Last two years have seen
remarkable stories of new jobs and salaries that raised the hope of thousands
of engineering graduates getting ready to pass out. The $110 billion IT
industry, hires them by the thousands every year, keeping the engineering
education sector gainfully engaged.
Almost always, it’s only the
success story that we hear - Infosys planning to hire 16,000, TCS setting a
much higher target of 55,000 new recruits, and job portals predicting robust
recruiting for the next 2-3 years. What go unnoticed are occasional blips - the
layoffs - that are not statistically not as significant, but are imbued with
sad stories of people.
Over the last few days, there
has been considerable noise about alleged mass layoffs by TCS. Social networks
are abuzz with unsubstantiated news that the company plans to send home about
25, 000 “non-performers” by the end of February 2015. Although TCS has
maintained that there is nothing extraordinary and it’s only part of “workforce
optimisation”, many discussants in social networking and media forums have
alleged unfair treatment and a surreptitious plan to downsize the workforce.
According to a Hindustan Times report, trade
unions such as Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and All India Trade Union
Congress (AITUC) have come out in support of TCS employees facing termination.
The report notes that this could be the beginning of unionisation among
the IT sector in India.
The trade union
have urged engineers to discuss ways to resist what appears to be a
large-scale retrenchment drive at the 3,13,000-strong IT services firm, noted
the report.
According to some analysts,
one of the reasons for the retrenchment could be to avoid employees with a few
years of experience, who are proving to be costly to the company, and use the
same resources to hire more people at the entry level. The seniors, who cannot
be inducted into leadership or project management roles - probably due to lack
of vacancies and competencies - add no better value than a new entrant. This
“workforce optimisation” is seemingly about “cost optimisation”.
This is a problem with most of
the IT companies. Most of the industrial scale recruitments are for for
“coding” (writing software) which require relatively but basic, skills. If the
employees keep doing it without constantly upgrading their skills, they become
no better than the new wave of recruits that enter the companies every year.
After a while, the earlier ones make no sense cost-wise because the same job
can be done by cheaper hands. The company, then talks of poor performance. On
the other hands, even if many of them do well, there are not enough senior
positions to absorb them.
In their testimonies and
comments online, some of the laid off employees, say that they had been
performing well, but still faced the axe. They also say that it’s difficult now
to find other jobs because fresh recruits are available at cheaper cost.
This is going to be a
perennial problem. Recruitment is a strategy for growth for the IT companies,
but the scale is so high that the employees hit the glass ceiling too soon. Is
retrenchment, to cut the flab and justify it in terms of workforce
optimisation, ethical? Is it the new wave of lay offs and worker unrest that
India is going to witness?
Reportedly, a group of TCS
employees had earlier met the labour commissioner in Bengaluru and complained
to him about the alleged lay offs across various centres in India. According to
one of them,
“first they remove you from the project, and later will ask you to leave the
company.” “Employees are asked to sign voluntary resignation letters. We are
given a one-month notice period, and are not being given eligible
compensation,” is the version of another employee. Employees who
lost jobs in Kochi also echoed similar sentiments.
Obviously, the scale of
retrenchment is higher because it has encouraged people to get together. A big
question that will come up in the coming days is the legal validity of the
lay-offs. Are they legally tenable? Shouldn’t the employees and the labour
department be notified in advance?
Before more and more
IT-professionals join the ranks of unorganised labourers in the country,
perhaps it’s time to look at ways to protect the rights of employees in the
industry. The IT industry, including the employees, have so far stonewalled the
overtures of labour unions. Last year, labour union activists in Karnataka had
opposed the five year exemption to the IT sector from
the Industrial Employment Act . The Left organisations such as
CITU also has raised the need to extend the protection of labour laws and
unions to IT employees.
It’s not just the present
uproar over retrenchment that calls for legal protection for the IT-employees.
There are also workplace issues such as long hours of work, lack of redress
mechanisms and severe stagnation.
Time for introspection by the
industry and more scrutiny by governments.
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