Fired workers complain against outsourcing to HCL Technologies.

In yet another high-profile controversy involving the much-beleaguered H-1B visa, 49 tech positions within University of California San Francisco (UCSF), will be outsourced to India, come February 2017, with the fired workers having to train their replacements.

A group of recently fired employees gathered outside the UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Tuesday to protest their jobs being sent offshore, reported a local affiliate of CBS News.

The jobs are being outsourced to HCL Technologies, and its employees will replace 49 workers with decades of experience.

“It’s probably discriminatory, they’re replacing us with a primarily young, all-Indian population,” Audrey Hatten-Milholin said at the protest. She’s been working at UCSF for 17 years. She’s also one of the employees being asked to train her replacement, reported CBS.

“You don’t want to take it out on them, they’re just here doing their job but at the same time you’re frustrated that you’re teaching someone to take over your job,” she said.

“They’re treating their employees improperly, unfairly, illegally, and it’s bad public policy,” Gary Gwilliam said. He’s representing Hatten-Milholin and 9 other recently fired employees in a discrimination suit against the university.

UCSF says these layoffs will save $30 million over the next five years. In response to the threat of legal action it released this statement:

“UCSF is still reviewing the DFEH complaint, but we have already noted that there are a number of misstatements of fact. UCSF has followed all applicable laws and UC policy, UCSF has no plans to use the H-1B visa program to bring in foreign IT professionals, and UCSF is working with other campuses across the UC system to identify alternative IT positions for the affected employees within the system.”

The workers being let go are concerned that if UCSF gets away with this, ”the floodgates will open,” Hatten-Milholin said. She worries hiring offshore workers and firing long standing IT employees will become the blueprint for cost-cutting at public universities.

ComputerWorld reported earlier that UCSF has got into a contract with HCL valued at $50 million over five years. It also had a higher number fo workers who wold be affected by the layoffs.

This layoff may have huge implications. That’s because the university’s IT services agreement with HCL can be leveraged by any institution in the 10-campus University of California system, which serves some 240,000 students and employs some 190,000 faculty and staff.

UCSF, which runs professional schools in dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy as well as a medical center, has a 565-member centralized IT department.

This layoff affects 17% of UCSF’s total IT staff, broken down this way: 49 IT permanent employees will lose their jobs, along with 12 contract employees and 18 vendor contractors. This number also includes 18 vacant IT positions that won’t be filled, according to the university.

UCSF has also been relocating some IT equipment to a Dell data center in Quincy, Wash., under a separate agreement. Similar to the HCL contract, the Dell contract can also be used by other university IT departments. It has also signed a contract with security provider FireEye.

“It’s very troubling,” said one affected IT employee, reported ComputerWorld. Employees contacted asked that their names not be used. Although the university is partially state funded, “California employees are losing their jobs because you’re moving their jobs to Washington,” referring to the Dell data center. “That’s the first problem, the second problem is people are losing their jobs because outsourcers from another country are coming in to take their positions, that’s insulting.”

A second IT employee said he suspects that the San Francisco campus is just the “first one” among the campuses to take this route.

The university’s IT employees “are passionate about what they are doing and they want to bring innovation to the hospital,” said this employee. But by turning to contractors, the university is hurting its ability to innovate, is losing institutional knowledge and is putting cost reductions over its mission to be “the best provider of healthcare services,” he said.

HCL will provide data center monitoring and operations, server, storage, database, middleware and Citrix, as well as network operations, routers, switches, firewalls, load balancers, WLAN controllers. Other services will include unified communications — telephony, email, chat, SharePoint, audio and video conferencing — and application maintenance for PeopleSoft, C#, .Net and Java apps. It will also provide application development augmentation services, according to the university.

UCSF employees say the training of the HCL staff has not begun, so they don’t know yet if they will be training visa-holding replacements. But HCL, along with many other offshore firms, is considered H-1B dependent under law, meaning 15% or more of their U.S. workers are here on an H-1B visa.

HCL and Cognizant were sued earlier this year by laid-off Disney IT employees, who allege the law was broken when they were replaced by visa workers.

“It is shocking that the California state government is exploiting loopholes in guest worker programs to destroy American jobs,” said Ron Hira, a public policy professor at Howard University, who has testified on H-1B use in Congress.

“It is a particularly egregious abuse of the H-1B program since the chancellor of the UC system is Janet Napolitano who served as President Obama’s Secretary of Homeland Security, which oversees the flawed H-1B program,” said Hira. “She well knows how the program destroys American jobs and subsidizes offshoring. For her to OK this abusive use of the program is embarrassing. She cannot plead ignorance,” he said.

In 2004, California lawmakers approved legislation prohibiting state and local entities from offshoring work, but the bill was vetoed by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

In 2015, following Southern California Edison’s decision to cut some 500 IT workers after hiring two India-based offshore outsourcing firms, the California State Assembly approved legislation asking the federal government to investigate the H-1B visa program. But this legislation stalled in the state Senate.

In 2003, one year before Schwarzenegger’s veto, a UCSF outsourcing contract made the news. A medical transcriptionist in Pakistan threatened to expose patient records unless she was paid more.

President-elect Donald Trump has said at campaign rallies that he will stop the policy of fired American workers having to train their replacements from overseas, usually on an H-1B visa.