On Tuesday, a group of Byju’s employees met V Sivankutty, Kerala labour minister alleging that the edtech giant was forcing more than 170 staffers to resign.
Byju’s is looking forward to discontinuing its operations and will be closing its office in Thiruvananthapuram (Kerala). However, the affected are been provided relocation opportunities in Bengaluru by the company.
A spokesperson for Byju’s said, “We are also offering the entire Trivandrum team an opportunity to relocate to Bengaluru. We have provided them more than a month’s time to decide on this matter.”
“If they choose to not use this opportunity, we have made available a generous and progressive exit package to all employees impacted by the restructuring, including extended health insurance benefits, outplacement services, and garden leave”, the spokesperson added.
The spokesperson further said, “This package even includes an assured opportunity to be re-hired by Byju’s within the next 12 months at any operational center across India.”
Employees’ Demands
- The employees are demanding payment of the salary for October on November 1.
- A one-time settlement of salary for the upcoming three months, from November 2022 to January 31, 2023.
- Leave encashment of all earned leaves.
- The full settlement of variable pay (as applicable to each employee).
Recently, Byju also laid off nearly 5 percent of the workforce, or 2,500 employees of its 50,000 employees. However, BYJU’s also claimed to have plans to hire about 10,000 more teachers in the coming year. This will be an addition to its current strength of 20,000 teachers.
“This (the new plan) will help us enhance efficiency, and avoid redundancy. So there will be rationalisation of roles as well. Our hybrid teaching model which is the tuition centre and our online teaching model which is Byju’s Classes or our learning app is scaling very well. Especially for our first two products, we plan to hire 10,000 teachers. Our revenues will be on track as per what we are doing,” Gokulnath said.
In June, WhiteHat Jr and Toppr combined laid off about 500 employees. Earlier this year, edtech unicorn Unacademy laid off more than 1,000 employees.
