The government has taken its stand on moonlighting in the Parliament and said that employees shall not take any work against the employer’s interest in addition to their job as per the legal framework.
“As per the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act 1946, a workman shall not at any time (type of) work against the interest of the industrial establishment in which he is employed and shall not take any employment in addition to his job in the establishment, which may adversely affect the interest of his employer,” Minister of State for Labour & Employment Rameshwar Teli said in a written reply to Lok Sabha.
“Employment and retrenchment including lay-offs are a regular phenomenon in industrial establishments. No specific information is available to indicate that layoffs are happening due to moonlighting,” Rameshwar Teli further said.
Minister of State for Labour & Employment Rameshwar Teli said this in response to BJP MP Sumalatha Ambareesh’s query on whether the government considers moonlighting to be a good reason for a company to sack employees.
Companies had made various policies on Moonlighting. In September, Wipro laid off 300 employees who were found working with its competitor companies at the same time as employment with Wipro.
Most recently, while announcing Q2FY23 results CEO Salil Parekh said that Infosys is looking at developing comprehensive policies to support employees to take up external gig opportunities. “For gig opportunities in the external environment, we support the aspirations of our employees to learn beyond work.”
“We will support them to work on certain gig projects after the prior approval of the managers. We are also developing more comprehensive policies for that while also ensuring contractual and confidentiality commitments are fully respected. However, to be clear, we do not support dual employment.” He added.
Parikh further said,” Infosys’s internal platform called ‘Accelerate’ has anyway been enabling employees to take up internal projects and gig for several years now. “We’ve always encouraged our employees to have that mindset within the company,” he said, adding that about 4,000 employees apply for it in an average quarter, while 600 get selected.”
Earlier, Infosys said that moonlighting is not permitted according to the employees’ code of conduct of the company and described it with the taglines ‘No two-timing, no moonlighting’ and ‘No double lives.
However, there have been a few companies such as Swiggy and Tech Mahindra that have come out in the favour of moonlighting.
