Flowers for the Women Wearing Veils - Volume II — Page 166
166 were bringing in wood and metal very quickly. B ut over here, the workers make the job very cos tly because of their laziness. I would describe their work in th e following way. W hen a worker goes to pick up something, he carries the basket as if his back is broken. He groans as he picks up his load and wobbling from side to side, walks over to the build er. When a worker goes to pick up bricks, first he gasps for breath; then he picks up ten or eleven bricks. He then takes a rest. Then, he picks them up and just like a louse , walks over to the bricklayer, taking a good ten to twelve minutes. The brickl ayer also works in the same way. Meanwhile a worker in Europe would have made at least ten to twelve such trips in the same given time. This is why European employers pay their laborers much higher wages. It is the same story with landlords [farmers]. I have compared the produce of our country with the produce of Europe. There is not much difference in the quality of our produce and that of Europe , h owever they pay their worker s ten rupees a day, while we pay ours at the most, one and a half rupees daily. Therefore , a European worker earns six times as much as our workers. Despite the high cost of labor in Europe, you still pay much less for produce. I have met quite a few agricultural experts and discussed with them that this country’s produce is one an d a half times that of our country’s produce , but they pay their workers ten rupees daily and we pay our workers one and a half rupees. Why is there such a difference? But most of them could not give me an answer. The real reason is that the laborers there work much harder. Here, we hire ten people to work an area of a hundred acre s , over there all you need is one person. Therefore , even if the worker here is paid three or four times m ore than our workers, it works out cheaper. This is all the result o f not being used to hard work. So , when you select a motto , think about this aspect as wel l. For example, in European countries the cooking is done while standing up. Our women sit while cooking. Doctors are of the opinion that our method is bad for the health. Hence, work can not be as agilely compl eted while sitting as it can be completed when standing. This is why in European countries people stand when cooking. In the same way, they stand while washing clothes and so the work is completed in very little time. And then the slackness wh ich is produced in one’s limbs when sitting, doesn’t occur. The same goes for embroidery work. T he Europeans are not