Importing a toxic work culture into India Premium

The working hours and practices in the multinationals working in India must be regulated by the government

An Indian woman in her twenties, working in Pune for a major consultancy firm, died one day after returning home from work. Her mother believes that this had resulted from exhaustion due to overwork at the office.

While the deeper cause would be difficult to ascertain, her parents have spoken publicly about their daughter informing them about the long hours she faced at work and the stress she endured from unreasonably close deadlines for reports.

Moreover, soon after the news of her death broke, at least one former employee has written or spoken in the public domain regarding the work culture that they experienced at the same company, which led him to leave. Ironically, on the website of the firm’s ‘India Office’ the first entry is a banner declaring that the company’s purpose is “building a better working world”

The firm concerned is a so-called multinational. This term is somewhat of an oxymoron, reflected in the reality that every multinational company has a distinct national affiliation, and national governments avidly work to further the prospects of their own multinationals (MNCs). Thus, when United States President Bill Clinton visited India in 2000, where he was mobbed by our parliamentarians in the Lok Sabha, he had come with a posse of American CEOs seeking opportunities. Most of the world’s multinationals are American. This explains their work culture, the essential part of which is an emphasis on long hours apart from the relentless pressure to fulfil stringent targets, whether of sales or, in the case of accounting/consultancy firms, commissioned reports for clients ranging from for-profit firms to governments.

It is useful to understand the provenance of the work culture found in multinationals. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. came to have an outsized influence on global affairs, and its economic architecture, including the work culture, came to be seen as the gold standard. From accounting practices to what is considered normal when it comes to hours of work, ‘the American way’ became the norm. Now, the culture of the multinationals came to possess the cachet of being of American origin even if the company itself may not be. This culture has a history.

The German sociologist, Max Weber, showed how the reformation of Christianity in northern Europe altered the view of work. Protestantism, especially Calvinism, doctrinally supported worldly activities dedicated to economic gain, seeing them as endowed with a moral and spiritual significance that was equal to working for the Church, which Catholicism had privileged. Weber identified the protestant ethic as a driver of early capitalism. As America was founded by northern Europeans intent on establishing a community based on Protestant beliefs, it is not difficult to see where the glorification of work that came to define the American way of life came from. Weber relies on the writings of the American thinker, Benjamin Franklin, to make his case. The point of all this is to see that the work culture at MNCs is not based on ergonomics or organisational psychology but is actually of religious extraction.

For the economist, it remains pertinent to ask where the American obsession with work has got Americans. I shall base my investigation on data issued by the International Labour Organisation. If we were to make a global comparison of national per capita incomes, a standard measure of the standard of living of a population, we would find that hard work has got the U.S. quite far for sure but not as far as others without the same approach to work. In 2023, the U.S. was the 12th globally in terms of GNP per capita. If we take Guyana out of this list — it was only barely ahead — 10 countries were ahead of the U.S. These were Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland. Note that apart from a tiny Asian country, the rest of the list is exclusively of western European countries.