UK IT contractors are being forced to train overseas
workers to take their jobs.
Businesses are bringing overseas staff to the UK to cut costs by
using
Intra
Company Transfer (ICT) migration rule, which is not meant for
this purpose. This is in addition to increased offshoring to
countries such as India to cut costs.
The
Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) will
today publish a report on the ICT rule in response to
complaints about its overuse and misuse, particularly in the IT
sector.
Offshoring to cut costs and using ICT to bring cheap offshore
labour onshore is reducing UK IT jobs and damaging UK skills in the
process, say IT contractors.
The ICT scheme was introduced to allow businesses to bring in
people with important skills that the company could not source
within the UK. But these
rules are being used to bring in cheap labour, claim IT
contractors.
IT contractors that have contacted Computer Weekly have spoken
of their experiences of offshoring and alleged ICT abuse by UK
corporates.
Onecontractor, who wished to remain anonymous, said he hadworked
at several large businesses that have used the ICT rule to bring
people into the UK. "They co-own Indian IT companies and bring in a
whole load of Indian workers for skills that they could find in the
UK."
According to data obtained by the Association of Professional
Staffing Companies from the Home Office under the Freedom of
Information Act, 35,430 non-EU IT workers came to work in the UK
last year. This compared to 12,726 during the dotcom boom in
2000.
The contractor said: "UK contractors have been cut at one
company he worked at and permanent staff have to train their Indian
replacements, who will eventually take the permanent staff jobs as
well."
Another IT contractor working for BT for over four years said BT
decided to replace an entire team based in Leeds with staff from
Tech Mahindra. These workers were paid rates littlemore than half
of the rates UK staff were paid, he said.
"There was no pretence that they could not find staff in the UK.
They were doing it to cut costs."
He said BT awarded a contract to Tech Mahindra, which has a UK
presence, and foreign nationals were brought in to replace UK
staff.
"The staff that came over did not know what they were doing," he
said. "We had to train them."
BT said the deal with Tech Mahindra is part of its massive cost
cutting programme. The UK telecoms companymade thousands of
redundancies last year and is planning the same this year. "The
majority of these will come from contractors rather than permanent
staff because contractors are paid a lot more money."
BT announced last year that it planned to spend more than £1bn
over the next five years with Tech Mahindra, which it has a 31%
stake in.
"We have replaced some contractors with Tech Mahindra people as
part of a global outsourcing deal BT signed with the company in
March 2008. No permanent staff have been replaced," he added.
The number of Tech Mahindra staff working with BT in Leeds is
around 120.
BT said the contract is outsourced to Tech Mahindra so it has no
influence in the staffing.
Tech Mahindra said: "Our operations in the UK complieswith all
the prevalent laws governing immigration and work visas. Employees
are transferred to the UK if and only if their particular skills
are needed to execute a client's projects."
BT announced last month that it was actually cutting 4,000
contract call centre jobs in India and bringing some of the work
back to the UK.
One IT contractor, who worked for the RoyalBank of Scotland as a
mainframe technician for a number of years, told Computer Weekly
business-critical work hadbeen moved to India to cut costs.
"RBS started moving the work we were doing to its datacentre in
Mumbai, known internally as Indian Datacentre. I had to train
Indian workers to do my job."
"This was to cut costs and not about filling a skills shortage.
They move the jobs to India because it is cheaper," he added.
RBS said in a statement: "As a result of our acquisition of ABN
AMRO we now employ 8000 people in India serving our operations
globally and we employ more than 70,000 people outside of the UK.
In the last year we have been progressing with work to integration
the two businesses and develop all our centres in UK, India and
across the globe."