A 70-Hour Working Week Has Nothing to Do With ‘Productivity’ and ‘Development’

When corporate capital stresses that an eight-hour working day is insufficient and other sections of society such as politicians applaud the assertion, the matter no longer remains a whimsical statement. It needs to be seen in conjunction with contemporary developments in labour regulation, writes Ravi Kumar.

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The hundreds of hours of entrapment of 41 workers in a tunnel in Uttarakhand will not be counted as being on work, obviously.

In general, workers already work beyond stipulated hours. Private capital as well as the State anyhow discount the travel time, the work that workers take back home, or the multiple jobs that many of them have to engage in to make ends meet.

When corporate capital stresses that an eight-hour working day is insufficient and other sections of society such as politicians applaud the assertion, the matter is not a simple one. It no longer remains a whimsical statement. It needs to be seen in conjunction with contemporary developments in labour regulation.

A while back, N.R. Narayana Murthy, founder-CEO of Infosys, father-in-law to the current British Prime Minister and one of the doyens of industry in India, had suggested that Indians should work for 60 hours a week to get over the situation created by Covid.

Now he has gone further and suggested that the youth in India should work for 70 hours a week to make it an economically powerful country and earn worldwide respect.

His words have drawn a great deal of attention— ranging from checking the veracity of whether Germany really made its citizens work extra hours or not to whether 70 hours of work in a week is good for an employee.

Other corporate honchos defended his words by saying that Murthy’s intention was to improve the status of the country and its youth. A film personality even interpreted what Narayana Murthy meant— to go beyond your comfort zone.

Workers already work beyond stipulated hours. Private capital as well as the State anyhow discount the travel time, the work that workers take back home, or the multiple jobs that many of them have to engage in to make ends meet.

One would like to ask who benefits from workers crossing this line from comfort into discomfort, those who take away the maximum share of the profit or a majority of those whose salaries have remained nearly stagnant?

The interviewer, Mohandas Pai, defended Murthy using statistics to argue that prosperity depends on hard work.

Critics expounded on how a person’s efficiency declines if he works beyond a particular number of hours. In fact, International Labour Organisation conventions also state that efforts should be made to progressively reduce working hours, wherever possible.

Murthy’s claim regarding the relationship between productivity and long working hours has also been challenged. The interviewer and the interviewee are both champions of a free market economy and with a limited sense of history. Their approach is to pick one aspect, divorced from the surroundings, and talk about development and growth.

For instance, while doing a critique of Nehru for ‘suppressing private Indian capital’ (on X), Mohandas Pai forgot to mention the Memorandum Outlining a Plan of Economic Development for India (1944) authored by top owners of private capital such as Sir Purushottamdas Thakurdas, J.R.D. Tata, A.D. Shroff, John Matthai, Ardeshir Dalal, G.D. Birla, Shri Ram and Kasturbhai Lalbhai.

In the document, the authors say that “money or finance is not the master of a country’s economy, but its servant and instrument. The real capital of a country consists of its resources in materials and manpower, and money is simply a means of mobilising these resources and channelising them into specific forms of activity.”

They were votaries of planned economy and federalism as well. Built into their vision was the realisation that only a robust public health system, adequate housing provisions and a public education system can develop the human resources of a country.

None of these visionary ideas are part of the thinking of the contemporary owners of private capital. What the contemporary owners and spokespersons of private capital— who keep quiet on issues of massive siphoning of public money by corporates and who are the greatest votaries of destroying the public health and education systems— forget, is that the welfarist capital’s vision was built into the actions of the State.

A dehistoricised understanding of the past— its moments and personalities— may not be a fruitful exercise.

The one-sided vision of corporate capital

The interview of Narayana Murthy is interesting to watch if you need to understand the ideological making of the Infosys founder. He is a great admirer of globalisation or the opening up of the economy and like many others, a critic of the licence raj who misses no opportunity to voice concerns at how earlier regimes suffocated corporate dreams.

In the interview, he provides an experiential trajectory of the transformation ushered in by the liberalisation of the economy.

Murthy believes that we got political freedom in 1947 but economic freedom only came in 1991 and he acknowledges its protagonists— Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and P. Chidambaram.

He says that “all of us should be very grateful to them”. Like any representative of neoliberal corporate capital, he is predictably grateful to these politicians. Poverty appears to be a big concern for him. Yet, he does not look at the government as a creator of jobs but rather at private capital.

Narayana Murthy has suggested that the youth in India should work for 70 hours a week to make it an economically powerful country and earn worldwide respect.

Once the government takes away all the restrictions and gives a free ground to entrepreneurs, they will create more jobs and wealth for themselves and investors and taxes for the government, he says. He does not see people, the workers, creating wealth for themselves.

