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On June 27, 2009, UNITES Professionals, a union representing IT and ITeS employees and its members were featured on the cover of Business Outlook India, a million copy in circulation magazine covering the country’s economy, business and personal finance. UNITES members from Wipro and other software companies have given their experiences of lay-off and current life difficulties. This eight page bold article, written by the magazine’s Assistant Editor, Mr.T.V.Mahalingam has made efforts to cover all aspects surrounding the industry’s lay-offs as the recession deepens further.



In this edition, the cover story, "Chronicles of the rise and fall of the Indian Software Engineer" covers real life stories of software professionals affected by the economic downturn. The IT/BPO industry, once the backbone of the city of Bangalore, is now facing a crisis of its own as thousands of its employees are increasingly being laid off. Most of these home grown IT /BPO companies mushroomed as MNCs outsourced these work to the IT capital of India.



Today, IT companies are sending out dismissals in unprecedented numbers as their businesses are severely affected by the slowdown of economic activities globally. However, many of the companies are not admitting to this fact but instead are shunning away from their responsibility by giving out poor performance appraisals in a bid to send employees packing. Employees who were appraised as high achievers a few months back suddenly found themselves forced out of jobs when they were found to be “not meeting their targets”.

Karthik Shekhar and Prithvi Lekkad,

founders of UNITES, union for IT employees

Not to mention the negative mark on employees’ CV if they have been found to be fired by their companies and hence many opted for ‘resignation’ instead. As such, many companies claim that they are not laying off workers but that workers simply left voluntarily.



UNITES expects that a lot of eyebrows will be raised from the IT companies, which are using unfair methods to remove their employees and to protect its corporate image. This story will surely boost UNITES efforts to create awareness about the union among the IT/BPO employees and instil confidence in the working population that there is a union trying to safeguard them.

To read the full cover story as well as this edition of Business Outlook India, click on:

http://www.unitespro.org/files/docs/2009/UNITES%20Outlook%20Business.pdf

http://business.outlookindia.com/outlook/27062009/home.aspx

http://business.outlookindia.com/

UNITES represent workers in the IT/ ITeS and BPO industries. To read more about UNITES, visit their website at http://www.unitespro.org/