Sujit De
After Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy suggested a 70-hour work week, now Larsen & Toubro chairman S.N. Subrahmanyan has taken one step forward with his 90-hour work week remark. He also suggested that people should work on Sundays.
These people bear the mindset of a capitalist in its primitive brutal stage before the emergence of welfare states and before it has been established by scientific evidence that the overwork destroys health and productivity of a worker. In the late nineteenth century, workers fought for an eight-hour workday when they had to work 10 to 16 hours every day. International Workers' Day is observed on May 1 to commemorate the eight-hour workday movement in Chicago in 1886.
Australia got a 40-hour work week by 1948, and Canada in the early 1960s. Most European countries had implemented a standard 40-hour work week by the 1970s. Now, a 40-hour work week has become one of the salient features of a welfare state.
Welfare states embrace a 40-hour work week because more than 40 hours of occupational work per week creates health hazards for workers and hampers their family and social lives.
Interestingly, Narayan Murthy himself said when his kids were at school, he and his wife Sudha Murthy dedicated more than three hours to reading with their kids Akshata and Rohan. What does it mean? The employers should spend time with their children. But a worker is not supposed to do it!
This is a perfect example of casteism that believes Dalits should not have access to education. They should toil hard for the upper castes so that the latter enjoy a good amount of leisure to study and teach their children with care.
According to the International Labour Organisation, India ranks as the second most overworked country in the world with 51% of those employed working for 49 hours or more.
A study by the World Health Organisation and the ILO concludes "that working 55 or more hours per week is associated with an estimated 35% higher risk of a stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from ischaemic heart disease, compared to working 35–40 hours a week".
Recently, the death of Anna Sebastian Perayil, an employee of Ernst & Young in Pune, has raised widespread concern over excessive workloads. Perayil, a 26-year-old audit executive, allegedly died as a result of stress, caused by backbreaking workload, a claim brought forth by her mother. Her mother said that Anna lost her life as she was forced to overwork for fourteen hours every day for four months since she joined E&Y.
Not only does overwork cause exhaustion and health issues for the workers, but also triggers unemployment. To get 24 man-hours daily, an employer needs 3 workers if each worker works for 8 hours daily (8×3). But if the employer forces each worker to work for 12 hours per day, he will employ just two of them (12×2). The latter and prevailing scenario causes unemployment for one in three workers.
According to a recent study, almost a third of app-based cab drivers work for 14 hours a day, while more than 83% work over 10 hours and 60% work over 12 hours. While 78% of app-based delivery persons spend over 10 hours each day at work, 34% earn less than Rs 10,000 per month.
Long work hours made drivers physically exhausted. This, plus the 10-minute delivery at the doorstep policy of certain e-commerce platforms are two of the reasons behind many road traffic accidents in our country.
India needs to formulate necessary labour laws and strictly implement the standard 40-hour work week. It would safeguard the physical and mental well-being of the workers, generate nearly 50 per cent more jobs than the existing ones, and reduce the number of accidents to a great extent.