With the passage of time new terminology comes into play. What was earlier called your own business, is now termed a Startup. Startup means the initial stage of a company. When one or more entrepreneurs start a company or project realizing the demand for a product or service, it is called a startup. One such startup with a billion-dollar value is called a Unicorn. Moonlighting is another new word being talked about in the corporate world these days. Its literal meaning is the light of the moon, but its actual meaning is also something similar. Moonlighting is the practice of working for an external paid project while being full-time on the rolls of a company. Most companies have stringent rules that prohibit employees from taking up external work, except with mutual agreement. However, new age companies like Swiggy and Cred have no problem with such a behavior of their workers.

However, moonlighting can be existing anywhere, but the issue is more prevalent in IT companies. The problem came into the limelight when Wipro recently fired 300 of its full-time employees just because they were found indulging in the practice of moonlighting. Not only this, Wipro Executive Chairman Rishad Premji alleged that those Wipro employees were working part-time for the main rival companies, which is a morally unfair practice. During the Covid pandemic period, when business was at a standstill and people were being fired from jobs, many of them had to work in two or more places to earn their livelihood. It was a time for work from home (WFH) and people had enough privacy to work for anyone anytime. From there the practice of moonlighting started, which is now emerging as a big problem in the industry.

In the old times also, one had to search for a side income or a part-time job to increase the household income and it was not taken seriously. Now it’s just given a fancy name – Moonlighting. Since it is a time to show off, they started calling a side income job moonlighting, which looks like a very glamorous thing. There is a debate going on in the corporate world regarding moonlighting whether it is a wrong trend or the right step to pursue a moonlighting job. While Wipro’s Rishad Premji considers it a ‘criminal act’, Mohandas Pai, former Infosys director, feels what is not wrong if someone takes up some other work in his or her spare time to increase income. He asked – “If I want extra income, I will work on Saturday. They can’t stop me from doing this.”

Rishad Premji said in an event of All India Management Association (AIMA) in New Delhi recently that employees can have a transparent dialogue with the company for their second or weekend work, but working secretly for our rival companies cannot be tolerated. In one of his tweets, he called Moonlighting outright fraud with the parent company. He wrote in the tweet – Moonlighting is cheating – plain and simple. Earlier, Infosys had sent a warning email to its employees that those found indulging in moonlighting would be severely punished and could even be fired. N Ganapathy Subramaniam, COO of Tata Group’s largest software services company, TCS, has opined that moonlighting can cause huge losses to IT companies in the long term. That is why this practice is ethically wrong.

IT companies are currently facing a double challenge. One is the lack of qualified staff, the other is problems like moonlighting and Quiet Quitting. Quiet Quit means secretly looking for another job in the market while working somewhere as a full-time employee. Also, doing only as little work as is necessary to keep the job going. Such employees do not work enough in the office and get detached from work or the company after the duty hours are over. As soon as they get a new opportunity, quietly leave their main job and vanish. IT companies hired over 1.20 lakh employees from April 2020 to September 2022, according to IT market intelligence firm UnearthInsight. Apart from this, people doing freelance work were also given full-time jobs. In the second half of 2020-21, these companies hired 70,000 gig workers for full-time jobs. Similarly, 30,000 freelancers were given full-time jobs in the first half of 2021-22.

The hired freelance workers were mostly assigned the responsibility of testing, application development, maintenance, support, cloud, and microservices. In Indian IT companies, gig workers are paid only 50 percent as compared to full-time employees. They are also paid very less on average per hour because India does not have a fully evolved gig ecosystem like in western countries. Moonlighting is also rising because the gig ecosystem cannot be considered a substitute for full-time work. An UnearthInsight official estimates that some of the people who were earlier gig workers may now be involved in moonlighting.

Due to the increasing use of digital technology, the demand for IT professionals is increasing in the Indian markets. Employment opportunities are being created in the technology, healthcare, e-commerce, and manufacturing sectors. The job opportunities in the field of Information Technology are much more than one can imagine. The way experienced and qualified professionals are in demand in the IT sector, qualified candidates are not much in supply. Since the desired candidates are not available in sufficient numbers, IT companies intend to increase the salaries of the existing staff to retain their qualified employees. Companies do not want to lose their existing employees. For example, HCL Technologies made a plan to give a stake to its 3000 senior workers in the company as part of the strategy to retain the talent.

The author is a senior journalist and columnist. Views are personal

Twitter @NarvijayYadav