Protests erupt after US pharma company fires 900 employees in India’s Keralam state

US-based multinational CorroHealth Infotech Private Ltd. announced on Friday, July 3, that it was shutting its offices in Kochi and Calicut, in the southern Indian state of Keralam, and sacked around 900 employees.

According to reports in the media, the company told employees their terminations were effective immediately due to a “drop in the work volume.”

Despite the immediate interventions by local politicians and former and current labor ministers in the state government asking the company to maintain the status quo until conciliation is finalized, the company went ahead and over the weekend unilaterally issued severance payments.

When employees attempted to enter the premises on Monday, they were refused access.

This invited strong protests from various unions, including the Center for Indian Trade Unions (CITU) and political groups such as the left-wing Democratic Youth Federation of India (DFYI).

The protests, led by unions and left leaders compelled the officials to finally open the gates and allow the employees in.

Workers question management’s justification for retrenchment

CorroHealth is a US-based company providing technology-based solutions to hospitals and health-care systems. It started its operations in India in 2019 and has multiple offices in several parts of the country with an annual revenue of over USD 2 billion in 2025.

The announcement to lay off all its employees in Keralam was made without any prior warning or notice and at a time when all the employees were busy with their daily work, V K Sanoj, a leader of the DYFI and sitting member of the state legislative assembly, told BreakThrough News.

Only after it faced protests, the company revealed that the decision to shut its offices in Keralam was made after an alleged “decline in its business volume.”

However, both the employees and the unions questioned the company’s reasons for the sudden termination of such a large number of its work force. They cited the positive financial records of the company and its expansion into other parts of India to refute its claim of financial troubles.

The employees have claimed that the company is shutting down its offices in Keralam because it was unable to exploit them as it is able to do with their counterparts in other parts of India. The employees told the press that they often had arguments and disagreements with management over rightful wages, and refused managements’ demands of working on off-days or without adequate overtime wages.

According to various employee review platforms, CorroHealth has a bad record of exploitative work culture with most of its former employees complaining about lack of job security, work-life balance, limited career growth, and so on.

Sanoj also confirmed that the most probable reason for the mass lay-offs could be management’s retaliation to the workers’ defiance and their assertion of their rights.

The impact of the new anti-worker labor codes

The labor minister in the previous government and a leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), V Sivankutty condemned CorroHealth’s decision, claiming that the multinational company was emboldened to take such a decision because of the four new labor codes introduced by the union government in India.

All major trade unions in the country and the left parties have been agitating against the four new labor codes introduced by the ultra-right-wing central government, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The codes compromise basic labor rights and strengthen corporate control over them in various ways.

In February, over 300 million Indians joined a national strike demanding the withdrawal of the codes.

Sivankutty’s claims were supported by several other leaders, including the former chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan.

“This mass layoff is a clear example of how the new labor codes introduced by the union government for empowering the corporate and the capital have an extremely harmful effect on the workers,” Vijayan said.

The CorroHealth issue confirms that companies are looking for flexible legal arrangements where they can exploit workers as they wish and if they are unable to do so in one area, due to strong unions, they are simply choosing to relocate to a more favorable place.

Sanoj, however, claims that in the present case, CITU and DYFI are willing to provide all the legal support required to the workers because the company has violated the basic legal procedure even under the new codes.

Sanoj points out how Keralam, under the left government until very recently, had refused to implement the four labor codes, providing some protection to workers. However, most other states have implemented them and companies know that fact.

Under the new codes “there is no job security” and workers have only two options “either to work as slaves or leave,” Sanoj argues.

“We cannot avoid the repercussions of the four labor codes for very long,” Sanoj warns until we take the fight to where it actually matters.

It is a must that “all sections of people stand together” and force the union government to withdraw the four new labor codes,” Sanoj demanded.