Outside a building that looks like a concrete cube, rows of buses wait to ferry workers home. The bell rings. Hundreds in sand-coloured uniforms stream out. Food vendors make their way through the queues, stationing their stalls in the gaps between the buses.Surabhi (name changed to protect identity) walks out slowly with a group of friends, shoulders drooping after her 16-hour shift. One of the women points towards an ice cream stall and gently pulls at Surabhi’s sleeve, asking if they should each get a cone.Surabhi shakes her head. “Rehne do; ₹80 ka ek hai (Let it be; one costs ₹80),” she says. She has worked overtime in the multinational corporation that operates within the concrete cube, its periphery guarded by other workers and barbed wire that runs across high walls. She has had to do the extra hours – 8 hours is a regular shift – to survive in the city.Over a month ago, thousands of workers from various private companies in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Gautam Buddha Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh, took to the streets to demand better working conditions and an increase in their wages. With inflation, there was very little left for savings or even minor indulgences.The State Government had not revised the minimum wage since 2014, despite considering it twice. Noida falls in the National Capital Region, an area spanning 55,083 sq. km centred around Delhi and surrounding areas across three States, constituted to ensure “balanced and harmonized development”, as per the government website.After a week of workers claiming the streets, the government was forced to revise the minimum wage. A committee, which included members of the Labour Department and representatives of workers and industries, increased the wages for unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled workers to ₹13,690, ₹15,059, and ₹16,868, respectively, from the earlier ₹11,313, ₹12,445, and ₹13,940.Hopes surpass salariesSurabhi started working as a trainee in an automotive manufacturing firm when she was a little over 21 years. She had hoped to go up the company ladder but says she is still where she started.Not learning anything new in the past nine years is her biggest problem with the job. “Learning how to make automotive parts is not tough: a 15-day training does that. But how does that add value to who I am as a person?” she says. “Will I ever get to learn anything about the world?”“How long do you think it would take to buy a house? Maybe a 100 years!” she says, answering her own question. “I want to buy a house where I can live alone. Then I will adopt a child,” Surabhi adds.At home, Surabhi pulls out her payslips from March and April. Comparing them, she says the increase will not have much of an impact on her life. She may still not have the money for the occasional ice-cream indulgence. “I would rather buy milk and vegetables,” she says.She cannot afford to live alone. In the past, she has survived on loans from friends. Now, her brother has moved in with her, and they split expenses. “My monthly expenditure goes up to ₹15,000,” Surabhi says. “Restraint has now become part of the routine,” she adds.The reason she was doing 16-hour days was that the government had reiterated that overtime work would be paid at double the rate per hour. The company insists that workers do the whole second shift if they want to work overtime.Rakhi Sehgal, an independent researcher who works on labour and trade union matters, says there’s a crisis of employment. “Decent, secure jobs are barely there, and it’s only going to get worse once the real impact of the West Asia crisis starts to show up on the economy,” Sehgal says. “What gets lost in all the talk about wage hikes and the cost of living crisis is that workers want respect and dignity, their hopes and dreams of a better life respected, if not enabled.”Surabhi hopes to graduate from college some day, so she can get a better job, then a house, then a child. The lure of a global city