SMART BOND 007

Wipro selected 60 of us during the placements at our engineering college. We were overjoyed to get a job. Then we were told about the bond of Rs. 75,000 for 15 months (which was to be deposited on the very first date of joining the company). The reason given was this – the company spends a lot of money on the training of the employees, so it needs to recover the cost which requires an employee to work for at least 15 months.

It is fair for the company to recover the training costs. And when training is over the employee starts working and the company starts recovering its training costs. So what if anyone leaves the job after serving for say, 14 months? In this case also whole 75,000 would be gone (when actually most of it has already been recovered). Clearly the company is in advantage. In fact, in any case the company is in advantage. Say if the employee leaves at anytime within the stipulated 15 months time, the company gets back its training cost of 75,000. And if employee stays after 15 months then he is obviously an asset to the company.

The employee stands in a loss situation if he leaves before 15 months. In this case the system of variable amount to be paid (which depends on the time one serves the company before leaving) which is adopted by some companies as mentioned by some of my friends would definitely be good for the employees. But let’s ponder on this point a little bit: Accenture and Cognizant both came for the placements in my college, but Wipro came earlier and we couldn’t afford to not sit for the Wipro job and wait for Accenture to come. It would be a lost opportunity. And this happens with most of the job seekers, especially the freshers. So saying that “Bond with the best and chuck the rest” is not possible.

What I want to say is that most of the time employees are not in a position to negotiate and they are required to accept it. What will happen in the future would be seen as and when it happens.

In fact while going through the threads relating to bond issues in pagalguy.com I found that people have got ways of dealing with this bond thing. Some suggestions were like this: just leave the company, after sometime your status would become absconding and there will be some mails sent to you asking to come and pay the money. Of course you would not get your reliving letter and so you would be required to show your experience by your salary slips. But the company won’t take any legal action as they don’t want to increase their costs on legal formalities.

There is an incident of one of my friends – he was selects in an automobile company which had a bond of 30,000 for 3 months (including one month training). He didn’t deposit his documents for a month and when he got another job he just cited medical reasons and stopped going to work there. He took one month’s salary and never paid 30,000. The company called for some time and then stopped .

So we see that the bond thing is foolproof. Some people pay the money some don’t. But it is not solving the purpose of retaining the employees. At first companies became smart by introducing bonds, and then employees became smart by finding ways to do away with the bonds. Now I think what companies need is something smart: maybe Smart bonds.