Freedom to slash jobs & economic prosperity

Multi-national companies (MNCs) are passionate about their human resources, but equally ruthless when it comes to sacking employees. In India, pink slips were not rare but India Inc barely subjected their employees to the clinical 'slaughtering', once termed an MNC culture. But now, things have changed. Indian companies too have painstakingly built the corporate culture of retrenching staff in their backyards.

Sacking employees is brutal and inhuman. But when companies face the whirlwind of an economic recession, stare at a loss of contracts and revenue streams, suffer from an ever-increasing labour cost, and worse, carry a huge debt on its shoulders, they routinely turn to the layoff option.

A 6-minute audio clip, uploaded on Sound Cloud by an Indian IT employee who got fired recently, is a testimony of a chilling trial. The employee at the receiving end is as distraught as the next animal to be slaughtered in the abattoir. The HR manager blows hot and cold, cites clauses in job contract that the employee had signed at the time of joining, and threatens him with dire consequences if he doesn't resign in 24 hours flat. Nobody is bothered to check the legal validity of such contracts. The criminal intimidation goes unchecked. It is like a neat murder.

Several big companies that are in the throes of bad debts today have all let their employees suffer. Some are taken to the HR abattoir, many others leave such organisations voluntarily. Employees who are in their forties and above are meekly surrendering to the cruel fate of a forced sabbatical or even an early retirement. Rarely, we try out the shoes of Colonel Sanders and step out to build a multi-billion empire called Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) that he built after 65.

A few years ago, when a retail giant in India sacked thousands of its employees, it claimed that the exercise was part of an annual ritual of weeding out non-performers and that they let go only some non-performers. The company, part of a listed conglomerate, didn't bother to inform any statutory authority as it was not binding on them.

India has a tangled web of stringent labour laws, but is lax in their implementation. It is a fact that in India labour health and welfare remain low priorities, minimum wage guidelines are routinely flouted, and social security, woefully inadequate. So replicating the West is simply foolish.

Hire-and-fire is already a convenient HR tool for the corporate world in India, though the government is yet to overhaul labour laws and make it legally binding. Companies go on a furious hiring spree in times of expansion and just fire people if their experiments go horribly wrong or they are swept off by the global headwinds. Unfortunately, this barely smears the image of the company.

So if a foolish move by a company to enter uncharted waters backfires, can it be allowed to sack its recently-hired employees? Should companies be given an unfettered right to retrench staff without notice and compensation? It's crazy to assume that such freedom given to companies will help India become a manufacturing hub and lead us to economic prosperity.

If the government finds it tough to create new jobs, it should at least try and save existing jobs by all means.