Huawei accused of racial discrimination against non-Chinese workers

A former employee of Chinese telecommunications hardware company Huawei is taking the company to court in the UK on charges of racial discrimination. The former fiber optics specialist claims Huawei has unfairly replaced British employees with Chinese.

According to the UK Daily Mail, Judeson Peter, a Sri Lankan expatriate, was cut from his job in a massive round of layoffs in 2009, which occurred contemporaneously with a large influx of Chinese employees at Huawei's UK division.

Peter said the company's Human Resources department sent an email on April 21, 2009 which claimed that all expat employees would be safe from redundancy layoffs.

But Peter was still let go.

"This is a clear racial discrimination against non-Chinese employees as most expats are Chinese," Peter told the Daily Mail.

At the time, Huawei laid off 25 percent of its British workers and 32 percent of its Chinese workers because growth had slowed so significantly from the previous year. In 2008, the company's revenue grew by 43%, in 2009 it grew by just 17%.

Huawei has denied Peter's claims, and said that its redundancies were in no way structured to favor Chinese employees.

The tribunal investigating Peter's claims is still under way.