Cognizant Discriminated Against Non-Indian Workers, US Jury Says

This is apparently a NASDAQ traded company with a market cap of nearly $38 billion (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/CTSH/). It looks like they've placed H-1B holders at Bay Area employers ranging from Google, Meta and Apple to PG&E, Kaiser Permanente and Walmart.

I get that this company may be exploiting loopholes in the visa system or acting in unethical ways to import workers. But assuming those workers are legally able to work in America, is it really illegal to replace existing workers with cheaper ones? Isn't that a freedom employers have? How could that be considered discrimination based on ethnicity? That seems like a judgment based on the outcomes (equity) rather than evidence of discrimination based on race (as opposed to the cost of labor).

The lawsuit itself seems to be making a case based on "disparate impact" rather than clear evidence of discrimination: “Cognizant has used policies and practices related to hiring, promotion, and termination of individuals that have had a disparate impact on the basis of national origin and race (harming those who are not of South Asian race or Indian national origin) that are neither job-related for the positions at issue nor consistent with business necessity”.

The application process was on-line, fill in a form, then submit and you get a page come back saying you've applied - but no confirmation email, no application ID, nothing.

I wanted some confirmation of application, so I tried to contact Cognizant.

This turned out to be impossible.

I won't go into the long-winded details of all the ways in which trying to contact Cognizant fails; but it was in fact literally impossible to contact Cognizant and say "did you get that application?" and it was all down to simple, basic incompetence at Cognizant - broken email addresses, phone numbers listed but which did not exist, no responses at all from such contact methods that did work, and so on.

I never heard back from them about the role, which had been advertized and then re-advertized, for a hard to fill skill set, and that was odd, because I'm a experienced specialist in a field where there is a profound shortage of staff; my suspicion, given the problems contacting them, is that they messed it up.

Additionally, I've come since then to have a sense that large consultancies probably take something like 50% of the payment being made by the client, as opposed to the usual 15% or 20% of a recruitment agency.

Cognizant = Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp