The Exploitative Hindujas - does wealth make people more selfish?
The Exploitative Hindujas were likely made miserly by their Wealth.
News that four members of the UK’s wealthiest family, the Hindujas, have been jailed for exploiting staff in their Switzerland mansion, is repulsive but not necessarily surprising.
Prakash Hinduja and his wife Kamal were sentenced to four and a half years in prison, and their son Ajay and his wife Namrata to four years.
The accused were not present at the Swiss court for their sentencing, suggesting a sense of being above such vulgar events. But their billions - their estimated worth is £37 billion - will not buy them immunity from the hardships of jail.
The convictions relate to the family’s exploitation of workers transported from India to act as servants in their sumptuous home. The workers had their passports confiscated on arrival, so that they were powerless to leave the country and return to India. They were not allowed to leave the villa. Many of them slept on mattresses in the basement.
One worker was paid as little as £6.19 per day to work up to 18 hours a day. In Switzerland, you can barely buy a pair of socks for this. The money was paid in rupees, into bank accounts in India, which they couldn’t access. Kamal Hinduja was said to have instilled a sense of fear. The family allegedly spent more on their dog than on the humans toiling for them.
The cruel and imperious exploitation suggested by the chilly culture of terrified slave workers and billionaire employers suggests that for the Hindujas, the vile caste system of inherited superiority was very much in evidence. But the abject miserliness of a family with billions in the bank not even paying workers enough to buy a sandwich - had they been allowed out to buy one - speaks to a sense many of us have nurtured since childhood - that the insanely rich are incredibly tight.
We have all heard stories that back this up. The Royal Family eating out of tupperware and paying their staff extremely modest wages. Historically, there are many examples of wealthy misers. Englishman Thomas Cooke (1726-1811) tricked a wealthy brewer’s widow into marrying him, then scrimped so much on food that she died of starvation. After her death, Cooke would visit friends at mealtimes, and coerce them into feeding him by saying he was considering who to leave his fortune to in his will.
MP John Elwes (1714-1789) served as the inspiration for the fictional character Scrooge. He dressed in rags, ate rotten food, and lived in his own vacant rental properties, moving constantly as each property was let out.
Daniel K. Ludwig (1897-1992), a shipping magnate billionaire, fired a tanker captain because he wasted a paper clip on a two sheet letter.
J. Paul Getty (1892-1976), American billionaire oilman, refused to pay a ransom when his grandson was kidnapped, even when the boy’s ear was cut off. Eventually, he lent his son the ransom money, but insisted that it was paid back with interest. He also had a payphone instituted in his home so that his guests would not add to his phone bill.
American millionaire Hetty Green (1834-1916) used free health clinics under a false name. And Ingvar Kamprad (b. 1926), the Swedish billionaire founder of IKEA, allegedly only wears clothes he finds in second hand stores, and reuses tea bags.
Tales of rich scrimpers also abound in fiction. As well as Scrooge, there are the ugly sisters and wicked stepmother in Cinderella, who can afford fine clothes for themselves but who work Cinderella to the bone and allow her to dress in rags. And of course Roald Dahl books are stuffed with the moneyed mean. Verruca Salt comes from a much richer family than Charlie in the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but is horrible. And The Twits are so mean that they place glue on tree branches to kill and eat songbirds.
But is there any truth to the urban myth of the vastly wealthy being as tight as as size 8 corset on Cyril Smith? It seems that there is. Assistant Professor of Psychology in Irvine, California, Paul Piff, and postgrad psychologist Angela Robinson published a paper in which they showed that it is those with fewest resources that are more likely to help others.