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www.channelingreality.com/News/Tata.htm

Say 'Ta Ta' To Tata


It's rare these days to find stories in the news that make one want
leap for joy. This is one of those stories. Tata is an Indian
Information Technology (IT) consulting firm doing business under the
names Tata America International, Tata Consultancy Services, TCS
America, Tata Infotech and Tata Sons, Ltd. Since moving to the
U.S., Tata has been a rising star in the IT consulting business -
winning bid after bid to develop and support IT systems. They have
been so successful, they even got a VIP welcome to New York from
Senator Hillary Clinton. Hillary's welcome to them was despite the
fact that they hire mostly imported workers on H-1B visas (i.e.
guest workers). They only hire Americans for the marketing
positions to show an American face to the client.

The propaganda campaign to justify the import of foreign workers has
been voluminous and insulting. We are told that the Indians win
bids because they are better educated and more highly skilled.
Mexicans work harder and do jobs Americans won't do. The truth is
that imported foreign workers are cheaper and more easily
exploitable as we can see in the Tata story regarding a class action
lawsuit filed by Lieff, Cabraser, Heimann & Bernstein, LLP. Tata
had a scam going on in which they cheated their imported employees
out of a goodly portion of their already low wages.

The way the scam works is that the imported employees are required
to use a particular firm that Tata hired to determine their tax
liability and to file their tax returns. The imported employees
were then told that they must turnover their tax refunds to Tata.
When the tax refund checks came, the employee's were required to
endorse them over to Tata America. So what Tata did in effect, was
to steal a portion of the employee's wages using the income tax
witholding system!

So how much money is involved? According to the plaintiff, Gopi
Vedachalam, he was forced to sign over state and federal tax refund
checks totaling $25,000. Clearly, there had to be overwithholding
to reach that amount of money in just five years of working for
Tata. Tata has over 5,000 employees in the U.S. That's a
staggering amount of money that would essentially be `off the books -
free money'.

Speculating, if Tata took cash withdrawals corresponding to the
amounts of the endorsed checks, the net effect to Tata's bank
account would be zero. That would make it completely untraceable
cash. So what could Tata do with that kind of untraceable cash?
Kickbacks? No doubt. Bribes? Probably. The most worrisome
possibility is that the money could have been used to fund
terrorism. If you've been following what the war on terrorism has
done for the IT Industry in terms of contracts for control and
tracking systems, you know that terrorism has been the best thing to
happen to the industry since the integrated circuit board.

The misnamed `free trade' in services is what brought Tata to our
shores to take jobs away from American citizens and to create the
conditions in which they can steal from their own countrymen. Trade
in services is nothing more than modern day slave trade by men with
good educations, refined manners and expensive suits. The trade
agreements put the multinational corporations in the position to
engage in global labor arbitrage and it is threatening the future of
America as a first world country. In fact, Silicon Valley has been
exported to India. Perhaps the time has come to stop looking for
terrorists in caves in the desert and start looking for them where
they really are - in the boardrooms of America's best corporations
and in the halls of Congress. Oh… and let's not forget the
Universities.