Chennai: As part of cost-reduction efforts globally, the IT major Cognizant has recently announced plans to slash 7,000 jobs in the next few months.
Besides the US-based company, which has around two lakh employees in India, would partially exit from content operations business and the move would impact another 6,000 jobs.
Since India accounts for the biggest share of the company's staff, the impact of these layoffs is expected to be significant.
Responding to ETV Bharat general secretary IT and ITES employees Alagunambi Welkin said, "The act of retrenchment for profit maximization by the company is illegal in many countries. We request employees to retaliate and form as union."
The optimisation of cost structure is expected to result in total charges of approximately $150-200 million, primarily related to severance and facility exit costs.
The move is expected to result in an annualised gross savings run rate of approximately $500-550 million in 2021, the company said.
Welkin went on to add, "The money spending on retrenchment should be put in use to reskill employees who they feel are not competed in to work in particular department.”
“In the current context where the economic synchronized slowdown happening through out the world, which pronounced by the IMF, this retrenchment may cause drastic effect in the families of those employees as well as the economy."
Welkin urged the employees, "Unite and demand the government to intervene in this issue and take appropriate policy to prevent this mass retrenchment and stop this illegal activity.”
Further, Cognizant is also likely to remove about 10,000-12,000 mid-to-senior level associates worldwide from their current roles in the coming quarters. This would include a net reduction of about 5,000-7,000 roles (about 2 per cent of its total headcount) and re-skilling and redeployment of about 5,000 of the total associates impacted.
Another 6,000 roles will be impacted by Cognizant's decision to exit a subset of its content operations business.
