Counter and Counter Attacks by Indian Tech Workers to Regain Lost Ground Despite Setbacks and Struggles!
Karma Management Global Consulting Solutions Pvt. Ltd. with recent cross overs to countries like Canada, US, UK, UAE, and South East Asia, has become a globe-trotting organization since April 2021, offering a plethora of services like payroll, temp staffing, recruitment and talent acquisition, HR services including employment contracts and regulatory compliance obligations including global regulatory health checks.
Despite the pandemic challenges and other initial hiccups amidst its foreign venture by setting global footprints, it has done very well for itself with expectations beyond imagination, as it now has numerous global clients on board, spinning out services with the help of experts and fully automated technology.
Meeting the legal obligations and countries labour policies across global regulatory environments and keeping up to date with changes, all this has become synonymous with Karma Global’s main stable of growth, expansion and timely deliverables for high tech business performance.
Karma has a well governed system of assessing emerging regulatory trends, tracking the regulatory changes relevant to specific industries, markets and countries, developing advocacy strategies and defining process improvements that facilitate conformity and minimize risk exposure.
It has over hundreds of elite clients on its excellent service dispensing list. The expert staff on its roll, deal with over thousands of regulatory compliance acts on pan India basis, some of the acts being state specific while others are enacted by the Central Government in India while in foreign countries, all the relevant regulatory acts are followed with diligence and within the framework.
Karma Global has always believed in keeping with the spirit and intent of the law intact as all its members in the global team are passionate about what they do and how they provide accurate results to the global clients which also keeps on ensuring that information and analysis are reviewed constantly by its experts grasping the subject matter for the purpose for which it is intended to and especially the latest trends happening across the countries on the labour front.
Mass Layoffs and Its Impact On Indian Workers, Karma Takes a Peek into The Global Layoff Scenario……
Layoffs across the tech industry, including at firms like Twitter, Meta and Amazon, have affected a significant number of Indians working in the US who are on visas like the H-1B.
Meta Platforms Inc.
On 9 November, Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, announced it would cut 13% of its workforce – the first mass lay-offs in the firm’s history which resulted in 11,000 employees losing their jobs.
Worldwide, more than 120,000 tech workers have lost jobs as a result of cutbacks by US tech companies, according to the Layoffs fyi website, which tracks tech job cuts.
While companies have not released India-specific numbers, San Jose-based immigration attorney Sweta Khandelwal says “it’s hurt the Indian community particularly hard.”
As warned by several experts and economists, winter seems set to be harsh on employees of tech companies, online businesses and marketplaces. Fearing an economic recession, most tech companies, who hired innumerable employees at insane salaries only a few months ago, are now laying them off faster.
Twitter Inc.
Even as layoffs in the tech sector had begun, Elon Musk ratcheted up the tempo by firing nearly 50% of the Twitter workforce soon after he acquired the company. Twitter’s 7,600-strong workforce is halved and several departments across the globe have been shut down completely, including in India.
Mr Musk has now slashed the food bill by asking employees of a company, that famously offered wine on tap, to get their own eats. This, and a series of layoffs that followed, is bringing home the harsh reality of the global economic situation for those who were hitherto the most privileged group of employees in the world and who had been unaffected even by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Meta, Twitter, Salesforce, Lyft, Stripe, Uber and tech giants like Microsoft and Google have laid off employees amid global macroeconomic conditions and recession fears. Some of them have also put a total freeze on new hiring’s.
Amazon to Lay Off 10,000 Employees – Amazon plans to lay off around 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs starting as soon as this week, a report from New York Times (NYT) says, quoting people with knowledge of the matter. This would be the most extensive job cut in the company’s history.
Seagate Technology Holdings Plc
The memory chip firm announced a restructuring plan including reducing worldwide headcount by about 8%, or 3,000 employees.
Microsoft Corp
The software giant laid off under 1,000 employees across several divisions this week, sources said.
How Indians are affected by Singapore’s widespread tech layoffs
According to data from the Singapore Ministry of Manpower for 2021, around 20,000 of the 100,000 holders of work permits are from India. The loftiest of good foreign professionals who are permitted to work in the nation are those who retain employment passes and must make at least S$1,000 (USD$7000) each month.
There’s doubt that numerous of these are impacted by the layoffs at Meta as well as other tech-related redundancies. In response to slow consumer spending, rising interest rates, and affectation, technology businesses throughout the world, including in Singapore, a significant tech centre where numerous of the big titans have their indigenous services, are halting recruiting or reducing.
