US Tech Giant Cognizant Lays Off 18,000 Employees, Trade Union Takes Them To Court
The Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU) has said that it has initiated legal action against US tech giant Cognizant over the alleged mass layoff of its employees in India.
According to KITU, thousands of Cognizant employees across India are being laid off and they have been asked to submit their resignations, to make it look like they have quit on their own.
The union claimed that several victimized employees approached KITU, and they have initiated a legal battle against the Cognizant management for this illegal action.
"The reports on large scale layoffs are coming from ¡®Cognizant¡¯ in the name of ¡®effectively managing workforce utilisation¡¯. Thousands of employees all over India are going to be the victims of this. Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU) strongly condemns this illegal and inhuman decision taken by the management of Cognizant," KITU said in a Facebook post.
The KITU has urged all the affected employees to refuse to resign if asked to do so by the company and called up on the company to respect the law of the land.
"According to the Labour Laws, companies that employs more than 100 employees need to obtain approval from the Labour department in order to execute layoffs. Rebranding a layoff by arguing that employees voluntarily resigned when they were, in fact, forced to resign, is also against the law," KITU said.
KITU has also demanded an urgent intervention from the government to this matter and request to take stricter actions against the management who violated the labour laws.?
The development comes at a time when several big and small IT companies in India are on the path of cutting down jobs in the name of restructuring amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since March, when the lockdown began tech companies in India have seen thousands of layoffs, as most of them saw their revenues plummet.
According to a recent?Nasscom?survey published in May, nine out of ten?Indian startups are bleeding. Nasscom conducted its survey with over 250 startups in India in April and found that around 62 percent are suffering revenue decline of over 40 percent, while 34 percent are facing revenue decline of over whopping 80 percent ¡ª all due to the?coronavirus?pandemic in the country.
In April, it was reported that HR experts and industry players see around 1.5 lakh employees in India's IT industry losing their jobs over the next three-to-six months.
