Byju’s allegedly shuts Kerala office, forces employees to resign

Byju’s, the world’s most valued edtech firm backed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, may have shut its office in Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala and asked employees working there to resign. The allegation was made by Minister for General Education and Labour in Kerala, V Sivankutty, on Facebook, saying the impacted employees came to meet him and discuss the issue.

“At Technopark, Thiruvananthapuram Employees of Baiju’s app came and met me with the office bearers of IT employees welfare organisation Echo of Technopark. Employees have many complaints including job losses. The Labor Department will conduct a serious inspection in this matter,” the Kerala minister wrote in a post in Malayalam on Facebook.

Over 170 employees, who were staffed at Byju’s Technopark office, met the minister on Tuesday, October 25 to seek compensation and pending salaries, according to the post. While the minister did not say anything about the layoffs, Technopark Today, which is a community media platform for employees working at Technopark, wrote on Facebook, saying that Byju’s management forced employees to resign. However, after the incident came into the spotlight, the edtech firm seems to have changed its decision about the layoffs.

Byju’s is now offering impacted employees of the Technopark office an option to transfer to offices in other locations, according to a report by The News Minute. According to one of the employees who spoke with the publication, the human resource department of Byju’s began “pressuring employees to resign” after confirming the Technopark office was shutting down. “They called each of us for an exit meeting individually last Friday and demanded our resignation. They also threatened to fire us if we did not resign,” the employee was quoted as saying.

But after the minister highlighted the issue on Facebook, Byju’s is said to have sent employees a “reconciliatory” email, telling them that the office has decided to accommodate the entire team working at the Thiruvananthapuram office into the Bengaluru office. The email assured employees that while the Kerala office was shutting down as part of Byju’s efforts to “realign its resources,” the jobs of the employees working there were secure. Impacted employees must join the Bengaluru team by December 1 to resume their current roles in the company, Byju’s chief content officer Vinay Ravindra reportedly said in the mail titled ‘Relocation Opportunity for Team TVM & Other Benefits’.

Those unwilling to relocate “will get a progressive exit package,” said Ravindra in his email, the screenshot of which is attached to the report by The News Minute. The package comes with a six-month extension of health insurance for the employee and their family, a “fast-track” full-and-final settlement, the provision of ‘garden leave’, which is a paid leave given to an employee to look for a next job, and outplacement aid.

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