Chennai/New Delhi, June 9 (KNN) IT company employees are free to form trade unions and get ‎redressed their grievances through evoking the provisions of the Industrial Disputes Act, Kumar Jayant, Principal Secretary for Labour and Employment of Tamil Nadu  said today.  

The IT sector will now be covered by the Industrial Disputes Act, 1947, which allows workers to form labour unions.

Talking to KNN, the General Secretary of Centre of Trade Unions (CITU), Tapan Sen said that "TN Government has not done anything. In the IT Sector there is no prohibition of making a trade union as per the law of the land."

“What Tamil Nadu Government has done extra in allowing them to form union?," he asked.

The issue rose after TCS dismissed hundreds of employees in January 2015, leading to the formation of the IT Employees Wing supported by the NDLF. The front, after failing to extract a response from the state government, approached the Madras High Court seeking a direction to the administration to clarify whether the IT sector was covered by the Industrial Disputes Act, following which the note was issued.

CITU General Secretary said that as per Trade Union Act 1926, IT sector is not out of bound of Trade Union. It is the weakness of the IT sector workers that they could not form their trade union very effectively.

Most large Indian IT companies like TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL Technologies and Cognizant have campuses employing thousands of software engineers in Tamil Nadu. Infosys has over 17,000 employees in Chennai, Wipro has 25,000, and TCS, India's largest software exporter, has 60,000 employees in 13 centres in the state. (KNN Bureau)