Moonlighting: Wipro fires 300 employees for ‘working for competitors’
“Employees can have a transparent dialogue with the organisation about their second or weekend work, but we discovered 300 employees who were working for direct competitors. There is no place for them,” Wipro chairman Rishad Premji said
After disapproving the practice of moonlighting, Wipro has become the first Indian IT major in recent times to have fired 300 employees who were found to be working for competitors at the same time.
“Employees can have a transparent dialogue with the organisation about their second or weekend work, but we discovered 300 employees who were working for direct competitors. There is no place for them,” Wipro chairman Rishad Premji said Wednesday at a conference organised by the All India Management Association . “It is an act of integrity violation in its deepest form,” he added.
Premji has been a vocal critic of moonlighting and had earlier made it clear that the company had no place for such employees. On Wednesday, he said that though he has received a huge amount of hate mail since calling it (moonlighting) cheating, he stands by what he said. Moonlighting refers to pursuing more than one job at a time and remote working (work from home), which became a norm during Covid days and is still prevalent at several workplaces.
It became a big talking point when recently, Premji equated the practice to cheating in a tweet. “There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating — plain and simple,” he had said. Later, other IT firms also commented on the issue with most supporting Premji’s views.
The only exception was Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani, who in a tweet, stated that moonlighting is necessary to keep changing with the times.
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