Anand Mahindra apologises for sacking of IT employee

Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra came out to apologise on Twitter on Friday for the brazen firing of a Tech Mahindra employee by a company HR representative, an audio clip of which had gone viral.

“I want to add my personal apology. Our core value is to preserve the dignity of the individual & we’ll ensure this does not happen in future,” Anand Mahindra said, commenting on a tweet from Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani.

Gurnani was tweeting an apology of his own on the incident, with a copy of an official statement from Tech Mahindra Vice-chairman Vineet Nayyar on the matter.

“I deeply regret the way the HR rep & employee discussion was done. We have taken the right steps to ensure it doesn’t repeat in the future,” Gurnani tweeted.

In the official statement, Nayyar indicated that depending on the company’s ‘strategic priorities’ and ‘requirements of the clients’, such decisions are often taken but insisted that going forward it will be done “in a manner that befits our Rise philosophy and our Group’s core values.”

In the audio recording that created a storm on social media, a female HR executive can be heard telling an employee to resign by 10 am the next day, failing which he would be terminated and not even be given any pending dues.

While there was no mention of Tech Mahindra in the recording, the HR executive’s profile on LinkedIn showed she was working with the company. However, soon after the story broke out, the LinkedIn profile was taken down.

Tech Mahindra’s statement thus confirms that the incident was indeed related to the company.

Similar stories were narrated to BusinessLine by former Tech Mahindra staffers in a report detailing the sorry state of employees who are asked to leave irrespective of their good performance.

Sources told BusinessLine that Tech Mahindra is expected to lose 7,000-8,000 employees in one of the biggest layoffs in the company’s history. The company had 117,095 employees till the end of December.

The Forum for IT Employees (FITE), which is fighting for the rights of IT employees, claims nearly 60,000 employees in the information technology sector have lost their jobs in the last two years.

About 85 such employees who lost their jobs have filed cases against companies such as Tech Mahindra, Cognizant, Wipro, Vodafone and Syntel, with Labor Departments in Pune, Bengaluru and Noida.

While the tech companies are also under increasing pressure from clients to move to automation, which requires less employees, the way in which companies often handle the situation highlights the dark side of the industry, which was once seen as the sunshine sector.

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