IT Major Cognizant Sacks One Of Its Employee Who Was Also A Trade Union Activist On Performance Grounds

Citing performance grounds, IT major Cognizant Technologies yesterday terminated the services of its employee Elavarasan Raja, who is also the general secretary of Forum of IT Employees (FITE), a registered trade union in Tamil Nadu and Maharashtra.

Business Standard quoted a Cognizant spokersperson as saying “Cognizant recently terminated this employee, who had been with the company for about five months, for performance reasons and based on client feedback. Our decision is consistent with the terms of our contracts with all of our employees,”

Elavarasan is said to have 8 years of IT experience, and joined Cognizant since last 5 months. According to the company, Elavarasan was provided with 17 opportunities in the last 5 months, but he couldn’t fit into any role.

Various trade union bodies including FITE and NDLF (New Democratic Labour Front) have strongly condemned Elavarasan’s termination and claimed that it was an illegal action. They accused the company of sacking Elavarasan for helpeing a fellow employees and raised concerns against management.

FITE said that Elavarasan has been terminated from Cognizant because of his association with the employee union.

FITE said that it will handover the complaint to the labour authorities today on the alleged “illegal” termination of Elavarasan.

Expressing solidarity with Raja, NDLF in a statement said “ Chief Minister of Tamilnadu last week in conference meeting requested IT companies to stop terminating employees. We see within a week, CTS is terminating general secretary of FITE and it is very clear that their intention is to create panic among fellow Cognizant employees and to terminate more and more employees. They foresee Elavarasan as an obstacle for their illegal action and terminated them backdoor without following any labour laws on single day. “

Last month, Cognizant announced that it will remove 10,000-12,000 mid-to-senior level associates worldwide in coming quarters in an attempt to optimise cost structure and fund its investment plans and growth agenda.

Under the “2020 Fit for Growth”plan, the company hopes to streamline costs and regain its position as the bellweather of the industry. The plan is expected to be cost the company anywhere between $150 million and $200 million, primarily related to severance and exit costs. The plan also involves investment in technology, sales and marketing, reskilling, acquisitions, and strategic partnerships to sharpen strategic positioning in key digital areas.

Cognizant’s current workforce strength is 2.88 lakh global workforce with over 75 per cent of them are located in India.

The company also said that net workforce reduction will be approximately 5,000 to 7,000 roles (about 2 pet cent of the company’s total population), as it plans to rapidly re-skill and redeploy approximately 5,000 of the total associates impacted.

Cognizant also announced that it had decided to get out of content operations business within its Digital Operations practice as it was not in alignment with the company’s long-term strategic vision. Cognizant will be exiting this area over the course of 2020, he said. The decision to exit content business is likely to affect another 6000 employees.