Amid growing resentment in the United States against outsourcing, labour organisations in the US have accused Indian IT majors Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys Technologies of "abusing" the L-1 visa programme to bring in cheap manpower to take over American jobs.

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These companies were acting as "bodyshops",  bringing in foreign workers through the L-1 system and then subcontracting them out to other businesses, Michael W Gildea, executive director of the Department for Professional Employees, AFL-CIO, America's largest labour federation, told the House International Relations Committee on Wednesday.

Some of these firms and others like them had a "troubled history" under the H-1B visa programme. "Yet, these firms are now among the biggest users of the L-1 programme supplying Indian IT talent to a who's who of the Fortune 500 corporations," he said.

The L-1 visa programme is designed to bring management executives and experts to companies owned by their employers with operations in the US.

L-1 visas are for "intra-company transferees" and L-2 visas are granted to their spouses and dependent children.

Dan Stein, executive director for American Immigration Reform, told the committee that unlike applicants for other categories of temporary employment visas, L-1 visa holders need not maintain a legal intent to return home.

This makes it easier for them to get on track to petition for permanent resident status "and makes something of a mockery of the idea that this is a temporary visa programme," he said.

Quoting a Business Week report last year, Stein said Siemens Technologies laid off a dozen hightech workers in their Lake Mary, Florida, office and replaced them with foreign workers supplied by TCS working on L-1 visas.

These foreign workers, on an average, are paid about one-third of what the laid-off Americans earned, he claimed.

Sun Microsystems has said it does not give American workers preference in its hiring and layoff decisions, and large banks, like Bank of America, have been quite open about their use of this programme to employ less expensive foreign workers, Stein added.

Gildea said that according to the San Francisco Chronicle, TCS acknowledged it paid some of the replacement programmers "only $36,000 a year - below the average local range of $37,794 to 69,000 for a basic programmer."

This was "well below the compensation levels paid to those US employees who were laid off as a result of their deal with Tata Consultancy Services," he added.

India-born Sona Shah, who came to the US at the age of three and is an American citizen, told the committee that the L-1 prograamme replaces American workers like her with lower paid visa-holders and they too were victimised.

"In countries like India, the opportunities for abuse written into these visa programmes have given rise to a cottage industry called visa brokerage."

"Indian visa brokers either take money up front and/or force the potential L-1 (visa holder) into unlawful contracts. By reforming these visa programmes you can prevent exploitation of both US citizens and guest workers," she added.