The Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES) has approached the Labour Ministry concerning the layoff of Indian employees at amazon.
“The law of the land is above Amazon policies,” Harpreet Singh Saluja, President, NITES said in a mail.
“As per the provisions of the Industrial Disputes Act the employer cannot, without prior permission from the appropriate government, lay off any employee,” complains said.
.@NITESenate approaches @LabourMinistry concerning layoff of Indian employees at @amazon.
— Abhishek Kumar Sahu (@Abhishek44sahu) November 19, 2022
“As per the provisions of Industrial Disputes Act the employer cannot, without prior permission from the appropriate government, lay-off any employee,” complains @_harpreetsaluja.
As per the reports, the company has given the impacted employees a deadline until November 30 to decide whether they want to resign voluntarily. This has impacted the Livelihood of thousands of employees.
NITES has said in a tweet, “If you’re neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
If you’re neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.#JusticeforEmployees #Amazon #layoffs #informationtechnology #ITEmployees #StrongerTogether #UnitedWeWin #StandAsOne #NITES pic.twitter.com/KjgnXwa1f9
— Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (@NITESenate) November 20, 2022
In the letter, NITES said, “It has received complaints from Amazon employees that they are being forced to quit the company voluntarily. The big tech firm also sent a detailed Voluntary Separation Program (VSP) to its employees.”
“The livelihood of hundreds of employees and their families is now vulnerable”, NITES noted.
NITES further said, “Essentially, a lay-off is a condition where the employers are constrained to deny work to their workforce owing to conditions that bring forth a temporary inability to keep their business going which is clearly not a scenario in Amazon’s case.”
Amazon started the layoff process of employees due to cost-cutting measures. The company sent emails to the employees requesting the termination of their services without providing any prior notice to them.
Amazon planned to eliminate 10,000 jobs across all departments. The company has recently started downsizing its headcount globally.
In India, the company has about 7% of Amazon’s total headcount of over 1.5 Mn. This layoff will affect nearly three percent of Amazon’s corporate employees and less than one percent of its global workforce.
The company already froze hiring in September. In October, the company stopped hiring for more than 10,000 open roles in its core retail business.
Earlier, Amazon also stopped corporate hiring. The company from April- September reduced its headcount by almost 80,000 people.
