Whichever way the market swings, the employee base gets affected the most. So who would bear the ultimate outcome of sub-prime mortgage and currency fluctuations? Of course, the employees! That means, in the coming months we are going to witness the effects of these two business concerns on the labor community.

Not surprisingly, the IT sector has already done the honor of bumping the losses on techies. The most recent one being IBM India’s decision to fire a big number of trainee programmers in an innovative way. 

“…entry-level trainee programmers, who were essentially freshers, were asked to go based on their performance in aptitude tests that were recently conducted in undisclosed IBM India locations. It is learnt that action on the ELTP front in major IBM locations was an ultra hush-hush exercise about which many senior IBM managers were in the dark. … Though IBM is silent on the actual number of ELTPs dismissed, the total is likely to be in excess of 700 across company locations nationally, including 180-odd in Kolkata alone,” as reported by The Economic Times’s.

In another recent incident, TCS decided to cut variables by 19.5 percent err …1.5 percent also seems as if the company has set an undisclosed target for it to reduce the company’s headcount. This is more of an indirect way, rather than innovative way, of removing employees   

“In an internal note sent to employees, TCS said that the company had not met its the third quarter internal economic value-added (EVA) target and as such it plans to make up for the losses with a cut in the variable pay given to employees,” reports Rediff.com … “The slowdown in the United States, the subprime crisis and the rising rupee are gradually taking a toll on the performance of Indian IT companies and employees are bearing the brunt of it.”

This is evident from both the cases that if the market is down, no matter what, employees will have to bear it all. Sometimes immediately, and sometimes after a year. �