June
1995 - Self-organisation
Some of the most recent literature
on the labour market seems to have concentrated
on the evolution of work. It is as if people are
beginning at last to question the motivation for
work. Is it an economic or social necessity or
a mixture of both?
The question is important. Only
when we know why people work can we develop effective
strategies for compensation and motivation. I
was reminded of this raison d'etre during a recent
visit to Bombay when I encountered the system
that delivers lunch to the city's office workers.
Every morning at the main station
termini from about 11.30 onwards, men, carrying
long wooden trays on their heads, struggle to
extricate themselves from the railway carriages
of incoming trains. Each tray contains about 30
round tins, like tall paint tins. These tins,
or dabbas, each contain the lunch of one office
worker.
The tins are handled by dabbawallahs,
men whose job it is each day to collect the lunch
tins from the office workers' wives at their suburban
homes, bring in the lunches, then collect the
empty tins and repeat the distribution process
in reverse.
Each tin has some small marks,
symbols and numbers, identifying where the owner
can be found. The dabbawallahs are expert at sorting
and distributing them. Some estimates reckon that
as many as 100,000 lunches are delivered in this
way in Bombay every day. Why?
The dabbawallahs are unique to
Bombay. They emerged from the desire of a single
British office worker more than 100 years ago,
during the Raj, to have his lunch cooked by his
wife and brought to his desk. The fashion caught
on and today, even though fast food is beginning
to appear in Bombay, there seems no real threat
to the system.
Labour is cheap, which means
that the delivery system and cost to the customer
is also cheap. It could be equated with the price
of posting a letter. The system is efficient.
Those who use it say it provides an important
social link with their home and with their colleagues,
since the arrival of the dabbas is one of the
few opportunities employees have each day to break
off and sit around a table and talk to each other.
It is cheaper than outside restaurant
meals, but surely not cheaper than sandwiches
or a prepared meal and fruit in a Tupperware box.
Also, why can't people take their empty dabba
back home with them? Looking at the system logically
it is arguably an unnecessary waste of work, particularly
to western eyes schooled on maximising the efficiency
of every job.
A counter argument says that
the 2,300 dabbawallahs, all members of the Union
of Tiffin Box Suppliers Association, would be
begging on the streets without their work. It
makes them happy and gives them a few rupees for
their families, it makes the office workers happy
- although wives might not like the way that it
confines them to the kitchen - and it works. It
is a perfect example of work driven by fashion
and social need, where economic considerations
play a secondary role.
Nowhere, perhaps, is labour such
an important national economic factor than in
India. With 880m people, keeping a plentiful supply
of work has become essential to maintaining order
and incomes at sustainable levels. Much of the
work, however, seems unnecessary. The state sector
is bulging with bodies filing bits of paper on
dusty shelves, passing forms from one desk to
another, often getting in the way of projects
which could inject genuine economic life into
the country.
Regulations in the property and
labour sectors tie the hands of those who might
want to create new businesses, while old businesses,
such as the textile mills of Bombay, grind along,
unable to compete with those which have moved
away from the urban areas.
Finance houses, banks and stockbrokers
have clamoured to enter the Indian market on the
back of economic liberalisation only to find that
liberalisation, at this stage at least, falls
quite short of what might be expected in the UK,
US or Hong Kong.
The financial markets have boomed
in Bombay, yet there is none of the accompanying
city regeneration or construction that usually
goes with a boom. Developers are not allowed to
develop because of the property laws. Industrial
manufacturers find it difficult to move out to
cheaper production sites because of tough labour
laws that make it hard to create redundancies.
Some recruiters argue that each
redundancy would be replaced by several jobs -
in construction alone, not to mention the new
office jobs emerging - if the market were allowed
to function as it could.
Yet the free market is viewed
with suspicion in India, partly as a result of
the legacy of administration under the East India
Company and partly due to a fear of cultural dilution
by western ideals, something which is already
happening. Additionally there is a belief that
any solutions to poverty emerging from the capitalist
system have been by-products of the system rather
than stemming from values embodied in any capitalist
ethos.
Some of the big established companies,
such as the Tata empire, have adopted Quaker-style
employment policies in parts of their businesses,
providing housing and social welfare for employees
and families. Some of the new human resource policies,
such as performance-related pay, are beginning
to break on to the scene but in a fragmented way.
It used to be the case that the
west looked guardedly at countries like India
as a threat to its own manufacturing base because
of the ready supply of cheap labour. It has been
argued that some of the Indian labour laws had
their roots in a desire by 19th century British
textile manufacturers to even out competition.
All that it succeeded in doing was to delay the
inevitable.
Today there is another way of
looking at India - as a market for western goods.
But to have that market, the Indian employee must
have purchasing power, and it seems that only
liberalisation can achieve this. Not only are
the west's future export markets emerging in developing
countries, these countries are also beginning
to provide high technology labour.
The Indians are becoming aware
of their human potential in the field of information
technology. One computer software designer told
me that hardly a US software company existed that
did not have at least a sprinkling of Indians
in its research and development department. Many
well-known transnational companies now use Indian
computer expertise.
Software design has the advantage
of mobility. It is a job that can be done almost
anywhere. Sourcing computer work in areas with
intelligent employees but low labour costs is
already proving attractive to many software and
CD-Rom manufacturers.
At last, labour-sourcing is beginning
to go to the places where it is most needed. It
is no longer realistic for western governments
to fear the search by the largest companies for
the cheapest labour. The advantage of sourcing
labour in developing countries is to create spending
power and wealthier internal markets which are
also export markets for western countries that
never existed before.
Global labour should not necessarily
mean a uniform mass of shifting humanity. That
is not happening, as Vincent Cable from Britain's
Royal Institute of International Affairs pointed
out in a recent paper featured here two weeks
ago.
What has happened is that business
has begun to seek out labour globally, and the
means of doing so, particularly in knowledge businesses,
has become simpler. This should not be seen as
a threat by governments inclined towards protectionism
but as a challenge to create new employment opportunities
- like home-cooked lunch for all.
© 1995 The Financial Times Ltd. All rights
reserved
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