Unorganized labour cheap across the world?

The New York Times recently published a report on Amazon’s orientation process in the US. It carried depressing behavior of Amazon officials reminding new recruits to dump their ‘poor habits’ they might have learned at previous jobs, ‘hit the wall’ and eventually ‘Climb the wall’. Recruits toil hard to meet or exceed expectations the company boasts are ‘unreasonably high’, and they can then declare "I'm Peculiar" – a virtual award to everyone who gets the perfect score.

For a company toying with the idea of delivery by drones but has workers suffering from cancer and miscarriages claiming they were edged out or unfairly evaluated, this could either be an HR innovation, or possibly an HR disaster.

Around 400 Flipkart and Myntra employees went on strike last month. They claimed they never receive enough uniforms, no proper access to toilets, inhuman shift timings and no weekly off days. The same company has also been in the news for making significant changes to its maternity leave policy and for implementing a comprehensive adoption assistance programme for employees to help their staff through crucial personal events.

While there have been conjectures and confusions, there is a common pattern weaved in the gamut of these disconnected cases – it’s often the lower rung that complain. This was also true of past complaints of abuse by IT employees and the Maruti fiasco in the automobile industry around two years ago.

While getting Flipkart deliverymen to speak up about their problems was like trying to get blood out of a stone, we spoke to an HR consultant to get a fair idea of what might be wrong with India’s e-commerce industry.

“Most outsourced staff in the industry get a raw deal. Often these deliverymen are outsourced staff. However, this might end up impacting the last mile delivery and the final point of contact with the customer”, Prashant Parashar, Princple Consultant, Potentia Growth Services says
If outsourced staff might put customer satisfaction at risk, why would billion dollar companies bet their reputation, and be at the brink?

“Outsourced staff may not always be a bad idea. It’s the way you deal with them. Outsourcing scales costs for startups and helps gather processes in a short span. It’s the question of the governance process to ensure that your staff adheres to certain standard”, Parashar says.
So is could be the crux of major labour problems in the Indian industry?

“There is a large section of unorganized labour in India where exploitation is still rampant. At the senior level there is a relatively higher employee crunch and higher supply-demand issue whereas there is relatively high supply of unskilled labour in India. Emerging industries are in a process of evolution. The market will punish employers who don’t get this fixed soon”, Parashar says.

Image credit: Indiatimes