India workers for HP will not be hit by the company’s plans to cut global workforce, CEO Meg Whitman has said.
In India, Whitman was interviewed by the Economic Times, and said: “We are not reducing our workforce in India. We have announced a global workforce reduction, but India will stay largely intact, because we not only have all our business units here, but also our R&D and back office.”
Whitman’s remarks fill out a little bit of the layoff picture for HP, which, like most tech companies, doesn’t detail global workforce patterns.
Earlier this year, HP announced plans to cut its workforce by 27,000 employees by 2014, or about 8% of its approximately 350,000 employees. One report said that about 9,000 of those workers would be in the U.S.
Indian firms have been hiring, not firing, and it would have been surprising for U.S. based employers to do similarly.
The U.S. IT job market, overall, has been hiring, too.
Foote Partners said its analysis of U.S. hiring report for July showed a net gain of 18,200 jobs, across the segments it tracks. Foote said those numbers represented the largest monthly IT employment increase since 2008.
But a different analysis of IT labour trends by the TechServe Alliance, an industry group, showed a more modest increase, with 4,800 new IT jobs in July. Labour analysts rarely agree in detail about IT labour growth because they use different Labour Department job categories to reach their conclusions.
Despite differences in the size of the IT hiring increases, the labour analysts almost always agree on the broad employment trends, and that has been a consistent uptick in IT hiring despite HP’s planned cuts.
