 For more videos on people's struggles, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Hello and welcome to People's Dispatch and today we're going to talk about the crisis in the IT sector in India. India's IT sector is worth billions of dollars and is a major source of employment for hundreds and thousands of people. But it has been facing a crisis in recent times. And to talk more about this, we are joined by Kiran Chander, president of the Forum of IT Professionals. Hello Kiran, thank you for joining us. So first of all, there have been a lot of media reports in recent times about what are called layoffs in the IT sector. So for instance, the IT major cognizant announced nearly 5000 to 7000 layoffs. There was Infosys which also announced an equal number of layoffs. And this is not a new thing in the past couple of years also we've seen reports of what the media calls mass layoffs. So could you talk a bit about what exactly is happening in the sector? So there's a problematic perceptional thing when the companies and the media say that it's a layoff. Layoff legally in the Indian conditions has got a very specific meaning which is attributed to the seasonal industry or industries which are of seasonal nature. So when the company is locked out or the production process has been locked out for the lack of resources, maybe for example, the case of a sugarcane industry or any of those industries of the agri products. The company is shut down for a brief period and then they are back into production. That period is called as a layoff legally. So in a layoff situation, it is mandatory. The law says that when an employee is laid off, when the company is back in the production, the senior most employee who has been sent home would be given the first preferential treatment and recruiting back. So that's precisely the reason when they use the word layoff. It means it comes with a backing up of a condition that any senior employee who has been sent home would be given the first preferential treatment and recruiting in the recruitment. But here what is happening in the IT industry is mass retrenchments which are illegal. So it is illegal retrenchments that are happening in the IT industry and you can't turn them as layoffs firstly. And the reason there is a huge number of numbers are in huge number when people are being sent home. And essentially they have nothing to do with any of the arguments which the companies are giving. They are retrenching them illegally and the numbers are pretty high. What essentially is happening in the Indian context is wage restructuring in the industry. The same role which is being retrenched, the companies are giving out in open and open advertisements in other various recruitment domains or platforms like Monster or Naukri. The same role is being filled up again with lesser wages. So what essentially is happening in the IT industry, they are restructuring the wages. Employees are being fired indiscriminately and people are being hired for low wages. So this is a process that has been happening. It is a violation of the Indian law and people are organizing themselves and fighting it back. Some of the arguments given by the companies is that one, there is a lot of automation going on and which is the reason for them having to cut their workforce. Then there is the argument that many of these people are their roles are redundant or many of them don't have the necessary skills considering the kind of shift in emphasis by many of these companies. So do these arguments actually make any sense or is it just an excuse? You have asked multiple questions in this. Let us take the first point that you have termed it as automation and artificial intelligence radically changing the nature of IT. Yes, it is true that artificial intelligence will change the nature in which IT is being there or the automation of IT itself, but we are nowhere near to that. So IT industry is automating itself. It is true. It has been happening for a period. And now all the jobs that are being closed are not as a consequence of the automation of the IT industry in itself per se. It is a process that is going to happen in the future. But have we matured to that level as of today? No. Because when you look at the recruitment patterns in the IT industry, the headcount of the IT industry has not gone down significantly. If IT industry were to be assumed that as a consequence of automation, the jobs are going, it would be a net reduction in the total number of employees in the company also, which is not true. And if you look at the recruitment patterns and the skill set for which recruitments are happening, the large scale of them are, as I have already pointed out, it is restructuring of the wages because we have a huge amount of reserved army of workable professionals close to twice the number of people who have been absorbed into the industry or outside waiting for jobs. So this gives a favorable condition for the IT corporations to violate the laws and the government is not responding to it. That is the first part of it. And when you look at the second aspect of it, when you consider role redundancy or these are a certain baggages which the companies on the one hand are sending their professionals brutally out and attaching them or tagging them with a lot of baggage, making their lives miserable and giving them or making their options of getting a job even more vulnerable. They are being pushed into a very vulnerable situation. What does this role redundancy mean? When the projects are ongoing projects are going on companies persuade IT professionals not to change their domain precisely because The area of work. When you say domain you mean the technology. Technology and also domain. If I were to work in a telecom domain on a particular technology, they would not want me to move from it. Let us take the classical example of mainframes. With the advent of cloud, the entire mainframe infrastructure is moving out but a professional has been forced by the corporations IBM which is firing IT professionals in a big way now in India. When they were firing IT professionals IBM mainframes, they have been persuading people not to move out of mainframes because they would be the highly billable resources because billing of resources happens based on seniority. So, 15 to 20 percent of the professionals were persuaded by the corporations not to move from the discipline that they have been working on to maximize their profits then. And now there is something called as industrial establishment standing orders in India where you will have to notify saying that what are the total number of roles that a corporation is creating and what purposes are you taking them in. So, there is a change of nature of