IT outsourcing firm Cognizant has received 52k H1B visas since 2009, more than any other American company. Almost all went to Indians. In October a federal jury ruled the company had intentionally discriminated against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees employed from 2013-22.
American employees were replaced by cheaper Indian H1Bs more willing to relocate. Labor costs drove hiring, not skills. Fewer than 20 percent of H1Bs Cognizant sponsored since 2020 hold a masters degree or higher. IT companies use the visas to fill lower level roles.
In 2015 Cognizant executives panicked when a bill in Congress aimed to prevent companies with more than 50% of its workforce on H1B visas from receiving more. The former head of US recruitment at Cognizant says “the entire business model is built off cheap Indian labor.”
A former executive alleges that he was asked to sign hundreds of official H1B applications for assignments under him that did not exist. He claims he was fired after filing an internal complaint alleging discrimination against non-South Indian employees.
Insiders allege Cognizant keeps a reserve of H1B workers abroad and gives them preferred assignments in the US. Corporate prefers transferring workers from India to hiring an Americans. American workers train them and are terminated shortly thereafter.
In the past five years, the five largest IT outsourcing companies have all settled, lost, or are currently fighting similar discrimination lawsuits. Plaintiffs stand to win hundreds of millions of dollars. These are the “skilled workers” companies sponsor under the H1B program.
IT outsourcing firm Cognizant has received 52k H1B visas since 2009, more than any other American company. Almost all went to Indians. In October a federal jury ruled the company had intentionally discriminated against more than 2,000 non-Indian employees employed from 2013-22.
American employees were replaced by cheaper Indian H1Bs more willing to relocate. Labor costs drove hiring, not skills. Fewer than 20 percent of H1Bs Cognizant sponsored since 2020 hold a masters degree or higher. IT companies use the visas to fill lower level roles.
In 2015 Cognizant executives panicked when a bill in Congress aimed to prevent companies with more than 50% of its workforce on H1B visas from receiving more. The former head of US recruitment at Cognizant says “the entire business model is built off cheap Indian labor.”
A former executive alleges that he was asked to sign hundreds of official H1B applications for assignments under him that did not exist. He claims he was fired after filing an internal complaint alleging discrimination against non-South Indian employees.
Insiders allege Cognizant keeps a reserve of H1B workers abroad and gives them preferred assignments in the US. Corporate prefers transferring workers from India to hiring an Americans. American workers train them and are terminated shortly thereafter.
In the past five years, the five largest IT outsourcing companies have all settled, lost, or are currently fighting similar discrimination lawsuits. Plaintiffs stand to win hundreds of millions of dollars. These are the “skilled workers” companies sponsor under the H1B program.
Channels are not fully encrypted, end-to-end. All communications on a Telegram channel can be seen by anyone on the channel and are also visible to Telegram. Telegram may be asked by a government to hand over the communications from a channel. Telegram has a history of standing up to Russian government requests for data, but how comfortable you are relying on that history to predict future behavior is up to you. Because Telegram has this data, it may also be stolen by hackers or leaked by an internal employee. Now safely in France with his spouse and three of his children, Kliuchnikov scrolls through Telegram to learn about the devastation happening in his home country. The company maintains that it cannot act against individual or group chats, which are “private amongst their participants,” but it will respond to requests in relation to sticker sets, channels and bots which are publicly available. During the invasion of Ukraine, Pavel Durov has wrestled with this issue a lot more prominently than he has before. Channels like Donbass Insider and Bellum Acta, as reported by Foreign Policy, started pumping out pro-Russian propaganda as the invasion began. So much so that the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council issued a statement labeling which accounts are Russian-backed. Ukrainian officials, in potential violation of the Geneva Convention, have shared imagery of dead and captured Russian soldiers on the platform. Pavel Durov, a billionaire who embraces an all-black wardrobe and is often compared to the character Neo from "the Matrix," funds Telegram through his personal wealth and debt financing. And despite being one of the world's most popular tech companies, Telegram reportedly has only about 30 employees who defer to Durov for most major decisions about the platform. At the start of 2018, the company attempted to launch an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) which would enable it to enable payments (and earn the cash that comes from doing so). The initial signals were promising, especially given Telegram’s user base is already fairly crypto-savvy. It raised an initial tranche of cash – worth more than a billion dollars – to help develop the coin before opening sales to the public. Unfortunately, third-party sales of coins bought in those initial fundraising rounds raised the ire of the SEC, which brought the hammer down on the whole operation. In 2020, officials ordered Telegram to pay a fine of $18.5 million and hand back much of the cash that it had raised.
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