WNS quells Nashik strike

Business process outsourcing company WNS has managed to quell the upheaval caused by some employees demanding wage rise and reinstatement of five colleagues.

The peace between erring employees and the company was brought in after the intervention of Nashik Deputy Labour Commissioner R S Jadhav.

WNS, the only large BPO in Nashik, about 130 kilometres from Mumbai, employs 1,100-1,200 employees at two centres.

"We do not want this company to leave Nashik.

"It is the only large BPO firm who has set up operations there.

"We have been told by the management that if they get such co-operation from local authorities, they will look at scaling up further in future," said Jadhav to Business Standard.

While the company did not say if the five employees had been reinstated or there would be salary hikes, a spokesperson said: "We have no disagreements with our employees at our Nashik centre.

"In the past couple of days, a few employees have tried to influence other employees to join their

unjustified protests around unreasonable demands which was successfully resolved internally with the relevant authorities.

"The company will not compromise its values, clients or employees. WNS has created new centres in Mumbai, Pune and Visakhapatnam for expansion."

Sources within the company and local authorities confirmed had the issue not been solved, WNS would have moved out of Nashik.

"The company had decided to pack up and leave.

A large client of WNS, served from Nashik, had also expressed concerns over the strike and was ready to pull out.

The employees were also told resorting to strike was not the right way of raising demands.

"If the local senior authority would not have intervened, things would have escalated for worse," said a source on condition of anonymity.

The Indian IT-BPO sector, with $88 billion in revenue, has never witnessed employee unrest.

Rather, attempts to unionise the sector have been unsuccessful.

WNS is the only company to witness such an agitation.

Though WNS has centres in Mumbai, Pune and Visakhapatnam, the agitation happened only at its Nashik unit.