The parent company of Shape and Gardena, publishers of games like League of Legends and Free Fire, and Sea Limited, a Singapore-based gaming and e-commerce hustler, made two rounds of cuts and abandoned job offers in June and September. According to the company’s most recent periodic report, Sea had 300 workers as of the end of 2021, more than doubling the number from the time before.
After posting a net loss of USD 931 million in the previous quarter due to rising borrowing costs and a slowing global frugality, the company reduced its overseas footprint and supplemental businesses in order to increase profitability by strengthening its position in its critical requests and core products.
Although the pot kept the number of job layoffs a secret, it’s believed that hundreds of people may lose their jobs at its locales worldwide, including those in Singapore. According to Jessica Huang Pouleur, a mate at adventure capital company Open space, “Last time, a lot of what passed was a lot of cheap backing in the request that swamped the request, which) allowed enterprises to develop nearly at any cost.” “In fact, people were hired quickly enough.
After posting a net loss of USD 931 million in the previous quarter due to rising borrowing costs and a slowing global frugality, the company reduced its overseas footprint and supplemental businesses in order to increase profitability by strengthening its position in its critical requests and core products.
You just throw people at your problem because you have one. I suspect we’ll see more of it in the coming months.” Stash Away, a Singapore-based digital wealth director, lay off 31 employees, or 14 percent of its pool, and Crypto.com, a currency exchange, lay off 260 employees, or 5 percent of its Singapore pool, are two Southeast Asian companies that reduced their workforces in the middle of the recession.
In Malaysia and in Indonesia …………….
In the meanwhile, the Malaysian online retailer iPrice lay off 250 people, or 25 of its pool, and the Indonesian education technology establishment Zenius laid off more than 200 staff. Twitter and the launch of digital payment services Stripe and Airbnb were two businesses that cut staff in their Singapore operations in November. Stripe announced on November 3 that it would cut 4,000 global jobs, or 14 people, from its workforce. After the layoffs, Stripe will employ around 3,000 people. Many jobs in Singapore were affected.
The recent decline in share prices of major tech companies is referred to as an overdue correction by some. While short-term volatility and goods on profit and employment in the tech sector are projected, long-term growth is anticipated for the sector. According to a recent study by consultancy and recruiting expert Mercer, the demand for digital moxie and positions in Asia continues to outpace supply.
At the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Trusted Internet and Community, Dr. Pang serves as the director of exploration. “During the last two years of the epidemic, widespread abandonment of technology at work and at home drove significant growth for assiduity,” she continued, “but the post-pandemic period has emphasized the need to acclimate and correct. “Given the recent layoffs, I’d say that technology is going through a significant period of adaptation.
Since thousands of tech people lost their jobs at Big Tech firms, the majority of them are finding it difficult to find new work, as practically every top firm has a hiring freeze due to global recession fears and macroeconomic conditions.
Stories of workers facing painful exit, especially INDIANS
California-based journalist Savita Patel speaks to workers who are facing the prospect of being forced to return to India if they don’t find another job.
Surbhi Gupta, an Indian engineer working in the US since 2009, was surprised that she was laid off by Meta this month. “I was performing well at work,” she says.
Now she is among thousands of educated and skilled immigrant workers fired by US tech companies this month.
Most of them work in the US because of the HI-B visa. It’s a non-immigrant visa that allows firms to employ foreigners for up to six years in positions for which they have been unable to find American employees.
It also allows holders to apply for permanent residency in the US and buy property in the country.
Ms Gupta says she worked very hard to build a life in the US for “over 15 years”.
Her visa now hinges on finding her next job.
Indian-origin Nilesh Bhandare, 39, worked for Twitter as a data engineer. He said to the San Francisco Chronicle that he has noticed a dramatic shift in market job availability
The report stated that while several recruiters have approached him, only approximately 20% are interested in full-time opportunities.
The rest are looking for contract workers, who may be sacked more easily. The previous time Bhandare went job hunting, the situation was very different.
Bhandare, putting his opinion forward, said that no one wants to commit to full-time work right now because businesses are unsure about the economic situation.
In the midst of inflation pressures and economic worries, tens of thousands of recently laid-off workers are experiencing a stressful period.
According to the report by the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco’s tech sector has been experiencing months of job losses
According to job-search website ZipRecruiter, there were 41,718 tech job openings in the San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont metro area in January.
