After receiving millions from the state, Infosys misses hiring targets and seeks to restructure contract

Just three years after Governor Ned Lamont agreed to pay Infosys $18 million in exchange for the global IT firm to hire 1,000 IT workers at their Hartford office, the company recently notified state leaders that is has fallen short on its part of the deal.

According to documents obtained by CT Techworkers, Infosys notified state leaders in 2020 that they were not going to meet their hiring quotas, as promised in their contract with the state, and sought an extension on the terms of the agreement.

Apparently, the company met the first part of the contract (i.e., hiring 200 workers by December 31, 2019) and was, presumably, rewarded with $4 million, But the company blamed Covid 19 for not being able to meet the next goal (i.e., hiring an additional 300 workers by December 2022).

As a result of this, the company has proposed that the deadlines in their deal be extended by two years. So, for example, the company is seeking to have 2020 deadlines be pushed back to the end of 2022.

This letter to state leaders was obtained as part of a Freedom of Information (FOI) request made by CT Techworkers during the Summer of 2021. The documents returned as part of this request did not include any email responses to the Infosys proposal. Not one of the calls made to the Governor’s office – or to the Department of Economic and Community Development – have been returned, so no more information is available at press time.

The request to extend the deadlines is somewhat curious. While it’s true that businesses across the country have had trouble finding workers. in the last 18 months or so, it hasn’t been the case in Connecticut.

Besides, the company has boasted about a talent pipeline they created with nearby Trinity College. A training program created there, in conjunction with Infosys, has had at least several hundred participants since its inception in 2019 and even a fraction of these students could have easily gotten the company to 300 employees. Why wouldn’t those students want to join a company that claims to be on the forefront of IT innovation?

But even if none of the students in that program chose to work for Infosys, Connecticut colleges and universities graduate 42,680 students every year. Surely some of these graduates would provide promising recruits.

And, if the company is not receiving enough contracts to justify hiring new employees, are they really the innovative company they say they are.

The Global IT firm has been rocked in recent years with fines for violating US Visa laws. The company’s workforce is almost entirely citizens of South Asian countries.

The company’s most-recent experiment with hiring US workers has been a disaster, according to testimonies left on the site glassdoor. Many current and former workers at their Hartford location say that workplace is a corporate nightmare, where the careers of hopeful employees are either left to languish – or are extinguished altogether if they don’t successfully navigate the company’s pedantic and petty corporate culture.

The state has never released any numbers on how many employees have been hired at the Infosys Hartford office – or how much taxpayer money has been paid to the firm (besides a $2 million training grant the state paid the company in 2019).