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Image Source : PTI
BENGALURU: Cognizant is laying off employees across a quantity of its locations in India. The actual numbers will not be clear, however IT worker unions allege it’s at the very least a number of lots of.
Vinod AJ, basic secretary of the All India Forum for IT Employees (AIFITE), stated Cognizant employees across Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Kochi and Kolkata have been affected.
FITE stated in a communication to the labour division and different authorities officers that some 18,000 employees are on the bench (these with out tasks), and plenty of of them may very well be affected.
Suraj Nidiyanga, secretary of the Karnataka State IT/ITES Employees Union (KITU), stated they’ve 20 complaints from Cognizant employees in Bengaluru, and 20 extra have complained to their Tamil Nadu union. “Cognizant is indulging in large-scale retrenchment of people on its benches,” he stated.
In October final 12 months, CEO Brian Humphries had introduced that the corporate can be parting with some 13,000 employees within the coming months, together with about 6,000 from the content material moderation enterprise that Cognizant does for Facebook. He had stated they might attempt to reskill some 5,000 of these employees and redeploy them in different areas.
The ongoing layoffs may very well be a component of that announcement. Cognizant globally has over 2.9 lakh employees, of which about 70% are in India.
When contacted, a Cognizant spokesperson stated that “recent third party allegations regarding a specific number of job actions are inaccurate, not based on facts, and were not announced by Cognizant.”
The spokesperson added: “…Cognizant continues to hire at all levels in India and globally. Likewise, the company continues to invest heavily in upskilling and reskilling its employees at scale in newer digital technologies, including cloud, analytics, digital engineering and IoT, where the company is seeing above industry-average growth.”
Cognizant was for years the quickest rising among the many huge India-heritage IT companies corporations, however the previous 2-three years has seen progress slumping. Humphries, who got here in final 12 months from Vodafone, has been endeavor a serious restructuring, together with some radical price cuts.
Several employees that TOI spoke to on situation of anonymity stated that they had been given a MS (meets some expectation) ranking – they stated an unusually excessive quantity of employees obtained the MS ranking this 12 months. Employees who get this ranking are placed on a efficiency enchancment plan (PIP) for as much as 45 days. Emails despatched by the corporate to some of these employees confirmed that they failed to satisfy the PIP objectives. “My weekly performance review was satisfactory, but at the end of my review, my performance was dubbed as unsatisfactory,” stated an affected worker. These are the employees being requested to go.
Employees are being provided severance packages of 12 to 21 weeks’ pay (relying on years of expertise) and one week’s pay for yearly of service.
Many have been additionally affected resulting from bench-associated actions. Last 12 months, the Nasdaq-listed IT companies agency shrunk the bench time from 60 days to 35 days for these employees who aren’t on billable tasks. After 35 days, they may very well be requested to depart.
Employees on the bench are moved to affiliate deployable pool and people whose exceed the 35-day threshold are warned to get themselves positioned in a undertaking. Employees are despatched a present trigger and requested to current earlier than a private listening to officer to clarify the explanations for not discovering an acceptable job to justify their “non-contribution of work.” An affected worker on the bench stated, “The undertaking managers and administrators don’t honour a service order raised to deploy benched employees to work on one other ongoing tasks. “They don’t approve the service order. So, we are stuck without a project even though some of us have similar skill sets,” he stated.
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