Moonlighting cannot be justified, for it fails loyalty test to contracts 

Right and wrong, fair and unfair, ethical and unethical are no longer subjects that have standard definitions. Logic, convenience, personal interests, hedonism are the determining features that influence the judgment or opinion about an action or conduct. Universal benchmarks are missing.

These are strange times. No one likes to be wrong so everyone thinks he is right and defends his viewpoints with logic which veers largely around commerce. We are into an era of commerce. The moonlighting issue of the IT services is no different. It is also about commerce. But the matter needs to be discussed in a wider perspective. Ends cannot justify the means.

One big IT company chairman has recently admitted that the company has fired 300 of its employees in the past few months for working for direct competitors. Now here comes another question. Does it imply that the employees working in one industry can work beyond office hours or weekends in some other industry that is not in the same business?

Not easy to answer because it cannot be considered ethical. Quite intriguing why this matter is not discussed in that context and even the chairman who described moonlighting as cheating is trying to soften his stand. It is not clear what he means when he says that employees can have a transparent dialogue with the organisation about their second or weekend work.

Why this ambiguity? Will the disclosure allow people to work for two different companies? Even if some companies may like to take a more generous view of the phenomenon, the fact remains that the practice of moonlighting cannot be a fair practice.

Rightly, some CEOs said that moonlighting is an ethical issue. Every employee who joins a company enters into a contract which has two aspects. An explicit one which is the appointment letter that mentions about the job conditions, duties and responsibilities, etc. But there is also an unwritten contract, the implicit one which requires that the employee should be devoted and loyal to the company.

Holding two jobs may thus be antithetical to this. Even if moonlighting may not exactly be about one person having two jobs, it certainly is some kind of opportunity cost that the company will have to bear. Full-time employment should not go along with part time employment. Conflict of interest of one kind or the other is likely to arise. And we have seen what kind of damage conflict of interest can do.

Moonlighting, of course, is not something which is a new phenomenon and has been a concern in the past, too. The only difference was that in those times people engaging in moonlighting would do it in a hush-hush manner as they realised fully well that it was not fair.

From teachers to doctors, earning extra money outside the scope of the respective jobs was happening. But people were not seeking approval for the act as its fairness was always under the cloud. Conscience during those days still existed. However, as commerce is driving everything these days, such values do not count.

Ethics is something that these days is only for the sake of writing essays or being taught in schools and colleges. It is no longer a practice. And even bigger irony is that some sections want it to be legalised and are creating pressure groups to justify moonlighting.

The big question is where is society headed for? Anomie ultimately leads to anarchy.

(The author is a former professor of management, IIT-Dhanbad)