A stand to protect the rights of IT employees: The rights against exploitation

Are you an IT Employee,working day and night but still have the fear to lose the job? Then read this article to take a different standpoint on employee exploitation.

The IT and ITES sector is the most promising sector towards the development of India and the great contributor to the GDP of India. According to the study of NASSCOM the contribution of the IT sector to India’s GDP stood at 7.7 percent in 2016 and the domestic revenue of the IT industry is estimated at US$ 38 billion with export revenue of US$ 117 billion in FY17.

Approximately 4.6 millions of employees are working as direct IT employees and 14.5 millions of employees are working as indirect employees in this sector. But now a day’s everywhere the question arise, how many employees of this profitable sector, the key heroes and the real contributors, are benefited and considered for their work towards the development of the country? The real contributors are always in a dogmatic condition due to the insecurity and instability in IT jobs. As we know the stability in IT sector is a missing factor. So it put the employees into the consequent or following sub actions like being exploited by boss, working day and night in stress, poor family relationship and low health condition.

An IT employee works 13 to 14 hrs per day. And they work in a very stressful environment for short term deadline with high deliverable quality. This is the reason they work day and night compromising their health and family.

And moreover in the project cycle the pressure is equal from high paid employee to low paid employee. In some cases it is reciprocal where the high paid boss put all his work in head of low paid workers. But in the year end when the appraisal comes, it does not reflect in these low paid employees salary. However the increment is not even considerable to market price and the real effort of these employees. Instead of getting a good market value these employees are harassed in appraisal meeting that their works are not up to satisfactory.

It has also been seen that as these employees future has kept in the clutch of manager, at the end, the manager or boss will take their value but lower and middle level employees are kept in queue for next year. That if they work good in next year then the company may think. So due to repeated fake promise of seniors, increase market price demands these employees couldn’t able to meet the family and social responsibility. For this again they switch to another company for being a victim of exploitation by another Company HR Policy and another boss.

But it is very sad to say that despite of so much effort, these IT employees are not appraised in a single forum for their contribution and hard work. Rather they are always in cover page when recession in the IT market ends up in cutting of job of these employees over the night. And in next morning in newspaper and the company fired job list, when these employees see their name, it simply makes them and their family helpless, speechless and stubborn. Because they are named as poor performers who are not upgraded themselves in better technologies and fired from the company.

But here the question arises, if they are really poor performers, why job cut happened only at the time of recession, but not before that? Rather if we do the depth research, it will be clearly noticed, whenever the IT market become down, the layoff procedure will be in a start. But not a single organization asks for these employee’s right.

In every sector whether public or private there are 3 categories of employees. One is best performer, one is middle performer and last one is poor performer. The way to handle the poor performers in IT sector is pathetic where as the poor performer also exists in public sectors but handled in a different way.

In all forums, all over the world, , everyone knows very clearly,” that IT employees work very hard under strong company HR Policies”. The Company HR Policies basically meant, to give more profit to company where employees concerns are least. It’s simply to make out greater profit for company, with more effective utilization of employees, “with fewer benefits towards employee”. It’s quite indifferent to public policy on which our Government runs. If we compare the different policies of public sector and the IT sectors for ex. leave policy, Salary policies, retrenchment policies, tax policies, pension policies, medical benefits, maternal benefits, and children benefits then we will get a huge difference in between this two sector of employees.

It will not be wrong to say, that every policies of IT employees are compromised for the welfare of the organization, whereas public sector employees’ fundamental labour rights has always been protected.

More over IT employees are not able to stick to one company for the whole job period, due to the fluctuation in the market, up gradation in the technologies, instability in job and increased market price demand which is unable to fill up by the employer due to lack of strong IT standard Pay commission .

Also read: "The agony of Private employee due to lack of uniform employee policy."

So now the time has come to look the issues of IT employees in a very serious manner where the contributors are highly educated youth of our nation. These youth have shown their high end contribution by sacrificing their health and family. They worked in a most stressful condition to give our country a proud IT Developed Country. And they are the highest tax payer and the backer in the high GDP of our country. Therefore, If their future is not properly secured and stabilized, with a backup up of strong "IT Labour Law",to empower the IT employees and to protect the IT employee’s fundamental human rights i.e. “rights against exploitation”, then the dream of India to become super power will be far realized.