Explained: What Is Moonlighting And Why Companies Are Against It

Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji criticised the trend of moonlighting in the tech industry, he tweeted, ¡°There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating - plain and simple.¡±

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The trend of ¡°moonlighting¡± or working other jobs to earn extra income has gained more popularity and scope during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In India, most companies do not allow their employees to take up additional jobs over concerns like conflicts of interest, job performance, or misuse of an employer¡¯s resources.

What is moonlighting?

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The practice of working a second job outside the regular business hours to earn extra money is called moonlighting. Any employee works a normal 9 to 5 job as the primary source of income and at night they works for another company or project to earn extra income.

What has contributed to moonlighting more?

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The working model of work from home (WFH) is said to have promulgated moonlighting among the white-collar professionals in India. It has also challenged the compliance issues within companies.

Many organisations would not prefer to allow their workers to take up additional jobs but, a few companies such as Swiggy are officially allowing their employees for moonlighting under certain conditions.

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Swiggy has announced its ¡°moonlighting policy¡± recently. While announcing the policy, the company said in a statement, "This could encompass activity outside of office hours or on weekends that does not impact their productivity on the full-time job or have a conflict of interest with Swiggy's business in any way.¡±

The emerging crowdsourcing platforms like Topcoder are also contributing to the situation as they provide short-term project-based services through hiring IT professionals.

Debate over moonlighting

Moonlighting has stirred a debate about the future of the gig economy and changing nature of white-collar jobs in India. While a few consider it bad for the tech industry and others go on to support the concept.

Wipro chairman Rishad Premji called the concept as cheating. According to a TOI report, a survey called Kotak Institutional Equities (July) was conducted on 400 people across the IT&ITES space and found that ¡°65% knew of people pursuing part-time opportunities or moonlighting while working from home.¡±

This has become a major reason why people are preferring work from home mode and interestingly 42% of the participants preferred to change their jobs or even quit if they were not allowed to WFH.

Vikram Shroff, head of the HR law practice at law firm Nishith Desai Associates told TOI, ¡°In full-time employment, the employee is expected and required to spend his entire working time, efforts and energy for the employer¡¯s interests. ¡±

Swiggy's human resources head Girish Menon told Economic Times that ¡°moonlighting is the 'future of work' and that employees will be responsible and declare what gigs or projects they're getting into.¡±

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Companies are worried about the loss of productivity at the primary job as moonlighting leads to overwork. They also have a problem that employees using company materials like laptops or software for their additional jobs.

It is noteworthy that there is no overarching law against moonlighting but individual companies have policies against it. In future, the companies might come up with new policies focusing on moonlighting and try to ban the practice of it.

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