Amazon Hyderabad fires employee for complaint against company's working hours

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swatkats

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The Amazon Development Center in Hyderabad has terminated the services of one of its senior operations managers for raising a red flag against alleged violation of labor laws with respect to the company's working hours. The Amazon employee, 31-year-old Vijay Gopal R, is a Hyderabad-based activist and is responsible for several path-breaking reforms from the regulation of school and college fees to free parking. He is the founder of the Forum against Corruption, an independent body that keeps an eye on graft. However, Vijay's four-year journey with Amazon, where he served as an L5 operations manager, came to an end on 27 November when he received a letter of termination.
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newsmeter.in

Amazon Hyderabad fires employee for complaint against company's working hours

The Amazon Development Center in Hyderabad has terminated the services of one of its senior operations managers for raising a red flag against alleged violation of labour laws with respect to the...
newsmeter.in newsmeter.in
www.newindianexpress.com

Amazon sacked me after complaint on 'unfair' labour practices: Hyderabad anti-corruption activist

HYDERABAD: Vijay Gopal, an anti-corruption activist in the city, has alleged that the Amazon Development Centre sacked him for complaining to the Telangana Labo
www.newindianexpress.com www.newindianexpress.com


If you are from Hyderabad, You may recognize this guy who has fought for Free parking when the unofficial parking mafia was at peaks. He's relentlessly fighting for Regulated School fees and even for the rights of Police personnel.

Infamous Amazon for its Labor practices has done what it has always been doing.



https://twitter.com/x/status/1333393641834905600
 
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Labor laws in India are a pathetic joke. They are geared only towards the blue collars because they are viewed as vote banks. White collars are predominately viewed as middle class and form the largest base of taxpayers so the govt doesn’t antagonise corporate and employers with stringent laws because they don’t care about middle class salaried tax payers and they needed to drive employment so they conveniently turn a blind eye to corporate misdeeds. The creamy layer who are also white collars (MD/CXO/VP/GM) etc are taxed heavily enough by the govt to bother about and their numbers are far too less to matter anyway.

Net result ?

1. companies can delay salaries
2. Companies can deduct salaries/reduce salaries on ad hoc basis but extract full work from staff
3. Companies can resort to putting staff on “leave without pay” which they heavily resorted to in this pandemic.. a form of forced unemployment to the extent that if an employee reached the limit and resigned the company would show it as employee resignation and thus would not be liable to pay for termination etc A LOT of companies did this.

India’s history is replete with examples where companies that went bust but who had international presence, ensured that their staff and others were paid in foreign countries with strict labor laws which could hold the owners/top level accountable stringently, were paid on time and in line with contracts but Indian staff were left with massive dues on account of salaries not paid/delayed. I won’t take names but 2 high profile companies in the last 10 years are perfect examples.

This will continue to remain the norm in my view.. with the govt pushing for make in India and attracting more manufacturing here, don’t expect anything to improve for educated/salaried workers.

lastly regarding Amazon, let’s just say I’m not surprised. I have a resident in my building who works with them and let’s just say long busy work hours is an understatement for him
 
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Are you supposed to count the lunch hour under the working hours.
Anyhow, the 'working hours' in India are definitely only in law and not implemented unless it is labor job.
As a personal opinion, I don't believe that 'working hours' can be implemented in white collar jobs. Every person is not efficient at the same level and hence for white collar jobs, one has to set goals according to tasks as everyone will take different time for same job. So, this 'hours based' scheduling concept can't work for white collar jobs, IMHO.
 
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I do not feel surprised at all with such practices. If you look at what people feel in the other countries, they believe Indians, Chinese and Vietnamese etc. can actually go to any length in order to make money. They feel that Indians can work for any time these big brands demand and most of the Indians satisfy their expectations. Sitting for long hours in office without having any work and no uttering a word even when the workload is increased without an increase in pay is a common practice by Indian corporate job holders. And then brands scare people by firing the people who rebel. I wonder if corporate workers have a personal life.
 
