Chennai: A group of employees from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) held a discussion with legal experts on Saturday, on reports about the company asking some of its employees to leave. They said the discussion was about challenging the company legally on its decision of massive layoff. But the company claims it is a continuous and regular, performance-based, workforce ‘restructuring’ exercise.
The IT employees, seeking anonymity, said the layoff involved employees from across India and on sites. They alleged that these people were terminated with short notice. They said the terminated employees were between 30 and 40 years of age and have worked in TCS for about 10 years.They claimed that the company said their profile did not match requirements. And they wondered why it took TCS so many years “to say we are not productive”.
While we have families depending on us and EMIs to pay, the company is in a good position. It wants to reduce expenses by retrenching old-timers, the participants alleged. However, a TCS spokesperson, in a communication to Deccan Chronicle, said there was an effort to form a union of IT employees of different companies and that was not happening. So, the non-performers were now using the media to defame the companies that fail to encourage non-productive personnel.
Even for the Saturday meeting, less than half-a-dozen people turned up, it said.“As a performance-driven company, workforce optimisation is a continuous process which happens throughout the year taking into account employee performance, business needs, and people’s aspirations. This leads to some amount of involuntary attrition in the company. This is nothing out of the ordinary or a special situation for us to comment about. We continue to be leading recruiters of IT talent across the world, not only in India. In this fiscal year, we have a total hiring target of 55,000 professionals and we are on track to meet it,” the spokesperson added.
Ex-employees go into huddle
The 31-year-old assistant consultant with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was part of the group that attended a gathering on Saturday to discuss the future of the employees being laid off by the IT major. She was issued the termination letter on December 22 and there were rumours about the possible layoff in office circles and in social media.“I was not allowed to contact my team members who had apparently been informed of my termination,” she recalled.
Unable to come to terms with the reality, she called and informed her husband who also works in the same company. A day later, the HR personnel called her summoning her to the main office in Siruseri.“I was asked to sign a few documents following a briefing by the HR personnel there,” she said. The woman has no idea if this massive layoff can be challenged legally and attended the gathering organised by ‘Young Tamils movement’ after coming across the Facebook post.
Less than 20 persons attended the gathering and most of us are in the dark as to what to do next, she said. “Frankly speaking, most of us have no idea if there is a legal recourse to this incident. We are hoping for the best,” she said.
