Entrapment of Less

FMS#360 || Faridabad-NCR || June 2018

The company’s lawyer was of the opinion that there is actually no answer to this complaint. He said if someone raises a complaint that she or he has been dismissed without being paid dues, then what answer can there be?

What complaint was it?

One of the few that the Labour Department still receives, and which the department then asks the companies to reply to.

To most workers it’s clear that no relief is going to come to them through the Labour Department. Things have to be resolved at the workplace itself. You have to act precisely and immediately in large groups, or small, within the workplace.

But if one finds oneself alone, then a complaint to the Labour Department does yield a response.

You’re saying a complaint can become a step.

Yes, a complaint can indeed be an effective push.

Intriguing. I’ve always thought of complaints as a negative thing. It’s been my understanding, as you well know, that complaints are like air coolers. They bring the temperature down a notch.

What’s negative in that?

Things stay hanging between hot and cold. They don’t become acts. The onus keeps slipping and gets deferred to someone else, another. But I’m curious about what you’re suggesting.

You might be right, though. And yes, my reading is a bit different.

There’s a debate between us about complaints. Some of us are even convinced that this entire system is standing on the edifice of complaints.

What I have seen of collisions leads me to think that we have to bring in discernment and variation in our reading of complaints.

How?

For instance, a complaint may open out a situation but remain confined to the person who has raised it. A frenzy of activity may begin between the Labour Department and the company on questions of illegalities. The department might then send summons, hearings could be held, and a figure for compensation begins to hover in the air. The company makes an offer to the worker, hoping to wrap things up. At this juncture, the shape things will take depends both on that worker’s ability to quicken his steps and keep the pressure on the company, as well as make an assessment of how long he is going to be able to keep this up.

In all this one also has to keep the mind still, and life running.

And everyone has ways by which they make an assessment of these capacities in oneself. It’s an awareness one may have about oneself, and yet it blurs when regarding others.

Only to find a deposit of it in some leader!

True, true. But I was hinting at another dimension. Everyone has an expectation of the scale and striving to which they think. They wait for it to emerge, and stay in anticipation of it. This sense envelops our own and collective acts at all times.

So your claim is that when we talk through or listen to a language of complaints, we are making an assessment of, or critiquing, or are in exasperation of the qualities of scale & striving that we find ourselves in.

For instance if I thought that this act of mine will enable 40 of my co-worker to join me…

But found only 15 in my support. It is here that a disappointment settles in, an anger and a litany of complaints takes over. Is this what you are hinting at?

No. I am hinting at not being able to read the enabling of 15 to stand and act with me. I’m talking about seeing this as less. And seeing the interval of this moment as less and as being of no consequence. Everything falls as less. 15… 500… 1000… 4000… 100,000. Always less. It is endless, this entrapment of less.

Sometimes we do laugh at each other on this disjoint.

Scale becomes everything and the intricacies and play of steps get de-valued. It’s self harm. Complaints trouble me.

Complaints are froth. Flotsam. Floating over what?

Over how we consider and regard one another.

Let’s all begin again!!

Fms June 2018 by baatein1 on Scribd