SUJIT DE
International Workers’ Day, or May Day, is observed on May 1 to commemorate the eight-hour workday movement in Chicago in 1886. Now, 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 innovation, creativity, and productivity.
The labour movements against exploitation can also be called the movements for human rights. Such movements took many countries to the highway of welfare economics and human development.
Unfortunately, the daily limit of 8-hour work has gone for a toss in the large unorganised sector in India and even in the government sectors like railways where loco pilots are forced to do extra shifts risking their own lives as well as the lives of the passengers. We need labour movements in India more than before as we are heading towards privatisation and contractual employment raj.
Informal workers are highly vulnerable to exploitative practices. They are always between the devil and the deep blue sea, or in other words, between exploitation and unemployment.
Some business persons, who bear the primitive mindset before it has been established by scientific evidence that the overwork destroys health and productivity of a worker, are advocating for a 70-hour or 90-hour work week for their employees.
A 70-hour work week means that a worker has to toil 14 hours every day on average in a 5-day week job. This is like taking us from the constitutional guarantee of becoming a welfare country to the days of brute capitalism in the nineteenth century when poor children had to die young after working as chimney sweepers.
Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy, who suggested that young Indians should work 70 hours a week, said when his kids were school students, 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! It is like advocating for a slave society where slaves toil hard to free up time for leisure for their masters.
Car and train accidents have become a routine affair now as app cab drivers, loco pilots, and gig workers have to work for long hours. Not only does it make their lives vulnerable, but also it endangers the lives of others.
The government needs to ensure that no worker has to work more than 8 hours daily to where she or he has been employed. On International Workers’ Day, the government also needs to take a pledge that it will ensure workers’ safety at work place.
A callous attitude to safeguard the lives of labourers has become the new normal. In spite of snowfall and avalanche alerts since February 24 this year, labourers working on a stretch of the road to Badrinath Dham had not been evacuated in time. As a result, eight labourers were killed when avalanches hit the area after four days on February 28.
I always become a bundle of nerves when I see a worker doing his job standing on scaffolding with almost zero safety equipment. Or when I see a pandal worker erecting or decorating a big pandal without any safety net underneath and without a safety rope tied to his body.
I feel annoyed when I frequently come across reports of their deaths after falling from scaffolding. Reports, like “Adwaita Hatua (44), a pandal worker, died after falling from a height of 28ft while trying to tie a bamboo pole of a pandal”, or “Manishankar Mondal (45) died after he fell from a three-storey building while painting its outer walls”, though published in brief, should make us put our hand on our conscience.