The Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and the Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC) are all set to take up the cudgels for employees being laid off by IT major Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) citing underperformance.
The State committee of the CITU-affiliated Association of IT Employees, the only relatively active trade union in the IT sector, has already initiated steps to get in touch with the affected employees.
“Some of the TCS employees are already our members though they would not openly admit it for fear of backlash from the management. Though our members have not been affected yet, they keep us posted of the developments based on which we have decided to intervene in the issue,” A.D. Jayan, State general secretary of the association, told The Hindu .
The INTUC will send a notice to the IT Secretary demanding course correction on the part of the company management and to shelve any move to ‘unfairly’ lay off even a single employee.
“We will launch direct protest measures against the company unless the issues being raised are addressed. We have the history of having taken out the first ever protest march to Technopark in 2011 against the hire-and-fire policy prevailing in the IT sector,” said INTUC State president R. Chandrashekharan.
The INTUC will take immediate steps to expand the reach of its Kerala State IT and Allied employees Association across the State.
At present, the association is mostly dormant with limited activities in Thiruvananthapuram. BMS State vice-president K.K. Vijayakumar described the TCS decision to layoff employees as “harsh” and pledged support to the aggrieved employees.
TCS stanceA TCS spokesperson had told The Hindu : “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 aspirations. This leads to some amount of involuntary attrition in the company. This was not an extraordinary development.”
