Moonlighting: Doing Double Duty Could Be A Case Of Profit With Peril

Robin Hood and William Tell would have understood the concept. As would have Arjuna and Ekalavya. Having a second string to your bow is always a good idea. If one string breaks, you have a ‘stepney’ that ensures you can still send your arrows flying.

Concert violinists recognise the same reality. In fact, their bows have multiple strings. We can recall the greatest of them, from Yehudi Menuhin to L Shankar, gamely playing on, even as a string or two snapped.

Young professionals in India, particularly those in the technology sectors, have intuitively imbibed the lessons about a second string during the last 30 months or so, of Covid-induced work disruptions. This saw the emergence of work-from-home (WFH) as a widely practiced strategy.

Like the urumi or flexible sword used in the ancient Kerala martial arts of kalaripayattu, WFH turned out to be a double-edged weapon. It gave professionals the ability to continue doing their jobs, without having to go to an office or punch a time clock.

It had its technical challenges, but the pay kept coming — well almost: There are no statistics about how many employers effectively reduced the take-home pay of their staff by suspending many work-place related allowances and subsidies.

And with recession staring at many industries, there have been many months since 2020, when no one knew if he or she would still have a job after three or six or nine months.

Many, especially those with marketable skills in coding, decided to activate that ‘second string’, to do some low-key work for another employer, that brought in some extra money — a nest egg in case the main employment collapsed.

The name of the game was ‘moonlighting’, working a nine-to-five job, then staying up late — by the light of the moon, so to speak’ — to work for another outfit, usually in another time zone.

Mostly it worked; mostly no one knew or cared — till some greedy guys overdid it.

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, doing the rounds, of a Bengaluru professional whose moonlighting expanded to embrace seven different jobs. He was found out because he had multiple provident fund (PF) accounts.

It is this detail about PF that leads one to doubt the veracity of the story, because people who do more than one job don’t see this as a long-term career move and mostly, they just take the money and put it away for a bad day.

At any rate, a few cases like this, real or fabled, have suddenly brought moonlighting into the front and centre of the public discourse. It is good to have two sharp sides to your urumi, but if you don’t leap out of the way, you can end up cutting your own legs.

‘Cheating — Plain And Simple’

Revelations about the prevalent moonlighting practices have been accorded by the business media, the familiar breathless shock-and-awe treatment of all those round-the-clock ‘breaking news’ streamers on the more excitable television news channels ( and they can be treated likewise). But some have risen to the bait:

Wipro chairman Rishad Premji, son of founder and philanthropist Azim Premji, in a widely reported tweet wrote: "There is a lot of chatter about people moonlighting in the tech industry. This is cheating — plain and simple.”

Mr Premji Jr’s thundering words would not be out of place in one of those workhouse settings in a Dickensian novel.

Of course, he is legally correct.

But enough people observed that they came in the same week when Wipro announced it was going to withhold the variable component of pay for all its mid-to-senior staff starting from July 2022, because to quote a report in Business Standard on 26 August, which shared the internal e-mail Wipro sent to its employers, “Our Q1 margins were lower at 15%....Given our underperformance on margins this quarter, our variable pay, including sales incentives, takes a hit.”

To paraphrase, "We — or rather you — didn’t perform hard enough, so you get to take home less."

Wipro’s top leadership apparently doesn’t share the responsibility for “our underperformance”: A Hindu Businessline story just days three earlier, said Wipro’s chief executive officer Thierry Delaporte drew an annual Rs 79.8 crore — representing a 20 per cent hike in his emoluments.

A report in The (Sunday) New Indian Express on 28 August, highlighted that two other IT bellwethers, Infosys and TCS had also delayed or reduced the variable component of pay of some class of employees.

Infosys reduced the variable pay element by 30 per cent for the quarter from June 2022, though its shareholders found no irony earlier this year, in upping its CEO Salil Parekh's salary by a cool 43 per cent to Rs 73 lakh.

TCS, whose CEO Rajesh Gopinathan saw himself taking home Rs 25.77 crore or 27 per cent more this year, clarified later that it was not reducing the variable element of its staff’s pay after all.

We couldn’t say it better than the HBL headline: “IT firms defer variable payouts but CEOs get richer”.

There is no suggestion that they reduced staff salaries, but it is still worth noting that the highest paid professional CEO of an Indian tech company is C Vijaykumar of HCL Tech, whose last reported salary was Rs 123.13 crore, a hike of 74 per cent.

Tech Mahindra’s CP Gurnani saw the sharpest hike in salary in recent months — up 189 per cent to Rs 63.4 crore.

All CEOs are equal but some are clearly more equal than others. Did someone say the tech industry just came through very difficult Covid pandemic times?

There is some pardonable cynicism, when employers whose creme-de-la-creme are so generously compensated during so-called Hard Times, bleat about staff who try to sneak in a second income to make ends meet.

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