by Manali Chakrabarti[1] and Rahul Varman
Background
For every problem today, the establishment seems to have one solution: privatisation. Whether it is airlines, railways, banks, health, education or water, the ruling elite waves the magic wand of privatisation and asserts that only because ‘vested interests’ are not allowing us to have this magic pill, we are being left behind on the road to ‘development’. In this light we share this small instance: the handing over of a guesthouse facility to a private corporate firm, in an elite publicly funded institute campus. Though this is a small instance compared to the scale on which the rulers are privatising entire sectors like health and transport, it provides an insight into some of the implications of privatisation.
Around the middle of August 2017, the campus community discovered that the guest house facility was being handed over to one of India’s largest corporate hospitality and facility management chains, Sarovar Hotels[2], from September 1, 2017. We learned that 72 of the existing 74 workers[3] were going to be retrenched, many of whom had been working for tens of years on contract for the Institute and the guesthouse. The guesthouse in the Institute is called the visitors’ hostel, henceforth referred to as VH. The VH and allied services in the Institute consists of 85 fancy rooms in its primary facility, another 44 rooms in an extension facility and 12 furnished apartments for relatively longer stays of visitors, along with dining and other related facilities to be maintained and managed.
Almost since the very beginning of the Institute in the 1960s, the campus has had a tradition of community involvement, including that of students and teaching staff, in defence of the rights of the workers. The first wave of worker struggles led to employment of regular workforce across the Institute, including in the VH, but this gave way to non-permanent staff, hired on ‘projects’ and the like by the beginning of the 1990s and wholesale privatisation of VH to a contractor by the end of 1990s. The working class struggle in the campus shifted to the rights of the contract workers once large-scale privatisation of services began in the 1990s. This long and on-going struggle led first to the formation of a workers’ cooperative in the campus among construction and cleaning workers, minimum wage rights for a wide section of contract workers, and later benefits like PF, ESI, etc. But most importantly, these struggles were able to ensure that workers would not be replaced even when the contractors were changed due to the bidding process every couple of years, and this really became the bedrock for ensuring minimum entitlements for the contract workers. That is how, despite changes of contractors, the same set of contract workers had been employed in the VH for long periods till August 2017 (60 out of 72 were working from 2010 or before), and were drawing the Central Government minimum wage rate for unskilled work of Rs 536 per day or more, depending upon their nature of work, as well as ESI, PF,etc.
Another important aspect of the running of the VH till now was that, for all practical purposes, it was managed by the Institute functionaries, and a contractor was used as an intermediary merely so that technically the workers were not directly employed by the Institute. Or, in other words, the VH was being managed directly by the Institute functionaries through ‘contract’ workers, while the contractor really existed only on paper to disburse the wages and benefits of the workers.
Given the stable workforce, who had picked up their skills at work and local leadership in the VH, the general opinion among the users has been that it is one of the best run such guest facilities across comparable campuses in the country, and there were no real complaints against it. So an alarmed community immediately stood up in solidarity with the workers and demanded cancellation of the new contract that purportedly was signed with Sarovar. There was constant interrogation of the administration by the community, an immediate protest march of 1500 persons from various sections of the campus, and a statement signed by more than 2000 persons asking the administration to cancel the new contract — all this and more before the beginning of the new contract on September 1st. The large alumni community was also an active part of the protests, as they are one of the main users of the VH. Though the administration did not budge from their stand on going ahead with the Sarovar contract, they relented to the extent of committing to re-employ all the 72 VH workers, 28 inside VH and the rest within the Institute in a month’s time.
Corporatisation/privatisation: claims and reality
The main justification of the Institute for going ahead with the new contract, in spite of the united resistance by the community, was that Sarovar would bring three things to the VH: 1) much higher quality service; 2) a higher level of mechanisation; and for both 3) the company’s own highly trained and experienced professional staff.
What actually happened once Sarovar took over was exactly opposite to these claims. The most visible aspect of this was the new recruits of ‘five-star’ Sarovar hotel: painfully emaciated, extremely tentative-looking boys and girls barely out of their teens, mostly from remote locations of Jharkhand, Bengal and Chhattisgarh, who had acquired some dubious ‘hotel management’ diploma (courses running from one to three months) after their 12th class, and then had worked in multiple hotels for a few months at a time. The entire work experience for most of these workers was less than twelve months. Most of them had been hired over the telephone through some intermediaries/contacts and were asked to report on a particular date. Once they came here they found themselves in a hostile situation (given the antagonism of the entire community) where they had no social moorings, and could not even converse in the local language well. Most of them could not speak English either. Not surprisingly again, most of the work that required skills/knowledge of VH operations was being performed by re-hired old VH workers! The only machines brought in by the new contractor were two high-end heavy duty floor-cleaning machines – which were unsuitable for most VH cleaning requirements, and further, none of the workers knew how to operate them. Predictably, this led to both overwork as well as a free fall in the quality of services, leading to an unprecedented level of complaints from users and guests.
