A spectre is
haunting India’s IT industry, the spectre of moonlighting. Wipro, one of the
biggest employers in India’s information technology ecosystem, has decided to
terminate 300 employees after it found that the workers had engaged in ‘moonlighting’.
Rishad Premji, son of philanthropist Azim Premji and chairman of Wipro, said
there is no place for moonlighting at Wipro.

Moonlighting:
Meaning

Moonlighting, the expression,
can be traced back to at least the 1800s. The verb used to mean “commit crimes
at night” taken from the word “moonlighter”, a reference to organised bands of
robbers who stole from agrarian lands at night. By the mid-20th
century, moonlighting came to be used to mean taking a second job, beyond one’s
regular employment, usually at night.

Moonlighting gained
in popularity in India’s IT economy during the coronavirus pandemic. With
millions of India’s IT workers working from home, many took up second jobs to
earn a few extra bucks. However, Indian IT companies have not taken it well.
While Wipro took the drastic step to fire 300 employees, another IT major,
Infosys, has also made its opposition to moonlighting clear.

Ethics of
moonlighting

A majority of
Indian IT companies has been unable to ride the tide on moonlighting. One of
the major issues they have come across is that many a time, employees start
working for rival firms, which companies believe is a breach of trust.

It was NG Subramaniam,
chief operating officer (COO) of another Indian IT major – TCS (Tata
Consultancy Services), who first articulated moonlighting as an ethical issue. “Moonlighting
is an ethical issue, we need to inculcate the ethics and (idea of) being right
if we make something like this for short-term gains, in the long term, we will
lose out.”

“If you look at it
as a war, it is a war. Business is all about operating within constraints. The
talent war happened because of two important reasons from my perspective because
during the pandemic 90% of the enterprises did not hire,” Subramaniam said,
adding that TCS had continued hiring amid the pandemic.

Meanwhile,
Mohandas Pai, former Infosys director and a veteran in the technology industry,
has said moonlighting is not cheating. “Many gig worker platforms have come up.
Tech work has been broken up in bits where people can spend 2-3 hours and give
it. Technology has enabled the gig worker.”

Stating that
moonlighting has become a fact of life, Pai said: “If I want some money, I’ll
work on a Saturday: they cannot stop me from doing that.”

Moonlighting:
Legality

While the ethics
of moonlighting is variously contested, there is no overarching law which bars
a person from doing multiple jobs. However, some jobs come with a
confidentiality clause and many companies use this clause to stop workers from
working multiple jobs. There are restrictions to double employment according to
the Factories Act. However, these curbs do not apply to IT companies in some
states.