Changes in job market demand an ethical moonlighting policy

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Toughening its stand against the practice, IT giant Wipro recently sacked 300 employees for moonlighting sending out a strict message against dual employment. “This is cheating — plain and simple," the company’s CEO had tweeted in August, expressing strong disapproval against the practice of workers keeping a second job, sometimes secretly, in addition to regular employment.

Since then, there has been a lot of debate about the ethics, and legality of moonlighting, with organisations staking their positions for or against it. This in turn has raised larger questions about issues related to job loyalty, employee satisfaction, employer-employee dynamics, and the future of work in a post-pandemic world.

So, how did we get here?

Why Professionals Moonlight

Moonlighting is neither new nor unusual. The practice has been around for a while with scores of professionals such as doctors, teachers, and consultants, routinely doing so for years. In the last few years, the prevalence of remote working, and hybrid work structures made it more mainstream in certain industries.

In the IT sector, the practice has become fairly commonplace post-pandemic, with a survey of 400 people across IT and ITeS space conducted by Kotak Institutional Equities finding that 65 percent of people knew of those pursuing part-time opportunities or moonlighting while working from home.

Having two income streams may seem like the most obvious reason to hold onto more than one job, but there could be other reasons too for why professionals moonlight. Employees may choose to moonlight, if they are transitioning between jobs, harbour entrepreneurial ambitions, pursue a passion project, or have poor job satisfaction levels. For a lot of professionals, moonlighting has also become a way to upskill, learn new things, and ensure they don't become redundant in their careers.

This is also not without its reasons. Gone is the time when a job seeker could learn a single skill or work with a single employer for the rest of their life. The last few years have seen a drastic change in the way we work, with both nature and terms of work having become more dynamic, and unpredictable. Young professionals, especially Gen-Z and millennials are cognisant of this.

As downsizing, mass layoffs, and restructuring became the norm, the dispensable attitude that most employers demonstrated during the COVID-19 era has also led to an erosion of job loyalty among employees. Now more than ever, people are aware that organisations can give up on them, and that they must safeguard their own interests.

The fix the IT industry finds itself in presently is due to a mix of these factors. It is not a coincidence that all of the 300-odd employees let go by Wipro were entry-level tech professionals — employees who may have had a reason to feel cheated themselves on account of being hired on scandalously low salaries.

Before accusing employees of cheating — a charge that also can be laid on any employer guilty of exploiting its employees with sub-par wages and less-than-desirable working conditions — IT companies would, therefore, do well to acknowledge the changing nature of work, and introspect the role they may have played in perpetuating a culture that forces an employee to hold another job.

The Way Ahead

This is not to say that valid concerns around moonlighting — like those related to data privacy and confidentiality — shouldn’t be addressed. Companies definitely have a right to set a boundary around anything that involves these issues, or holds a conflict of interest, but holding employees captive by dictating to them their out-of-work goals and ambitions is downright unreasonable.

Instead, organisations would do well to encourage openness and flexibility — setting a high standard for performance and productivity in working conditions that foster trust and transparency. The right way to frame this debate, therefore, revolves around addressing issues of fairness, and flexibility.

In this regard, incorporating a fair and broad-based definition of moonlighting — much like what Swiggy has implemented in its ‘industry first’ policy — could be a way forward. Delineating clearly between side gigs for gainful employment versus projects that require data confidentiality, an ethical moonlighting policy could be an effective way for both employees and employers to meet midway — allowing employees to explore side gigs while assuaging employers’ confidentiality, and productivity concerns.

Eventually, organisations need to understand that they don’t own all of their employees’ time, nor should they expect to. What they pay for are fixed work hours defined by targets, set out in contracts. As the nature of the job market changes, it is only wise to redraw these contracts, to accommodate the future of work, and more importantly, attitudes towards it.