Bond with the best - Chuck the rest

It has becomes a general opinion among employees that a bond is something that invokes only negative feelings. At least an Employment Bond. I don't think that anyone has negative feelings about James or Ruskin Bond. But it doesn't always have to be evil!!

In my view bonds are of two kinds. The ones that try to protect the employer's interests alone. These are the reasonable ones. Then, there are the ones that just try to restrict their employees. Like in the case of Satyam ( mentioned in the case). I mean what kind of employee goodwill are you going to get by making your employee pay huge chunks of money when he/she is just joining your company? I think it's plain greed, if not sadism.

But not all bonds are vile. Let me recount something from my experience. Though I am a fresher, my one chance close to a job was my campus job offer with Accenture. Though I have no clue if they would have stuck to what they claimed during the Pre-Placement Talk, whatever was said, seemed pretty reasonable. Their claim was that the value of the Bond was Rs 100000. The training period was 3 months. If an employee left during the training period, he/she would have to reimburse the cost incurred by the company for the training completed till then. After 3 months, the value of the bond would gradually keep decreasing from Rs 100000. On completion of 12 months, the employee was free to leave without having to pay anything extra.

Now this seems like the employer is only trying to protect his legitimate interest. After all, employees cannot just get all the training and choose to leave whenever they want. I think this concept of bonds is pretty justified, though the case of Satyam (with the employee having to pay interest to work in the company) seems highly unfair. Employees should refrain from signing bonds with such companies in order to protect their self interest.