Unfair pandemic clean-ups

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Editor's note: It took less than two months for Stovekraft to go from planning a company offsite to becoming a house of horrors. Bengaluru-headquartered Stovekraft is one of India’s largest kitchen appliance companies. It’s the parent of the Pigeon and Gilma brands, and the official partner-licensor of Black + Decker products in India. It’s almost always prefixed by “Sequoia-backed” in media coverage, and was in the news last year primarily for two reasons: floating an IPO, and hiring Rajiv Mehta as CEO (Mehta is the hotshot executive credited with turning around Puma’s fortunes in India).  Stovekraft is no high-flying Pegasus, but it’s no pushover either. And so its employees--aware of an unfolding pandemic but hopeful that the virus wouldn’t turn wrathful in India--looked forward to the company offsite in March. Fast forward to early May, however, and the offsite became a distant memory. Nearly 700 people were laid off. But that’s not the story. This is: that in a townhall meeting on 8 May, a salary reshuffle was announced for employees with compensation packages of Rs 6 lakh or more. The pay …