Infosys HR was being pressurized to not hire Indians

Normally, the HR of a company is a meme material for their employees. They believe that HRs have the easiest job in hand. But that is simply not true. The HR always faces heaviest pressure from the top brass of the company.

If a company has to do something even remotely illegal, the poor HR is handed responsibility of overseeing the process. Infosys management is no different. One of its former HR managers has dropped a bombshell.

Infosys does not hire Indians, Moms and oldies

In 2018, the American arm of Infosys hired a 59 year old Jill Prejean. Jill became Vice President of talent acquisition. She was handed over the responsibility of hiring executives at the vice president and partner levels.

Naturally, being a Vice President should have meant that Jill would not be interfered with in her day-to-day operations. But her fault was that she expected it from Infosys, one of the most bureaucracies driven companies in India. When she went on to hire people, she was asked to engage in illegal activities. She was supposed to violate New York City Human Rights and Laws.

According to statutory principles, Jill was free to hire anyone with desirable qualifications. But big heads in Infosys asked her to discriminate on the basis of age, gender and caregiver status. Infosys asked her to not hire people of Indian origin, women with children and people above age 50.

Jill tried to change the working culture within 60 days of her hiring. However, Jill had to face direct intervention from people inside the company as well as partners of Infosys.

In her lawsuit, she explicitly named Mark Livingston, a former senior vice president and director of consulting as a culprit. She also accused Infosys partners – Jerry Kurtz and Dan Albright of circumventing her authority. According to Jill’s lawsuit, she lost her job because of this scuffle.

Meanwhile, Infosys tried to dismiss the motion, but was not successful and now it has to respond to the accusations before October 21.

Cognitive dissonance in hiring

The unsaid hiring practice of Infosys is self-contradictory in more ways than one. First of all, let’s talk about the age factor. They hired a 59-year-old woman and told her to not hire people above 50 years of age. Does it make any sense? It does not. They did not even think about the cognitive dissonance present in the circumstance.

Also read: Can a company of Infosys’ stature afford to arbitrarily boycott a country that India has diplomatic ties with?

Dichotomy in not hiring Indians

But their decision to not hire people of Indian origin does make a certain degree of logical sense. But only a few degrees, because Narayan Murthy’s previous lectures contradict it. Infosys is not preferring Indians because they are pro-establishment. When the H-1B Visa was a hit, Infosys had relied on it for three straight decades. But the system came under siege when Trump promulgated new rules targeting the visa programme.

Infosys somehow wanted to stay in America. In 2017, the global IT company had committed to hiring 10,000 American workers over two years and had then exceeded its target by generating 13,000 jobs. In September 2020 too, Infosys announced plans to hire 12,000 American workers over the next two years and brought its recruitment commitments in the country to 25,000 over a period of five years.

Later, it turned out that Infosys was splurging free money to stay in the good books of the US government. American employees were playing video games and just passing time while working from home.

Meanwhile, back home, Narayan Murthy was busy peddling advice that brain-drain is actually good for India. In December last year, Murthy said that a small percentage of Indians going abroad and becoming model citizens of western societies should not be a problem for Indians.

One would wonder what these model citizens would do when they would be forced out of their jobs due to anti-brown racism. Whatever happens to them, one thing is certain that the Infosys of their own country would not hire them in America. Why would it? Infosys is itself a key partner and enabler of anti-brown racism.

Infosys does not like strong, independent women

But not hiring Indians is not the only trait Infosys has borrowed from American companies. Being anti-woman is another one. You must have seen hara-kiri reports after the striking down of the controversial RoevsWade in America.

American Supreme Court left it in the hands of states to decide whether they should legalise abortion or not. Now women and men of America will decide the legal aspect of abortion. Instantly, a lot of states had decided to make it illegal.

And then American corporations jumped in. They started paying for abortion travels. Women employees are now allowed to be on paid leave for abortion. They did it because babies were not beneficial for the profit-making business of companies.

It’s costlier to send a young mom on 6 months paid leave than paying for a week-long trauma for adventure. Additionally, a mother would always prefer child’s interests over company’s profits, which makes investing in abortion care a Capital expenditure.

However, there are women who are mothers and want to handle dual responsibility. They are industrious, orderly, assertive, enthusiastic and most importantly strong and independent. This is where companies like Infosys fail to practice what they preach.

They do not want these women since they would always be uptight regarding their concerns, which would obviously make it tough for companies to exploit. That explains why Infosys does not want to hire Moms in its ranks, though its founder may say the exact opposite.

Infosys-A controversy in itself

Frankly, looking at the shoddy record of Infosys, it does not even come off as a surprise. In terms of controversies and allegations of corruption, it would not be wrong to term Infosys as “Amazon of India”. Just like Amazon faces multiple accusations of corrupt business practices, Infosys has also been scrutinised on similar principles.

In the last few years, the Indian government has awarded Infosys many big-ticket projects. These include 350 crore rupees MCA21, 1,380 crore rupees GSTN portal, and Income Tax portal, and all of them continue to face one issue or other to date.

Moreover, the company just refuses to listen to the government’s concerns on the mishandling of its projects. One of the biggest embarrassments for the Modi government came earlier this year, when Income Tax Portal started to face glitches.

Taxpayers faced problems such as slow functioning of the portal, non-availability of certain functionalities or technical issues in functionalities. On its part, the government contacted Infosys authorities, but the bureaucracy inside Infosys was probably on lunch hour.

Then the government had to resort to public naming and shaming of Infosys. The Income Tax Department tweeted about the problem after which Infosys started emergency maintenance on its website. The IT portal debacle along with other criticisms such as connections with Naxals, leftists and Tukde-Tukde gang prompted Panchjanya, a RSS affiliate magazine to accuse Infosys of engaging in anti-national activities.

Also read: Infosys has a shoddy track record, but the government keeps handing projects to it

When Infosys came to the scene, it was a game changer. It gained a first mover advantage. Now, it is a victim of its own success. It was once better than government companies, but now it has become a mini government company in itself. Until they do a rejig and introduce more sensibility, downward trajectory awaits them.