Unrealised dreams, uncertain future: Voices of young workers need to be heard

In 2020, just as the pandemic was inducing lockdowns all over the world, 24-year-old Safina was looking to go back to working in a supermarket within one of the biggest malls in Bengaluru. Safina had by then worked in malls for six years, her multiple jobs being that of a ‘promoter’ for different food manufacturing companies in supermarkets. This involved ensuring that the products moved quickly off the shelves. Though the pay for a ‘promoter’ does not include receiving stocks, sifting through damaged products, or even stacking the shelves, Safina and her colleagues were expected to do all kinds of work on the shop floor.

Since the jobs, coming under the umbrella of organised retail, did not demand any special qualification, Safina had begun working in the sector when she was in Pre-university College (11^th standard) to support her own education. Her mother had been ill in 2019 and, as primary care-giver, Safina travelled to their hometown, Pune, giving up her job as trainee anchor in a Kannada media house. After a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, History and Kannada, and a diploma in journalism, she had worked in the media house for two months, but without any pay since it is commonly understood in the profession to treat the time as an unpaid training-period. At the end of the stint, she had no experience letter or pay-slip, which meant retail remained her only option to earn a steady income.

In another part of the city, 22-year-old Nandita was working as a sampling-promoter for a well known brand in a mall. Her ‘part time’ job with a 10-hour shift everyday earned Nandita Rs 15,000 a month with which she pursued her higher education in humanities and helped support her family of five. This was before the first lockdown of 2020 that closed-down all shopping malls.

Safina’s and Nandita’s experiences are much like those in a study conducted by Kanaja, the research cell within Samvada, an organisation working on youth rights and livelihoods. The study, focusing on the impact of the lockdowns on youth working in the shopping malls of Bengaluru, brings together stories where the pandemic appears as only a moment of increased hardship in the already precarious lives of young people. It shows how the multiple transitions of youthhood in the journey from education to paid work are never linear for those from marginalised locations.  

Most of Nandita’s and Safina’s co-workers on the shop floor were of their age. While some of them had made it to 12^th standard or degree, those who were ‘10^th Fail’ also managed to find a job in retail – in food and beverage, clothing, or cosmetics. Pavan, whose narrative appears in the study, is only 19 and works as a sales executive in a mobile and electronics store in a mall. He talks of having no stipulated breaks, and slipping into the room where stocks are piled to have lunch as quickly as he can, only to reappear on the shop floor as if he had never left. Arriving at work even a minute late meant losing half a day’s salary, and ‘weekly-off’ was simply a term used for a total of three days off a month. Despite the poor working conditions, he says his colleague of the same age was able to buy a bike through EMI before the pandemic. Pavan has no plans of moving out of retail or pursuing higher education.

With no special training or qualification required for the job, organised retail has been growing as one of the largest employers of youth in the country according to a study by Shaoni Shabnam and Bino Paul published as early as 2008. Yet, when we hear the word youth, the image that crosses our mind is hardly the retail worker at the cash counter or the one stocking the shelves in the neighbourhood supermarket. Too often we have been taught to think of youth as a student eager to take the nation’s GDP to the next coordinate through his academic accolades and entrepreneurial skills. This is what the draft National Youth Policy (NYP) too imagines when it states its objective as “unlocking the potential of the youth to advance India.” This framing forgets that youth are already transitioning from education to paid-work or are in paid work to support their education, while also steeped in familial and societal expectations of them.

High aspirations, low salaries

Safina recalls how, at a morning briefing, a floor manager had once asked the workers what their plans were for the future – if they wished to grow in retail – and fell awkwardly silent when she said she wants to become an IAS officer. “There’s nothing to support all of us who are working part-time like this. I’ve never been able to continue in journalism… and now after COVID there are no vacancies, no processes to apply and absolutely no pay in any media house.”

