One of India’s largest trade union federations, the Centre for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) supported demands of legal action against Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the country’s largest software company, over claims of its violation of the Industrial Dispute Act (IDA) and labor rights.

CITU, in a statement on Monday, August 4, called TCS’ mass forced layoffs illegal and asked its units to stage demonstrations at all the establishments affiliated with the company across the country on August 19.

CITU’s call came days after the Karnataka IT/ITes Employees’ Union (KITU) filed an industrial dispute against TCS, accusing it of forcing hundreds of its employees to resign under an illegal retrenchment program.

KITU claimed it received scores of calls by TCS employees asserting that they are being forced to resign their posts by the higher officials without adequate compensation or remedies.

As per India’s Industrial Disputes Act (IDA), adopted in 1947, any company with more than 100 employees is required to take prior approval from the government before carrying out mass layoffs or retrenchments. Such retrenchments are only allowed for specific reasons and under conditions clearly defined in the IDA.

“This well-established and consistently upheld labor jurisprudence has been violated by the TCS management, which has resorted to the criminal practice of forcing employees to resign,” KITU said in a statement last week.

CITU pointed out that “forced resignations, threats of termination, increased work pressure, and manipulated performance metrics used as tools of informal retrenchment” are in violation of the IDA and those responsible for the same must face the consequences.

TCS is India’s largest software company with over 600,000 employees and over 31 billion US dollars in revenue in 2025. Citing requirements of its future plans, the company claimed last month that it was undertaking “reskilling and redeployment” initiatives and “releasing associates … whose deployment may not be feasible,” Mint reported.

The decision will affect over 12,000 mid-to-senior level employees as “some people … find it difficult to transition to tech heavy roles,” K Krithivasan, TCS CEO, was quoted saying by Mint.

Violation of workers’ rights

CITU questioned the rationale of such mass level retrenchment at a time when TCS is recording huge growth and has emerged as the market leader thanks to the sacrifices made by hundreds of thousands of its workers.

“This sudden attack has been unleashed upon the workforce at a time when TCS reported” over 6% growth and the industry’s highest operating profit margin of 24.3%, CITU claimed. It also noted that the company approved a 20% increase in dividend to its shareholders and earned over USD 47,000 in revenue per employee in 2025, a massive increase of nearly 16% from last year.

TCS is laying off mid-level professionals who have spent 20-25 years of their life in the company just so that it can hire entry-level workers at salaries 80-85% lower, all in the name of “reskilling and upskilling”. This proves that TCS is prioritizing profit maximization over industry sustainability and workforce protection, CITU alleged.

CITU underlined that the reskilling or upskilling of existing employees is the responsibility of management and under no circumstances should employees be held responsible for not receiving those opportunities.

“Denying existing employees reskilling opportunities and forcing them out-is a violation of natural justice,” CITU asserted.

“Rather than absorbing the impact [of technological and geopolitical shifts, for example the impact of AI and US tariffs] through responsible measures, firms like TCS are choosing to shift the burden onto employees,” CITU claimed.

CITU also argued that opting for hiring entry-level workers while laying off the senior employees in order to reduce operational costs is a clear case of pitting workers against workers for profit while upper management salaries grow without restraint.

The TCS CEO’s pay was increased this year and he received a cumulative salary of over USD 3 million last year, yet there was no pay hike for the common employees in the company, CITU claimed.

“The IT sector is a textbook example of the financial greed of the neoliberal capitalist system. IT workers in India generate a huge amount of surplus for their domestic and international employers and largely remain without any labor rights,” the CITU statement reads.

After KITU’s interventions, The Hindu reported on Saturday that the state government has called for a reconciliation meeting between TCS officials and trade union representatives on Wednesday, August 6.

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