Khobragade redux: US firm caught paying Indians a pittance

Indian diplomat Devyani Khopragade may have been forced to leave the US after being accused by an overactive US prosecutor of underpaying her domestic help, but apparently American employers have been coolly getting away with the practice.

A company in Fermont, California, has been caught paying eight Indian employees as low as $1.21 (Rs75) per hour last year. The minimum wage in California during the period was $8 per hour.

The eight Indians from Bangalore were made to put in as much as 120 hours a week and not paid overtime, which is mandatory if workers put in over 40 hours a week.

The employer was Efi, or Electronics for Imaging, a 25-year-old company that calls itself a ''provider of products, technology and services leading the transformation of analog to digital imaging''.

The company told NBC it ''unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local US standards''.

The US Department of Labor called the incident ''outrageous and unacceptable'', but ended up fining the Silicon Valley company a paltry $43,000-odd in back wages and penalties.

The workers were helping the company move its headquarters from Foster City, California, to Fremont, California, during a three-month period, according to the Labor Department.

Efi, a ''world leader in customer-focused digital printing innovation'' according to its website, had just recently announced Q3 revenues of $197.7 million. The company generated revenue of $728 million last year, when the misconduct occurred.

Instead of overtime pay, the company gave the Indians unspecified bonuses while paying the transferred workers the same wages they normally received in their normal jobs in Bangalore, India. The workers were even paid in rupees while in the US.

Michael Eastwood, a Department of Labor assistant district director, told AP that the abuses at Electronics for Imaging were among the most outrageous he had ever seen - even worse than problems he had seen at garment factories in southern California. ''This is worse than anything that I ever saw in any of those Los Angeles sweatshops,'' Eastwood said on Thursday.