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My brother works in a middle management position in a prominent PSU. It's hell of a job if you count working hours. It's almost 11-12 hours a day ! No off days on Saturdays and he gets called on Sundays too , even if it's a small type emergency.
 
rdst_1 said:
Are you supposed to count the lunch hour under the working hours.
Anyhow, the 'working hours' in India are definitely only in law and not implemented unless it is labor job.
As a personal opinion, I don't believe that 'working hours' can be implemented in white collar jobs. Every person is not efficient at the same level and hence for white collar jobs, one has to set goals according to tasks as everyone will take different time for same job. So, this 'hours based' scheduling concept can't work for white collar jobs, IMHO.
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IMO - Purpose of such legislation is not to provide a set of rights and wrongs for every use case, but to provide an overarching guideline on what's in best interest of both employees and organizations. Project Managers, HR and other management employees exist for a reason, its their job to make sure they hire and estimate keeping working conditions in mind. Why are they being paid if not for that ?

There was a time when paying a person for labor was not required or mandatory, these horror stories sometimes pop up even today.
If an entrepreneur wants to work hard to grow his business and become rich, he/she is free to do so, even making people who agree work overtime is allowed, but pay them for it.

Companies expect most employees work overtime regularly and fill '40' hours in their time sheet. Nobody protests if this happened only during production releases or a few times a year, but making it a part of day to day culture is exploitation. That's illegal.
 
JMP said:
Companies expect most employees work overtime regularly and fill '40' hours in their time sheet. Nobody protests if this happened only during production releases or a few times a year, but making it a part of day to day culture is exploitation. That's illegal.
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I would like to re-iterate what I wrote in the post you quoted. The 'white-collar' jobs, shouldn't have an hourly limit. It should be based on performance specific standards since the 'hour metric' doesn't mean anything for such jobs.
But of course, it is too much to expect our govts to keep updating the laws according to changing times, so what happens is what you described above. The company can't survive if their employees only worked 40hrs but they have to adhere to the laws and so they file bogus reports. What's an even a bigger indicator of this is how even govt employees have to work more than this stipulated 40hrs to keep up with their work.
 
rdst_1 said:
I would like to re-iterate what I wrote in the post you quoted. The 'white-collar' jobs, shouldn't have an hourly limit. It should be based on performance specific standards since the 'hour metric' doesn't mean anything for such jobs.
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I get your point, but what do you mean by performance specific standard ? How would you generalize it for all white collar fields ?

My point was that the law was never meant to be a benchmark for employers to measure their productivity. It was intended to protect health and social life of an employee. Its responsibility of the organization to ensure their KPIs (key performance indicators) do not end up causing majority of their employees staying for more than 40 hours in the workplace.
 
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JMP said:
I get your point, but what do you mean by performance specific standard ? How would you generalize it for all white collar fields ?

My point was that the law was never meant to be a benchmark for employers to measure their productivity. It was intended to protect health and social life of an employee. Its responsibility of the organization to ensure their KPIs (key performance indicators) do not end up causing majority of their employees staying for more than 40 hours in the workplace.
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Of course, the performance specific standards can't be generalized and as you rightly pointed out, they would be organization specific and they might even be project specific.
What you are talking about, is usually an ideal situation where majority of employees are efficient at their work and the performance standards which allow them to only work for 40hrs a week will also be profitable for the company.
It is a well known fact, that most Indian graduates are unemployable. As an employer, who might have to employ them anyway because there are no other choices, it is much easier to let them work for longer hours against having to fire them for not being fast/efficient enough so that both, the company is profitable and they don't work more than 40hrs.
In simpler terms, I'd rather provide employment to people who are less efficient but get the work done by working longer hours as that allows me to operate profitably and also provide decent pay to my employees rather than closing down my business because I can't find enough people who can finish the work within 40hrs a week work schedule.
 
My take on this very different. Having worked for quite some time in various IT companies I have learned that most of the work in these jobs can easily be done in 4-5 hours a day by a competent person (not counting the various meetings which are more often than not simply a waste of everyone's time). Folks who are not able to complete the work within 8-9 hours are usually not managing their time well and/or are totally incompetent in the job.

Simply forcing extra time on employees never really improves productivity, everyone just adapts to wasting more time accordingly & keep doing the same amount of work. There are definitely situations where more time is actually required but this doesn't happen through out the year & is usually limited to product release cycles/new launces etc.

