The untimely and sudden death of a 26-year-old chartered accountant employee of Ernst & Young (EY), one of the “Big Four” professional services companies in the world, has sent shockwaves. Anna Sebastian Parayil, originally from Kerala, worked in Pune at the time of her death in July 2024. She was under severe stress, experiencing sleeplessness and anxiety. The news went viral as her mother wrote an open letter to EY’s India head, Rajiv Memani, about the circumstances of her overwork, burnout and eventual death and how not a single colleague had attended her funeral. Anna had only joined EY in March 2024. EY was her first job.
Anna’s death has also led to other corporate workers revealing the conditions of their employment on social media and the toxic work culture that pushes young workers to burnout, including working late into the night and weekends, with constant pressure to perform. While some people have highlighted the role of managerial staff and senior management in such cases, others have questioned the working conditions that make it impossible to have a work-life balance. Her mother’s letter highlights the broader problems at such workplaces, writing, “This is a systemic issue that goes beyond individual managers or teams. The relentless demands and the pressure to meet unrealistic expectations are not sustainable…”
This conversation about inhumane working conditions should not be limited to the corporate sector. The mainstream media does not highlight – or publishes in very fine print – the illnesses, debilitating conditions and even deaths of working men and women in factories, daily wage labour, as domestic workers and piece-meal wage rate workers who are not fully covered by labour laws. A recent report by a leading magazine highlighted how constant exposure to silica dust in Indian factories has led to a silent silicosis epidemic among workers.
Domestic workers (most of whom are women), on the other hand, are grudged even basic leave, denied the time off needed to access medical help, paid much less than any minimum wage regulations and also face casteist treatment within homes, employers ensuring they only eat in separate utensils and have access only to stale food. They also face sexual abuse and are unable to escape due to their financial precarity.
Additionally, there are shared concerns among women workers in all fields linked to their specific needs. Employers need to enshrine policies of being equal-opportunity workspaces and institute reasonable accommodations to make offices more inclusive, ranging from substantive implementation of Internal Complaints Committees, organising gender sensitisation for all employees, maternity and paternity leaves, and not penalising or implicitly discriminating against women employees in case of pregnancy.
All of this adds up and turns into a conversation only when there is a crisis, as in this case. But many more such stories go unreported, as many employees wrote about quitting such jobs and still suffering from the after-effects of anxiety and sleeplessness due to the atmosphere they experienced. While many people feel tempted to say that such employees should resign rather than continue in such hostile workplaces, they ignore the fact that most such workers do not have generational wealth or social nets to rely on, have dependents, and cannot leave their jobs due to the condition of the job market.
How can employers ensure a transformation in working conditions in India? For starters, there has to be an honest conversation about the unreasonable expectations placed on employees, the pressures of intense “productivity” in offices and the principles that need to be implemented to break this cycle. Labour laws need to be strengthened and not diluted, unionising at the workplace should not be criminalised, and existing government regulations on labour norms should be applied more intensively to ensure that workers are not implicitly pressured to work beyond regulation hours. The solution does not lie in one-off “retreats” as corporates tend to do, but in systemic changes that can benefit employees who are currently being treated as expendable commodities rather than the human beings they are.
Certainly….. Work pressure and competition lead a woman to such situation…. Because they not only the ones who manage their home but also meet up all the expectations at their workplace.. so it should be such where they can get treatment like humans…