While her job in promoting food products at a mall helped Safina sustain herself, it was at odds with her aspirations. These young people, whether the gig worker new to the city and its roads, or the older resident promoting cosmetics at an air-conditioned store, and their aspirations need to form the centre of our imagination of youth while formulating policies. Instead, the draft NYP itself appears as a suboptimal solution in an incompatible ecosystem that encourages vocationalisation and skilling for low-paid jobs, and discourages public funded higher education.  

When the ‘un-lockdown’ (as the government called it) came in the middle of 2020, it brought no relief for Nandita. “I had to quit the retail job although I was called back. We had lost my father by then and I had to support the family… my mother, my elder sister who was living with us and her infant. The supermarket offered Rs 8,000 a month and I could barely cover household expenses and the debt that my father had made. I couldn’t have got through college with that salary,” she explains. 

The pandemic had meant that even with a bachelor’s degree in History, Economics, and Political Science, she had no work experience related to her field of study. Nandita is the first to reach higher education in her family which comes under the 2A or ‘most backward’ OBC category in the state. In the middle of the pandemic, she joined a paper-mill factory near her house, and continued working there for two years, earning Rs 10,000 a month, so that she could complete her MA.

Safina too settled for a job that entailed cleaning rice and lentils for a supermarket on a part-time basis. It paid her a mere Rs 5,000 a month, with no incentives, ESI, or PF, but the alternative was unemployment as media houses were not hiring. In the little time she got to work in the media, she faced caustic competition, based on appearance, to face the camera and was also taunted for her alleged relationship with a man in the organisation. Without a chance to explain her side of the story, she felt compelled to switch jobs. In the second media house, there was no pay at a time when she had to pay for her mother’s healthcare.  

Gender and caste in the workplace

Narratives similar to Safina’s are captured in another study by Kanaja that looks at experiences of young women journalists in Kannada media. These media houses today remain without basic facilities such as creches, pick-up and drop services, and mechanisms to prevent sexual harassment at the workplace, and display a singular lack of institutional will to enable young women to build a career in media.

Far from the kind of post-feminist environment claimed by ‘national’ or English language media houses, something that a 2016 study by Nithila Kanagasabai critically analyses, these workplaces have visibly instituted patriarchy that treats the recruitment of women itself as a burden. With so few women in higher positions in the profession, decision making is in the hands of men. In Kannada media these men are known to belong to one Brahmin community. What this means for people like Safina is pressure to write, sound and look like them. Kavana, a 22-year-old, who comes from a Vokkaliga family and works in a Kannada news channel, has been subjected to snide remarks about her language and accent as it does not meet the standards of “mainstream” Kannada.

Another narrative that appears in the study is 25-year-old Savitha’s. “I know that they only hire people from their own community as reporters. So, I started as a copy-editor. Dalits are lesser in number in the entire organisation and profession, and I entered this profession to represent my community,” she said.

Besides knowing the “right” kind of Kannada, one must be prepared to work at any hour, despite the stigma that working late nights carries for women. Savitha says, “I have requested the higher ups to place another woman in the night-shift along with me… But they have not made any attempt to make it woman-friendly or safe for us. Instead, I’ve had one of my senior colleagues incessantly text me very late in the night. I just had to strategise on my own… the next day at work, I loudly said, sir, I’m sorry I couldn’t pick up your call at 12 last night. Was it something important? He felt ashamed that I questioned him in front of everyone, but now he pulls me up for small, insignificant mistakes in the copy.”

The women also talk about a sense of competition that creeps in among them as positions for women only open up when other women quit. “First of all, we have to bear with remarks on our appearance, complexion, and our weight when we are hired. And while on the job, we see that male colleagues are sent to cover important events and meet famous people. We are never given such assignments,” says Savitha. 

The competition brings with it the idea of individual merit. Aadya, a Brahmin woman says, “People say that Brahmins get preference in the media but I have not seen anything like that. I don’t get all the opportunities that my male colleagues get but some of them have encouraged me and given me feedback. Building our career is just as important to us as it is for men. It is up to us to prove our ability.” For Aadya, her membership in her community seems to be insignificant in landing her the job or garnering the support she gets at work. To cut through this caste-neutral imagination, the study brings together narratives of women from different castes, regions and religions, who grapple with multiple axes of oppression.

