Infosys faces charges of H1B visa misuse, age discrimination

[OhioChick]

30 Mar, 2011, 06.02AM IST

BANGALORE: For India's top outsourcing companies looking to hire more local staff in the US, allegations of visa misuse and age discrimination in recruitment is the latest form of backlash to deal with.

Over the past few weeks, two individual lawsuits alleging H1B misuse and age discrimination in local hiring have been filed against Infosys, the country's second biggest tech firm that counts JP Morgan among its top customers.

While Infosys is the only company to have faced individual lawsuits, tougher visa regulations are affecting business for India's $60-billion software exports industry. For instance, US visa rejection rates for Indian techies have doubled from around 4% to over 8% over the past nine months.

"We're still quite young in this game. We'll need to learn from how companies like Toyota dealt with such issues many years ago," said a senior official at one of the leading Indian technology firms with operations in the US. He requested anonymity because he's not authorised to comment on this issue. "We are making sincere efforts to hire more locally and even engage with policymakers, such lawsuits against big outsourcing brands are opportunistic," he added.

More: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/jobs/infosys-faces-charges-of-h1b-visa-misuse-age-discrimination/articleshow/7821951.cms

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