INDIA
G4S in India
G4S employs more security workers in India than in any other single market around the globe, but it doesn’t behave the way you’d expect a market leader to behave.
Recently, 20 cash service workers employed by G4S filed charges with the company for failing to pay overtime. According to union filings, G4S routinely pays workers straight time pay after eight hours of work in a day. The law requires workers be paid double their hourly wage after eight hours.
In addition, workers report that families of guards killed on the job are refused compensation by the company. On one occasion the company allegedly removed the uniform off a dead man so that it could disclaim all responsibility.
G4S Restores Grave of “Imperial Psychopath” Brigadier General John Nicholson
October 2006--Anger and confusion greeted the renovation of Nicholson Cemetery in Delhi, India, named after the notorious Brigadier General John Nicholson. G4S sponsored the renovations, spending $13,000 over two years.
Nicholson was known even during his own period for his cruelty and disdain for Indians. He died while putting down the 1857 uprising that Britain refers to as the “Indian Mutiny” and India refers to as the “First War of Independence.”
"Nicholson is the personification of everything the British should be most embarrassed about, the ultimate racial psychopath who hated Indians with a passion and horrified even the most bloodthirsty British," says historian Historian William Dalrymple, author of The Last Mughal. Nicholson once beat a cookboy to death for walking in front of him, and wrote a fellow officer suggesting “the flaying alive, impalement, or burning of the murderers of the [British] women and children of Delhi . . . The idea of simply hanging the perpetrators of such atrocities is maddening.”
“I’m a little baffled about why they are valourising Nicholson now,” Narayani Gupta, author of Delhi between Two Empires, told reporters. “He doesn’t come out well in the Mutiny, especially in his attitude toward Indians.”
“The renovation of the Nicholson Cemetery by the British Government is an insult to those Indians who died fighting for the country in 1857,” Kavita Punjabi wrote in a letter to The Telegraph, a newspaper based in Calcutta. G4S, rather than the British High Commission, provided the funds for the renovation, but the High Commission officially supported the project.
A G4S spokeswoman defended the choice to renovate the cemetery, saying “it’s named after Nicholson but there are lots of other graves there. Yes, his grave is there. Yes, he led the assault on Delhi. But that is part of our heritage too.”
During the Mutiny, Nicholson wrote a letter saying: “I would inflict the most excruciating tortures I could think of on them [Indians] with a perfectly easy conscience.”
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