Greetings bodyshoppers! Welcome to the penultimate edition of the Bodyshop Report. What a week this has been! Since this blog was started a couple of months ago, we are finally starting to see tangible progress made towards protecting white collar worker jobs:
- DHS Proposes to Change Admission Period Structure for F, J and I Nonimmigrants
- Department of Homeland Security and Department of Labor Rule Restores Integrity to H-1B Visa Program
- ICE Arrests 15 Nonimmigrant Students For OPT-Related Fraud
- DHS, Trump Administration Protect American Jobs from Unfair International Competition
To everyone who has been supporting my effort to expose bodyshopping and how it harms workers, thank you. Millions of workers stand to benefit from the aforementioned actions.
This week we have added our final WITCH and the usual assorted mom and pops. If you follow me on Twitter I’ve been exposing them for the last week; if you missed that, you can catch up here. Now let’s take a look at the two new entrants in our top 10.
#9. Artech LLC – Morristown, NJ; Hyderabad
This Hyderjersey bodyshop came out of nowhere and ended up in our top ten thanks to 142 one star reviews and 828 recruiters. From Wikipedia:
“Artech Information Systems was co-founded in 1992 by Ajay and Ranjini Poddar, and is headquartered in Morristown, New Jersey. Early clients for the company included the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and General Electric, followed by larger ones including Fortune 500 companies. Ranjini Poddar serves as the company’s CEO. Artech is the largest woman-owned IT staffing company in the US, and has around 10,500 employees.”
This bodyshop is different in that they hire Americans, however the usual exploitative practices are prevalent, as we can see from their reviews below. Artech makes employees sign a rather punitive contract during onboarding where pay is cut to $10/hour retroactively if the employee quits or is fired.
What Artech Employees Are Saying
If you try to leave before 30 days they throw this at you. By the way, never saw this document but according to them was on my onboarding package: “Article 10 Probationary Period Employee agrees and acknowledges that employee will be employed on a probationary trial basis for the first 30 days of the assignment. During this time Arthech will pay employee for earnings of $10 dollars a day plus a draw against en of month pay, equaling the hourly salary agreed in Exhibit A of this document. In the event the employee resigns or its terminated for poor performance, employee will be paid only for hourly salary of $10 without any additional monies drawn from completion trial period. When termination occurs after one or more pay periods, the total amount already paid as advances, will be deducted from employees final paycheck. Artech is compelled to follow this method as clients withhold all payment to Artech in the event of employee voluntary or involuntary termination during the trial period.” In essence they penalize at will employment as they clearly don’t believe in it..
“Stay Away from this company”
Current Employee – Network Engineer
Dishonest business with the main goal is to make $$ by using and abusing you. All policies only support that. Incredibly disorganized company. Most of the responses would arrive days or weeks after, if at all. You have to constantly manage them. Rude HR team. Overall horrible experience. I will never work with them again.
“3rd World Company”
Current Employee – Anonymous Employee in Mountain View, CA
No method in which to contact someone at the office. No pay rate increases in 8 years. Furlough and pay decreases No real benefits. No US resources. Did not pay my final payroll for 6 weeks, a violation of state labor law.
“This place is an absolute joke, avoid at all costs.”
Former Employee – Windows Systems Administrator in Indianapolis, IN
#1. Tata Consultancy Services – Rockville, MD
Here at #1 this week we have our final WITCH. TCS earned a whopping score of 238.6, thanks to 890 one star reviews and 1,154 recruiters. They are the 2nd largest Indian company by market cap and the lowest paying of the WITCH companies with an average salary of $74,100:
TCS’ reputation of paying peanuts is reinforced by their recent announcement that salaries were being increased in anticipation of Trump administration wage rules, however the promised pay raises have yet to materialize and workers are beginning to suspect the announcement was a PR stunt:
Why is it taking so long for TCS to release the compensation letters. Deciding on the percentage to give doesn’t take so long. It looks like more of a media griminck than actually hike given to the employees. It’s just about gettitye g good press for the company than actually caring about the employees. Previously the letters were released after few hours of the announcement, but now it has been 20 days still we are waiting for the letters. The company has gone down the road after Gopinath taking over. No clear direction just fake promises and fake policies.
TCS Confessions
TCS BPS (business process outsourcing) is the 3rd largest Indian IT outsourcing company after Capgemini. The turnover rate in this division is 19.5%. In the TCS Confessions group on Facebook, we learn the BPO group is a tough place to work in:
27M , working in TCS Kolkata, FORCED SLAVERY SEGMENT (BPO) ,Exp- 5 years and in hand Sal-20k (BPO 2 grade) . Need not explain how blood sucking industry this BPO is. Realised too late about mistake of joining this industry.BIG THANKS to all the humiliation, insult, Slavery, no return for hard work, no promotion, no visible hikes, no career growth scope, depression, physical and mental illness, torture, 5th grade management, HRs with human element missing etc, TODAY I HAVE BAGGED AND EARNED A STATE GOVT JOB with my pure hard work (after regular 13 hrs working window including travelling). Although late but by grace of God i could turn the tide around for me and my family. I’m the first in my family tree to get govt job, my father was daily labourer. Hardly he could manage two meals for family.Today i feel i have given him the reason to smile and be proud . Can’t express my gratitude to Almighty for helping me get through this hell..
So obviously TCS is a horrible place to work for. Next, we will look at the other side of people made to suffer by BPO, here in the United States of America.
2019-20 – Walgreens announced a $1.5 billion contract with TCS after announcing an unspecified number of layoffs.
2019 – Transamerica laid off over a hundred employees in Little Rock as part of a $2 billion restructuring deal. They were sued by rival CSC over theft of source code accessed by Transamerica employees hired by TCS.
2018 – TCS was sued in Oakland, CA over discriminatory firing practices where Americans are 13 times as likely to be fired as Asian workers.
2016 – Dawn Collins was forced to train her TCS replacement and appeared on 60 Minutes.
2015 – SoCal Edison laid off 500 workers forced to train their TCS and Infosys replacements.
2014-15 – Cargill laid off 900+ workers in Minnesota and outsourced their jobs to TCS.
Wow. So much devastation caused by one company. My heart breaks for all the thousands of workers who lost their jobs to TCS outsourcing.
Finally, let’s listen to Kumar Exclusive talking about unprofessional TCS interviews, usage of illegal layer companies, and discrimination:
Be sure to tune in next week for the final chapter of the Bodyshop Report where we will unveil the complete list of Misfortune 500 companies and the #1 overall worst bodyshop in America. If you want to go behind the scenes and see our data, it’s all in Google Sheets. Remember to vote!
White-Collar Workers of America 