Shiv Visvanathan writes on tech layoffs: The real sadness is our entrenched silence to a tragedy

According to insider reports, 30 to 40 percent of layoffs are of Indian professionals.

Sometimes, there is a poignancy to the news which the media does not capture. The reports are dismal but are presented as inevitable. The recent stories of corporate layoffs announce the news as if it is an indifferent weather report.

They rarely cover the backstage of anxiety, grief and shame. The later stages of the tragedy are rarely captured. A few attempts in social media attempt to heal by creating instant communities. These are but temporary islands of consolation in an ocean of grief.

The audience still displays a sense of awe towards corporate giants like Goldman Sachs, Microsoft and Amazon. These icons are the dream come true of this aspirational era. We cannot believe that these institutions can create an epidemic of nightmares where over 200,000 lose their jobs.

Just A Statistic

We report it as if the corporation is a tree shedding its leaves in autumn. It almost feels natural and the ethical critique gets muted. The sadness doubles as the narrative proceeds; the tragedy of the layoffs is compounded by the stiff-upper-lip silence of the media.

A friend of mine said we need an old-fashioned protest. He insisted we build a Wailing wall in front of Microsoft and Amazon to challenge their formal piety. In fact, a town crier moving from city to city reciting the story of 200,000 victims sounds more effective. One misses the power of storytelling at these moments.

The French novelist Albert Camus in his classic book ‘The Plague’ claimed that statistics do not bleed. We recite them like indifferent indices or impersonal numbers, a body count of the retrenched and the obsolete, without a sense of the tragedy of everyday life. We need a social drama of these facts.

Who’ll Heed Their Pain?

According to insider reports, 30 to 40 percent of layoffs are of Indian professionals. What haunts these individuals is not just the spectre of dismissal but the temporariness of citizenship. Many of them have H1-B or L-1 visas. The immediacy and urgency of getting another job haunts them. Citizenship in the world of IT literally denies membership to the unemployed. Few corporate journals devote any time to joblessness in the corporate world.

No one asks what happens to these men and women, and the dreams that they share with their families. The ritual of dismissal is usually abrupt, anonymous and impersonal. It's more like an act of bloodletting recommended by the new ‘healers’ of the corporation. There is little sense of apology and embarrassment. Our immaculate Satya Nadella, head of Microsoft, can announce the retrenchment of 10,000 employees as a ‘hard decision’. There is an unstated social Darwinian model implying the survival of the fittest.

The Japanese code of leaders apologising for their errors needs to be revived. In fact, one needs the right to information legislation to go beyond the indifferent facade of facts; one needs a new ethnography of entrenchment.

Silence Of The Lambs

The drama shifts to family and community. Children have to be withdrawn from school and budgets trimmed. One has to face the reality of forced sales and the uneasy return to India. The injustice deepens as the unemployed face the stigma of failure as corporate dons look pious and correct. What corporations begin, immigration departments complete with a Kafkaesque finality.

No one asked about the ethics of entrenchment. No one expects the carnivorous corporation to behave like a welfare state. Worse, there is a little history of memory when the economy takes an upturn. The grief and loneliness of the entrenched are not a part of the folktale or oral narrative but not a fragment of established history. One has to chronicle the idea of the corporation as a nightmare. The question of silence of crimes of indifference and erasure has to be challenged. And the sadness begins there.

As an observer put it “the bloody gore of corporate bloodletting cannot be met with the silence of the lambs.” We need a new ethics of witnessing to challenge the alleged inevitability of these tragedies.

Shiv Visvanathan is a Sociologist and Professor at OP Jindal Global University. Views are personal and do not represent the stand of this publication.