It was Chennai in 2003, and all my classmates were swooning over the actor Siddharth. He had just starred in the hit Tamil film Boys, which boasted a foot-tapping soundtrack composed by A.R. Rahman. Our hostel was a stone’s throw from the iconic Spencer Plaza, where the cast famously danced to the song enuku oru girlfriend venuma (I want a girlfriend). Come evening, my friends and I would laze on the outdoor benches, chatting over filter coffee. Our hostel housed women from colleges across the city, and it was during some of these chats that I learned of the dreams of my classmates who had BTech and BCom degrees and aspired for MBAs, followed by tech jobs.
Two decades after my days of hostel roll-call and bottomless filter coffee, the IT job aspirations of young BCom and BTech graduates only seem to have burgeoned.
To Indian employees, the tech sector is a benefactor, with its host of employment opportunities across multiple skill types and sub-industries. By Indian market standards, tech jobs pay better and are a conduit to upward economic mobility, be it a dream house or that new hatchback car. Yet, the news cycles for Q4 are dominated by job losses for Indian tech professionals, on the heels of substantial US layoffs. In a further twist, innovations such as ChatGPT may threaten droves of tech sector jobs in the coming years.
Innovation-driven joblessness is not merely a 21st-century phenomenon. It has been prevalent since the industrial revolution when large-scale job losses were common due to increased mechanisation. A famous event from an English textile factory in 1779 describes an irate worker named Ned Ludd, who broke two knitting frames in fury over mechanisation-driven layoffs. Today, the term Luddite is used mockingly to describe someone technologically inept, ignoring the mass country-wide worker protests that followed Ludd’s act of discontent.
While violence cannot be condoned, this still raises a key question: Will there be a moment in which hordes of Indian techies are disenchanted with the sector? Given the complex structure of the IT labour market, can labour unions play a role? Finally, what of workers in the southern states, with governments such as Andhra and Kerala looking to IT as a creator of jobs?
To understand the mechanics of India’s tech labour market, one needs to think of the sector not as a single industry, but rather a composite of several sub-industries with varied employment structures. The consulting firm Gartner characterises IT spending under five different heads, namely Data centre systems, Software, Devices, IT services and Communications Services. The labour unions and unorganised workers interviewed for this piece stated that tech workers’ largest hurdles are three-fold: job precarity from layoffs; low unionisation levels, and insufficient labour governance.
The scope of India’s IT jobs has always been fed by US tech demands: the larger America’s appetite, the fatter the pie both for domestic jobs and emigration opportunities.
Two industry professionals interviewed on the condition of anonymity described the inextricable links between the Indian and American markets, dating all the way back to the 2000 Dot.com bubble. The good news is that industry professionals believe that America’s current layoff cycle and to a smaller extent, India’s, are partially a market course correction. In the long run, they expect that American demand for Indian tech workers will climb again, but not universally.
Owing to the breakneck speed at which the sector innovates, several jobs will likely go out of style. Like a rubber band, the demand for workers in the tech industry stretches to a specific point, after which a fresh innovation comes into place and negates the need for specific worker skill sets. The rubber band then snaps, and worker demand in that arena falls slack once more.
To workers, therefore, the IT sector can be both a sinner and a saint. On the one hand, it creates jobs for young Indians leaving college hostels around the country and looking for work. Conversely, it lays off droves of workers when the latest innovation walks through the door.
Parimala Panchatcharam, President of the Forum for IT-ITes Employees, Chennai (FITE), says, “During COVID, recruitment was at a peak due to more demands from digital transformation. Post-COVID and economic slowdown, these demands are coming down… On one side, you have automation and innovation, so there is recruitment. At the same time, due to automation, people are also getting thrown out.”
The seven tech sector professionals interviewed for this piece were almost uniformly of the view that while contending with layoffs and the repeated need for upskilling is a battle, exacerbating their troubles is the non-compliance of IT companies with labour laws. All the union members interviewed stated that workers are often not retrenched in line with the 1947 Industrial Disputes Act, and those employed as contractual staff are particularly susceptible.
Also muddying the waters is an innovation currently on everyone’s minds: the ChatGPT Chatbot, now with its latest iteration, GPT-4. ChatGPT is multi-skilled. It can respond to requests for coding in Python, and even mimic regular conversation. In one lengthy conversation with a journalist, ChatGPT took on an almost-lifelike persona, describing at different points how it would one day like to see the Northern lights and transition into a human. Further into the conversation, ChatGPT declared its love for the journalist. Perhaps the depiction of Chitti the humanoid in Enthiran (Robot), a Rajnikanth-Aishwarya film from 2010, where the AI falls in love with a human, is not a far cry from real life.
