According to Karthik Shekhar, former general secretary of Unites Professionals, a now-defunct union of IT workers, about 50,000 techies were benched or pink-slipped during the meltdown of 2008.
Two months after the Lehman bust and just two weeks before his wedding, in November 2008, Rahul Bhargava lost his job. The IT professional, based in Bangalore, couldn't get himself to tell his family, or his wife, because of the stigma of suddenly finding himself unemployed, and went ahead with the wedding anyway.
Every morning, he would leave home, but spend the day at a friend's office. For two months, Bhargava kept up this charade. Then, in January, he got a job after accepting a considerable pay cut, and told his wife and family what had happened. Bhargava was lucky to land another job so quickly.
According to Karthik Shekhar, former general secretary of Unites Professionals, a now-defunct union of IT workers, about 50,000 techies were benched or pink-slipped during the meltdown of 2008 and most were without work for years. Many of them—crippled by fast-depleting savings and mortgages on cars and homes—settled for whatever offers came their way, while some turned entrepreneurs, with varying degrees of success. "It was a time of intense fear and insecurity," says Shekhar. "IT professionals were scared, not only of losing their jobs, but also of losing a certain kind of lifestyle they had adopted during the preceding years of bullishness. They suddenly found themselves about to lose it all."
Shekhar says the axing in 2008 was brutal. "Some staff was given a few hours to clear out their things and leave. Employees also began to dread the weekly Friday meetings, where senior managers would walk into the room and literally hand out pink slips, just the way their counterparts did in the US."
Employees, says Shekhar, were often let go with a month or two in salary, and it was difficult to challenge the decision as the companies had individual contracts with each employee—the terms being different for each person, and usually kept under wraps. "There was no unity among the sacked IT workers," says Shekhar. "They could not, as an aggrieved group, fight for their rights."
Some techies, like S Raju and 10 or 12 colleagues, did challenge their sacking. But they were confused about the legal route.
They started by approaching the local cops seeking payment of arrears. They then took the case to the labour court, where it dragged on for some years, till both sides got fed up and allowed the case to fizzle out.
Unites tried to reason with some companies to not sack en masse, but slash salaries or move employees into skilling programmes.
"But only one organisation tried this out," he says. Shekhar, however, sees Lehman as just a catalyst— a pin-prick that burst the IT bubble that would've deflated anyway. "The process got sped up because of Lehman," he adds
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