The old contractor worked with proper rosters and 8-hour shifts, but all this went haywire under Sarovar. Earlier, since all the workers were local, they had their own accommodation either on campus or in nearby localities. And at work, they were provided regular full meals (meals to be served to guests were cooked with an idea of how many workers were on the premises, so that left-overs would cover everyone’s meals). Under the new contractor, workers were forced to rent accommodation several kilometres away, adding considerable amount of time to their already long workday. And given the extended and unpredictable work hours, there were even reports of new workers sleeping within the VH wherever they could find some space. No regular full meals were provided to workers – poor quality and recycled left-overs, broken rice, etc. became the norm without any provisioning for meals, snacks or breaks. This led to a fairly high turnover of new workers in VH (approximately 10 to 12 in the first two months) further destabilising an already poor quality service. Interestingly, the only aspect of Sarovar’s VH that seemed to be living up to its ‘five-star’ promise was the pricing: a guest (an ex-IITK faculty) paid Rs. 194 for getting a set of salwar-kameez laundered, which earlier would have cost Rs 20!
Farce of rehiring of old VH workers
As has been mentioned earlier, 28 of the old VH crew were re-hired by the new contractor, and due to sustained pressure by the community the Institute had to promise to rehire the remaining 44 workers within a month. And yet even eight months after the deadline has got over, at least 14 workers have still not found regular employment within the Institute. Only about eleven of the remaining 44 workers found employment commensurate with their earlier jobs in the first month – six as sanitation workers and the remaining five in various ad hoc positions. After repeated reminders to the Institute authorities to comply with their commitment, they finally declared (in October 2017) that the remaining would be adjusted in the messing facilities in the students’ hostels. The Institute had 13 operational messes across 13 hostels at the time, and given the similarity of service it seemed feasible to place the VH workers in these messes. The only problem was that the Institute did not make any provision (monetary or positional) to accommodate these workers. And on top of that the messes already had a significant number of ‘extra’ workers. A brief background to the messing contracts would help to appreciate the impact of the ‘largesse’ of the administration while committing to absorb the old VH workers in the hostel messes.
A typical hostel of the Institute houses 450 to 750 students, and the messes provide meals three times a day (in some hostels evening tea and snacks are also served). According to the Institute norm, a mess should have at least one worker for every eleven students (or 40 workers for 450 students) present at all times during the running of the mess. Accounting for the mandatory weekly holiday it translates to a workforce of 47 workers for running a mess for 450 students. If one looks at the number of workers employed in the messes, it would seem that most messes employ a significantly higher number of workers than the norm. But this has to be seen in the context that each worker gets far fewer ‘duties’ than the norm of 26 days. In fact in many messes the workers used to get as few as 20 ‘duties’ per month[4]. Even as each worker gets less than the norm of workdays per month, the average workday is anywhere between eleven to fourteen hours – most workers start the day at 6-6.30 am and finish only by 10.30-11 pm. Though there are some breaks in between meal times, this workday is ‘illegally’ long – the law mandates that in services like restaurants the maximum workday (shift) cannot be longer than eight hours, spread over at most twelve hours. As per our calculations, if a shift system were put in place in the messes, all the existing workers would be accommodated and there would be no excess. But since the privatisation of the messes this has been the general pattern – 14 hour workdays in spite of ‘excess workers’ and barely 20 to 22 duties a month for each worker. The Institute reimburses the contractor on the basis of the norm – i.e. 40 workers for 30 days per month for a hostel of 450 students, or in other words for 1200 person days per month. The contractors overwork the workers and underpay them and pocket the remaining. Given the dire employment situation in the city and neighbourhood the workers rarely protest against this.
Thus, in this situation, when the Institute instructed the contractors to accommodate the VH workers without making any extra economic provision, it further worsened the condition of the existing mess workers. What happened was as follows:
- The Institute instructed the contractors, who in turn instructed their supervisory staff to accommodate the workers without any directions as to how to go about it.
- The supervisory staff obviously kept their own ‘duties’ unchanged and imposed all the duty cuts on the ‘unskilled’ workforce under them.
- Thus the only jobs available were of the most menial kind, including for the experienced and qualified VH workers, many of whom were in supervisory/managerial positions earlier. They were offered jobs which had no bearing with their earlier salaries or their experience – for example a dining hall supervisor was asked to do sanitation work in the mess. Many of them refused to accept the offer, which probably was the management’s intended outcome in any case.
- Fourteen VH workers were finally accommodated in the messes –and the existing mess workers bore the entire ‘cost’ of the VH workers – which basically means that the workers had to take a further cut in their wages.
- In fact the supervisors went even further than their mandate and reduced significantly more mandays than were required to accommodate the workers. And thus surprisingly, in spite of accommodating 14 workers across the messes, the total person-days actually ‘reduced’ by a whopping 608 days! Or in other words, instead of having to shell out extra funds, the contractors were able to ‘save’ around Rs 3.25 lakhs per month – a very ‘efficient’ and ‘profitable’ mechanism indeed[5].
