Jobs forever

Here’s one example of why the management of government-owned Air India will have its work cut out pruning its bloated staff rolls. The airline’s New Delhi office has a superintendent in its finance department who has no work to do, though the job description requires the person to supervise four or five people. How did this happen? The superintendent in question is the widow of an employee who died 20 years ago. She was given the job purely on compassionate grounds. In her two decades in Air India, she was promoted to superintendent level, though her only job was to write addresses on envelopes for letters sent by the finance department. Now, technology has rendered that job redundant — the addresses are printed using a computer. But given the airline’s hyper-active unionism, eliminating even such a post will be next to impossible.