employment. It is the responsibility of the corporation or the company to train the IT professionals to upgrade their skills and then move on. So, I am speaking about a very narrow percentile of 15 to 20 percent of the IT professionals who were stuck with a particular trade or a particular discipline just because of the compulsions from the corporations themselves. And when you look at the rest of the 85 percent of the IT professionals, if you look at the resumes of the IT professionals in the IT industry everyone has gone through over a change of five different variants of technologies and the people who have been fired look at the age. Anyone who is about 10 years of experience is becoming vulnerable and they are firing them. If you look at any IT professional who has worked for 10 years in an IT industry with the majority of them close to 85 percent they would have transformed themselves with five to six different variants of technologies. It means they have been upgrading themselves. If you look at the budgets and the spending and the expenditures of all these corporations nowhere there would be an expenditure of upgrading their employees' work base or training the employees' work base into a new sector or new technology. So, all these the IT professionals have done it from their pockets. They have paid themselves through the non-formal education mechanism that exists in India and all the metros. So, IT professionals have upgraded their skills and despite which they have been tagged and then sent out. This is a serious cause of concern. On the one hand they are violating law. On the second hand they are making their lives of these IT professionals miserable and vulnerable to an extent that when they are firing an IT professional the insurance that is being provided, employees insurance that has been provided particularly in the lines of health and health insurance has been cut off. It means he is going to be just vulnerable. Just look at any of the new generation industries. They just wash their hands off from taking up any of the welfare measures which otherwise are elementary to be provided. You look at all the IT majors Pune, Mumbai, Delhi or you could say Gurgaon, Oida, Hyderabad, Bangalore or Chennai, any of these places. In no place you have one school, one hospital or one college set up by these IT giants cooperatively put together or collaboratively put together in the interest of IT professionals. But if you look at the fourth industry they had their own school. So, on the one hand they have washing off their hands from all social responsibilities brutally violating law, adding tags and baggages to the IT professionals and also making their vulnerable from even the elementary healthcare system the insurance which the IT professional pays from his pocket. We need to understand that these corporations don't even pay a single price. It is the IT professional who pays it as a group insurance even that they are truncating off making it more vulnerable and miserable. And this is made worse by the fact that the industry, the culture of the industry itself has involved treating employees as individuals the performance appraisals, the discussions with the HR for instance and there is not this active discouragement of any attempted unionization or any attempted organization. I think, yeah, there is really have to look at how the IT industry is organized. The new generation industries have been organized. So, they have ensured that the work is fragmented such that each employee is pitched against his co-employed. A developer's team is pitched against a testing team and the developers themselves, the on-site developer and the developer at the main office are pitched against one another. So, it was built on a structural arrangement where the necessary conditions for people to have a homogeneous culture at the floor level is basically balkanized. When they sit with each other also, they are just broken down and divided. There are huge walls that are built between the IT professionals barring them from having any kind of a spiritual environment or cultural exchange to happen. That's one part of it. But however breaking all those stuffs, all this they have built it at a point when there was the IT industry was in a booming situation. When IT industry was in a booming situation, when people were not happy with the promotion systems or the increments, they just quit and moved outside. So, attrition was considered by the same IT industry as a strong point of strong point. When they said strong point, they were building strong philosophical roots so that people don't organize themselves into. But now the situation has changed. There is a sense of realization among the IT professionals and also the IT and IT sector. And they have started organizing themselves and barring all these issues. There have been a lot of struggles, fights that are happening. And there are significant amount of successes where IT professionals are gaining in this. And one of the other key points also is that which again is used by companies to sort of justify or against labor action in labor codes is that many of these employees are managers because they have the designation such as team leader and other designations. So, a huge percentage of the IT employees are supposedly managers. Even when you look at, I was just mentioning about the structure of the IT industry. There are a lot of judgments that are in place, Supreme Court judgments, directives, and also the law explicitly states that it is the content of work that matters but not the designation that they attribute to. I think there would be any industry apart from the new generation industries where every individual is considered to be supervising more number of people or he is in a managerial role. Close to 30% of them would be team leads, team managers or someone who is above someone else. There are people who are individuals who are still considered to be with the designation of a manager. So, this is the argument that giving individuals with the names, this has been the tactics of the industry persuading them not to organize themselves to an extent that when people join the IT industry, there are induction sessions or you could say inception or induction sessions when HR comes in particular and says that if your association with any of these organizations might lead you to be getting out of the industry. So, there is a force, people have been deprived of the rights and the norms in which they want IT people to, IT professionals to think the companies have been persuading them in the inception level and this entire thing even if you look at a manager by definition according to the law, the labor laws of this country, manager is a person who can represent