Exploited.... Unaware....

I had gone for a dinner yesterday with my aunt (dad’s sister) and her husband and some other relatives. One of the topics that revolved around the dinner was the fact of how people are being exploited by the higher-ups in the organization… one of the aunties there related this incident…

She is a teacher in a school out in Ahmedabad and she was one day interviewing candidates for the post of librarian for the school. Now the school I guess is quite well-to-do even though being under some association or group (did not quite listen to that part of conversation..!). But the point is that, there was this lady candidate who applied for the job and her interview was being handled. After the initial round of questioning, she was asked what her expected salary was… the poor lady was in a dilemma and after a few minutes of thought, she hesitatingly replied “Rs.3500/- ??”… Now my aunt and the principal who was along with her were put in a fix… the poor thing was unaware of how much she was even entitled to get… Misreading the expressions on my aunt and the principal’s faces she again haltingly said “I will be ok with it even if the salary is reduced by Rs.1000/- to Rs.2500/-.” This from a lady, my aunt said, who is qualified to be a librarian by all standards and who is entitled to the job as much as anyone else, in fact more so than anyone else… My aunt allayed her fears saying that she was entitled to actually Rs.12000/- as per her grade and qualifications… And the look on the lady’s face was one of pure astonishment apparently because she could not believe that she would be entitled to an amount so high when she was asking for a sum of Rs.3500/-. Again she haltingly asked whether she could get that much for the job.

It’s sad to see deserving people like this being unaware of their rights and getting exploited by the dime-a-dozen people who cheat others out of their jobs and money etc…