Why I joined the union as a tech worker
AKA how almost losing an eye led me to union organising
By AIITEU Delhi Member
I was on a train about to reach Jaipur station when I started seeing dark grey spots through my right eye. When I shut my left eye to assess the situation, and moved my head I could see my sleeping teammate sitting next to me, parts of his face masked with transparent grey spots. “Akshay” I called out. “There’s something wrong with my eye.”
We reached the station and were greeted by blinding white afternoon sunlight. I kept winking and shutting my left eye to figure out what was happening. “You were working on the presentation all night. It’s just fatigue from the screen.” Akshay tried to offer an explanation.
Our train was late. We had to rush to our meeting. This was 25th May 2018 — a Thursday. We were working on a project to improve the call centre experience for an Adolescent Counselling Helpline in Rajasthan. My office was in Delhi, we were doing field research with youth groups on sexual and reproductive health issues with an NGO partner in a small district in Rajasthan, and we would make one-day trips to Jaipur to meet with the helpline providers to update them on our learnings.
This particular meeting was an important one. I hadn’t slept in two nights, barring the short nap on the train. The funders (client), call centre leadership and the tele-counsellors would all be present. It was a half day workshop, where Akshay and I were to share our research findings, and then all of us were to brainstorm on ideas to make the helpline more impactful. I knew something was terribly wrong, but I put on my ‘game face’ and got into the cab.
Staring at a nightmare
We met in a conference room at the call centre. Lights had been dimmed for the presentation. I could not see anything from the right eye. By the time the meeting ended in the evening and we got out, the tiny grey spots had increased in size. The vision in the right eye had reduced by 50 percent, at the centre of which was a giant grey semi-transparent spot. I started googling frantically after we boarded our train to Delhi. “I am sure it’s nothing. Take an off tomorrow and get it checked.” Akshay tried to calm the silent nervousness he sensed. “What if I go blind in one eye? Are there jobs that one can do only with one eye?” I joked half seriously.
By the time I went to the eye doctor the next day, I could barely see anything from the right eye. I had to get a friend to accompany me because my peripheral vision was affected and I couldn’t cross the road. It was difficult to describe what was happening to me. “Imagine if someone put a ninety percent dark grey screen on one of your eyes” I told the doctor.
I was 31 at the time. I never had any serious health issues except for a tonsillectomy to help with a chronic inflammation. But I knew I wasn’t living a healthy life. I would work all night very often. I didn’t sleep well. I never ate properly or on time. I had terrible mechanisms to cope with stress and anxiety. I blamed myself even though I did not know the cause. The eye doctor didn’t say much. He asked me to get an MRI and CT scan along with some usual tests. He also told me to consult a neurologist.
The initial prognosis was Optic Neuritis — an inflammation of the optic nerve — but the cause was unclear. So I had to do follow up tests and referrals. In the middle of this I also went to work. I was not compelled by my superiors. Quite the contrary. Nor was it bravado. Perhaps, I didn’t want to be alone while I waited for the results. So I put a cotton ball on my eye, patched it with medical tape and squinted at my laptop in the office. Somewhere in the day I would follow up with the labs or doctors.
It was a Thursday when I met with a second neurologist with my father who had come to Delhi at my behest. “Get admitted right away,” The doctor ordered. “If we keep trying to find the cause, you will go blind. It might already be too late.” This was the first time it really hit me. Why didn’t the first neuro suggest this? Did I not ask the right questions? Why did I go to work instead of focusing on this? In this internal monologue happening in parallel as we were discussing the treatment plan, I blamed myself again.
After my admission, I was pumped with steroids for three days. By the second day, the vision in my right eye started coming back. They did more tests to pinpoint the root cause. A spinal tap revealed that my cerebrospinal fluid (the liquid around the brain and spine) pressure was abnormally high. Why? They couldn’t figure out.
Idiopathic inter-cranial hypertension causing Optic Neuritis, said the medical report. A disease is called idiopathic if the cause of apparent spontaneous origin is unknown. I didn’t internalise it at the time, but it didn’t take me long to realise that the ‘unknown’ disease is Neoliberalism.
The blurred lines of work and play
The place I worked at could be termed extremely progressive and modern. It was a small sized and tight knit design studio, that did user-centered research and design in different domains, including digital services and technology platforms. Here, the bosses were your friends. Mental health was considered an important issue. Senior employees could take paid sabbaticals if they felt ‘burnt out’.
Employees were asked to consider the organisation as their own. One was encouraged to voice their concerns to the bosses. We were not just expected to do project work, but organise learning sessions, inculcate hobbies at the workplace, host get togethers and improve the organisational culture and administration as well. There was a values manifesto that emphasized that ‘culture’ and ‘play’ was as important as work. If work felt like play, then it was ideal. Everyone truly believed that.
I believed that.
When I started working at the organisation, let’s call it BurnoutStudio, as a 22 year old right out of college I thought it was utopian. When I lost my eyesight, I had already completed 10 years there. I haven’t told this to anyone but I had wanted to quit every year, but a part of me couldn’t shake the ‘work is family’ indoctrination. I truly believed that one could work from within and ensure that as employees we got fairer compensation, better governance and be able to voice ethical concerns on projects. I was due to leave the organisation when the project I had gone to Jaipur for ended. I’d like to think my body decided to expedite my exit by going on strike.
