BT slammed for 'importing' cheap Indian contractors
On-site offshoring
BT has been accused of laying off expensive UK contractors and replacing them with Indian staff.
Workers brought in using intra-company transfers are replacing contractors for about half the price, a contractor told BBC Radio 4.
According to a contractor working for BT Global Services on the National Programme for IT - the NHS project, workers from TechMahindra, earn about £220 a day, versus £400 a day for a UK contractors. The contractor told the BBC's File on 4 it was a cost-cutting move. He said he'd got the figures from his line manager.
BT told the programme that it was looking to cut its dependence on expensive contractors and that anyone brought in from India was a specialist; intra-company transfers are meant to be for people with skills not available from the British workforce. It said it had not replaced any permanent staff with Indian staff.
TechMahindra said it followed all relevant immigration laws and staff would only be moved using intra-company transfer visas if they had specific knowledge or experience not provided by the UK workforce.
BT owns a 31 per cent stake in Tech Mahindra.
BT is cutting 15,000 jobs this year, on top of the 15,000 cut last year. So far this year it has also frozen wages for its 100,000 staff, and cut contractor rates.®
COMMENTS
This has been happening at BT for ten years
I've worked on multiple projects at BT and the spread of Indian contractors has been steady.
Initially brought in to do testing, then bug fixing, then greenfield coding, then design and BA work, then project management work. Almost all onshore, with some low level coding done in India.
Alongside them on the management side Accenture has steadily spread its tentacles to the point where many BT staff actually report to non-BT managers.
When things go wrong (as they often do) the solution is simple. Flog the Indians til they drop and bully the UK staff to comply as far as possible. 24 hour shifts, including over weekends, frantically churning out release after release in the hope one will eventually go right.
Managers banned from turning off their mobiles, so some lunatic can phone them up at 4am and abuse them about another issue.
So much for working time directives and human rights law.
Part of the problem is there is a whole layer of BT management in their 40s and 50s who are locked into their final salary pensions. They have no desire to leave as they'd reduce a great pension, and no desire to rock the boat in any way. The good ones bite their lip, try to minimise the screw ups, and keep their head down, the bad ones do what they've been doing for the last ten years or so - nothing.
The leadership vacuum they have created is exploited by more commercially savvy suppliers who are stripping the company bare.
Ugghhhhhh Racist Smachist - NO feign Call Centre Workers...
I have had so many severely bad expereinces with "foreign" call center staff that these days I refuse to even buy products from companies that employ them.
English Speaking, Live in my own country, Technically Proficient - only.
Barely able to understand english, live far away, utterly clueless script monkey - NO WAY.
Last case: Western Digitial Hard Drives...... Situation: An apparently flawed HDD, sounds like it's having a head crash... Ring the Western Digital "Help Line / Tech Support" for Hard Drives; Gets guy in Philipines / India / Malaysia call centre....
"Hi I have bought a new HDD, and it's having a "head crash".... answer 1. "What is that?"
"It's when the read write heads start scraping on the disk surface".... answer 2. "Could you be more specific?"
Etc.,
A FUCKING CLUELESS script monkey......
Oh Hoooray for Western Digitial Hard Drives.......
another facet
The Tech Mahindra contractors are paid split, half in the uk and half in india (in fact its not even 50/50). The indian gov gives them high levels of tax relief on the bit earned through offshore (ie working in the uk) work, so while they may be cheaper, theyre actually a lot better off than they look on paper compared to the expensive UK employee they just replaced, because the whole Tech Mahindra setup is taking the mickey out of the british taxation system.
You should also remember that not so long ago Tech Mahindra was once called Mahindra BT, and only very very recently was it floated off and sold, so it was designed at the start as a mechanism to offshore all the IT workers and managers to india without raising the spectre of mass union action... Now BT has flogged TM to some unsuspecting suckers on the basis of their cashflow, they have a new load of bods in from yet another indian outsourcing company, because theyre cheaper than the Tech M guys!
It really is a race to the bottom.
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