The ideas of individual merit and efficiency is popular among those youth working in retail too. The belief that one will be rewarded if one performs well prevails among them, even while young people from marginalised backgrounds of caste, religion, region, and ethnicity face greater challenges in the sector.

In a distressing finding, the report quotes 23-year-old Meera, who belongs to a Scheduled Caste community from a north eastern state: “I work up to 14 hours a day for an income of 12,000 rupees. I’m always afraid to walk back home so late in the night but the owner doesn’t care.” Meera, who has worked in retail for three years, had to return to her hometown during the lockdown with no savings in hand. On her work in Bengaluru, she says: “There’s a perception about North East girls… that we’re ready for anything… the owner has touched me and held me in ways I don’t want. But I just keep quiet because they can throw me out of the job. There is a lot of competition in this work.”

The impunity given to perpetrators of sexual harassment at the workplace and outside of it is much more when the survivors have no support system locally, are far away from their homes, and do not have language on their side. Besides, women like Meera are harassed not only on account of their gender but their racialised identity.  

Similarly, Muslim women talk about their everyday negotiations in the sector. Safina, for instance, must constantly negotiate with her family and community to even enter the public realm, owing to the prescribed uniform at the mall. While these women’s hijabs are seen as religious symbols that need to be shed at the workplace, women from dominant religious communities do not have to make the same negotiations.

The draft NYP seems somewhat cognizant of the differences among young people, given their varied locations. It speaks of strengthening existing scholarships for SC, ST youth, and youth living with disabilities. It also mentions efforts to encourage entrepreneurship among marginalised youth including women, disabled, SC, ST, LGBTQIA+, and the ultra poor. There are also repeated references to the idea of social inclusion and equitable progress while addressing youth not in education, employment or training (NEET). These policy suggestions will only hold ground with a detailed explanation of their numbers that can lend into action plans for states. Besides disaggregated data and situation analysis, such policies would only gain by listening to the voices of the youth that they aim to serve. It is only through these voices that the contradictions between equitable growth and educational policies that push for skilling programmes and low-paying jobs can be prised open. 

For Safina, no amount of manoeuvring has helped remain in journalism – the profession of her choice. Nandita, who wishes to work as a lecturer, is paying off debts even before starting her career in education. Pavan does not seem to imagine a career outside of retail. These young people are making career ‘choices’ in a context of limited opportunities and seem to be internalising the responsibilities imposed on them.

Insecure jobs, uncertain future

Across various studies by Kanaja – on retail, on women in media and on Dalit women’s education, career and marriage – one can find among the youth, a pattern of unconditional gratitude towards their families. The refrain, especially among young Dalit women, is that the family has done so much for them, despite all odds, and now it is time for them to show their gratitude by setting aside their own dreams and aspirations. At an age where they are expected to ‘settle down’ into married life and start their own households, they are also expected to fulfil family commitments, financial and emotional. One way to do this is to make no qualms about the parents choosing their partner for them within caste norms.

These familial and societal expectations are not far from the way the state imagines their contribution towards the betterment of the nation. The draft NYP, in fact, calls itself a roadmap for the “development of youth today to ensure a bright future for India tomorrow.” This leaves the futures of the young people themselves unaddressed.

Today Nandita is preparing for exams to be eligible to teach. Safina is on the lookout for a job with a decent living wage. Young people like them are setting aside their own needs and desires, while the State expects them to ‘build the nation’ and employers set impossible targets to be met. Their experiences show that those concerned with the rights of the youth need to think outside abstract notions of development and respond to the specific needs of young people whose lives are situated in growing informalisation and contractualisation, and in older, enduring systems of inequalities.         

Shraddha NV Sharma is a consultant researcher at Kanaja, the research cell within Samvada, an organisation working on youth rights and livelihoods. Samvada is on Twitter as @officialsamvada.