This refers to Shyamal Majumdar's column "Keep unions out of IT" (Human Factor, January 16). Employee unions, formal or informal, are also created when employers fail to provide an upward communication system for addressing the employee's grievances, concerns and anxieties for a quick redressal, along with a lack of downward communication mechanism for sharing important information with them.
A poor communication system engenders detrimental rumour-mongering. If the rumour spreads fast, is believed to be true and not repudiated in time, it is further proof of an ineffective internal communication apparatus. Tata Consultancy Services may be right in its policy of getting rid of dead wood, but it failed to communicate to its people of the need for making it a ritual for three successive years.
No doubt, employees in the information technology sector are paid well and have good working conditions, but this is in exchange for long hours of work, stressful work and work-life imbalance. The result is that the workplace has become a sophisticated oppressive sweatshop, leading to early burnouts. The so-called bond with the employees fluctuates with changes in profits and commercial aspirations of the management. In such a scenario, political trade unions would only fish in troubled waters.
Y G Chouksey Pune
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