For us as employees, the expectation was set really high. Both in terms of what BurnoutStudio expected from us, and what we could expect from it. It was in the latter where the cracks started unravelling. This blurring of the personal and professional, doesn’t change the fact that an employee is, at the end of the day, selling their time and skills for money.
The neoliberal workplace extracts more and more work, time and mind space from its employees by branding it as ‘play’, ‘craft’ or ‘family’, but will very often avoid the topic of risks and dividends.
Living, breathing and thinking about work at all times, I as an employee realised that we are being fooled into thinking we have ‘ownership’, so we work more. This ‘cult of work’ makes us sacrifice everything — our health, our well-being, our social life — and it happens slowly and insidiously.
The week that I lost my eyesight and the many weeks that I spent recuperating after, I mostly felt guilty. Guilty that I hadn’t taken care of myself. Guilty I left my colleagues in a lurch. Guilty that I dropped the ball on my last project. I internalised all this guilt knowing very well that my body was under a lot of duress because of work.
While talking about the ‘eye incident’ with friends and acquaintances, similar stories would crop up. A friend working in a tech startup spoke about a young employee with a chronic illness who kept missing her doctors appointment due to the intense amount of workload, and passed out at work. When she was admitted to a hospital and regained consciousness her first request was for someone to mail the boss that she won’t be coming in for a few days. “She didn’t tell anyone at work about her condition. Why? I just don’t understand.” said my friend.
I understood.
This is how the cult of work under neoliberalism dehumanises us in our own eyes. I always knew this but hearing stories similar to mine over and over, verified it.
In this ecosystem, the only form of resistance we truly have, outside of quitting are ‘whining’ sessions. A temporary salve that makes us realise that we are not alone and our miseries are shared by our co-workers. At times, even the bosses joined these sessions. To them the ‘lack of life’ due to the cult of work was a shared suffering. No one ever pointed out that the bosses own the profits that can keep them afloat for a very long time if they were to shut shop. That wasn’t true for the employees.
I harbour no ill will towards them or their naiveté. We are all victims of neoliberalism, some are more unequal. I’d often remark that employees at BurnoutStudio should unionize. At the time I didn’t know much about unions, except that they represent workers’ concerns. “But we are so privileged. Don’t unions work with factories and stuff?”.
I didn’t have an answer then.
The long road to unionising
It took me 2 years to find out and eventually join a union. It was an extremely circuitous journey. I joined a Marxist study circle in Delhi and eventually got involved in a left mass youth organisation. Through them I learnt more about working class politics and trade union history in India. I did all of this because I was very angry. The horror stories I heard from others about similar health incidents, only emboldened me.
My peers feel that my quest for better mental health and figuring out ‘work-life’ balance took a radical turn, but I don’t think joining a union is radical. I think it is necessary and just. Not just for technology or creative industry workers, but specially for them.
Our generation (people in early twenties to late thirties) is probably the second, at most, the third generation to work in the professional services sector. My grandfather was a small farmer. My father’s generation was the first in his family to get higher education and work in a professional job as liberalisation took roots. Mine is the second generation in our family. Growing up as kids, we barely saw our father. He was in the development sector working 10 odd hours a day, and also went to the office on weekends. My mother was a government employee working in a bank. She had closest to what one might consider ‘work life balance’. She worked and took care of the homestead as well.
Many of my peers, like me, are unmarried, or don’t have kids. We like to think it is because we are anti-establishment, but the truth is we can barely take care of ourselves. I shudder to think how things will be for the next generation if this goes unchecked.
There is a famous May Day poster that was created in the 1800s during the eight-hour workday movement — a pivotal moment in labor history that set 8 hours as the remit of a workday for generations to come. The poster says ‘8 hours labour, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest.’ When this motto was coined industrial workers were working 12–16 hours a day, six days a week. Seems like we might be coming back full circle.
Today, the neoliberal workplace has eaten into recreation time by equating work with enjoyment; and most of us are probably thinking about work before we go to sleep, and the moment we wake up. With Covid-19 and ‘Work From Home’ becoming a norm the notional delineation between the three will all but fade away. The onus of striking a balance between labour, recreation and rest also lies on the individual, which in all honesty, feels like more work.
As a result, our bodies and minds are tired from being wrung out to maximise productivity and profits for companies, while we deal with exploitation, alienation, physical/ mental exhaustion and burnout.
What the union can do for us
This is why I think a union is necessary. It empowers employees and workers by making them aware of tactics used by companies to overwork and underpay them.
It takes everyday forms of resistance and magnifies them towards action and change for all workers. Every right we take for granted — a weekend, health benefits, equal pay for women, etc — came from centuries of organised struggles by workers’ unions, not from employers.
You might not be ready to join a union today, but the union is here for you whenever you need it.
In the meanwhile, as an employee, question everything, specially when it’s sold under the garb of productivity or beneficence. If your company installs a work tracking software, ask them why it doesn’t log and compensate you for overtime. When you’re offered flexible work hours, track if you’re working more than you had excepted to. If your company pushes for work from home as a policy because it’s ‘convenient for you’, ask them if the money they save on rent and utilities will be added to employees’ salaries.