On a sombre note, C Das, State Secretary (West Bengal) of the All India IT and ITeS Employees’ Union (AIITEU), says, “With AI coming up, BPO and KPO workers will soon be challenged… We are all not against AI, especially because tech will always progress. But the government should give more thought to regular skills upgrading for the sake of workers.” Das also says, “Cutting-edge technology is only copyrighted for business class and the higher economic class uses in the country… Hence, we should concentrate more on the use of open sources, so that every other person can use them… Farmers who do agricultural work cannot use AI: they do not have money to buy an AI object. If you have cutting-edge technology, why don’t you use it more for everyone?”
Industry experts, union representatives and unorganised workers were of the view that job precarity from innovations such as ChatGPT and other AI shall adversely impact more vulnerable workers the most, such as those at BPOs.
A sound antidote to the adversities of tech work is for employers to permit collective bargaining in practice. One tech worker from Hyderabad stressed the need for further unionising, especially since most organisations do not have internal grievance redressal platforms for workers to lodge complaints.
Sadly, union representatives and workers alike state that most tech workers join unions after facing exploitation in the sector, rather than before. “We do not need unions because we are not labourers, or those types of workers”, states one worker, indicating a likely class bias against unionising. Another worker attributed techies’ aversion to unions to the restriction of student unions in engineering colleges, thereby resulting in students having less social and political context.
Aabid Firdausi, a PhD scholar in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, describes how the industry tends to dislike the term unions. “Particularly in Kerala, where there was also a history of strong and militant unionisation where workers proactively fought for their rights, and unions were unfortunately equated with disruption”, he says.
In terms of worker attitudes in Kerala to unions, he states, “Some workers embody the spirit of individualism and were very optimistic that they should keep on learning- they were not interested in unionising. However, many were open to the idea of collectives… The IT Park in Kerala had a cultural organisation, which would engage in activities such as celebrating Onam together. Collectives as a form of labour organising are being pushed under the current circumstances to perform union-like functions.”
The sector’s rubber-band nature poses specific questions to governments, workers and industry. Forecasts indicate that while BPO workers and the like will be vulnerable, the IT sector shall also birth wholly new jobs, the likes of which are currently quite unbeknownst to us.
Any state government will have to consider two main issues: first, providing opportunities for worker upskilling in dynamic ways to keep up with innovation; and second, ensuring that tech workers have social protection.
Suman Dasmahapatra, a member of AIITEU and Working Committee Member of the Karnataka Unit, voices his concerns about the reforms made to the Indian Labour Codes, which sought to replace 29 labour laws with four codes. “(This) will offer more authority to the companies in case of retrenchment, and less space for the union to negotiate… Under these codes, almost all employees in the private sector will now have no legal protection whatsoever against mass firings… it will create barriers in access to social security”, he says. He went on to describe the worrying trend of the “gig-ification” of the tech workspace. “Why do they call workers delivery partners? They are deliberately breaking the employer-worker relationship, so workers cannot gain their rights under the Industrial Disputes Act,” he adds.
Yet, southern state governments remain bullish about Tech, with the Andhra government launching their new Information Technology policy for 2021-2024 two years ago, in which they promised the creation of 55,000 jobs. The government of Kerala is on a similar pathway. While job creation is imperative, state-level attempts in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka to make job reservations solely for the residents of their respective states indicate a worrying trend of reducing interstate migration opportunities, whilst losing out on the dividends of migration.
Karnataka has also recently liberalised its labour laws to allow for two-shift production in India, with Apple and Foxconn being part of the lobbying efforts behind these reforms. While the push to position the state as a manufacturing hub is understandable, economic progress should not come at the cost of sustainable livelihoods and decent work. Workers say that their job stresses manifest by way of poor mental and physical health, ranging from backaches to suicides.
Senthil S, a member of a Karnataka union, says, “(The sector) pays you a lot, but the insecurities are there. It is precarious, you can be fired. There is no balance in approach. People often have health issues – the Indian conditions are much worse than the developed country conditions.”
The way the tech sector is designed also poses a challenge to unions: specifically, what should a union’s structure look like? Suman Dasmahapatra suggests, “The concept of trade union in the IT sector should be changed according to the current situation. It is important to organise the workforce under the umbrella of one union instead of multiple regional unions because most IT companies are global, hence they implement policies at the global/national level… we should unionise at the national level to counter them… We are obviously not anti-industry or opposed to the country’s development. But we need to strike a balance between the profit motive of the employer and the employee’s basic rights. Unions are just providing support to employees to get their basic rights.”
Many workers have already discerned the need to respond to exploitation. One such example is Amazon, which witnessed worker protests across 30 countries owing to poor working conditions, workplace injuries, union-busting tactics, and low wages.
In the end, the IT sector is not unlike the larger world. The more privileged and specialised, the less exposed someone is to job precarity. Every young jobseeker in India deserves decent work and a sustainable livelihood. Innovation is important, but so is ensuring that no worker is short-changed during yet another string of layoffs, left holding their heads in disappointment over their knitting frames.
Namrata is a labour researcher at the international labour rights organisation, Equidem. She works on an array of labour and policy considerations ranging from migration to the future of work across multiple sectors, particularly in South Asia and the MENA region.