Employment Bond: An edge for the Employer.

These days all the companies ask the new joinees to sign the employment bond at the time of joining. The employees have no way out other than signing the bond. The language stated in the bond may differ, but in all cases they act as obstacles to search for jobs. Some of the typical clauses in a common employment bond are:

a.If one leaves a job, he/she has to give a notice beforehand.

b.One cannot join a company that is into a similar line of business, which in itself is very strange because one will only join a company that he/she has experience of working in.

c.One has to pay to the company a particular sum if he/she is leaving the organization.

Now some of the reasons ,why it becomes difficult to leave a job because of the bond are:

1. The companies, that one goes for an interview , will want the candidate to join office immediately. But if one would say that he/she has to serve a notice period,then they would seldom consider the candidature. This in itself is contradictory because at one hand they will not allow their own employees to leave without notice but on the other hand they would lure employees from other companies to break the bond.

2. Even if one thinks of quitting by giving the notice without a job in hand, there will not be any guarantee that the employee will secure a job after the notice period expires.

After having worked with TCS for 4 years , I have seen that ,on many instances the employee simply leaves without informing the organization. This has its share of problems:

The organization sues the employee in the court for breaching the employee contract. All relations with the employer are broken. Employment with the organization gets closed for ever. One doesn’t even get dues from the organization.

Also in addition to the normal bond which one signs at the time of joining , in TCS one also needed to sign a bond (called MODA) before leaving for an onsite assignment. According to this bond one would have to serve TCS for 6 months after returning to India, else one would have to pay a required sum for breaking the bond.

Thus we can clearly see that resigning from a job is much more difficult than even finding one. One has nothing nothing to lose while finding a job.