Worried by unprecedented layoffs and “injustices” meted out to employees working in the IT/ITeS (Information Technology enabled services) industry, a group of IT employees in the city have banded together to form a registered trade union. The first meeting announcing the registration of the union will be held on Sunday.
The organisers behind the proposed trade union have rallied support from more than a hundred IT professionals and are expecting a few hundreds to turn up for the first meeting on Sunday.
According to Mithun N., a network operations centre engineer, the situation of employees working in the IT industry was in sore need of redressal. “More than 10,000 employees have been laid off from major companies. There are layoffs happening in small companies too whose data we don’t have,” said Mr. Mithun. Another concern is the large number of workers joining the industry on bare minimum wages. “Many prominent companies have started to take people on contract, who do the same work as full time employees, but are paid far less,” he added. Consultant agencies through which companies hire from campus are the main culprits in this, taking a major cut of the promised salary. Former engineer Chithra weighs in that layoffs are only one of the concerns faced by IT workers. “There is no regulation on work hours, nor is there enforcement of guidelines to ensure the safety of employees,” she points out. While the IT/ITeS Employees’ Association had made several attempts to improve the condition of IT workers, they frequently hit a wall as they were told that as an association they had no standing to demand changes.
This is not the first time IT employees have tried to organise themselves under a trade union. The Bengaluru-based Information Technology Employees’ Union, which registered as a trade union last May, has 7,000 registered employees across India. However, the number of enrolled employees who have given their employment details to the union is far less.
One reason for this is that in 2014 the State government gave a five-year exception to IT companies from the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, 1946, under which they are mandated to allow company-specific trade unions. “We have requested the current IT /BT Minister that this exception should not be extended,” said Kumaraswamy A.C., president of ITeS. He added that unless people come forward in droves to represent the trade union, it will be difficult to get anything changed on the ground. “When the Labour Commission tries to verify members, people have to be willing to come up front,” said Mr. Kumaraswamy.
