Dual employment by their employees, referred as moonlighting by the employers, seems have become a serious concern in IT industry. Of the late many IT companies started talking openly about their employees cheating the company by taking up multiple jobs. There’s very interesting debate going on this topic details as follows.
Background:
This is the new trend that emerged because of the special conditions prevailed post COVID pandemic. It is known thing that most of the IT employees are working from home since March’2020 i.e. after the breaking out of covid pandemic. Initially there were lot of hiccups with this model of working from home but slowly companies and employees got accustomed to this model.
New concept of dual employment:
However, some employees started taking advantage of this situation by accepting offers from multiple companies and working for both the companies simultaneously. By doing so, they started earning two salaries from two different companies every month. Needless to say that, achieving such a monthly pay through single company would have taken them years . Usually, the workload in IT companies is so much that one will struggle to achieve the targets in a single job. Then how come these employees doing multiple jobs cope up with workload that is almost double?.
That is because most of the youngsters are ready to take such a huge pressure for the sake of monetary benefits. Most of them are actually putting their physical and mental health at risk by taking up multiple jobs. Moreover, they all know that this is an opportunity that is short lived and they will not be able to do multiple jobs once companies start asking employees to return to office. They also know that these opportunities cease to exist once current boom in IT industry slows down. So some IT employees are taking full advantage of this situation and earning from multiple jobs.
Some of the employees have become even more greedy, have started taking up more than 2 jobs and are getting the work done through proxies, who are junior engineers or unemployed. And, a very small percentage of these people are doing multiple jobs located at abroad locations and thereby earning multiple salaries in foreign currencies.
Companies see this as cheating and a real big problem:
IT companies see this behaviour of their employees as a serious problem for two reasons. Firstly, no matter how effectively am employee handles these multiple jobs, there is always a dip in the productivity of the person doing multiple jobs in both the jobs. Secondly, most of the companies are now complaining about data leakage to their rival companies by their employees who are also working for the rival companies.
Rishad Premji, chairman of Wipro, tweeted, “There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating – plain and simple.”
There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating – plain and simple.
— Rishad Premji (@RishadPremji) August 20, 2022
Many other companies also thinking of returning to work from office model to solve this issue. However, such companies are failing to find human resources to run their projects as the prospective employees insist on work from home opportunity.
Employees reaction:
However, netizens reacted to Premji comments negatively. They commented that these chairman and CEOs take up multiple roles within the same company and earn huge while paying paltry to the employees who do the actual work. Some others reminded how ruthless IT companies would be in case of the recession and justified their actions of making hay while Sun shines.
Conclusion:
Most of the western countries do not have restrictions on their residents taking up multiple jobs. In fact the governments earn more tax if a person is earning more money. So there is no restriction from the governments of western countries. However, most of the companies have their employees sign the legal agreement that will have clauses prohibiting them from taking up other jobs that are not of freelance nature. Because of signing those agreements, employees are bound by those agreements and so employees need to realise that what they are doing is wrong. However they are free to choose jobs that do not have such clauses in future. At the same time complicates need to realise that this is a transition period and they cannot solve the issue through whipping or punishing the employees and they need to find some innovative solution that fits the changed circumstances.
– ZURAN
