Writing in The Oxford Book of Work, editor Keith Thomas says: “Although work has afforded mankind many satisfactions, it has also caused an incalculable quantity of unhappiness. Throughout human history most work has been too exhausting, too unhealthy, and too poorly rewarded. The abolition of slavery was achieved in most parts of the world, but reformers continued to lament a system that permitted ‘free’ workers to turn themselves into wage slaves.”
Anna Sebastian Perayil was only 26. She was earnest and young, a freshly-minted chartered accountant. She thought she’d got her corporate dream job except that it turned out to be a fatal nightmare. She possibly thought that at most she’d only sold her soul; it turns out her body was on the line.
No one from her workplace, Ernst and Young (EY), showed up for the funeral. In the words of her mother, Augustine, “After her funeral I reached out to her managers, but I received no reply. How can a company that speaks of values and human rights fail to show up for one of its own in their final moments?”
Not only that, EY allegedly also silenced its employees from talking about the death on social media. No one is allowed to rage against the machine; the machine controls your life in toto. Perform or perish. If you die in the process, don’t expect us to come for the after-party.
After Anna collapsed in her PG accommodation, there are those who are saying: “But we all went through this. Overwork cannot kill anyone”. That’s the stupidest, most callous thing to say. One, saying that “everyone goes through this” doesn’t mean that what happens is morally right. Days after Anna’s death, a 38-year-old software engineer from Tamil Nadu committed suicide for similar reasons, by wrapping himself in a live wire.
Two, death from overwork and work-related exhaustion is a fact. The Japanese even have a term for it — karoshi. Remember, post-war Japan was an example used by Narayana Murthy to justify his 70-hour work week proposal.
The finance minister, Nirmala Sitharaman, didn’t help matters when she said that people need inner strength to handle pressure and this can only be achieved by divinity. She’d been invited to deliver a talk at a university, which has set up a “Meditation Hall and a place of worship for all its students and faculty.”
When the workplace is toxic, it’s toxic — no amount of shutting one’s eyes and folding hands in prayer will help. If anything, it was Sitharaman who was shutting her eyes and being wilfully blind to the issue at hand.
Some stats about the Indian workplace to help the finance minister focus, while she meditates: a report in The Hindu states that young professional Indian women work 55 hours a week, the highest globally. The report adds, “The 56.5 hours done by Indian women in IT and media are the highest in the world. In Germany, for instance, women in IT and media work for 32 hours.”
Also read: Anna Sebastian Perayil’s Death Shows How Capitalist Labour Takes the Life of the Worker
According to the International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) 2024 estimates, at 46 hours a week, India makes it to the list of countries with the longest average working hours. At the same time, ILO’s Global Wage Report 2020-21 found that we have the lowest minimum wage globally, except for some sub-Saharan economies.
Anna was a real person buried in these statistics. When one reads her mother’s open letter, or interviews with her father, a horrific picture emerges.
Her mother writes about Anna’s manager, who was a T20 cricket fan: “Her manager would often reschedule meetings during cricket matches and assign her work at the end of the day… Anna confided in us about the overwhelming workload, especially the additional tasks assigned verbally, beyond the official work (emphasis mine). She worked late into the nights, even on weekends, with no opportunity to catch her breath. Her assistant manager once called her at night with a task that needed to be completed by next morning, leaving her with barely any time to rest and recover. When she voiced her concerns, she was met with a dismissive response, ‘You can work at night; that’s what we all do’.”
Anna would return to her room utterly exhausted, sometimes collapsing on her bed without even changing her clothes, only to be bombarded with messages asking for “more reports.”
Reading this makes one want to repurpose Pink Floyd’s lyrics from “We Don’t Need No Education”: “Hey! Manager! Leave those kids alone.” I wasn’t at all surprised that he was a T20 fan. A slave driver of capitalism will worship at the altar of cricket capitalism. Test cricket fans are, by the very nature of sporting choice, more humane.
Anna’s mother goes on to say that because she was just starting out, “like many of her age”, she didn’t have the “experience or the agency” to push back against unreasonable demands.
Here, I want to make a point about the senior-junior divide that plagues Indians. A caste-based society will fetishise hierarchy of any kind, including senior-junior. The senior is the master and the junior is the slave. There is no end to it. It’s something we carry from cradle to grave.
The Indian, for the length of her life, is condemned to playing a game of snakes and ladders.
One starts out in school as a junior, a second class citizen. Once you leave school and enter college, you are once again a junior. The ragging resumes. Once you leave college and join a professional institution, you start as a junior and again face the same ragging. When you get your first job, you are a junior, again! Every time on the snakes and ladders board you are in sight of ‘home’, the 100 square, the senior snake bites you and you slide back to 1.
Anna was the junior at work, her managers were the seniors. You are not a young professional bringing a fresh vision to the table, but a workhorse to be flogged by those above you, who, in their time, were treated the same way, and are now giving it back. Chef and nutrition coach, Nayantara Menon Bagla, recalls working at a luxury hotel where bullying by seniors was the norm: juniors who came late were made to stand for hours with their hands in the air or made to clean fridges with bare hands. The idea of humiliation is pathological to hierarchies. It’s exactly what a toxic work environment is.
And it’s not just India. Asian workplaces in general are hierarchical. Take the carefully calibrated culture of bowing in Japan. The Japanese bow to those senior to them; it serves two purposes: it’s a greeting, but also a mark of respect. The bow is initiated by a junior, “bending from the waist to an angle of between 30 and 45 degrees from vertical,” according to an article on Japanese business and etiquette on Asialinkbusiness.
Like Japan, South Korea too places an emphasis on respect and hierarchy in communication. If in Japan silence is a tool deployed to convey agreement, in South Korea saying “no”, is a strict no-no. One is expected to find a suitable phrase to convey disagreement more gently. The blow has to be softened.
Over in China, the idea of “saving face” is crucial to business communication. One cannot make the other party look bad in public. Non-verbal cues play a role here. It’s like in Thailand, the act of smiling plays a key role. The hierarchical corporate structure in Asia, generally speaking, doesn’t encourage cutting to the chase, but skillfully beating around the bush.
Also read: The Unsung Anna Sebastian Perayils Who are Dying Everyday
Things are beginning to look different in other parts of the world. Australian employees now have the right to ignore their bosses’ calls and messages after work hours. This is codified in a new law — the “right to disconnect”. Passed earlier this year in February, the law, reports VOA, “protects workers who refuse to monitor, read or respond to contact from their employers after the hours of work.” More than 20 countries, including France, have introduced similar laws.
At present the situation in India resembles the 19th century reality Karl Marx was writing about in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: “Labour produces works of wonder for the rich, but nakedness for the worker; it produces beauty but cripples the worker; it produces culture, but also imbecility and cretinism for the worker.”
Anna’s death has to be an inflection point. It’s up to Gen Z, the juniors, to push back hard. Don’t suffer in silence — bite. A bit like how over in America Gen Z has thrown its weight behind Kamala Harris as the agent of change and equity. It’s time middle-aged manager pricks are shown their place, and if required the door. Cancel the companies. It’s literally a do-or-die situation: this generation has to make a break with the previous one, and its inhumane ways of working. As a Gen Z-er told The Quint: “We are humans, not resources.”
Palash Krishna Mehrotra is the author of The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolor Youth, and the editor of Recess: The Penguin Book of Schooldays.
