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Saturday, 30 March 2024

HR News: 29 Mar, 2024

 1.

WFH for IT employees to solve Bengaluru’s water crisis?

Working from home can be one way of reducing the population in the city temporarily and lifting the pressure on its resources. Bengaluru may have to allow employees to work from home because it is facing a major water crisis. The city is home to about 15 lakh employees working for the information technology (IT) sector alone. If these employees are allowed to work from home, even temporarily, the pressure on the city’s resources will be reduced to a significant extent. Therefore, IT-sector staff and experts are of the view that work-from-home arrangements for a year will go a long way in helping tackle the crisis. They have been requesting the Government of Karnataka to give serious thought to the issue, as it will help conserve water. This suggestion is worth considering, for Bengaluru houses some of the biggest IT companies, including Infosys, Wipro, TCS, Accenture, Cisco, Mindtree, IBM, Oracle, Capgemini and Cognizant. A good percentage of the employees working in these firms come from outside Bengaluru. Many belong to tier-2 and tier-3 cities as well. It is pertinent to mention here that with the IT sector growing in leaps and bounds, the population of Bengaluru has also grown tremendously. While its population was about 25 lakhs about five decades ago, the figure has now cross one crore. The increasing density of population has naturally put a lot of pressure on its sources of water. While it requires at least 2,600 million litres daily, the city is falling short of almost 500 million litres of water a day.

 

2.

Stellantis turns mandatory WFH day into termination day

400 employees were let go from the auto company’s engineering, tech and software divisions. When employees at Stellantis were told to work from home/remotely on 22 March so that maximum participation could be ensured for important meetings to be held that day, little did they realise how significant the day would be. The said “meetings” were for announcing their termination from service! At least 400 employees from the engineering, technology and software divisions were laid off when they joined the remote call. The notice that sought mandatory remote work resulted in employees being terminated enmass when they joined the call. As per some media reports, Stellantis plans to outsource work to countries where labour would be less expensive, such as Mexico, Brazil and even India. Like many other global firms focusing on profitability, the Italian-American automotive manufacturing company, associated with brands such as Jeep and Chrysler, also seems to be looking towards developing countries for better efficiency at lower costs.

 

3.

Ericsson to axe 1,200 jobs amidst falling demand


The layoffs will help the company that manufactures 5G networking equipment to cut costs. Ericsson AB, the manufacturer of 5G networking equipment, is all set to axe about 1,200 jobs in Sweden. Why? Because it is not receiving enough orders and is adopting cost-cutting measures, for which it needs to streamline operations and processes. Additionally, it expects demand to fall further outside China this year, and is not expecting significant investment levels either from operators. With return on investment being adversely affected amidst the high competition in Europe, mobile carriers are also cutting down expenditure on networks. To add to the woes, there is the availability of open radio access networks technology, which allows carriers to conveniently use several vendors, leading to stiff competition in the network components space.

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