Human Resource Community

At a time when other edtech firms are significantly cutting back on staff, Physics Wallah, the unicorn edtech company, is hiring. Over the following two months, the company plans to add around 2,500 more employees to its workforce. It seeks faculty members, teachers, consultants, business analysts, data analysts, operations managers, and batch managers. In accordance with its growth plans and objectives, the company is apparently hiring for a variety of roles and responsibilities. The company is looking for individuals who share PW’s vision of offering “affordable and quality education for all” and who can be a student’s lifelong learning partner. In an effort to broaden its upskilling offerings, the Company recently acquired iNeuron, an edtech company with a focus on artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, in a deal worth Rs 250 crore. With a workforce of 6,500 employees, including more than 2000 teachers and subject experts, PW dodged downsizing like many other edtech companies. To strengthen its supply chain operations, the edtech platform has partnered with Unicommerce to deliver study materials. PW, which caters students of class 6 to 12, also provides materials for students hoping to take competitive exams like the NEET and JEE. Thousands of students throughout India rely on its content and study materials.

Employees in Vasant Vihar in Delhi and the Air India Colony in Mumbai who haven’t moved out of the home provided by the company have started having pay deducted from their salaries. The employees said that their December salaries had been significantly reduced, anywhere from 15,000 to 90,000 rupees. Last Friday marked the airline’s one-year of being privatised, but many of its employees who live in the airline’s staff quarters in Mumbai and Delhi had to accept severe pay cuts and hefty rising rents. Due to this, deductions have been made from the salaries of the employees who haven’t left their flats as of August 2022 and will keep happening until they do. They will also be required to pay a 10 lakh rupee additional penalty on top of the standard deductions. A letter informing Air India personnel living in the Air India Colonies in Kalina in Mumbai and Vasant Vihar in Delhi that a fine of 15 lakh and 10 lakh rupees, respectively, will be withdrawn from their pay and other benefits was sent, according to ANI. The employees of Air India claim that although the government gave the Tatas control of Air India, the colony was left out of the agreement. Due to higher establishment and living costs in Mumbai, which is regarded as the nation’s financial capital, employees there will see larger pay reductions than those in Delhi. In a letter written to Air India last year, the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MoCA) stated that individuals who don’t leave their accommodations will have to pay double the market rate for rent each month in addition to the fine. In a letter dated September 29, 2021, it was stated that anyone found residing in company accommodation without permission from August 1, 2022 until the date of vacating the housing would be subject to a penalty fee equal to the sum of normal occupancy charges and double the market rent. The penal rent will be deducted from the employee’s income and other due payments.

Wipro notified 452 freshers that they had to leave the company since they performed poorly on the internal evaluation. Despite the training they had received, it appeared that these freshers did poorly on the organization’s internal test. According to Business Today, the impacted employees received a termination letter informing them that the company had decided to waive off the cost of their training even though they actually owed them Rs. 75,000. For some new hires who were finally onboarded after months of waiting after getting the offer letter, the termination came as a huge shock. Wipro, however, says that these fired freshers were let go because they failed the test, which consists of evaluations that determine whether the person will be able to match with the goals of the company. The Company apparently makes an effort to mentor and train them, but if they don’t still improve, they are terminated. In the last several weeks, layoffs in the tech sector have been making headlines. Most organisations throughout the world are turning to team downsizing as a result of firms realising they have excess staff on hand and an anticipated recession.

