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"Am I to be blamed for the recession?” This must be the question raging in the minds of many unemployed educated youth here in India. This is the situation in the employment market. There are no jobs to be had and if there are, they come with a heavy price to pay for accepting them. The IT industry particularly has taken a beating from which it is really taking long to recover. In the meanwhile what happens to the work force that’s being churned out like an assembly line from the various institutions here and abroad ? The poor girls and boys coming out of these factories are needlessly caught up in a mess that was created in faraway America.
A youngster having spent most of the best part of the last 6 years studying and burning the midnight oil (metaphorically speaking) and then doing some research to boot that too spending a fortune in the process finds that there is dung rather than a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow. I know of a few people who are really struggling to find a job let alone a well heeled one. They of course have become extinct. Well paying jobs I mean.
But the crux of this essay is not just the youngsters themselves but the situation they face today. These times are spawning some typically exploitative behaviors in employers. Two years back a post graduate in the technology domain armed with some research experience would have easily landed a plum cushy job and started life very, very comfortably. There was in fact a time when it was felt that youngsters were getting easy pay too quickly and that it was bringing in the culture of consumerism and obvious consumption too quickly in India. But today’s graduates are finding that they have to settle for terms and conditions of employment which reek of the highest form of exploitation. In their desperation to get a break, they are willing to accept any terms.
These youngsters often have to join small establishments which believe in taking maximum advantage of the prevailing situation and deprive the new joinees of any pay or some wholly unjustifed pay until they prove themselves worthy against some arbitrary benchmark which is just an excuse to extract maximum work with minimum or no pay. Even if the employers know that the selected candidate is a person of potential, they have no compunctions about exploiting the new kid on the block. After all make hay while the sun shines! So these hapless victims end up working 14-15 hour days just to prove themselves over and over again.
I do wonder then if it makes a dent in the confidence of our investments for the future. Do they get frustrated and disillusioned? Do they carry on with the optimism that after all everything is transitory and that this phase will also come to pass? It is after all anybody’s guess about when the situation will make a turnaround. Does a sense of despair seep in when they see they have missed the bus and that they happened to be the people in the wrong place at the wrong time? Would they resent the people who inhabit the workplaces where they would be employed, because more often than not they would find that these people possess far more modest competencies than they do?
It is true that in the recent past the newly joining work force was being catapulted too quickly to a lifestyle of excesses but is it fair that they now have to accept a diametrically opposite situation? Why do we have to deal in excesses always? There is always a lack of moderation in all our actions. Neither the former scenario nor the present one seems to answer the holistic growth needs of the younger generation. Where then is the answer?