In his vision, then, wealth is meant for a few. His imagination of the socio-economic structure is clear— sharply polarised income groups. This imagination is already in play as shown by recent figures wherein the gap between the freshers in an industry and the CEOs is massive. The salary of CEOs grew by 835 percent whereas that of freshers grew merely by 45 percent between 2012 to 2022.

Similarly, the gap between the rich and poor in the economy has widened. As per a 2023 Oxfam report, the wealthiest 10 percent own more than 72 percent of the total wealth, the top 5 percent own nearly 62 percent of the total wealth, and the top 1 percent own nearly 40.6 per cent of the total wealth in India.

Do these figures suggest that the economy is growing and developing in a robust manner, as understood by a leader of the industry?

The role of the government is limited to creating public goods, roads, hospitals and schools without any corruption. Murthy does not look at the contradiction— if private capital is left to have its way, then it will commodify all aspects of our social and cultural life.

If government schools and hospitals coexist with private ones, private players cannot do business in hospitals, schools and universities if the government provides free healthcare and education of the same quality as any private institution.

Ultimately, giving private capital unbounded freedom must destroy the free public health and education system as has been rapidly done post-1991.

Also, private capital has this attitude of ‘holier than thou’ when it talks of corruption. It seldom introspects and brings its own books into public discourse the same way as it has historically done when crying about corruption within the State sector.

The recent revelations about a particular business house have not been taken up in public discourse by Narayana Murthy and others. The charges have extended from stock manipulations to price manipulation of coal and electricity to taking control of industries such as airports and Food Corporation of India (FCI) silo complexes.

There have been cases of possible manipulations in stock in the past as well and massive corruption in information technology (IT) companies. However, there is always a silence around these issues from corporate capital.

Murthy says his heart goes out to the vast population of rural India who have not been able to earn and grow as much as urban India. It is true that there is massive poverty in rural India and also in urban India that needs to be tackled.

He has a solution— a transition from agriculture to a low-tech industry. The advice is to open up further to foreign investment and “create whatever incentive they want so that they can create jobs”.

One would like to ask who benefits from workers crossing this line from comfort into discomfort, those who take away the maximum share of the profit or a majority of those whose salaries have remained nearly stagnant?

Giving them incentives would imply that private capital must come in with certain protections against failure and these protections are, at the end of the day, coming out of public money.

Murthy wants India to become “the most competitive nation in manufacturing” and sell “low-tech equipment”. At present, it is countries such as Vietnam that are taking away these benefits.

Built into the “incentive”, “subsidy” and “competitiveness” is to do away with the labour laws and provide a cushioned platform to private capital, a move towards this has already been made by the Union government.

Again, Murthy is batting for the creation of jobs, wherein, effectively, the large workforce will be paid at the whims of the employers.

A sanitised world without caste and religion

If you listen to the corporate leaders, the world seems sanitised, the complexities of caste, gender and religion do not exist.

Murthy is no different. He talks about creating jobs but does not touch upon the caste composition of CEOs in India. It has been shown through figures in recent times that the accessibility of education and then jobs remains a major issue in many universities.

Fourteen departments in the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi do not have any Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe faculty.

A 2018 report pointed out that 88 percent of the top positions in Indian media were held by the dominant castes, who are less than 20 percent of the population.

Countless educational institutions have no Dalit faculty members and very few Dalit students. The Scheduled Caste population still continues to be overrepresented in low-paying jobs according to a report. Caste issues have started springing up even in the US.

International Labour Organisation conventions state that efforts should be made to progressively reduce working hours, wherever possible.

The discrimination does not stop at caste but the employment scenario is lopsided in favour of the majority religion. An Economics Times analysis in 2015 revealed that “a mere 2.67 percent of directors and senior executives— 62 of the 2,324 executives— among the BSE 500 companies” were Muslims, who constitute 14 percent of India’s population.

There have been reports of women experiencing bias in hiring for jobs. In fact, a 2022 report showed that Muslims earn less than non-Muslims.

When Murthy talks about jobs, he fails to comprehend the dynamics of how jobs become inaccessible to Dalits and Muslims. It is not simple arithmetic.

However, the concern of private capital being accumulated at all costs takes away attention from human aspects and, therefore, is hardly a reflection of the complexity of Indian society and its economy.

The economics of neoliberal India is Brahmanical, it has historically evolved to this point where Dalits and Muslims have been made absent from the economic frame of corporate capital.

But corporate India chooses to ignore these realities and histories. This sanitised view of Indian society is also an aspect of the so-called free market economy, which is afraid of historicising its own trajectory just like the political right wing.

