She is scared to speak. The consequence, she fears, is a summary sack. She does not know if someone has ever been thrown out for venting a grievance to the media. She has agreed to being called Purnima in our story.

Our Purnima is a pretty young lady. Customers will interpret her grimace and shining eyes as service with a smile – the promise of the professional yet personal and friendly touch with which the supermarket beckons customers. She carries home a wee bit more than Rs 3,000 per month. On the face of it, there is little else this senior-secondary pass-out could ever ask for.

When asked to mention the one thing she liked about her work, Purnima, in the blink of an eye, said, “It is so cool here. Even the ice-cream does not melt in this air-conditioned environment.”

And the one thing she detests about her workplace? “We are expected to bear with perverse customers, who are more interested in fun rather than shopping. It is common to come across men making passes at us or offering to take us out for an evening. If we bring it to the notice of the floor managers, we are told they do not want any nuisance in the place and we should not come across as being unfriendly. And when someone follows us from the bus stop to the workplace, we are told it must be our fault.”

Purnima`s statement gives us just a glimpse of the `from-the-frying-pan-to-the-fire`-like vulnerabilities of a retail establishment worker. On the one hand, it offers an escape from the physical miseries of their one-room tenements in the urban villages of Delhi. On the other, it compromises their basic human self-respect.

For the Purnimas of Delhi’s retail sector, the long hours at work, the low wages and the insecurities of life are but a part of the litanies of heaped indignities that are their bane.

Bright lights, the sound of music, the chill of a mid-summer air-conditioned mall, colourful designer clothes and the exposure to things on the shelves they cannot ever even dream to own — the retail sector is a chimera, an attraction that the ever-growing army of unemployed young men and women cannot resist.

Most of them come from Delhi`s Hindi-speaking economic and employment hinterland. Language matters. So do appearances. You must look pleasant, whether you are a man or a woman. Many salesmen and saleswomen come through networking and referencing, which may well be an advantage because it offers a solution to the boarding and lodging problems of the city. For example, a good majority of ground sales staff in the Reliance Super Hypermart in East Delhi comes from Eastern UP. They live and cook together in groups of three, four or even five in a single room not very far from their workplace. This helps them save some money to send back home. Wherever they live, they compete for space and amenities with the very fruit and vegetable hawkers, who their paymasters threaten to displace.

Just a handful of these hopefuls come with a career-in-retail dream. At Spencer’s, for instance, there are some young Nepalese. Some of them have been in India for most of their lives. Yet others have come here for the opportunities the city offers. “I want to make a career in the retail sector and will go back to Kathmandu once the retail scenario picks up there and the political scenario stabilises,” said one.

If gender balance (or the lack of it) is any indication, men are preferred. In truth, though, much of this is because of late working hours. Besides, employers are unwilling to take responsibility for the safety of the women employees returning home from work late in the night. This means that the likes of Purnima are responsible for their own safety on their way back home. The Purnimas of Delhi’s retail sector have to come from very poor families and must be desperate for jobs to expose themselves to such risks. Implicit in this is that their power to negotiate is very low.

Organisation

Neighbourhood retail enterprises such as Subhiksha, Sabka Bazaar (part of the Home Store chain), Apna Bazaar, More and Big Apple exist alongside shops, and also deal in fruit and vegetables. Subhiksha has a pharmaceutical counter too in many of its stores. In many places, these establishments compete with the smaller dairies and medium-scale dairies. The vast majority of these establishments survive on outsourced workers. A Subhiksha outlet, for instance, has 18 to 20 people; barring one or two, the rest are outsourced staff.

A typical supermarket has a pyramidal structure with floor managers at the top supported by supervisors, on the organisation’s payroll, managing care executives and handling staff.

The floor managers are usually responsible for maintaining inventories, analysing work relating to sales and giving inputs to corporate bosses, from the shop floor. They often carry MBA degrees. A mall usually has five to six floor managers, one each for Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG), Staples, Electronics, Garments, and Fruits and Vegetables. At Spencer’s Hypermart in Ghaziabad, Big Bazaar in Noida and Ghaziabad, and Reliance Super in Mayur Vihar (East Delhi), there are five floor managers. This is an indication of the large workforce these retail giants command. In case of a very big establishment, two to three supervisors may be reporting to one floor manager. 

Supervisors handle customer sales executives and the handling staff, and ensure that they work consistently. They process some of the paperwork necessary for the inventories. Often, in the electronic goods section, they explain the features of a product to customers. At Reliance Star City Mall, Mayur Vihar, seven floor personnel report to one supervisor in the fruit and vegetables section, whereas, at Subhiksha, three to four floor personnel report to one supervisor. Handling staff have to attend to customers, answer their questions and locate products. They also stock shelves and are responsible for sundry errands.

