TinyOwl’s hostage crisis
medianama.com
medianama.com
Layoffs have some contractual basis for being paid, and even more, a social expectation that it will be fulfilled...! There's some social contract around labor?!? (I've been at companies that went bust, got diddly-squat). The police and political parties' representatives are present during the labor standoff, but not to resolve it.
I'm not saying it's better or worse... partly it feels better: support for workers; partly it feels worse (is it just me, or does the presence of the police and politicians seem... odd, corrupt? perhaps this is just my cultural myopia)... but the entire scene is just really hard for me to parse. And I upvoted because this is absolutely fascinating to me; I want to hear more from an Indian perspective. (For the record, I've been only once, for a few weeks for a friend's wedding, so don't know anything about the situation but would love to learn more.)
Apparently India doesn't have a good bankruptcy law, and so they're overhauling it:
indianexpress.com/article/explained/simply-put-bankruptcy-law-and-the-need-to-have-one/
Fortunately here in South America there's a growing awareness about "startups" being different, but some employees might not be aware that said "companies" don't have an ongoing business and might go bust if they don't "make it". OTOH, it's still not very common for employees to be offered stock options.
From the article: " “We had an indication from the investor that we’ll close the funding by September end and we gave a 45 day period (for the F&Fs). But due to a bad market, it took time to close the deal and we were extremely cash crunched. So we requested people that as soon as we get new funding, we will shoot (off the payments). We told the old employees that money was coming on the 15th and we’d distribute it the same day.”
I'm not sure about India, but in Uruguay, severance pay is HUGE (usually several salaries) and can impact very heavily a company.
The World Bank ranks India 178 out of 188 in contract enforcement[3] -- essentially if you have a dispute, especially a small one, you may be better off cutting your losses. If you're up against someone with patronage/influence your chances are even dimmer (which is why you need to have your own patrons/influencers if you are serious about doing business in India, which just perpetuates a bribes-and-corruption culture). It also causes people to take matters into their own hands, because if you suspect your employer won't pay your salary, you can't file a suit. It actually makes more sense to lock him up (as long as he isn't harmed the likelihood of a criminal case is remote) until he releases the cash.
For companies for whom this is feasible, one common workaround is to add boilerplate to their contracts to be subject to Singapore courts for dispute resolution (much faster!).
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=court+case+taking+decades+in... [2] http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-11-25/speeding-up... [3] http://www.doingbusiness.org/data/exploreeconomies/india/enf...
I'll keep that in mind next time I don't even get a subscription to the Jam of the Month club at the end of the year.
It may well be that India is bad for contract enforcement, but here in the U.S., many of us don't even have a contract to enforce.
Last time my entire office was escorted out of the building by security, on 3 days notice and with no severance package, there wasn't even anyone around that we could have taken hostage. It would have been a dream come true to be able to mildly inconvenience the person most directly responsible for our permanent layoffs for a couple of days, get a monetary concession, and have the cops and local political flacks on our side! Instead, all we got was a fresh boot-print on our collective backsides.