Days have passed since the death of Anna Sebastian Perayil, the 26-year-old chartered accountant with a renowned multinational company, from stress related to work. One has not heard a single voice of sympathy for the dead girl from the corporate world. It was expected. Most of them are complicit in similar crime against employees.
So when Swiggy Food and Marketplace CEO Rohit Kapoor spoke out against the ‘hustle culture’ in many industries, it was no surprise that it received wide applause. Kapoor, speaking at an event in Bengaluru, stressed on work-life balance. The pursuit of success, he said, should not come at a cost to mental and physical health. Hard work is good and essential but not so being crazy about it, he emphasised.
“You need to work hard, but not be crazy to the point that you sacrifice your personal life…Go home, be with your dog, wife, girlfriend, kids. Do something,” he said. The short inference from his words is ‘Guys, go home. Have a life. Work is not everything.’
Nice words. But do the employees have a choice? Do they have any protection, legal and otherwise, if they choose to refuse work at ungodly hours or of ungodly duration? Could Anna have said no to all additional work poured on her? The answer is no.
Hustle culture, for those not in the know, refers to a workplace environment where success, and ambition get heavily prioritised over self-care, including work-life balance. It glorifies overwork. Youngsters, eager to prove themselves and achieve professional goals, get trapped in the culture. Organisations foster competition and in-house rivalry to extract the maximum out of them, and they simply don’t realise when to put their foot down.
Before they know it, they would be slaves, trying to be superior to other slaves, all the while being exploited by the organisation. Hard work is not such a problem if they were genuinely appreciated, compensated well enough, allowed to be more than machines, and treated with empathy and respect. Of course, if their personal life and health were taken care of.
Unfortunately, continuous graveyard shifts, meetings after duty hours, work beyond official brief, verbal orders from bosses, work without a break, harassment and workplace toxicity have come to be accepted as normal. One wonders whether the younger generation is even aware that many things the organisation demands from them are on the wrong side of the law. Surely, it would not have been taught in whichever institution they emerge from. It’s another matter that labour laws mean little to most organisations.
Parents gloating about the salary package of their children hardly realise the situation of stress, anxiety and generally dehumanising environment the latter could be walking into. They should notice how exhausted and drained the children are; and how disconnected they are from social support networks, including friends, and how lonely. It’s time they woke up to the nasty reality of corporate work culture.
For youngsters, Rohit Kapoor has the right message: ‘Go, have a life.’ Success in career is not the ultimate measure of self-worth. The truth is there’s no difference between a slave and a bigger slave.
(By Arrangements With Perspective Bytes)
