An attorney for the IT consulting behemoth cautioned the jury not to let the trial become a referendum on H-1B work visas or offshoring of tech jobs.
LOS ANGELES (CN) — Cognizant Technology Solutions was on trial again Tuesday over claims brought by a class of about 2,000 former employees who say the information technology consulting giant has a pattern and practice of discriminating against workers who aren’t from India.
Jurors in downtown Los Angeles will be asked to decide whether the non-Indian employees who lost their jobs were the victim of intentional discrimination. A jury last year wasn’t able to reach a unanimous verdict, prompting a new trial before Chief U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee.
Among all the midlevel IT workers Cognizant employs in the U.S., there are more than five times as many who are from India than from any other national background, Daniel Kotchen, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said in his opening statement. However, employees who aren’t from India are more than eight times as likely to get terminated from Cognizant’s so-called bench, where workers who are in-between projects wait for a new assignment, he said.
This statistical anomaly can only be the result of discrimination, the attorney said.
“They were fired because they were put on the bench and not put in a new position,” Kotchen told the jury.
In support of this accusation, the attorney cited a 2020 determination by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which found that a statistical analysis showed significant shortfalls of non-Indian employees in Cognizant workforce and that there was “reasonable cause” to believe that Cognizant discriminated against applicants and employees that weren’t from India, including by terminating them when they remained unassigned.
In addition, Kotchen said, Cognizant’s culture is hostile to non-Indians who are excluded from social events and who have to participate in business meetings where Hindi is spoken.
Christy Palmer, one of the former employees who sued the company, claims that she was often the only non-South Asian and non-Indian employee at her work location and was intentionally left off meeting invites and not invited to group lunches or after-work events.
One of her managers, she claims, would often invite the entire staff except her to all-team meetings. In the few instances that she was invited to the meetings, Palmer says, the South Asian and Indian managers would turn their back on her when she was speaking and ignored her ideas and suggestions. At one point, a South Asian Director from Cognizant told her to “shut the fuck up” when she was contributing to the meeting, according to Palmer.
Cognizant has about 40,000 employees in the U.S. who work for a wide range of corporations, from large tech companies, to banks and insurance companies, to retailers and international airlines. They provide IT consulting services to keep these corporations technology at the cutting edge, Richard Doren, a lawyer representing the company said in his opening statement.
Doren cautioned the jurors to not let the trial become a referendum on H-1B visas, which Cognizant uses to bring engineers from India to the U.S., or on offshoring IT jobs to India.
He also told the jury not to be swayed by “us against them” evidence that appeals to “baser instincts.”
It would be counterproductive for Cognizant to discriminate against any employee on the basis of national origin or any other criterion, Doren argued, because the company is engaged in the extremely competitive consulting industry where the it has to provide the best possible team for its customers’ projects.
Employees who don’t have a new project lined up when they finish their latest one, are put on the “bench” for as long as five weeks at full pay and benefits until they are assigned to a new project, he said. The company’s talent supply chain, which runs the bench, uses search engines and algorithms to find the best match between an employee and an upcoming project, and race and national origin aren’t part of these algorithms, according to Doren.
Palmer, he told the jury, left the company for a higher paying job.
However, if an employee can’t be matched after five weeks or more with the specific needs of a customer’s project that yields revenue for Cognizant, Doren said, they will eventually be terminated..
“At the end of the day, it’s a business,” he told the jury.
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