Mr. Thirumalai Selvan, a 48 years old professional was let go by Tata Consultancy Services 7 years ago back in 2015. He took to court, and finally, in June 2022, the court based in Chennai has ordered the company to give him his job back and even pay him the salary and give him benefits for the 7 years according to official reports.
Mr. Selvan had been employed with Tata Consultancy Services for 8 years before being tossed away by the company as they had a big purge letting go of scores of employees. According to the company, the man’s performances were not up to the mark which is why they decided to let him go and part ways.
Mr. Selvan worked his way up at Tata Consultancy Services and ended up having a managerial role at the company heading teams and projects. However, after he was let go, he was forced to take up free lancing jobs to support his family and pay the bills. He worked as a software consultant in a contractual basis for various local companies and was earning less than Rs. 10,000 every month which is very difficult to raise a family with, especially in a metro city like Chennai.
His wife started to take up jobs and helped Mr. Selvan to support their family. Mr. Selvan said that the legal fees that took to win the legal battle took up most of his finances. He went on to say that he would have visited the court over 150 times over the past 7 years.
Fortunately, all of his hard work has paid of finally after all these years as the court in Chennai concluded the case in his favour. The court said that Mr. Selvan was part of management and was not a ‘work man’. He is someone with an advanced set of skills and is not a general employee and terminating him out of the blue was unfair for him.
Mr. Selvan did not fight against the massive company on his own and had help and assistance from The Forum for IT Employees (FITE) which is a trade union that works to protect the right of information technology employees. When the news of his victory came out, people of the union publicly celebrated their joint victory.
The union was also appreciated a lot by IT workers and by social media users for the work they did to bring justice to this employee.