Staring at One's Wife, L&T Permitting?

 

It is a year since Mr. Narayan Murthy of Infosys advised the young men and women of India to put in seventy hours per week so that India could become a great nation. Now the L&T Chief, Mr. Subrahmanyan has gone one up and has demanded 90-hour weeks  from Indians. This must be music to all Industrialists, Business Houses, and the IT Industry. It surely sounds like a genuine call for nation building. When prisoners, with sentences of hard labour, put in just a few hours of labour and spend most of their bondage in cells, barracks, or outdoor games, it sure must be a commitment of the highest order that would make workers in factories, call centres, IT industry, offices, and secretariats to voluntarily put in twelve or fifteen hours a day - six days a week, or fourteen or eighteen hours a day – five days a week.

A ninety-hour week would mean fifteen hours Monday to Saturday. i.e. 8 In the morning to 11 in the night at work, two hours of commute and a full 7 hours to recuperate, look after the family, go shopping, take the child to the doctor. Meanwhile the husband and wife can stare at each other for five minutes everyday for they will be sleeping all Sunday.

So, Natarajan and Lalitha, wake up at five in the morning. They hurriedly heat-up the stale food that the Bangla Desi maid had cooked three days ago and stuffed in the refrigerator. While the microwave whirrs, they wet themselves in their respective bathrooms and rush for dressing up. The Gym and Yoga hour has been sacrificed at the altar of nation-building. Gulping the leftovers and some multivitamins they rush down the lift. O, they wonder, has the lift slowed down? It takes ages to descend. Seven AM is the deadline they must meet to leave home for the hour-long commute, in different directions, in the Gurgaon traffic.

Indeed, China does prescribe a 9-9-6 work schedule in some parts of the country and in some industries, which means working from morning nine to evening nine – six days a week, or seventy-two hours a week. Can anyone tell me when the Captains of our Industry last visited Chinese labour camps wherefrom they picked up this idea? Surely, they may have also learnt that China is facing a demographic collapse in the next decade or two. Young men and women are not marrying, and married ones are not producing any children. I would find it rather unacceptable to bring up a child on home-delivered food provided a couple can afford even that. Dumplings, burgers, French fries, sushi and rice noodles – Ah! Won’t the toddler love it?

Back to Natarajan and Lalitha. The two-year-old was left sleeping. He had colic pain and vomiting in the night. They didn’t have the time to phone a doctor, let alone visit one what with a six-day, twelve-hour-a-day week. In any case, which doctor would receive a call at six in the morning? So, the poor child is left to the mercy of the Bangla Desi maid, or the mother-in-law, who may occasionally visit them from Pudukkottai. It is during such visits of the mother-in-law that Natarajan and Lalitha sometimes go watch a movie and hold hands. And, they are certainly not going for a second child, national demography be damned.

The day is over at eight in the evening, a full twelve hours after they had punched in. Now, they must rush back home – Natarajan had to pick up some medicines for his blood pressure, which he would like to believe is a temporary affliction. Lalitha had to pick up some disposable diapers, among other things, but the shop was closed by the time she reached. She tried to call Natarajan to pick up a pack from the medicine shop, but Natarajan couldn’t take the call on his motorcycle. Maybe tomorrow, or else good old Amazon will come to the rescue.

Natarajan’s company did a poll to find out if the employees would prefer a fourteen-hour-a-day week so that they could have a two-day weekend. That would mean a shift of morning eight to ten in the night and returning home at eleven. They are still debating.

The days of the Industrial Revolution, I am told, had such back-breaking working hours. Thousand died of exhaustion, accidents, tuberculosis, sheer exhaustion and burnouts every year across Europe. I have also learnt that post-war Europe and Japan had had workers putting in such long hours to rebuild their nations. But that was for a limited time. Natarajan and Lalitha are not citizen of a country at war; they are being urged and morally compelled to face such a work schedule with no end in sight. That millions upon millions of compatriots are doing the same is no solace to the grieving heart of Lalitha, who can look after her child only on Sundays – bathe her, groom her, cook for her, which is every mother’s dream and delight. But no, Mr. Murthy is no mother and his children have grown up. He has also done his share of nation building. It is up to Natarajan and Lalitha now.

Well, Natarajan and Lalitha are software engineers, or techno-coolies, writing lines upon lines of codes. Let’s look at factory workers now. The Indian Factory Laws and the International Labour Organisation limit factory working hours to forty eight per week and a maximum of eight hours a day. There can’t be an unbroken spell of more than five hours. A minimum of a thirty-minute break is mandated after five hours. Any extra hour must be paid at double the wage rates. But no, M/S Narayan Murthy and Subrahmanyan would have none of it. They wants to maximise the output of his swanky, air-conditioned, software development centre, with high-end servers, gigabit backbone, and Project Offices and Work Sites and multinational clientele by making their employees sit longer. No, they won’t pay them extra. Employees are but a cog in the wheel. They must volunteer to serve them extra hours for free since isn’t he building the nation, while they draw 51 crore salaries (a 43% hike in less than a year) and buy 50 crore flats.

There is something called productivity, Dear Industrialists! And, there are ways to make your people more productive in the same eight-hour, five-day week. Automation, Smart Working, Fail-proofing make for more output and a Happy workforce. But, to commission a study to achieve this, and to bring in more equipment and provide useful training would cost money and resources. Why spend, when a call to nation-building does it for free?

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