On August 19, 2020, Axis Bank, one of India’s leading private sector banks, announced that they are exploring a ‘Gig-a-Opportunities’ mandate: the company has 85,000 full time employees but over the next three years, 15% of their incremental hiring will be based on alternative models of working, said the Bank. This may be new for India but approximately 150 million workers in North America and Western Europe have left the relatively comfortable existence in a corporation to a life as independent contractors. It is possible that some of them did not have a choice, but all of them seem to be…
Read moreM K Rao hails from a lower middle-class Mumbai-based family and needed a job. As luck would have it, soon after he completed his 10th exam in 1970, a friend referred him to a multinational company that was looking for office attendants. Rao’s smattering of English was enough for him to land the job. Given that the staff in that company was unionised and job guarantee was a done deal, he could have continued as an office attendant and retired at the age of 58 after serving the company for 40 years. Most of his fellow office attendants had been…
Read moreThe warning bell was rung by the Prime Minister when he announced Janta Curfew on March 22nd this year. I had returned to Mumbai on March 13th after a series of Board Meetings in Chennai. We were discussing annual operating plans but knew that we may be hit by a tidal wave soon. We did not expect it to be a Tsunami. When I spoke with HR heads of companies in mid-May, many said that they knew a lockdown was coming. Many global companies had issued a diktat as early as March 15th to move employees out of offices. The challenge…
Read more