it's your company's turn -- just find one that either never jumped on the bandwagon or is coming back from it. If the newbie pipeline dries up, then offshore firms will be able to say "See? No one domestically wants these jobs" the same way migrant farm work is justified.

    I feel really bad for the IT guys in this situation -- you join a public university system knowing you're not going to make a ton of money compared to the private sector. I know, because I know people who work in the SUNY system. They're trading off current salary for stability and a safe retirement, and are well aware of their choices. When you're midway through a career and are told that your public sector salary is still too high, that's a pretty big blow.

  • As much as I feel for these people, is there any law here that applies that they have a chance of winning? Is there something on the books that states that a company cannot outsource to save money? I also what evidence they have on age / national origin discrimination, as that's usually difficult, barring obvious
      discriminatory statements in email and such.

  • People whining about losing their jobs is downright pathetic. They know perfectly well that the other employees were cheaper, and that is all it comes down to. I'm sure if they all agreed to work for the same wages the Indian firm was charging (accounting for things like employment taxes, benefits, and all that), the university would be happy to hire them back.

    These people somehow think they're better than the millions of U.S. Americans who have lost their jobs to overseas manufacturing and other industri

  • If you employ local people they spend their money in the local economy. If you train and develop local people, you spread more money around the local economy and you help develop your area and your country. Its also a lot easier to do collaborative, agile work when everyone is co-located. Sure you can outsource to a foreign country that bring people into the country, but they rarely stay longer than a couple of years and take your companies IP back home with them along with their accumulated savings. Outso

  • IANAL, but having been in a similar situation and after spending some time with a lawyer, I learned that age is indeed a protected class, but lawsuits of this nature typically take a very long time to get through the courts, and the chances of collecting, in the lawyer's words, are about 50/50.

    "National origin discrimination"... I haven't heard of that one, but hey, it's California. It might work.

    There have been, I think, some recent traction on companies not following rules on outsourcing, they may be abl

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