Today's Corporate World

I often wonder when the “easy” days are coming. Challenges come in many shapes, sizes, and danger levels. Attitude often determines whether people face these crises successfully or crumble under the pressure. No one wants to exist in crisis management mode forever. This attitude often generates the wrong results when find a job, earn some money for living, becomes the challenge on the table.

With the rise of Globalization, Economics and economists view reality through the lens of money.  Everything has its price, they believe, from rain forests to human labor to the air we breathe.

Our country is in the process of being built on various fronts like education, healthcare, tourism, fishing and agriculture, and industrialization … As for the society, it was in a flux.  Except for rich resort owners and those who held high posts in the government agencies and the bureaucracy, or public sector undertakings, everyone more or less is economically at par.

There are thousands of people in the corporate world who worked for a better future, but the general fervor that pervaded the very atmosphere then is somehow absent today. If we had been working together to better lives then, it is more of a ‘benefactor -beneficiary’ exercise today.

Activist literature colored our thoughts or rather robbed them of color. Everything had to be in two shades – black and white. If your freedom is curbed, fight and then bolt. Bad work environment? What are you still doing there? Walk out! Boss being mean and you feel discriminated? Just slap him and resign from the job!   Black and White – that was life. Where was the need to complicate it?

It took a while to realize that while issues could be in black and white. Problems have hundreds of shades and unless we can see them, we would be the losers in the end.

(And strangely today, things seem to have come as a full circle here too, but with a twist. It is now to do with individualism tinged with radicalism. Corporate world is junked as being political, with the danger of throwing out the workers with their position itself, compromise is considered weakness and a blow to one’s self-respect (or ego?) at work environment.

Back to the past: one thing had changed for us though; we wanted answers to a lot of questions that were baffling at the work place – Employment Act and beliefs including employment Tribunal and the place of a worker in the Corporate Ladder, starting with the basic rights has been created and became vital. Even though very few supported their colleague in their quest for answers and sometimes didn’t even understand what the noise was all about. It even upset the policy makers that the people were asking questions about things that had been accepted hitherto meekly. As our minds had been opened and we began thinking about the rights of an employee and other things that affected our lives.

Changing lifestyles and increasing incomes, rise in inflation; saw another phenomenon at the work environment and job market. Employees are reportedly being discriminated against for their gender, disabilities, religion and even in retaliation for a multitude of different reasons. Sometimes, the discrimination can be so subtle, that it goes unnoticed and unreported.  Despite all the awareness created, statistics from government organizations upholding the country’s employment act shows that still the Workplace discrimination and harassment  occurs, during the process of selection of staff for the job, Training and type of training being offered, Being considered for a transfer, promotion or sacking, and by setting Work place conditions at larger scale.

Political changes and the dilemma in the name of democracy have also created a new job market. Sacking people when ever they needed and giving jobs to the ones they chose without even thinking about their position and qualifications, earning extra money made the difference between eating one meal and starving for the poor. Erstwhile employer and employee and the change was cleaving the once near homogeneous fabric of society that they didn’t see anything wrong in sending their kids to work instead of to school or provide them with higher education. Some were sent to work in companies as child laborer.. If poverty had bound people, development drew them asunder. It was a sad thing that the very same benefits which were intended for everyone in the society were slowly being appropriated by the privileged few.

Slowly and almost imperceptibly the concerns of the discrimination began changing and then completely diverge. And while we were finding our feet and even sprouting wings, they were still floundering on the filthy earth.

The divide that began in the past has widened today to an unbridgeable chasm, with no apparent meeting ground of the two in sight. Even with so many women at top positions in government agencies and political corridors today, the status of the poor nonetheless is still the same. A large part of our working population, whether urban or rural is still in the grip of insecurity, ignorance, violence, exploitation and discrimination at work on top of everything else. The worst ignominy for this working population of the nation is that we have no job security; we have no proper guidelines to follow, even with the so called Employment act which is  just a structure that has no base in it. So what kind of development have we achieved in the last half century?

And the Activists, or who raised their voice against discrimination? Well, they groped their way through, fought, argued, questioned and sometimes found answers, but often didn’t. But they had the advantage of a better social and financial standing when compared to low income group and they were resourceful… but that’s not the end I guess, even for them!!