Last week, India’s second-largest IT services company Infosys announced its fourth-quarter results ending on March 31, for the financial year 2022.
The company has reported that it has hired 85,000 freshers both off-campus and on-campus in the financial year 2022 and the total headcount stood at 3,14,015 from 2,92,067 within the December 2021 quarter.
Bengaluru-based, IT major has announced that its attrition rate reaches 27.7% in the March quarter, up from 25.5% in the December quarter. It shows Over 80,000 employees have resigned from the company between January- March 2022 quarters.
Facing record levels of attrition, recently, Infosys is reportedly invoking the non-compete clause in the employment agreements to curb attrition.
According to this non-compete clause, the company is banning its employees from joining Tata Consultancy Services, IBM, Cognizant, Wipro, and Accenture within 6 months of quitting the organization in case they have the same clients.
And the ban also includes nine companies Tech Mahindra, Genpact, WNS, TCS, Accenture, IBM, Cognizant, Wipro, and HCL for business processing management (BPM) employees.
The non-compete clause also bans employees to work for the same customers with whom they had worked at the company for the last 12 months.
The matter came to light after a Pune-based IT union, The Nascent Information Technology Employees Senate (NITES), has written to the Union Labour Ministry seeking the removal of the clause, calling it “arbitrary, unethical and illegal”.
The complaint has been registered, NITES said, “Non-compete clauses are not valid in India as per Section 27 of the Indian Contract Act, which states that any agreement that restrains anyone from practicing a lawful profession, trade or business is to that extent void.”
However, in response to the non-compete clause, Infosys said, “It is a “standard business practice” for employment contracts to include “controls of reasonable scope and duration to protect the confidentiality of information, customer connection and other legitimate business interests”
“These terms are fully disclosed to all job aspirants before they decide to join Infosys, and do not have the effect of preventing employees from joining other organisations for career growth and aspirations.” IT clarified in a company statement.
Commenting on this, Shewali Tiwari said, “In an era where organizations like Meesho and Zerodha are going fully remote, and many others are spending more time, value, and effort on employee benefit programs, a move like this will only contribute to more attrition.”
