We Indians sure are a melodramatic lot. If you live a while in India, it won’t take you long to conclude that it’s not just our movies that love to resort to it at the drop of a hat (I will admit though that the new wave of Indian cinema is different in this regard) but that even the average auto-driver on the streets of Hyderabad has a penchant to resort to melodrama without much provocation at all.
In truth, it is an affliction that affects everybody from politicians who make sweeping statements on camera (NT Rama Rao, former CM of Andhra Pradesh, perfected this to an art when he was alive) to business leaders who use the media to make bombastic pronouncements as if they were actors in the grandest soap of them all.
This past week saw much the same penchant for melodrama on display, as Jet Airways unceremoniously laid off 1900 of its employees and then turned right around and hired them back in a heartbeat as the political and media heat got turned up on them.
The whole incident was ridiculous at so many levels that I don’t even know where to begin.
Let’s start with Jet Airways and the manner in which they went about laying people off. Clearly, the once-booming aviation sector in India has hit a really rough patch. With the price of oil more than doubling over the last year and the global financial meltdown hitting home, it was clear that the airline had to do some serious cost-cutting or run the risk of going bankrupt. While any professionally-managed company would go about this in a more sensible way, Jet decided that the best way to inform employees that they were being terminated was by announcing it to the media! Wait, the stupidity doesn’t end there. Employees were called up at the end of their day and simply told not to bother coming back the next! If there was ever the worst possible execution of a round of layoffs, this had to be it.
But it didn’t end there, of course. Before you knew it, there was an uproar amongst politicians, one of whom promised Jet that none of its flights would take off from Mumbai unless it took all employees back without condition. The ultimate quote came from Veerappa Moily, who said, “Hire and fire is not a proper labour policy… we do not approve [of] this.” The Congress also added, “India is not America.”
There you have it, the classic Indian socialist mindset mixed with hypocrisy at its best. We love capitalism only as long as it’s boom-time!
And sure enough, two days later, Jet’s Chairman, Naresh Goyal, announced that it was his decision to reinstate all employees who had been laid off.
“I apologise for all the agony you went through,” he told a news conference in Mumbai, adding that he could not bear to “see tears in their eyes”. “The management will have to understand sometimes in a family there are disagreements, but the father of the family decides.”
Although it was stressed over and over that the decision was not made under political pressure, I think we all know what went on behind the scenes!
This whole incident, I believe, is a reminder of how our country’s brush with globalization until now has been one really long party, starting from the early 90s. Salaries went up, up, up. You could change jobs every month of the year and only scale greater heights. The stock market kept smashing records and made us all feel like we had truly arrived on the global stage. In all the euphoria, nobody really cared that globalization is really a two-way street.
But make no mistake, the global financial crisis will take its toll in India. There will be retrenchment, cost-cutting and an overall slowdown of growth. People will be reminded that what goes up must indeed come down.
As they say in America, “The party’s over.”
