Who Killed EY Employee Anna Sebastian Perayil?

“Sit, drink your coffee here; your work can wait awhile.

You’re twenty-six, and still have some of life ahead.

No need for wit; just talk vacuities, and I’ll

Reciprocate in kind, or laugh at you instead.

The world is too opaque, distressing and profound.

This twenty minutes’ rendezvous will make my day:

To sit here in the sun, with grackles all around,

Staring with beady eyes, and you two feet away.”

Vikram Seth, ‘Sit’ from All You Who Sleep Tonight (1990)

The Union ministry of labour and employment has decided to probe the tragic death of a Pune-based chartered accountant after her mother alleged that she had been subjected to intense ‘work pressure’.

Twenty-six-year-old Anna Sebastian Perayil, who was working as a chartered accountant for a member firm of Ernst & Young (EY) Global reportedly succumbed to ‘exhaustion’.

The ministry’s decision to investigate the matter comes after the young woman’s mother, in a poignant letter addressed to the company’s India head Rajiv Memani, made an earnest plea to revisit the company’s work environment.

In her letter, she also revealed how her daughter was subjected to ‘back-breaking work’ and would have no time for relaxation, often collapsing into bed after returning home from her workplace. Anna’s father has also lamented that no one from the company attended her funeral.

While prolonged working hours or toxic working environments marked by increasing surveillance are certainly not new, the incident’s aftermath has left a bitter taste in the month.

India’s political class has responded by describing the death as ‘distressing’ on social media platform X, calling out ‘unsafe and exploitative’ working conditions.

While denying any liability for Anna’s passing, the EY India chairman has taken up a patronising stance, claiming that every employee has to work hard, Anna was no exception in that regard and that she had merely joined the firm four months back. He has also made an ostensible commitment to introspect and receive feedback on workplace practices, even as his response reeks of insensitivity.

Twenty-six-year-old Anna Sebastian Perayil, who was working as a chartered accountant for a member firm of Ernst & Young (EY) Global reportedly succumbed to ‘exhaustion’.

The incident comes at a time when the International Labour Organisation (ILO) has initiated a study that would shed light on prevailing working hours in the country including an assessment of wages paid for overtime engagement.

India has consistently figured in unceremonious rankings that list the most overworked countries in the world by compiling data obtained from ILO sources and national statistical agencies.

Long durations of incessant work are also accompanied by below-par pay. The unemployment scenario in India has been continually bleak in recent years with the real wages for workers also having stagnated in the last decade amidst escalating casualisation of jobs.

Veneration of long working hours in everyday discourse

Over the past few years, corporate moguls in India have insisted upon longer hours of work, demonstrating a wanton disregard for the physical health and emotional wellness of employees.

Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy notably came under fire last year when he exhorted India’s youthful population to work for at least seventy hours a week to boost national productivity.

Other business bigwigs such as Bhavish Aggarwal, the Ola CEO, also followed suit extolling the benefits of a longer work week, bizarrely dismissing free weekends as an outcome of slavishly following Western culture.

From the standpoint of competing with other developing countries, India’s fate appears to solely hinge on extracting more work from youngsters as some in India Inc. would have us believe, when in reality it is the country’s inept manufacturing apparatus that is to be blamed.

There is also evidence to the contrary that suggests that the fatigue accumulated by working for long hours offsets the perceived increase in output.

India’s ruling dispensation and its elected representatives including Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut also glorify longer hours of work, adequately backed by a pliant media that provides visibility to such unwarranted virtue signalling.

The Union home minister Amit Shah launched a vitriolic tirade prior to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections about how Rahul Gandhi is no match for the workaholic Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The purported ability of the Prime Minister to work for eighteen hours at a stretch was slyly contrasted with Rahul Gandhi’s repeated withdrawals from public space to take vacations.

The Union commerce and industry minister Piyush Goyal too waxed eloquent about how the Prime Minister worked for eighteen to nineteen hours a day even after campaigning for elections during the devastating second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic in India.

Hardeep Singh Puri, Union minister for housing and urban affairs, was another voice praising the Prime Minister’s supposedly tireless efforts.

The incident comes at a time when the ILO has initiated a study that would shed light on prevailing working hours in the country including an assessment of wages paid for overtime engagement.

When the national leadership unwittingly resorts to making the capacity to work for long hours a part of its electoral plank, lingering concerns of worker well-being and their right to dignity are inevitably aside.

The derision reserved for a political leader who takes the occasional pause is an unsavoury attempt to showcase the Indian National Congress party scion as a vulnerable adversary of the indefatigable Prime Minister Modi who does not take leaves from work.

