Night shift and graveyard shift

Graveyard shift, I am curious to know whose coinage this is. Organizations, mostly Indian, some American with a strong presence in India wanting to take advantage of the cheap labor of the APAC region. are perpetually forcing their workforce, those bright little children into night shifts. The idea is that we, the people of the third world will have to be up and about at a time we need to go to bed. Why? In order to cater to the developed world's (the western world) business needs. We need money, we need growth, we need development. That is why, bright and creative managers have initiated night shifts in most third world countries. Later they initiated graveyard shifts; some of you will be horrified to know that children who go for these shifts return home at 3 or 4 in the mornings. No sooner they return home, they go off to sleep. The inmates are on the alert so they do not disturb them. Imagine the coinage, graveyard; children who work in this shift know that they are dead all the time, when they are working, and when they are not. This does have its manifestations, something that disturbs the well being of the society where they belong.

We get money, but we pay the price

As a result, what we get as a consequence to this sad slavery is anger, angst, hatred and other negative vibrations. Social behaviorists can help with grim statistics of anger, hatred, depression, killing as an outcome of working in dead hours. I guess it would have started post globalization because in our times going for night shifts was an exception, not a rule.

I am sure there is a way out to see that both, businesses and the workforce, do not get negatively affected if we think more creatively to save our souls. But the question is who will bring back those children into the normal and nature-abiding routine and why would anyone do it, for there seems to be no need, everything seems to be working fine. We need to wear all the colored hats and deliver us a way out. Qualified managers, CEOs think it is okay to let people work in odd hours on a regular basis. There needs to be a group of well-meaning people who, by means of research, would show how our society, the third world's, is getting negatively and very adversely impacted because of endorsing abnormal working hours as a norm. Governments need to intervene to ensure that it is not enough to ensure people working for eight hours a day, but the timing is also vital. Night shifts can only be accepted as exception, not as a rule. Doesn't human rights have anything to say about this.

When these children go out, drink, smoke and entertain themselves in an 'unapproved' way, we raise our eyebrows; we look down on the ways as a western influence, but we do not see that the real western influence is happening elsewhere, under the ground. No one even asks as to why we should keep awake and work at night when the western world would work for normal hours. Are we now losing out on sleep? This can have criminal repercussions in society, the frog is sure to die an untimely death if we do not wake up now. If we were slaves during colonization, or before independence, what are we now. Interestingly the western world, from where we get business, will not mind if we chalked out an effective way to safeguard the interest of the all the stakeholders, but we will not dare to do that, one wonders why... are we still puppets in their hands.

People are not products
 

We are pushing one entire generation into insomnia, depression, unrest, intolerance for the sake of some money; we showcase our growth and development, but we are blissfully unaware of the harm that we are causing to our own society, a permanent damage that would make us 'developing countries' for good. Our perception of looking at people as products is the key here. People are not products, they can never be, this belief system needs to change. In our earnestness and sincerity, we have forgotten one fundamental fact; money, possession are not the signs of success, they are the invisible quagmire to growth under which we get drowned and buried every day. The western world has somehow realized this. On the face of it, growth might look beautiful, but just like the tree in the picture, the apparently beautiful tree is also trying to communicate its sufferance, for how long can we ignore this. We cannot keep the tree artificially awake on one hand, and on the other, market our environmental consciousness with beautiful muddy saplings in our hands. Bringing those bonnies back into life can be the most helpful corporate social responsibility we can think of. If CSR has to start, let it start from home first.