An ex-employee of the Indian IT giant Tata Consultancy Services has filed a lawsuit against the company in the US alleging racial discrimination against non-South Asian and non-Indian job seekers and employees.

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According to publicly available data on the US District Court website former TCS employee Shawn Katz filed a class action lawsuit against the IT company.

TCS is facing a class action civil rights lawsuit at the US District Court for the District of New Jersey in the case which was filed on December 7. People who have experienced the same or a similar injury are considered in a class action lawsuit; however, Katz claims that the precise number of participants in this proposed class action case is unclear and can be found utilising TCS' records.

The lawsuit claims that TCS has implemented a policy of discrimination against non-South Asian and non-Indian candidates and workers "concerning recruiting, staffing, benching, termination, and promotion choices."

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Katz asserted that throughout his nine years working for the company, while always satisfying the requirements for promotion, he was never promoted. He continues by saying that despite recommendations for promotion from both management and client firms, he was benched before being let go. He asserted that TCS did not offer "meaningful help" while he was on the bench.

He further added in the complaint that while just 12–13 percent of the US information technology sector is South Asian, TCS' US workforce is “primarily composed of non(US)-citizens from India who are in the US on work visas.”

“TCS’s discrimination is systemic and ongoing, and impacts non-South Asians and non-Indians across the company, as well as applicants, who are disfavored in TCS’s hiring, staffing, promotion, and termination/retention decisions,” the complaint reads.

The lawsuit alleges that despite the fact that employment decisions cannot be made based on race or nationality, the TCS talent acquisition and outside suppliers actively promote the hiring of people with Indian ancestry.

According to the lawsuit, this discriminatory practise regularly results in non-South Asian and non-Indian applicants being passed over for unfilled positions and not hired. Since they must participate in the same hiring process as new applicants and compete with them to be hired for new projects, existing employees are also impacted by this.

More than half of TCS’s annual revenue comes from America. In 2019-2020, revenue from America contributed 52.2 percent to the total revenue of TCS.

The news of bias existing in the IT industry is not new. There have been many complaints by employees of not being hired because of age, and women have faced discrimination for being above a certain age or being mothers.

In March, five US-based former employees of Wipro filed a class suit alleging “discriminatory employment practices” based on race and nationality. In the same month, a former Google employee sued the tech giant for racial discrimination, saying it engages in a “pattern and practice” of unfair treatment for its Black workers.

Separately, in 2019, Google agreed to pay $11 million to settle an age-discrimination class suit brought by over 200 job applicants over the age of 40 who were denied positions. In 2015, cases were filed against tech giant Microsoft for discrimination based on gender and nationality.

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