Wipro sacks 300 employees for moonlighting with rival firm

BENGALURU: Leading IT company Wipro has terminated 300 employees found to be moonlighting with one of its key rivals at the same time, its Chairman Rishad Premji said in Wednesday.

Speaking at the All India Management Association (AIMA) National Management Convention, Premji termed moonlighting is a complete violation of integrity "in its deepest form".

"The reality is that there are people today working for Wipro and working directly for one of our competitors and we have actually discovered 300 people in the last few months who are doing exactly that," the Wipro Chairman said.

The company has now terminated their employment for "act of integrity violation".

Premji recently said that the concept of a second job in addition to the regular job is "plain and simple" cheating.

"There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating -- plain and simple," he had tweeted.

Amid the brouhaha over moonlighting in India, cloud major IBM last week made it clear that the practice is not ethical and the company does not promote such behaviour at workplace.

IBM India Managing Director, Sandip Patel, said that the company's position is exactly that of the overall industry in the country.

"All of our workers when they are employed, they sign an agreement which says that they are going to be working full-time for IBM. So moonlighting is not ethically right for them to get into," he said.

Moonlighting allows employees to work outside their primary working hours.

Some startups and unicorns like Swiggy have encouraged the practice, while most of the traditional companies are calling it cheating.