Work-Life Revolution

By Ernest Joseph

I have spent my life from childhood to adolescent stages from 1958 to 1980, growing up in houses which were provided by my father’s employer, Amul – the largest cooperative employer in the field of dairy. In fact, the cooperative movement which started in 1946 is now considered the white revolution of India – coined of course after the color of milk.

This housing benefit was provided to 80 or so employees of Amul, out of hundreds of total work force. Amul, being a cooperative company primarily owned by the farmers who provided milk for processing, could not compete with other private sector employers who would offer higher pay to lure top talent, for example. So in lieu of cash compensation, housing was an attractive option.

I would like to note that the talent Amul has been able to acquire historically has sacrificed that extra monitory compensation in lieu of a strong belief in cooperative movement and work for the modest owners – the farmers.

While at the corporate level Amul has been always successful in recruiting top talent, we, the families of these talented employees were also benefited by another revolution – Work-Life Revolution.

This is my rationale about the hypothesis of work-life revolution:

Here in USA, we started hearing about work-life balance in recent years, but the concept of work and life balance was well understood by the founders and leaders of Amul cooperative Limited. They saw that if we can help our employees to maintain work life balance by offering housing within the vicinity of the dairy, then it will contribute to productivity and will help in balancing their work and life.

Whether the hypothesis is true or not, one thing is sure – because of the benefit which was provided to our parents while working at Amul, we, their children grew up in a colony where the common factor was Amul.

This fact is the reason we, the Amulites as we call ourselves, feel connected with anyone who grew up either in Amul Park or Amul Dairy colony, regardless of what generation we spent our lives there – from 1950’s to 2000’s.

So for that reason, I feel that while there is a white revolution that is well known and documented, for us kids of those employees of white revolution, we have also experienced work-life revolution.