Between the supervisors and the handling staff (also called handy-boys or handy-girls) is a layer of care executives, who may be on the organisation’s payroll or may be outsourced. The arrangement differs in retail organisations. At the bottom of the pyramid is the housekeeping staff, recruited and employed by the contractors (or ‘agents’) that the retail giant hires.

Whereas what is visible fills up the public imagination, the retail sector also has a dark underbelly — the personnel in the warehouses, IT, transport, security, and loss and prevention (L&P) teams — that supports the monoliths. More often than not, the warehouse, IT and L&P teams are on the direct payroll of the retail companies, mainly because of an expectation of loyalty and the institutional memory they carry. The logistics centre of Spencer’s (in Delhi) is staffed by a team of about 50 people, who serve 12 dairies, each with approximately 20 staff members. A hypermarket and supermarket chain such as Big Bazaar has a logistics team of about twice the size of Spencer’s, and almost 10 times the number of staff in its stores.

For customer care executives, the process of transition from being an outsourced worker to being on the organisation’s payroll can be a painful one, as the example at Spencer`s suggests. The executives are school pass-outs (some are graduates). After years of work in the retail sector they are not entirely sure what their terms of employment may be in the long-term because these are different for different outsourcing agencies. Whereas most of these outsourced customer service executives are now on the payroll of Spencer’s, the agony of waiting for the good news can be seen writ large on their faces as they speak on this issue.

The outsourcing agencies and the companies take advantage of a simple fact when hiring. Prospective employees are overwhelmed by the huge, slick setup; it fills them with awe and undermines their sense of self-worth. Companies interview prospective salesmen and the selected candidates are given a contract. But there is a catch — the contract is not between the salesperson and the company. It is between an agency and the person. In short, the retail enterprise recruits people it knows but the employer is an agency the candidates have no clue about. Salespersons at Subhiksha spoke of how difficult it is to find valid agencies such as Perfect, Jupiter and Peninsula, which they know of only through their letterheads. The sanctity of the process, or the lack of any, is evident from the fact that the salespersons interviewed said that they never kept their contracts safely. They have been led to believe it is not an important document, and this may be reinforced by their being familiar with a culture of casual work agreements.

This explains why all the outsourced workers (handy-boys/handy-girls) in Subhiksha were not clear about the conditions under which they were hired. Rajiv (name changed), barely 18, working at Subhiksha’s fruit and vegetables outlet, said that he was just too happy to have got a job that will bring him a couple of thousand rupees at the end of the month. “I was told that I had to work at the fruit and vegetables section and I arrived here one morning to work. It pays me. And it’s better than wasting my time loafing about,” he said. Asked if he had any employment letter or any other piece of paper that said that he was employed, he said he was yet to receive a copy of a document he had signed because it had needed to be amended. Rajiv was hired in summer last year. He does not even know the date he joined work. What he knows is that he made umpteen trips to Subhiksha’s head office in Neb Sarai in the hot summer afternoons of 2007 before he was eventually hired.

Rajiv himself describes his engagement with Subhiksha as a one-way street. “We are accountable for what we do or do not do to Subhiksha as if they have employed us. But the Subhiksha management is not accountable for what it does.”

Given the rapid rate of growth of the retail sector, the requirement for the people is far higher than the availability of workers. This is why the retail sector boasts of the second-highest salary hikes only after the IT sector, according to the Retailers Association of India. What is not clear, however, is where the salaries have been hiked — at the topmost level of the pyramid, or elsewhere, or uniformly through the structure.

Pantaloon, which runs the Big Bazaar outlets, saw its salary budgets rise almost to100 crores. At Shoppers Stop, salary costs went up by 45 per cent in 2006-2007. According to the human resources consulting firm, Watson Wyatt India, salaries across the retail sector in 2007 swelled between 18 and 25 per cent as against 12 to 14 per cent in other sectors.

An extrapolated calculation made in 2002 by the consulting firm, Jones Lange LaSalle, predicted a 14-fold rise in the space dedicated to modern-format retail and more than a million new employees.

The growing requirement for working hands in the retail sector also means that staff is being poached. This is being resisted by the management through a carrot-and-stick policy. For instance, Big Bazaar has come up with its concept of Mera Bazaar, a website where its staff can buy gold, clothes, food or electronics as an incentive to stay within the group.

The employees on the direct payroll of the retail companies, on the other hand, have somewhat better conditions of work than those contracted, including incentives, mediclaim, access to ESI and provident fund (CPF). The last, is a bone of contention, though. For instance, at Spencer`s, the company does not contribute to the CPF; instead, it is deducted from the salary of the employee itself.

Endless Hours

Insiders admit that poaching and long hours of work are taking their toll — attrition rates have touched up to 40 per cent for some retailers. In such a scenario, the incentives given to staff are not designed to make them feel attached to the company so much as to give them a balance sheet advantage that other companies cannot afford to match. For instance, at Big Bazaar, this comes in the form of heavy discounts on goods sold through an internal company website (merabazaar.com), in which the total discounts offered are figured as a form of compensation whether or not they are availed of by the staff. Says Vijay Kumar, who comes from a sister organisation of Big Bazaar, “It is stupid to think that we buy whatever is offered to us on Mera Bazaar. We do not have that sort of money. But, whenever someone speaks of the total salary package, this incentive also figures.”

