Gulag in the Workplace
By JMN Pasricha
I have lived through 21 years of Martial Law and Ferdinand Marcos' Rule in the
Philippines. I was also in India under the Emergency Rule of Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi. But I have not experienced this kind of Gulag life that I am
going through in India. And this is not because of the government. This is
because of the corporate culture in the top employer of India, Asia and Great
Britain. This proves that the award is undeserved. Perhaps, it is even fraudulent,
a misinterpretation of what employers and employees should professionally be.
That this is happening in a mobile global world of the 21st
century is incredible. First, employees
sign a contract that stops them from using social media. Perhaps it is
acceptable to do so in the office. But to demand it from an employee in his/her
private life is an intrusion into privacy. So my daughter is following the
contract. But as mother I have not signed such a contract. As a private person,
I am not supposed to be part of that contract. However, my email addresses, Twitter
and LinkedIn are being monitored. My emails are being printed out and read by a
whole floor of employees, as if they have no other work to do, but to follow my
emails. And when they cannot watch over my emails 24/7, guess what is used as
tool to stop me from communicating with the world. Talk about bad practices in
the workplace. They cut my internet connection. They cut my Wifi connection.
That is how and why we are invited into this Gulag Guest House, really a
concentration camp.
This is all because my daughter has accepted a job, very
much less in pay than the average pay of an Ivy League graduate. She has also asked
for reasonable accommodation as a Person of Disability. And she was promised to
be given an office that is disability friendly; reasonable accommodation in
transportation, and reasonable accommodation in housing.
But what does she get instead?
Reasonable Accommodation in the Workplace:
My daughter was given a cubicle for an office. But she was
given a desktop while everybody else has a laptop. When she asked for a laptop
that she can also bring home; the employees say that she should be given the
oldest and heaviest laptop and that she cannot open her files at home because that
is a security risk.
Then there is the problem of a disability friendly bathroom.
There are four floors in the office building. On the first day that my daughter
reported for work, she discovered she could not use any bathrooms. The Power
wheel chair could not enter any door. During the weekend, the administration
hurriedly transformed a disability accessible toilet cubicle in the fourth
floor. When my daughter went up to the fourth floor to use it; her number two
boss asked her what was she doing there. It is a highly classified IT floor,
considered a high security risk. Employees say that my daughter’s using a
disability accessible toilet in the fourth floor is a high security risk.
Perhaps, not even Bill Gates or Melinda Gates would agree to this downright
discrimination in their IT fourth floor.
Everybody also has a card to swipe the office door open. My
daughter has been asking for this card since the beginning. She is passed on
from one admin staff to another. When finally she reaches the authority who
releases the card, he says that it is not his job. One week after joining
formalities, my daughter still has no card to swipe open the door. She has four titanium metal plates, two rods and ten screws in her spinal column, and she is forced
to open the door manually with her meager strength, and from her Power wheel chair. The security people simply
watch her and comment that she has studied so much abroad but such a simple
problem of a card she cannot solve. The sub text to this kind of comments from
employees is that Ivy League graduates are not as good as Indian educated MBA’s
who proliferate but are becoming suspect in the international arena as
falsifying their credentials.
Reasonable Accommodation in Transportation
Before accepting this contract to work, my daughter asked
for reasonable accommodation in transportation. So she is given a monthly
transportation allowance, even if at the end, it is deductible from her basic
pay. She goes to work in a rent a car, which costs 350 rupees one way;
therefore 700 rupees back and forth. My husband wakes
up at dawn to fetch my daughter and bring her to office. He rides in a three
wheeler for ten rupees, rides the metro train for twenty rupees, and then rides
a three wheeler for fifteen rupees. He spends fifty rupees one way, one hundred
rupees two way, or two hundred rupees a day just to fetch and bring my daughter to
office in the morning; then fetch her from office and bring home to the company
guest house. Two hundred rupees a day is out of his pocket. So he is literally
subsidizing the office transportation of my daughter. That is the meaning of reasonable
transportation in the Gulag company.
Reasonable Accommodation in Housing
My daughter and I am staying in a company guest house for
fifteen days since joining formalities. There are twin beds, air conditioning
and fan, hot and cold water in the bathroom. But the electricity is erratic. There
are half a dozen blackouts a day. There is a converter that could provide power
during this blackouts; but it could only accommodate lights and electric fan.
You cannot even connect your laptop to the dead sockets.
Speaking of laptops. We have our own personal laptops. There
is WIFI in the company guest house. But this is how the Gulag company monitors
and harasses and abuses their incoming employees. The contract says that employees cannot use
their Facebook in and about work. But certainly, family members are not
included in that contract. I should be able to access my own Email and Twitter and
LinkedIn. My daughter has stopped Facebook, which is one of the pleasures of
her life as a creative writer. Facebook has helped her recover from her surgery
in the number one and top hospital of the United States. Facebook has given her encouragement and support as she plodded through her masteral thesis in graduate school.
Facebook is a meaningful part of her life. Now for a job that pays one thousand
five hundred dollars a month, and that includes all benefits, she is giving up
her joy.
The lesson here is that an Ivy League graduate should not
sell down her cutting edge degree. An Ivy League graduate is worth sixty to
ninety thousand dollars a year salary. The minimum pay in an American
corporation is forty thousand dollars. To agree to a salary of one thousand
five hundred dollars a month and get relocated to the Third world is cheap. One
ends up meeting cheap people, cheap mind construct, cheap human capital who
do not realize they are abused as slave labor workers and consequently they also
enslave their co-workers. Would Mark Zuckerberg even think of this?
Now what happens is that because whoever is monitoring us
cannot do it 24/7; and it certainly is not their job nor is it included in their job description. What they do is cut off our WIFI connection. So here I am with
no internet connection but having all the time to reflect and write about Gulag
IT service companies.
Mitt Romney is really wrong about outsourcing to India. What about the policy of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton?
Conclusion
My daughter knows her rights as taught to her in Disability Law at Penn Law. She has the best professor. She knows that she should identify herself as a Person of Disability, and demand for her disability rights, in three prongs.
Conclusion
My daughter knows her rights as taught to her in Disability Law at Penn Law. She has the best professor. She knows that she should identify herself as a Person of Disability, and demand for her disability rights, in three prongs.