Consequently, Gandhi’s inclination to take the odd break, alongside his privileged background, is supposed to make him incapable of leading India. The divergent portrayal of a hard-working strongman leader with avowedly humble beginnings, who is perpetually at the service of the nation as its mythical custodian, while being a typical fascist strategy, also emanates from the normalisation of a compulsive hustle culture.

The aggrandisement of overworking is culturally ingrained in India, in consonance with the posturing by India’s political and business functionaries.

Company incentives are structured in such a way that working for long stints without break has come to be valued, to the extent of compromising health or cutting down on quality family time.

It coaxes employees towards pursuing relentless work, triggering burnout and poor lifestyle choices in the process. The fulfilment of aspirations for upward mobility are also seemingly contingent upon such perseverance. Work-from-home models embraced at the height of the pandemic have also exacerbated concerns about the blurring of work-life boundaries with work-related stress gradually infiltrating the domain of home.

Women alarmingly suffer the brunt of this toxic culture as they inordinately bear the burden of household work. Despite taking up an overwhelming proportion of responsibilities such as raising children, an assessment of her workplace achievements is unfairly pegged against the standard set by a successful male colleague.

For India’s blue collar working classes from social margins, the situation is even more grim. With dwindling wages and meagre social security guarantees, many have to take up moonlighting to supplement the income earned from their primary jobs— hailed as labour market flexibility by some even as others are critical of divided employer loyalty.

Given the increasing costs of living and rising household debts, many end up working for gruellingly long hours in multiple jobs beyond ILO-prescribed standards to sustain themselves and their families.

Labour law relaxations and possible solutions

India has ratified the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention of 1919, the first-ever ILO instrument. The multilateral treaty sought to limit working hours to eight hours per day and forty-eight hours for the entire week in specific industrial undertakings.

While the universally recognised eight-hour workday was the culmination of a concerted labour struggle over previous centuries, several Indian states sought to undo the historical gains made by vouching for a longer workday of twelve hours.

Not only have employees’ unions condemned the clamour for extended work hours in response, the Karnataka government’s recent attempt to increase work duration for IT employees too was met with stiff resistance, following which the plan was shelved.

One can also categorically recall the attempt made by the Gujarat government during the pandemic to increase working hours by taking advantage of an emergency clause in the Factories Act, in a bid to enhance industrial production as profits had plummeted temporarily. 

Over the past few years, corporate moguls in India have insisted upon longer hours of work, demonstrating a wanton disregard for the physical health and emotional wellness of employees.

It took an intervention by the Supreme Court to set a precedent and offer a much-needed pushback against such exploitative practices that were instituted at the behest of a state government hand-in-glove with the industry.

Under the proposed Code on Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions, 2020 that is yet to be implemented, the spread-over work time is also set to rise to twelve hours while the government also retains a discretion to increase the number of working hours in the event of a ‘public emergency, disaster or pandemic’.

At the same time, many countries from the Global North have begun experimenting with shorter workweeks to offer workers more time for rejuvenation, thereby boosting their productivity during working hours despite remaining within the bounds of a market economy.

It is expected that such tweaks would provide a fillip for improved work-life balance. Moreover, a few nations have increasingly been receptive to recognising a right to disconnect from the workplace, with employees acquiring a right to turn down unreasonable work requests from their superiors outside regular hours.

While France became one of its first exponents, Australia is the latest to have joined this group, having adopted a law conferring the right to disconnect.

Where do we go from here?

As improved efficiency is fetishised as the life-blood of the capitalist system, India’s political and business elite has failed to come to terms with the idea of shorter working hours.

Employees are merely seen as dispensable cogs in the wheel or ‘resources’ who would facilitate the material enrichment of a few at the top of the social ladder. The outright rejection of a private member’s Bill introduced by Supriya Sule, that had recognised a fledgling human right to disconnect from the workplace, not once but twice in the Parliament without serious debate, underscores the same trend.

A few nations have increasingly been receptive to recognising a right to disconnect from the workplace.

Driven by the anxiety that shorter working hours will translate to less opportunities for wealth generation, the prevailing work culture in India favours extractivism at the cost of worker welfare while corporate entities also seek to evade any obligation to pay for overtime work.

One can still hope that Anna’s untimely demise offers a moment of collective reflection for us all, and not just one for the company she worked for— to decide what values we would like to espouse at the workplace as we seek a better future. Legislative reforms can only do so much without the cultivation of empathy.

Rongeet Poddar is a doctoral candidate at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, Kolkata.