This is where a convenient relationship of the political and economic Right is also developed. The moment either of them gets into the question of caste, religion and economy, their mindless accumulative dream would collapse.

De-contextualised appeal at raising productivity

Narayana Murthy, a great admirer of globalisation and opening up of the economy, talks about his vision of an overexploited workforce with selective examples from the past— what Japan, Germany and the US did in the past.

Murthy does not tell us that though the official unemployment rate in the US is around 4–5 percent, in actuality it may be higher because the calculation method does not “include the large number of people who have given up looking for work, those stuck in low wage, low hour jobs or those stuck in part-time jobs when they want full-time ones”.

The much-celebrated country of dreams, the US, also reels under the weight of poverty even according to the official figures. The American economy keeps expanding its debt limits.

Back home in India, the economy has not been at its best. A recent Reserve Bank of India report says that the growth of financial assets of Indian households is at its slowest in the last fifty years. The household debt has also doubled due to borrowings of different kinds by the people.

The unofficial figures may be higher as in the case of most countries. When leaders of industry and representatives of corporate capital talk about growth and development and providing everyone employment they knowingly hide this underbelly of their growth story.

Murthy believes that we got political freedom in 1947 but economic freedom only came in 1991 and he acknowledges its protagonists— Narasimha Rao, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh Ahluwalia and P. Chidambaram.

That is where their argument for prolonged working hours needs to be placed— trying to come up with a method to hide the actuality. Murthy hides all of this.

Providing jobs to everyone is a tough job and industrialists including Murthy must be realising it. It depends on the economic model that characterises the society and if the aim of the model is to hand over everything that exists to agents of profiteering then there will be fewer jobs and underpaid jobs because only then can capital accumulation be maximised.

This is happening as we speak, as the Oxfam report suggests: “The total number of billionaires in India increased from 102 in 2020 to 166 billionaires in 2022”. The top 10 percent controls 63 percent of the wealth.

The insatiable appetite to accumulate more and more wealth becomes possible because the owners of capital compress wages, contractualise workforce, take away social security, and destroy public health and education leading to debt.

70-hour working week: Accumulation in times of crisis

One can debate as much as one wants but neoliberal capital’s persistent existence, manifested in the most unabashed dehumanised state, survives on the blood-sucking corporate capital and the State making ridiculous demands of the workers, the latest of which is to work 70 hours a week.

The new labour code, when implemented fully, will radically transform the way the world of work will be experienced by wage earners in India. Sociologists of work, with any semblance of humanity that has not already surrendered to the fear of curtailment of funding, will be compelled to go back into history, revisit the struggles of workers for decent working hours and then come back to the present.

A mere casual approach towards humanising the workplace does not explain Narayana Murthy and subsequent industrialists’ advice for a 70-hour working week. This is a moment of crisis for capitalism. The neoliberal order did away with the separation between State and private capital when it came to adopting mechanisms for reducing labour costs and managing enterprises more efficiently.

This has been seen in the informalisation of workplaces within the State sector as well as new rules governing the employees. The notion of work and workplace imagined and implemented by the neoliberal capital has become part of the State’s imagination as well.

The victory that workers got in terms of reducing the working hours to eight was dismantled by economic liberalisation and the invention of new management techniques which made workers appear to be part of private capital.

The recent revelations about a particular business house have not been taken up in public discourse by Narayana Murthy and others.

New gadgets, apparent say in decision making, possibilities to ‘go beyond the comfort zone’ and thereby the willingness to forget the notion of working hours have created a situation wherein a statement that there should be a 70-hour working week is not seen as denigrating but demands a debate allowing people to openly support the suggestion.

Within this imagination, the crisis of capitalism reflected in high unemployment, declining consumption, higher retail inflation and unprecedented household debt, combined with the insatiable appetite of accumulating wealth at all costs by a few has made the situation more complex.

The income of the owners of private capital continues to grow unabated. The rich get their loans waived off whereas the vast mass of the citizenry has to confront all the difficulties of paying back their loans.

While artificial intelligence and the development of technology are threatening further job loss and a bigger impending crisis of consumption, the corporate world seeks to retain its vampirish appetite by compressing wages for the larger mass of workers and raising them only for a few.

The victory that workers got in terms of reducing the working hours to eight was dismantled by economic liberalisation and the invention of new management techniques which made workers appear to be part of private capital.

The 70-hour working week is a recommendation within this difficult situation wherein the so-called productivity will be heightened at a lower wage and destroy human sanity.

The tragedy is that politicians and corporates do not seem to understand this, perhaps as a ruse. Some have even hinted that this appears to be in continuity with the labour code regime.

Ravi Kumar teaches sociology at South Asian University.