More Members of Congress Criticize UC Plan to Offshore Jobs

Members of Congress are weighing in against the University of California's plans to lay off 89 Information Technology employees and replace them with workers brought to the U.S. under the H-1B visa program by the India-based outsourcing company HCL. This is just the beginning of an offshoring scheme that could affect hundreds of IT workers at the public university that is, in part, financed by U.S. taxpayers.

U.S. Representatives Zoe Lofgren, Anna Eshoo, Mark DeSaulnier, and Barbara Lee, all California Democrats, along with Iowa Senator Charles Grassley (R), all have written letters to UC President Janet Napolitano, criticizing her actions and calling on her to reverse course.

Members of University Professional & Technical Employees/CWA Local 9119 have been mobilizing against the move for several months, building public support for the IT workers and against UC’s plan to send good paying, community jobs overseas.

UC employees will be forced to train the substitute techs to do their own good-paying, taxpayer-funded jobs. The majority of the offshored work then will be done in India. Additional IT staff may be brought to the UCSF campus from overseas on H-1B visas, public documents reveal.

As a requirement of their severance, UCSF technicians must train their foreign replacements before they hand in their badges in February. A very few of the current UC techs may be "rebadged" as employees of HCL. The others will be pushed out altogether.

Although UC is trying to downplay the severity of its outsourcing, the HCL contract can be utilized by any institution in the 10-campus UC system.

As Secretary of Homeland Security, Napolitano pledged to police H-1B visa loopholes that enable American employers to undercut U.S. wages and offshore good jobs. She once told senators, "Our top obligations are to American workers, making sure American workers have jobs."

"It is clear that the University is seeking to replace American workers with lower-cost foreign workers abroad and potentially also in the United States," wrote Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, which overseas immigration. He told Napolitano that the H-1B visa program was "never intended to facilitate the replacement of qualified American workers with foreign workers, nor did Congress envision that employers would retain foreign guest workers rather than similarly qualified American workers, when employers cut jobs."

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