IT giants & hysterical measures to control attrition

Heavy attrition of employees in IT companies is not a new story, but what is new is the way companies are trying to control it. While they call themselves ISO 9001, ISO 20000, CMMI Certified, strong process based global companies, giants like IBM, HCL, iGATE,  have resorted to the stoop levels of increasing the notice period from two months to three months. Well, every organization has the right to define its own notice period, but shouldn't there be any limit which should never be crossed. In my opinion, such measures hardly work for the benefit of their business or in avoiding jeopardy of critical projects as they claim it to be.

The answer is very simple, they already have a huge bench strength which can be utilized any time they have lack of resources, and adding on to this, they themselves boast of having strong processes and least human resource dependency, the "hysteria" behind blocking an employee for three months looks illogical. My experience say that the more time the resigning employees stay in the org, the more they negatively influence other existing people directly or indirectly while being minimally productive.

Another aspect of this issue which shakes me the most is the trauma & harassment resigning employees go through during this long notice period. I have even heard of multiple cases when employees' appointment letter gave them the right to "buy out" the notice period, but were denied just to traumatize that person. Thanks to our handicapped labor laws, which we cannot even take chance to go to court and get this settled, the outcome most probably may result in ruining our own career. So the resigning employee is left to the mercy of the management who has all the tools & weapons to make the person's life miserable.

Shocking stories don't end here, just recently one of my friend in HCL technologies told me that their esteemed management have come up with an innovative way to control attrition, in addition to serving three months notice period, an employee will not get his salary in this entire period, and all this will be paid after couple of months of leaving the organization in the form of a "full and final settlement". Can you survive three months without salary? At least not me.

While, I am still waiting the response of my RTI to labor ministry on above issues, I would love to see someone knocking the court's door on any of such issues. Am I expecting too much from the so called "highly paid and highly educated class" in the society?