According to reports cited by the UK broadcaster Sky News, Microsoft Corp. is considering eliminating 11,000 jobs, or around 5% of its total workforce. According to a report by Bloomberg, the company intends to reduce the number of engineering divisions through new rounds of layoffs. Microsoft now joins other tech giant in announcing layoffs in response to a weakening market and a failing economy. Microsoft reportedly let go of less than 1,000 workers across many divisions earlier in October. Less than 1% of the more than 200,000 employees of the software company were affected by these cuts. The company had said in July that a modest number of positions had been cut and that it would eventually hire more people. As of June 30, the company employed 221,000 full-time employees, including 122,000 in the US and 99,000 abroad, according to filings. After several quarters of a slowdown in the personal computer market impacted Windows and device sales, the company, according to Reuters, is under pressure to sustain growth rates at its cloud unit Azure. On January 24, Microsoft is expected to announce its quarterly results. For thousands of tech workers, the start of the new year has a dismal tone due to worldwide layoffs. More than 30,000 individuals had lost their employment globally in less than a week in 2023. By the way, this is almost twice as many workers as were fired throughout the entire month of December 2022. According to data from Layoffs Tracker, 30 organisations have fired 30,611 individuals in total over the first six days of January. In addition to Amazon, the list also includes many other companies, such as cryptocurrency exchange Huobi, tech giant Salesforce, and video hosting platform Vimeo. This statistic includes a sizable fraction of the over 18,000 positions that Amazon.com Inc. decided to eliminate as part of a workforce reduction. The 11,000 layoffs announced by Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc., last year have now been surpassed by the Jeff Bezos-owned company.

According to reports, Elon Musk owned, Twitter is looking to close its coworking spaces in Delhi and Mumbai after doing so in Bengaluru. Reports citing sources state that the office closing procedure began in December of last year. There are about 80 workers in The Executive Centre in Delhi’s Qutub district and about 150 at the WeWork facility in Mumbai’s BKC. The sources claim that the company has left coworking facilities in Bengaluru as well, indicating that this was the result of company-wide reforms. The remaining employees of Twitter in Singapore were advised to stop coming to work and work remotely earlier this week after Musk, who failed to pay the rent for the San Francisco headquarters, reportedly failed to pay the rent. The decision to let Twitter staff leave the CapitaGreen building and work from home was reportedly communicated to them via email. “Twitter employees were just walked out of its Singapore office – its Asia-Pacific headquarters – over nonpayment of rent”. “Landlords walked employees out of the building,” Casey Newton of Platformer wrote in a tweet on Thursday. Due to its failure to pay the $136,250 rent for its San Francisco office premises, Twitter has been sued in the US.

The ex-employees who left Twitter in November 2022 received severance agreements on January 8, 2023. Twitter cut over half of its 7,500 employees in the beginning of November 2022. Elon Musk, the new CEO, said that all departing employees received three months of severance pay, which is 50% more than what is needed by law. However, the ex-employees claim that they were only given their final two months’ pay through January 4th (the formal date of their termination), and that they were forced to wait to get a post-termination severance payout. Despite Musk’s assurance that they would receive an extra month of pay as severance, the employees contend that given what Twitter had already agreed to pay prior to Musk’s takeover, they are actually owed more. Bonuses, stock vesting, and other benefits that might reach tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars for each employee were also meant to be included in the severance package. The severance agreements that Twitter is offering are actually “settlement agreements,” according to Lisa Bloom, a principal attorney at The Bloom Firm in Los Angeles who is currently representing former Twitter employees. These agreements “SILENCE WORKERS FOR LIFE” and require them to give up significant legal rights.

Allegations have been made against Air India for allegedly not responding to a situation when a man on one of their planes allegedly urinated on a woman. According to a report in the Economic Times, as a result, the company would have to delay the implementation of their new human resources policy. According to reports, the airline’s acquisition deal with the government, signed in January 2022, prohibits it for a year from changing its “terms of employment.” The new human resources policy’s implementation has been delayed as a result, and it can now only go into effect after March 2023. According to the report, union resistance prevented the agreement from going into effect on January 1 as originally anticipated. Since the Tata group does not have a hiring-firing culture, a senior official from the company told the Economic Times, Air India has implemented indirect recognition programmes to reward customer-focused behaviour and accountability. The CEO added that the company is committed to putting the Tata Code of Conduct into practise by doing away with biases and prejudices within the workplace and encouraging staff to base decisions on facts and statistics rather than rumours and conjecture. According to reports, the airline’s management has finished drafting a new service agreement with major performance metrics and objectives. It was mentioned that increased accountability would make the move more efficient. In response to the recent drunk man incident, aviation regulatory body, the DGCA, has given the airline instructions to keep track of any passengers who have displayed disruptive behaviour and to add them to a “No-Fly-List.” The regulator further demanded that the airline notify their internal committee about the incident, which will have 30 days to decide how long the unruly passenger will be prohibited from flying, with options ranging from no days to a permanent ban.

