The 70 hour work week.

Is this a hark back to the 1850s and 1860s of undivided Bengal?

Imagine we enter a Time Machine that transports us back in time to early 19th century. We are now workers on a plantation called Indigo Systems. Indigo Systems is a darling of the investors. Workers have it good for a while too but in the mid 19th century, things change! There is a rude realization that the good fortunes of investors have come at the exploitative cost of workers.

‘Gee! Workers at Indigo Systems!? That’s us!!!’ Our bosses, the plantation managers at Indigo Systems claim that they are THE best company at reprogramming their workers to believe that “the future is neither Paddy nor Millets; the future is Indigo!” Indigo is a plant that is a cash crop; it's not a grain, it's not a food crop. Indigo is a popular dye in Britain where the British elites, like other colonialists believe that other cultures need to be colonized and civilized.

In the honeymoon period on the plantation, which lasts for about three decades, enough to get an entire generation addicted to a drug called moolah, we are lulled into a happy bubble. We have decent take-home pay checks to chase our dreams. A pucca house, we’re doing better than most of our countrymen in terms of ‘stuff’ we can afford. Our customers are overseas and have pumped in their Fiat currency. They have invented a magical system that makes their money grow in value against the Indian currency. We are told that the reason for the currency exchange rate being what it is, is the abysmal ‘productivity’ of Indians. The founder of Indigo Systems and his right hand man, the personnel department chief echo this false and frankly, racist and denigrating narrative about a culture that expresses itself best as a leader and refuses to blindly follow diktats. To compensate for our alleged drawbacks and help India ‘develop’, they talk down to their countrymen, especially the youth and bat for a 70 hour week for the Indigo plantation workers!

Indigo Systems is actually owned by plutocrats who live outside of India; their middlemen are Indian, the top brass at Indigo Systems who are feted as if they are veritable avatars of Narayana, Krishna, Nanda Lala, Gopala, Raghavendra… you get the drift! They are avatars who are the epitome of ‘industriousness’, worthy of our reverence but our gods are the colonizers who seem to be adept at creating new machines. Eventually, along with their neo-colonial allies, they will create countless ‘languages for machines’ but to this day, find it an almost impossible task to learn a new tongue that is different from their native lingo.

Indigo Systems is a shining example of capitalism bringing comforts to a section of the society even as the chasm between the haves and have-nots widens. It is assumed that the have-nots will have a ‘craven aspiration to get ahead’ while the haves flaunt their nouveau riche status, “I have new money now and I'm richer than my not-so-indigo neighbor because he's farming regular crop”! Economists study income inequality and come up with fancy terms like Gini coefficient. As a plantation worker, there’s little I can do as Indigo Systems courts the media and wins fancy titles like “The Best Employer Award”! I am left to wonder who is voting for my employer? I certainly didn’t!

But wait!

Fast forward to today. Neo colonizers, neo-colonial elites to be precise, continue to wallow in self aggrandizing thoughts and day dreams; they fancy themselves as a civilizing force. While some in the global north aren’t as pretentious, most are convinced that they are superior. That the global south needs their intervention and aid; they have new propaganda tricks up their sleeve. They quote the ‘rules-based order’ not to better the world but to ensure their entitlements at the cost of the global south.

Indian origin honchos now head global banks and funds; some of them get appointed as ‘turn-around specialists’ of Indian financial institutions with disastrous tenures. Nothing to show for results except for regaling a fawning media audience with ‘theories’ on why dosa prices have been stagnant over the years. There is even a hedge fund manager turned Prime Minister touting his Hindu origins even as he engages in Russophobia at conferences.

The new avatars of Indigo Systems are companies that have bought into this narrative of ‘development’ to put their workers on a hamster wheel. “Do our bidding if you want some of the Fiat currency”, they tell us. Not what you are inclined towards doing, not what you like doing… na na na! There is no place for creatives here!! Like Indigo Systems, they seem to wield greater control over Fiat money than even the government of the day. As workers, we can’t question whether our efforts are to the detriment of our country and its people. Is it benefitting someone outside pulling the strings to our detriment? We are too caught up in the show-off act. “Look at him, he's still riding his old scooter. I got this fancy car and so, I must be doing great”! It isn’t really capitalism that is to blame but the way that human systems work; the way human greed works is that you look at your ‘competitor’, you compare and then you say, “I gotta get something better than what he has to feel good”. Forget showing off, we need the Fiat currency because it is the only store of value with which we can buy basic necessities.

Like Indigo Systems, companies that are really glorified sweatshops, court the media to get certificates and fancy ‘Best Employer’ awards. Again it isn’t the employee who will tell companies whether or not they are the best employers. Employees are just a bunch of recruits who will follow orders if they want to get paid. Media will announce without a count of the votes of employees that some companies are the best places to work and great employers; different media houses will award different companies. People will share the ‘good news’ about their employers on WhatsApp with family and friends along with pictures of their company campuses that look like adult Disneylands with ‘stuff’ put in there for marketing blitz and advertisement.

I recently read an article about prisons in the United States that have stuff like that - a pool, gym, cafeteria - the cushiest ones of course. To be honest, the campuses have the show-off value of a Disneyland and an exploitative feel of a prison. Promoters of ‘development’, as some call this way of life, build huge glass buildings on their campuses to add to the adult Disneyland feel. Maybe, they think that people will applaud them even as their wives busy themselves in CSR initiatives or make small talk with pakodi waalas and waalis on the pavements of Bangalore, with shutterbugs in tow.

Mr. Murty perhaps wants fame to acquire an APJ Abdul Kalam halo and become the president of India at the exploitative cost of workers. He is batting for a 70 hours work week even as the International Labor Organization or the ILO, in its most recent reports, said that anything more than 55 hours a week on the job has actually resulted in 7 .5 lakh deaths globally with India having an oversize share of preventable fatalities. Is he batting for the death toll to reach the 10 lakh figure? Since one of his favorite pithy quotes is, “In God, we trust. For everything else, we need data”, it would behoove the man to look at the data of ILO before making not just an inane statement but a dangerous one as well.

In closing, the IR-ideate team underscores the need for this whole angle of exploitation of workers to be considered in the discourse on International Relations. A friend of ours coined the abbreviation IIR or International Industrial Relations, which we feel is an important subject of study for the future MBA graduate.

The US of course lectures India on human rights but won't talk about the exploitative aspect of outsourcing because US is the pioneer of this killer ‘work ethic’, not to mention the benefits that such a practice of working gruellingly long hours, accrue to the greenback.

None of the Indian politicians is complaining about an ‘invasion of aliens’, to use the somewhat racist American term for non citizens, from overseas. No one is complaining yet, but it seems like workers are suffering soulless capitalism everywhere in the world, quitting their jobs and making a beeline for an Indian visa to join the yoga revolution.