Even as the debate over ‘moonlighting’ continues, Infosys, India’s second-largest IT services company said that it is not in favour of dual employment by its staff.
Infosys on Thursday said it has fired employees who were into moonlighting over the last 12 months.
Don’t support dual employment
Infosys CEO Salil Parekh said during the Q2 earnings briefing on Thursday that the company does not support dual employment.
“We don’t support dual employment… if we found… in the past, employee doing blatant work in two specific companies where there is a confidentiality issue, we have let go of them in the last 12 months,” Parekh said.
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Take approval for gig opportunities
Parekh, however, said where gig opportunities in the external environment is concerned, Infosys supports the aspirations of employees to learn beyond their work but after prior approval of the manager has been obtained.
“We will support them to work on certain gig projects after the prior approval of the managers. We are also developing more comprehensive policies for that, while ensuring contractual and confidentiality commitments are fully respected. However to be clear, we do not support dual employment,” he said.
What is moonlighting
Moonlighting refers to people who are already employed with one company taking up jobs outside their work, for additional income, usually without the employer’s knowledge. The term “side job” refers to a job that is often done after hours or on the weekends.
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This practice had caught up globally, especially in the tech and services industry in the past couple of years, when working from home was the norm.
People started taking up gig work to compensate for the loss of income they had suffered due to salary cuts and restructuring by their employees, citing the COVID-induced financial crisis.
Wipro fires employees for moonlighting
Last month, Wipro Chairman Rishad Premji revealed that some 300 employees were fired as the IT services company had no place for any employee who chose to work directly with rivals while being on Wipro payrolls.
Premji had taken to Twitter to highlight the issue saying: “There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating – plain and simple.”
No moonlighting in HCL
Recently HCL Technologies too had weighed into the issue of moonlighting and said it does not approve of dual employment, although it hastened to add that the issue is not a major one within the company.
Dual employment while working for HCL Tech…we do not approve of that. Everybody who signs up to work for HCL Tech is signing up employment contract which requires exclusivity. The requirements around confidentiality, and non compete… all those provisions that are there we expect our employees to honour those commitments,” Ramachandran Sundararajan, Chief People Officer of the company said during the Q2 earnings briefing.
