It is typically people who have not guarded a picketing line or had direct conversations with vulnerable workers at a tea stall or other less comfortable spaces who sermonise about what workers should do for economic growth.
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WHILE talking on a podcast recently, Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy started a debate by advocating that Indian youngsters should work 70 hours a week so that India can compete with other developed countries.
He added, “India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world. Unless we improve our work productivity, we will not be able to compete with those countries that have made tremendous progress.”
We seek to analyse his advice on extended hours of work critically. His proposition is based on three assumptions.
One, there is enough work available to increase the hours of work— the demand for and supply of work is typically seen in the hours.
Two, work efficiency is measured by work hours: so the longer the work hours, the greater the efficiency or productivity.
Three, there is enough space in the total hours available for non-market activities so that work hours could be increased at will.
The Philadelphia Declaration of 1942 significantly asserted that “labour is not a commodity”.
This declaration has had far-reaching consequences on the manner society in general and employers in particular view “labour”.
The Philadelphia Declaration of 1942 significantly asserted that “labour is not a commodity”.
It simply recognises the fact that unlike tradable commodities (goods and services), workers are people with hopes, dreams and aspirations for themselves and their families.
In other words, paid work is about more than just meeting workers’ material needs; they also need the opportunity to fulfil their personal lives, and thus, workers need to have a healthy work–life balance.
Also read: A 70-hour working week has nothing to do with ‘productivity’ and ‘development’
The objective of economic development is to ensure that over time people have to work for fewer hours so that they can indulge in cultural and other pursuits.
Being a signatory to the Hours of Work (Industry) Convention, 1919 of the International labour Organisation, India implemented in the Factories Act, 1948 eight hours of work a day and 60 hours a week. It was a huge reform considering the baby steps made during the colonial period to reduce the hours of work from over twelve hours (as per the Factories Act of 1911) to eight hours in 1948.
During the Covid pandemic, several States sought to increase the work hours from eight to 11 or 12.
The government has largely taken away the historically-won labour rights via the new labour codes in their persistent bid to offer flexibility in all realms to employers. In the Occupational Safety and Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020, the spread-over hours have been increased from 10.5 hours to twelve hours.
It is well known that workers in the garment industry work more than twelve hours. Further, in their quest to maximise their earnings, they perform overtime work for which they may not get legal compensation of twice the wage rate.
Young women workers in the garment industry in India are subjected to multiple adversities, including excessive hours of work. Their workspan is often short and by their late thirties or so they cannot cope with these strenuous working conditions and are dispensed with or withdrawn from employment.
The objective of economic development is to ensure that over time people have to work for fewer hours so that they can indulge in cultural and other pursuits.
Prof. Dev Nathan dubs this as “mining of the body”. Still, reform-oriented economists often recommend the government to “do a Bangladesh” (harsh and unsafe working conditions but contributing to its exports) to secure more global market space in the garment industry.
Even in the Information Technology (IT) and allied industries, employees subject to project dynamics work 12 hours a day, and now working from home has only resulted in higher hours of work. In some surveys, employees in the IT sector have expressed working time as a significant concern.
According to Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS)’s unit-level data, in 2021–22, the average weekly hours of work for the self-employed category was 53.40 hours; for regular salary and wage employed, 54.20 hours; and for casual workers, 55.25 hours. This indicates that Indian workers are already working more than mandated by Indian labour laws and global standards.
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The irony is that human resource management discourses coming from corporate honchos sermonise on work–life balance while great achievers such as Murthy are calling for longer hours of work!
Murthy is correct in dubbing India’s labour productivity as one of the lowest in the world, but he and others do not ask whether workers get even competitive (i.e., wages proportionate to productivity) and fair wages (distributional share of wages in the value added).
In the organised factory sector, according to the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI), real wages (nominal wages deflated by consumer price index) have always lagged behind the real labour productivity (gross value added or GVA per worker deflated by wholesale price index) during 1981–82 to 2019–20.
During 1991–92 to 2019–20, the compounded average growth rate (CAGR) of real wages is 0.34 percent, while the same for real labour productivity is 0.54 per cent. In fact, during 2001–10, real wage CAGR was negative (-3.62) while it was 2.10 percent for real labour productivity.