However, by November 1, there were 27,919 fewer jobs, a third fewer than before. Also, jobs in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area decreased by a third, from 28,421 tech job postings on January 1 to 18,748 on November 1
Even those who were hired after being laid off in earlier waves of layoffs seems to have a pessimistic outlook on the market.
A number of persons with Indian origin are left helpless because time is running out on their work permits.
In another case, IIT-Kharagpur alumnus Himanshu V, who had previously worked at Adobe, GitHub, and Flipkart, was fired by Meta.
Himanshu, in his LinkedIn post, wrote that he moved to Canada to work for Meta, but two days after he started, he was affected by the company’s major layoffs, which put an end to his journey in Meta.
Raju Kadam, who spent nine months working at Meta, claimed that he had good performance in all quarters since joining the social network and that he had not expected being laid off.
Kadam, posting pictures of his sons Yash and Arjun on LinkedIn, said that it had ended abruptly. He further asked for help to find a job because if he doesn’t, he will have to take his kids and leave the country. He added that he would do everything in his power to offer his sons the best chance to be successful in the United States.
So he urgently needed a new work in the USA. He claimed to have lived in the US for 16 years and to have experienced the greatest economic downturns, yet he never lost his job.
The Main Story – Indian Tech Workers Fighting Spirit Gains Dominance ……………Amidst Layoff Notice?
Over the past few months, the tech industry has witnessed the biggest workforce layoffs in history, thrashing the IT Industry and snatching jobs from many employees.
The wave of massive layoffs flinched as many tech giants and digital start-ups announced and mass layoffs because of global headwinds and funding shortages.
As a result, thousands of young Indians are suddenly staring at an uncertain future. Tens of thousands of IT employees and aspirants are experiencing anxiety due to inflationary pressures and recessionary worries but many of them aren’t going to stay quiet about it.
Particularly in the tech sector, Indian employees at private businesses have had a difficult few months. Byju’s and Unacademy, two tech firms have made numerous layoffs; Twitter has laid off more than half of its employees in India; Facebook the parent company of Twitter has laid off about 13% of its 87,000 strong workforce.
The most recent round of layoffs has sparked outrage on social media and many of those affected, are turning to the web to vent their angst and form support networks, much like their counterparts in other countries.
They are tweeting about abrupt terminations, posting job request on LinkedIn and using messaging apps like WhatsApp and Slack to rally their colleagues, defend their rights and inform journalists.
This is partly because the culture of shame and silence that has historically accompanied terminations in India is crumbling as mass layoffs are becoming more common.
Today’s layoff and downsizing have become accepted business practices and so terminations are no longer a taboo topic.
Although millions of Indian employees are still members of the union, the movement has been losing strength for years. Their membership and power have been weakened by a number of causes, such as expansion of the private sector workforce, recent labour changes and an increase in contract work.
Angry ex Twitter employees have used social media to express themselves. In order to express their grievances and defend their rights, many employees are looking for alternate ways.
Workers at US multinationals like Apple, Starbucks, Amazon have formed unions in recent years and observers predict that calls for unionization will grow louder and extend to more industries.
Conclusion
It is time for the government to step forward and control the employment sector with strict employment standards and laws, especially with layoffs on the rise and the rising inflation causing a hole in a consumer’s pocket.
Governments should endeavour to develop the market’s infrastructure for jobs in addition to implementing programmes for employment fairness.
The job market’s future is uncertain and unclear as a result of the increasing tech industry layoffs
Effect on India and the future of employees
Experts say companies that are firing their employees are loss-making and are unable to raise funds due to global economic conditions and hence these laying offs have become eventuality.
Once the funding picks up, these companies will again resort to hiring spree, the experts further added.
Experts also opined that employees must look for more sustainable companies in the short term till the global economic scenario improves. It is the normal business cycle and hiring will kick in again.
The tech industry always goes through “periods of major adjustments and corrections”, such as the “dotcom bubble” in the mid-1990s to early 2000s, said Dr Natalie Pang to Channel News Asia.
“Widespread adoption of tech at work and at home drove significant growth for the industry during the last two years of the pandemic, but the post-pandemic era has highlighted the need to adjust and correct,” she added.
Proprietary blog of Karma Global
This blog has been collated and compiled from various sources, by the internal staff of Karma Global with the knowledge and expertise that they possess, for its monthly newsletter Issue 06 of December 2022 and in case of specific or general information or compliance updates for that matter, kindly reach out to the
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