Are You A Moonlighter/Multi-Hyphenate/Slashie Or... A Cheat?

In the late 1800s, Frank Lloyd Wright, today ranked among America’s best architects, was terminated on account of moonlighting.

Fast forward by about 130 years, Rishad Premji stirred up a hornet’s nest this weekend with his tweet on moonlighting in the tech industry. “This is cheating—plain and simple,” the executive chairman at Wipro Ltd. wrote on Twitter.

His comment came after Swiggy, earlier this month, introduced its new policy to allow employees to pick up gigs outside the company. “With this policy, our goal is to enable employees to pursue their passions for economic interests alongside their full-time employment,” the company had said in its Aug. 3 blog.

Conventionally, moonlighting is defined as an act of working an extra job, often without the employer’s knowledge. Now, employees are veering away from the traditional script.

Moonlighting can be an important part of “creating financial security for you”, according to an article by Harvard Business Review on personal finance. “Having multiple income-generating streams ensures that you always have money coming in (even if you lose one stream).”

Work from home amid the pandemic, along with a sharp surge for demand in tech talent, led to rising instances of moonlighting, especially in the IT sector.

A scroll through comments over Premji’s tweet elicited a range from complains from insufficient pay and variable pay cuts by IT companies amid margin pressure, to no payments for overtime. Some, however, even agreed with Premji.

The decision to allow moonlighting is organisation-specific, Rituparna Chakraborty, co-founder and executive director at TeamLease services, said. “First, an organisation might want to earn brownie points and be an employer of choice. Second, because an employer can’t match the financial aspiration of every employer. For an employee, it is the ability to pursue diverse passion and an additional source of income.”

Legally, there is no restriction on dual employment or working with two organisations at the same time, Ajay Singh Solanki, leader for the labour and employment law practice at Nishith Desai Associates, had told BQ Prime in an earlier conversation on moonlighting.

But even if the law does not restrict such activities, companies can.

Employers typically want their employees to not serve multiple companies at the same time because of issues like confidentiality, protection of intellectual property and productivity. For these reasons, often employers prefer to include a ‘moonlighting clause’ in their contracts that does not permit working for another organisation.

“It can be a ground for dismissal from the company for breach of contract,” Solanki had said.

His advice to employees—“Be transparent”.

At Swiggy, projects have been divided into two buckets A and B.

List A projects are high-sensitive, leveraging professional know-how. List B is projects that fall under the space of interests and hobbies that are non-professional in nature.

According to the policy, projects that are picked up for economic consideration and/or fall under List A will need to be declared. The employee can pursue these projects once they are approved by Swiggy.

“Any project or activity that is taken up outside office hours or on the weekend, without affecting productivity, and does not have a conflict of interest, can be picked up by the employees. The employee will have to declare a few necessary details so that the team can green light the project,” Yamini Koganti, AVP–HR at Swiggy, said in the blog.

The impact of moonlighting on health, how it affects work and work-life balance, attention to detail, timings and logistics all determine whether an employee can moonlight. Employers and employees have to make a choice, with moonlighting possible in some roles and not possible in some, TeamLease’s Chakraborty said. “While there is no need to bash it up as a policy, it is important to have a meaningful debate.”