Cognizant Lays Off Employees Across '6 Indian Cities' - Report!

As a big shock to IT professionals, IT major - Cognizant is laying off employees across a number of its locations in India. The exact number of employees who are being laid off is not clear, but IT employee unions allege that it is at least several hundreds. 

Meanwhile, Vinod AJ, general secretary of the All India Forum for IT Employees (AIFITE), claimed that Cognizant employees across Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Kochi and Kolkata are being affected with this new move. In a communication to the labour department, FITE said that some 18,000 employees are on the bench and many of them could be affected.

As per a Economic Times report, Suraj Nidiyanga, secretary of the Karnataka State IT/ITES Employees Union (KITU), said they have got 20 complaints from Cognizant employees in Bengaluru and 20 more in Tamil Nadu. 

“Cognizant is indulging in large-scale retrenchment of people on its benches,” Nidiyanga said. Cognizant has more than 2.9 lakh employees globally, of which about 70 percent are in India.  

As per Economic Times, when contacted a Cognizant spokesperson, he said that “recent third party allegations regarding a specific number of job actions are inaccurate, not based on facts, and were not announced by Cognizant. Cognizant continues to hire at all levels in India and globally. Likewise, the company continues to invest heavily in upskilling and reskilling its employees at scale in newer digital technologies, including cloud, analytics, digital engineering and IoT, where the company is seeing above industry-average growth."

Meanwhile, Times of India (ToI) spoke to several employees, who had been given a MS (meets some expectation) rating. They said an unusually high number of employees received the MS rating this year - which means employees who get this rating are put on a performance improvement plan (PIP) for up to 45 days. 

“My weekly performance review was satisfactory, but at the end of my review, my performance was dubbed as unsatisfactory,” said an affected employee after which the employees were asked to leave.