Labour department officials held talks with the employees of C Cubed Solutions, a company that provides call centre, BPO, healthcare billing and IT outsourcing services, and the management representatives here on Thursday and arrived at an agreement on payment to the employees as the company was stopping operations here.
An employee who did not want to be identified said that C Cubed was present in India for the last 15 years and started Coimbatore operations four years ago. It employed 283 people and most of them were engineers. On January 19, employees who reported to work at 6 p.m. were told that the Coimbatore operations were being stopped, the employee claimed.
On Tuesday, a couple of representatives of the company told the employees that the pending salary payment would be made in two terms. The employees met the District Revenue Officer on Wednesday and labour department officials on Thursday here.
According to Joint Labour Commissioner P. Marimuthu the employees would get 25 per cent of the pending salary on Thursday and a post dated cheque for the remaining on January 27. The company would also give experience certificates to the employees.
At another IT firm located at Singanallur here, there were reports that the company was downsizing the employee strength. However, an official of the company said that it was “downsizing to a minimal level”. The total strength of about 350 plus will come down by hardly ten per cent and “We have followed the due process of retrenchment.” The company started operations here seven years ago.
An industry source told The Hindu that with technology development, the dynamics were changing for service companies. The companies here should be able to live up to the expectations of customers. If some of the overseas customers shut shop, companies here would bring down the employee strength. Downsizing is neither a trend nor a problem in the industry. About 7,000 new jobs would be created by the IT and IT Enabled Services sector here in the next one year. “We are on the growth path.”
Mr. Marimuthu said such instances are a new dimension of industrial disputes here. These are new to Coimbatore as the management teams of these firms are not headquartered here.