the company on its behalf to the larger public. If you look at it, I don't think there are many number of people in the IT industry even if an IT industry which has some 60,000, 70,000 professionals, hardly 10, 15 people would be able to come out and represent. Anyone below the level of the business unit head is eligible to be considered to be a workman and they can organize themselves and we have had significant successes in this aspect. So, the structure of it is an important thing which made the IT professionals live in a make-believe world considering themselves to be managers which myth is being now broken. And could you talk a bit about the resistance that is currently on, like you said over the past few years organizations have been mobilizing in this sector. The employees have been increasingly dissatisfied and they are understanding the importance of organizing. So, could you talk a bit about the experiences and what are the same methods through which this kind of resistance works? I think today marks the anniversary of a very second anniversary of a very brutal incident. I would just want to bring it to your notice that when firing people in a multinational corporation called Verizon, bouncers, paramedics, psychiatrists, HR managers was a team that was engaged in firing close to a thousand IT professionals across the country. So, you see the way in which they fire people, it was a very brutal way in which they engaged and people have started resisting and there are close to 67 members who have filed a court case petition in the high court of Telangana. And apart from that, there have been arguments in the Labour Commissioner's office as a consequence of the pressure from IT professionals in Bangalore, Tamil Nadu, Telangana and other regions. Particularly Telangana region where there were close to 2,500 petitions on the IT professionals, the Labour Department was forced to come out and say that labour laws are applicable and also there is a recent GO that speaks about paying overtime to the IT professionals if they work extra. So, though it is being implemented or not, this I would say at a regressive period when the governments are moving or shying away, the Labour Department coming out and giving out such a statement has been a consequence of the struggle or the battles that the IT professionals are waging it up. And people, there is still an apprehension among the IT professionals that what would happen if IT professionals come out and protest. I said to you, there are close to 2,500 cases. All of them have been moved back into the industry and people have been fighting cases in the high courts or also back in the industry. Now people started realising that right to association, right to organisation is their fundamental right and that is why there is a sense of realisation among the IT professionals also. And the resistances range from dealing the cases at the Labour Department to making protest, street level protest and multiple levels of activism which people are coming out in a very big way. And finally, what has been the response to the state and national governments on this issue? Have they taken it up seriously at all because the numbers you are talking about are in the tens of thousands and this happens almost every two years. So has there been any policy level intervention by any of the governments? You see, the governments I would rather say that they have been irresponsible, particularly the central government. The IT minister himself has come out and said that the Labour commissioners need to behave well. What does he expect the Labour commissioner to do? He is bound by the statute and he will have to implement the statutes. When the people are coming for justice. But behave well, he means in a pro-cropped manner. Exactly, when he says behave well, he was speaking them to not to be oversensitive and respond to the IT professionals' demands. And the Labour commissioner's office is bound by the law and the central government is unhappy and there have been many derogatory remarks against the IT professionals also. To an extent that in IIS officers, the principal secretaries of IT departments are coming out and saying that certain non-performers have been removed. So our principal demand has been when an IIS officer at the level of the principal secretary or the top level bureaucracy in the state who is supposed to take care of these labour laws, implementation of them comes out and says that people are being removed as non-performers. It means he does not understand the law of the land and henceforth it will be sacked because they are there to protect the statutes and when they violate, it is in subordination. The government of India and the state governments should consider them a sumo to in subordination and tactic action on them. On the contrary, I would basically want to bring to your notice and also to the audience that the labour laws that have been as a consequence of the Indian freedom struggle have given a lot of sections which are favourable to the working people based on which we have been having significant amount of successes whereas I would say that where companies have come forward to fire 300 people in Hyderabad, they have gone back and certain companies which were absolutely stubborn took back the employees. Certain companies have come forward and paid compensation. So the rate of success has been differential but they are having significant successes as a consequence of the existing labour laws which I feel that they are weak not completely in the interest of the working people but now the labour amendment bills that are coming out in the parliament, that have been tabled in the parliament are just going to be disastrous. Just in the definitions itself they have removed a lot of people, a lot of grades in the definitions itself which bars all the IT professionals or significant number of the working professionals away from the ambit of the applicability of the labour law and I think that is a serious cause of concern and the central government's action is very nasty and against the interest of any working professional not just IT industry, be it pharma industry or be it any of the new generation industries along with the conventional industries and this is going to be very hazardous among the state governments there is a difference I would say there is Tamil Nadu relatively progressive Kerala very progressive Telangana they would say via media they are in between so there is a difference in the way the state governments are responding but the central government is absolutely in a way that it is going to hit hard on any of the working people Thank you so much Kiran. Thank you very much. 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