By Sujit Bhar
In the background of Infosys founder Narayana Murthy’s controversial comment about 70-hour work weeks, came the news of the death of an employee of the Pune office of international accounting firm Ernst & Young (EY). The 26-year-old Anna Sebastian Perayil had allegedly died due to an extremely heavy workload and stress.
The office remained unrepentant and it has been said that not a single employee of the firm cared to even attend Anna’s funeral. Thereafter, EY India Chairman Rajiv Memani has issued some inane statements that failed to resonate with the general public. In a letter to Memani, a grieving Anna’s mother claimed that her daughter died on July 21 after being burdened with a “backbreaking workload” and “work stress”. Anna was just four months into her job.
Based on this letter, the Union Labour Ministry ordered a probe and it has now been found that the office was functioning without the state permit that regulates work hours. Since it had opened its offices in 2007, the office had been operating in flagrant disregard of law and without a permit.
According to a report, Maharashtra’s Additional Labour Commissioner Shailendra Pol has confirmed that the Pune EY office did not register under the Shops and Establishments Act, which limits working hours to 9 hours per day and 48 hours per week. Pol said: “EY applied for registration only in February 2024, which we rejected because they have been non-compliant since the office opened in 2007.” The company
has been given a short notice to explain this lapse.
The issue of this death has travelled further, with the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) having taken suo motu cognizance of the issue. The NHRC’s argument is that if this case has substance, then such issues of severe anxiety, mental stress and lack of sleep tends to affect young workers adversely, violating their basic human rights. A statement from the NHRC said: “It is the prime duty of every employer to provide a safe, secure and positive environment to its employees. They must ensure that everyone working with them is treated with dignity and fairness.”
The NHRC has issued a notice to the Union Ministry of Labour and Employment (this is the oversight ministry, while each state has its own version of the Act), seeking a detailed report within four weeks. The NHRC also wants to know what steps are being taken to prevent recurrence of such incidents.
As the issue stands, the probe and the hullabaloo around the death is bound to see a premature closure in an atmosphere where employee benefits reside at the bottom rung of corporate ladders. This has been aggravated by the nationwide rise in unemployment and through the slide in remuneration levels across the board. While the economy of the country keeps growing at a fast clip, companies show several external factors to snip away at remuneration packages and even in hiring.
Such a disastrous situation was evident recently when a recent report cited a placement crisis at India’s top technical institute, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). The report, citing disclosures under the Right to Information (RTI) Act by IIT Kanpur alumnus Dheeraj Singh, said no fewer than 38 percent of IIT graduates across all 23 campuses remain unemployed.
In his Linkedin post, Singh mentioned that 8,000 students failed to secure placements through campus recruitment this year and that this is a sharp increase from two years ago, when the number who failed to find placement was 3,400.
This figure is startling. If this reflects the joblessness that afflicts the top institutes of the country, one can surely imagine the condition of other institutes. It is being believed that organisations, including firms such as EY, are taking full advantage of this situation to drive home to its employees the fact that it is “my way or the highway”. While Anna may have succumbed to her condition, there would remain millions of others who remain silent sufferers within this condition.
The positive thing that may emanate from this incident is that laws that had been deemed to have been dead a long time back are slowly being brought back to life. There needs to be awareness of such laws that allow full participation of an employee in the workings of the organisation, within the ambit of law. When we consider the human rights involved, this becomes a larger and more pertinent issue.
It is also pertinent—especially in this particular case—that the women workforce of any office is protected by several employment codes of the Union Labour Ministry and such will have to be followed. With the parents of the deceased stating that they do not wish to pursue further litigation in this issue, maybe several other instances of violation of legal and human rights of Anna would remain unresolved.
With Indian laws able to provide succour, it becomes incumbent on the public to use every sentence of legislation to effect. That is the only way such imbalances in employment may be solved.