According to Monisha Advani, Head of Mumbai-based Emmay Human Resources, “Retention of employees in the retail sector is a challenge on account of the unique workplace conditions and circumstances. For instance, there is a tendency to work ten-hour shifts as opposed to the regular eight-hour shifts.”

The ten-hour shifts take the biggest toll on the workers. A few incentives here and there do not compensate for the extraction of more man-hours. Since the sector first came up, many of the young men (and the few women) have also got married and want to go home in time, as opposed to preferring the comfort of the air-conditioned environment at their workplace.

While off-days are availed “to catch up with lost sleep, if for nothing else,” as one employee at Reliance said, off-days are a luxury in the rush during the festival season. And though there are legislated provisions, ensuring that staff gets rest, it takes other things such as power shortages to have these laws enforced. Shoppers and staff witnessed this in Gurgaon on when 115 retailers, including Big Bazaar, Vishal Mega Mart and Reliance Fresh, were fined and shut for the day, ostensibly for not giving a week off to the staff. The closures were really meant to keep the malls from guzzling electricity.

Earlier, through a notification issued on 27 February, the Haryana government had ordered that all retailers in Gurgaon town shut their shops on Tuesdays.

On the record, though, retail workers are also entitled to some leave — usually 12 days of privilege leave, sick leave etc. When they avail of this, they are made to feel guilty about it. An employee at Spencer’s says, “So much happens in the span of a week that taking leave for a week can make us feel obsolete.” They cite the case of their colleagues from Mumbai, who had been transferred to Delhi, and had come with months of leave. They were, however, able to take only a couple of days off to sort out their housing and schooling for their children.

Is it not possible to feign illness? The workers reply in the negative. Much of this can be put down to management practice. The bosses on the shop floor are, more often than not, endowed with some leadership qualities and they drive their workers to perform. “He feels let down,” is a common refrain. One woman said, “I have a backache from standing for hours in the busy season and my boss is very nice to me. He lets me go to the doctor and I can come 30 to 45 minutes late. My late entry is taken care of.” Backaches and pain in the legs are a common occupational hazard, many admitted.

How this is built into the management system becomes clear if one examines the work of the L&P teams that make routine checks. Back-end staff (warehouse, logistics etc) is aware to what extent losses are tolerable by L&P standards. These are referred to as shrinkages. However, people on the shop floors have no clue about this and are led to believe that there is zero tolerance of shrinkages resulting from, for example, breakages or missing articles. The floor managers and supervisors exploit this lack of knowledge of shrinkages and, to a large extent, even perpetuate this ignorance in order to cultivate a sense of loyalty and personal responsibility to the team leader.

The outsourced staff has none of these privileges. A day’s leave means a day of lost wages. Allowances for CPF and mediclaim remain a pipe dream. Often, the agents are asked to withdraw outsourced staff, citing shrinkages. This instills fear, on the one hand, among the rest of the workers whereas, on the other hand, it makes them feel beholden to the floor managers for bailing them out of a dreadful situation.

None of the staff at Big Bazaar or Subhiksha interviewed could recall the last time they had had a shift of less than nine hours. Following a small discussion among themselves, a group of support staff in one retail giant’s warehouse agreed that their work hours were a minimum of 10 hours a day. On an average, they spent 12 hours at work and during the peak season, the number of hours of work went up to 18 hours a day. Besides this, there was no weekend or off-day during the festival season.

The fruit and vegetables section operates for customers from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Rajiv paints the story of a slave: “I arrive at 5 a.m. to ready the shop for customers. Often, the vehicles with the fruit and vegetables arrive before we do, and we get rebuked for not coming earlier. It is a mad rush to get the shop ready on time. In the evenings, the shutters are down for customers by 9 p.m. We then have to clear up the mess. By the time I leave the premises, it is 10 p.m. Unless there is a problem, an emergency, only two managers have an arrangement whereby one leaves by 4 p.m. Else, as you can see, I work 17 hours a day, six days a week. By the time I reach home, there is little energy left in me.”

Guards working at some of the malls are outsourced from local security agencies, hired for a pittance and made to work for endless hours12 hours is the norm for guards employed by Delhi-based security agencies and contracted by retail outlets. The same goes for the house-keeping staff. Sales staff on the shop floor speaks, in hushed tones, of sexual harassment of women among the housekeeping staff, but there is no environment to speak to these people and they become difficult to approach on this topic. Such is the dread of losing their jobs.

As for attempts to organise these workers, there does not seem to be much going on. Tapan Sen, National Secretary of CITU, noted that it takes time, in fact many years, to organise a union, and that the retail format is very new.