Amazon is reportedly preparing to layoff 1,000 employees in India as part of organizational-wide role eliminations, CEO Andy Jassy announced in a statement on January 5, 2023. Given that Amazon employs 100,000 people in India, the 1,000 jobs that would be lost would account for 1% of all employment there. Jassy claims that the company disclosed its “painful choice” to eliminate many positions across its Devices and Books businesses in November. For a chosen number of PXT organisation employees, it also made a voluntary reduction offer. He also revealed the choice to eliminate 18,000 employees in 2023. Many teams will be impacted, but the PXT and Amazon Stores groups will see the majority of the roles terminated, he continued. The Amazon CEO continued by stating that although in theory the company would delay such statements until after speaking with anybody who might be impacted, the announcement had already been made as a result of an inside leak. He said the company would begin getting in touch with the impacted employees on January 18. “Normally, we hold off on discussing these results until we can get in touch with the people who will be directly impacted. But since one of our team members released this information to the outside world, we felt it would be preferable to break the news early so you could hear the specifics from me. Beginning on January 18, we plan to speak with affected workers (or, as appropriate in Europe, employee representation bodies),” said Jassy. Amazon has reported 18,000 job cuts, which are the company’s largest to date and more than other tech giants have disclosed, but the company still employs 1.5 million people worldwide, significantly more than any other internet company. Jassy says that Amazon has endured difficult and turbulent economies in the past and will do so in the future.

As the rollout of the high-speed service unleashes a “compounding impact” on recruiting for both non-niche skills and technical skills, NLB Services predicts that the 5G rollout will increase hiring in the telecom sector in 2023. The need for specialised telecom technology skills increased by approximately 20% in 2022 when compared to 2021, according to a statement from the global staffing and recruiting firm. It predicted that future recruiting demands will not be limited to the telecom industry alone. In order to expand up their service capabilities for 5G, NLB Services predicted that industries like healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and automotive would also look to hire tech talent. Among the most important job profiles in non-telecom sectors are data scientists and cybersecurity specialists. According to NLB Services, “In the last year, there has been a 15-20 per cent rise in demand for technology talent in the telecom and allied sectors, and the trend is expected to create a new record 25-30 per cent in the coming year.” Some of the most sought-after job roles at the moment earning roughly 10% to 12% better pay packages, according to the report, include cybersecurity, cloud computing, data science, and data analytics. It referred to 2022 as a “momentous year” for the Indian telecom industry as the 5G concept started to take shape and “green shoots in the job market.” “Leading telecom players have already rolled out 5G services in over 50 towns across India and are expected to cover most parts of the country in the next two years. This clearly indicates a compounding impact on hiring as well both for non-niche skills and technical skills,” it pointed out. NLB Services is a provider of transformative workforce solutions that was established in 2007.

The American multinational automotive and clean energy company Tesla is believed to have directed employees not to discuss salary and working conditions, and has thus been accused in violation of US labour laws. The maker of electric vehicles is accused of ordering its staff members not to bring complaints about their salary or other working conditions to the attention of senior managers. The staff are also requested not to talk about their salaries with others. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has been notified of the complaint.  These incidents allegedly occurred between December 2021 and January 2022, according to the complaint. Additionally, it is said that Tesla has instructed its staff to keep hiring, suspending, and firing decisions confidential. The firing of two US-based Telsa employees who complained to the NLRB that they were wrongfully terminated for criticising Musk shows that the company does not appreciate criticism of Musk. According to other reports, two female employees of Twitter filed a class-action lawsuit against the company accusing it of breaching federal and state of California laws that forbid gender discrimination at work. 57% of female employees have been let go by Musk, compared to 47% of male employees. Other grievances against Twitter have also been filed with the NLRB.