Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation has laid off several employees working on its bench who were not actively handling client projects, reported IT employee unions. The State IT employee union in Karnataka and Chennai have said that the Nasdaq-listed IT company has supposedly laid off 18,000 bench employees from different parts of India. However, the number has not been verified.
The Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU) has raised voice against this decision taken by Cognizant and has "strongly condemned" it.
In its official statement, KITU said, "The reports on large scale layoffs are coming from 'Cognizant' in the name of 'effectively managing workforce utilisation'. Thousands of employees all over India are going to be the victims of this. Several victimised employees approached KITU, and the Union has initiated a legal battle against the Cognizant management for this illegal action."
Another IT employees' union based in Chennai, known as The New Democratic Labour Front (NDLF) has also condemned this alleged layoff and said that the company has been forcefully benching its employees and then making them resign against their will after 41 days.
After these accusations were placed, a spokesperson from the company said that all layoffs have been based on employee performance. "Performance management is a normal process across all companies in the IT industry, including Cognizant," the spokesperson said.
He further added, "While Cognizant does not comment on rumour and speculation in the marketplace, we would like to clarify that recent third-party allegations regarding a specific number of job actions are not accurate, not based on facts, and were not announced by Cognizant."
In any IT service company, a small per cent of employees are always benched to execute projects on an urgent basis. Employees on the bench are often considered as 'non-billable' resources and their cost is not billed by clients. Cognizant comes after Tata Consultancy Services Ltd (TCS) in India's IT firm market and has an employee base of 2 lakh staff across India.
Officials from Cognizant also stated, "The company continues to invest heavily in upskilling and reskilling its employees at scale in newer digital technologies, including cloud, analytics, digital engineering and internet of things (IoT), where the company is seeing above industry-average growth."