Obviously the above dispensation caused dissonance among the existing mess workers and an antipathy against the VH workers. Significantly, the mess workers had been the main support base for the struggle to find employment for the retrenched VH workers – and with this master stroke the administration was able to dent the growing solidarity among the workers. In fact when the mess workers protested against the reduction of their ‘duties’ to their supervisors they were told ‘yeh sab VH workers ke chalte hai – aur jao jhanda lekar unke liye bolne, ab bhugto’ (all this is due to the VH workers, this is the result of your campaigning for their rights, now pay for it).
This imposition caused serious disruptions in the functioning of the messes too, which had to be handled by the contractors and their men. It is significant that the Institute declared their inability to ‘convince’ the new VH contractor (Sarovar) to retain the workforce and yet was able to coerce the mess contractors to ‘employ’ them. This is probably because the mess contractors are much smaller operators compared to the new VH contractor, and hence the Institute could force them to absorb the workers. Which brings us to the point of bringing in large corporate contractors, instead of local smaller players, and its implications.
Ownership veil of corporations
While doing a cursory background check on the Sarovar Group which has taken over the VH facility in 2017, we came up with fascinating insights. The Sarovar Group was founded in 1994, and at present has 75 hotels in the premium, mid-range and budget categories in over 50 cities. In 2017, Louvre Hotels Group, the second largest operator in hospitality industry in Europe with 1233 hotels in over 54 countries, bought over the majority stake in the Sarovar Group. Thus Sarovar Group is now part of the French conglomerate. But in 2015 the Louvre Group itself was acquired by the Shanghai-based Jin Jiang International Holdings, a State-owned tourism enterprise of the People’s Republic of China. Or in other words, in the name of privatisation, a guest facility of a public Institute in India is being run by the Chinese State[6]!
Obviously, with such formidable contractors, the Institute authorities could not impose any conditions on them to retain the existing workforce or cancel the contract, in spite of tremendous pressure by the community. In fact the primary demand of the community was for cancellation of the contract, but the Institute stated its inability to do so because of serious legal implications. Thus it came as a shock to the community when they came to know (through an RTI response) that the Institute in fact had not even signed the contract till over two months of the commencement of operations (due to some technical issues).
What does privatisation really do?
We think that this small episode of the handing over of a guesthouse facility in an established academic institute to a private corporation described above encapsulates some essential features of privatisation:
- Deterioration of services compared to the earlier dispensation, and these at higher costs.
- Replacement of workers with access to legal rights and privileges (proper wages and appropriate work hours and work conditions) with more vulnerable workers who are ready to work more for less.
- Devaluation of workers’ skills, with experienced and skilled workers rendered substitutable by any other worker. And the converse: even highly skilled workers asked to do unskilled jobs, or leave.
- Technology used not to bring in more material efficiency, but merely as a threat to workers, to further subjugate them.
- Any possibility of united resistance by the workforce systematically broken by various divisive tactics – old workers replaced by new workers, new hires ‘accommodated’ by curtailing the rights of existing workers, etc.
- A chain of hierarchical contractors leading up to some of the most powerful corporations of the world, often not even apparent to the users.
- The local end is handled by the small contractors, who are equally dispensable should there be a problem, and yet would not affect the ‘efficient mechanism’ to siphon surplus to the actual owners.
- The local authorities (in this case the Institute) no longer accountable to the community, instead becoming facilitators of this extraction mechanism, often at a global scale.
And yet…..
- This is only half the story. In spite of the concerted assault by the authorities and establishment, the workers forged remarkable and sustained solidarities across the Institute. It is remarkable how the fired VH workers were able to appreciate that the hapless girls and boys from far-flung places who had replaced them were as much the victims as they were of this process. The fired workers in fact fought for the new workers’ rights to minimum wages and better work conditions too. Even more inspiring was the consistent support by the mess workers, who had to bear the cost of the Institute’s ‘generosity’ towards the fired VH workers, in spite of their own precarious work conditions and wages. And that too in spite of being repeatedly told that they were being punished for their show of solidarities. The extraordinary saga of resistance by the workers needs to be shared but deserves a separate piece.
[1] manalichakrabarti[at]yahoo.com
[2] It claims to be ‘India’s largest hotel chain’ with 75 hotels across the country and some abroad, as well as guest facility management contracts in various elite campuses in the country.
[3] Apparently a deal was struck to retain two white-collar workers who were in the good books of the administration.
[4] These are daily wage workers, hence lower days of duty translate to lower wages. Twenty duties instead of 26 would mean a loss of wages of over Rs 3200/- per month.
[5]As has been mentioned earlier the Institute pays according to the norm written in the contract, i.e. at the rate of 40 workers for a mess catering to 450 students, which translated to 1200 person days. Thus it is in the contractor’s interest to get the work done with as few workers as possible so that the rest can be pocketed by him.
[6] The intricate layers of ownership of Sarovar Hotels was pointed out to us by Amit Singh, an alumnus of the Institute. He in fact wrote a detailed note on it https://drive.google.com/file/d/14Q7sTYAEd9xFY23-hhqIWSDz0IM-3uX1/view
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