Wipro laid off staff who worked simultaneously with other IT companies. (Representative image)
New Delhi:
How did Wipro, which recently fired 300 of its employees for working with other IT companies at the same time, learn of this work-from-home infidelity? The company didn’t explain this – only calling these “black workers” “cheaters” – but one Twitter user’s theory is now going viral.
These IT pros “in their work-from-home avatar” joined other companies that were also in WFH mode, tweeted stock market investor Rajiv Mehta, who has more than 20,000 followers and mostly posts advice on stock trading.
“Same skill, double delivery,” he wrote of the moonlighter, “Two different laptops, same WiFi, catering to two different customers – all from the comfort of his own home, in his own city. native.”
300 #Wipro employees made redundant because they were taking advantage of working from home and working in parallel with another company.
How #Digital#India precisely found the culprits is amazing. Please read the article below. Fantastic system in place in India.
— Rajiv Mehta (@rajivmehta19) October 10, 2022
“It was impossible to catch them. So who caught them? he wrote.
And then he answered his own question, saying: “The most innocent, unassuming, always in the background – the contribution to the provident fund.”
PF is a government pension corpus scheme where companies deduct part of it from the employee’s salary, and must add a contribution to it.
“The PF contribution must be filed regularly (by the company) and breaching it is a serious offence,” Mehta noted.
This is where digital document linking comes in, he said. “Like all Aadhaar, PAN numbers are taken by banks to open a salary account, the same are used to deposit PFs… The systems are so well integrated with the backend that it was nearly impossible for these workers at the black to create two identities both financially and demographically,” according to Mehta.
He claimed the duplication was detected as PF authorities ran a “daily deduplication algorithm to check if anyone had accidentally paid double”. “They discovered that there are accounts of individuals where the contributors are multiple.”
PF authorities have not confirmed this.
But Mr Mehta said “the whole Bhanumati ka kunaba broke down” after this duplication “was reported to the companies”.
Although he hasn’t shared how he arrived at this theory and whether he has any proof, the tweet that started the thread received over 10,000 responses within an hour of being posted just after noon. October 10.
Mr Mehta paid tribute to the Digital India government’s initiative – and the interconnected infrastructure – to “work at the local level to root out corruption”.
Wipro boss Rishad Premji said last month he was getting “hate mail” about the layoffs. But, he insisted, playing in a band on weekends is different from secretly working for rivals. “Cheating, plain and simple,” is how he described it. Other tech majors like IBM and Infosys have also said moonlighting is “an unethical practice”.
The viral Twitter feed today gave another spark to the wider debate.
A user by the name of Abhishek More described moonlighting as “300 employees working twice as hard…trying to earn extra income to better support their families.”
He criticized Mr. Mehta as “a privileged man playing golf and giving one of the most useless leads on digital India!” Mr Mehta’s profile picture shows him playing golf.
Moonlighting should be legal. It is not a question of integrity. If you honestly give your 8 hours, what you do next is up to you.
— soormavihari (@soormavihari) October 10, 2022
But another user named Vicky sought to bring some balance: “Most employment contracts clearly state that employees cannot moonlight. It’s not only unethical, but also very risky for the ‘company.”
“A completely different business or something unrelated to the current job is acceptable in my opinion,” he added.
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