The root cause of the problem is actually the mindset of employers today, they actually do not want to retain experienced folks due to high salaries & prefer bringing in new folks at low salaries. The other problem in Indian white collar jobs is that employees are expected to keep getting promoted frequently else they are considered as under performing. In developed markets the story is quite different where folks stay in same role for 10 or 20 odd years without having any issues & as a result they get very good in their jobs which simply doesn't happen in our Indian job scene.

Regarding Amazon, they have been following similar practices everywhere & have made a name for themselves in this. I don't think any government can do anything in our country simply due to the unemployment numbers & the lack of job opportunities. The best we can hope is that more companies start hiring in India due to the recent changes in labor laws & people get multiple opportunities to choose from.
 
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The labour laws
Ankit Gupta said:
I do not feel surprised at all with such practices. If you look at what people feel in the other countries, they believe Indians, Chinese and Vietnamese etc. can actually go to any length in order to make money. They feel that Indians can work for any time these big brands demand and most of the Indians satisfy their expectations. Sitting for long hours in office without having any work and no uttering a word even when the workload is increased without an increase in pay is a common practice by Indian corporate job holders. And then brands scare people by firing the people who rebel. I wonder if corporate workers have a personal life.
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Totally agree with your point here, the perception of Indians is such that we are perceived no less than labours by corporates, no wonder that all the big shot corporate companies hire Indians in large amounts because they only see us as "cheap labour". In India, law and order is anyway just a piece of paper and no matter what the labour laws say, it is very easy for companies to get away with making employees work overtime without having the moral obligation to pay them for it and being totally inconsiderate of their mental health.

According to the Labour Law in India: "As per the Factories Act 1948, every adult (a person who has completed 18 years of age) cannot work for more than 48 hours in a week and not more than 9 hours in a day. According to Section 51 of the Act, the spread over should not exceed 10-1/2 hours."

Speaking of personal life, I have experienced this myself that the senior management in such corporates does have it and they just tend to pass on their share of work to overload the low-scale employees. Only a few of them actually have policies where the employee can complain against such practices of the higher management to the HR, but sadly it is not practiced widely.
 
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swatkats said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1345021427309658115
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I have no idea what life in Amazon is like but this guy is most prob an idiot. The letter is an incoherent word salad. I have some experience of dealing with people with no grasp on reality. This behavior looks familiar. I doubt anyone in Amazon is worried about his attacks.

WTF is this:

"Instead of sacking senior Managers who approve goals that are met by 99% people, designed by their unskilled PETS' who have NO statistical understanding or Qualifications, & holding such Incompetent managers accountable, they found this CHEAP way of managing their employees'."

And no, Jack Welch didn't conceive of the Bell curve. You can't talk about other people's knowledge of statistics if you get something this basic wrong.
 
Tushar Sharma said:
Because this is Amazon, the news has been highlighted but the fact is that many people across India are facing such issues with the private firms they work with. Of course, people look to earn more and more these days and try to impress their bosses in the matter. I think the main culprits are those who work for extra hours without even demanding extra money. I have seen such people at many places who would keep sitting in the office, doing nothing, but just to impress the boss with their presence.
And the bosses who consider these employees good enough are actually destroying the career of hard workers who finish their work in time. Corporate work culture in India needs a serious makeover and in this matter, the ones doing the US shifts are far more in comfort.
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Agreed, bosses who promote such kind of working culture are the ones who themselves have become manager(boss) by doing this "chatukarita".
 
Amazon is famous even in the US for having terrible working practices - and that's just for their highly-paid engineers, not for the thousands of low-skilled warehouse workers. Right now there's a unionization drive in a couple of Amazon warehouses and Amazon is in the news in the US for trying every legal and some not-so-legal ways to stop it.
I shudder to think how bad working conditions must be for desi AMZ warehouse workers compared to American ones.
A friend of a friend who worked for them in Seattle once described how people on his team used to go 6 floors down to use the bathroom because if they went to the bathroom on their floor they would be seen by their manager and that was dangerous.
If I recall correctly, Amazon lays off a certain amount of (tech) staff every year as an on-going practice. I'm sure that's limited to the US and not in the EU where that would probably be seen as coercive on the part of the employer.
 
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