During 2006–10, the share of nominal wages in nominal GVA was less than 10 percent while on average it was around 13–15 percent during the post-reforms period. As the wage share is small and declines marginally, the share of profits in GVA rises.
Reform-oriented economists often recommend the government to “do a Bangladesh” to secure more global market space in the garment industry.
In such a scenario, the marginal gain of every hour of work by workers shall not be returned to workers in terms of better living or welfare; instead, it will make a few handfuls of corporations better off with the rest of the workers worse off. Thus, workers gain neither competitive nor fair wages.
Further, Murthy’s advice ignores the massive problem of youth and educated employment. According to PLFS, youth unemployment rate in 2022–23 in the urban areas for males was 13.8 percent and for females 22.0 percent.
On the other hand, many firms in the manufacturing and service sectors are replacing human labour with capital-intensive and labour-replacing technologies which apart from destroying jobs create high-niche techies and reduce the demand for unskilled workers. Skill disparities cause welfare losses for vulnerable workers.
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To understand the demand for labour (by employers), it is essential to know the total number of hours worked and effort performed by workers, which influences output per worker (both direct and indirect).
However, one can measure the direct impact by calculating the immediate effect; it gets complex when we attempt to estimate the impact on the indirect impact, such as support efforts to complete the product task.
In a standard, neo-liberal capital market, logically, longer hours can lead to higher productivity if a worker faces fixed set-up costs and fixed unproductive time during the day or if longer hours lead to better utilisation of capital goods.
In other words, if workers were given a monotonous task along the division of labour based on their skills with total surveillance of their activities, they would perform longer hours knowingly or unknowingly under the threat of termination. Hence, productivity could be achieved in a coercive environment.
Till now, we have witnessed that many Indian corporate surveillance techniques have been used to monitor workers’ productivity, leading to an incohesive work environment.
On the other hand, if we continue to have such a work governance mechanism to regulate productivity, worker fatigue could set in after some hours worked so that the marginal effect of the productivity of an extra hour per worker starts decreasing— dissipating the effects of added work efforts.
We have witnessed that many Indian corporate surveillance techniques have been used to monitor workers’ productivity, leading to an incohesive work environment.
This effect has been profoundly found in two well-known empirical studies by John Pencavel (2015) who argues that long weekly hours and long daily hours do not necessarily yield high output and this implies that, for some employees engaged in certain types of work, their profit-maximising employer will not be indifferent to the length of their working hours over a day or week.
It is further observed that below a regulated hours threshold, output is proportional to hours; above a threshold, output rises at a decreasing rate as hours increase, leading to industrial accidents and health hazards.
Also read: Workers should unite to realise May Day dream of an eight-hour working day
Similarly, in a field experiment study by Collewet and Sauermann (2017), using daily information on working hours and the performance of a sample of call centre agents, the study finds that as the number of hours worked increases, the average handling time for a call increases, meaning that agents become less productive.
This result suggests that fatigue can play an important role, even in jobs with primarily part-time workers. The Crushed Reports by Safe in India have, over the last five years, shown a high incidence of occupational injuries (fingers or hands chopped off) in the automobile sector in the National Capital Region; some injuries even render workers unfit for future unemployment in the automobile sector.
Worker fatigue could set in after some hours worked so that the marginal effect of the productivity of an extra hour per worker starts decreasing.
Despite having global evidence of the ill effects of longer work effort duration, according to PLFS data, Indian workers continue to work longer hours (i.e., more than 48 hours in a week) while externalising the work-related risk to their family and society for the country’s economic growth.
It is typically people who have not guarded a picketing line or had direct conversations with vulnerable workers at a tea stall or other less comfortable spaces who sermonise about what workers should do for economic growth.
One is tempted to wonder: Will they stop demanding 70 hours or go beyond it, say, 96 hours, so that output will be efficiently maximised? Why do we care for workers’ welfare? And who shall we hold accountable? This is the fate of India’s workers in the hands of the majoritarian government.
