Dear Editor,

I am writing this letter to describe the condition of one of the new sections of the working class – the modern IT worker. The IT worker is caught in the milieu of white-collar status that is collapsing like a pack of cards with the downturn in business.

Recently Patni Computer Systems has laid off close to 400 employees citing non-performance. The country’s sixth-largest exporter claimed that it was part of a routine appraisal exercise, carried out every year to weed out “non-performers”, and was not related to any slow down.

Layoffs in whatever name amounts to loss of livelihood for the worker. In addition, it definitely shatters the worker's self esteem.

The statement given by the management while laying off 400 employees, including at managerial level, is shocking. The spokesperson of the management of Patni declared, “This was an absolutely regular appraisal that is important for any performance-driven organisation. It is something we do every year. These are performance-based resignations; we have not issued any termination letters!” He said the comparable figure for the previous year was 148. He further declared “Retrenchment is a word used when you are facing negative growth or no growth and cutting down on your labour costs. We continue to recruit – the number of new employees we intend to hire, according to our quarterly results communication, is about 2,000.”

Bench is a term used to indicate employees who are not working on any available projects because they are undergoing training or are between projects. As a strategy, companies also maintain a bench in readiness for new projects. In a slowdown, because of postponement or cancellation of projects, the bench size increases more than what companies plan for. Under such circumstances the company throws out workers on the bench, concocting poor performance as a reason.

The IT worker is at the mercy of greed for higher and higher profit by the company, which is least interested in the individual worker who slogs for 10-12 hours and sometimes even 24 hours trying to meet targets of the company at the cost of his/her health and family and social well-being. As long as IT workers remain unorganized, they will be subject to arbitrary lay-offs. Frankly, I do not find much difference between the working conditions of the contract worker of a construction company and that of an IT worker.

Yours,
Anamika Joshi