India and the 70-hour work week
Young Indians should work 70 hours a week, demands an Indian billionaire. How does that compare to Germany, where there are clear working hours and a weekend off? Why are there rules about this in Germany but not in India?
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Narayana Murthy is the co-founder of the Indian software company Infosys, and he's a billionaire.
00:09 He has suggested that young people in India should work 70 hours a week to further boost
00:13 economic growth.
00:15 But why?
00:18 I don't quite understand where Mr. Narayan Murthy is coming from.
00:22 If at all anything, it's the senior bosses perhaps who need to be told that, you know,
00:28 they should be working hard, because they are the ones perhaps who have very little
00:32 to contribute in actual generation of value or performance.
00:40 Many people in India work under very hard conditions.
00:45 Long working days are quite common.
00:51 The average time, especially amongst the semi-skilled, unskilled workers, would range anywhere between
00:58 10 to 16 hours a day.
01:01 Even in the IT sector, where many well-trained programmers work, high expectations lead to
01:06 long working days.
01:09 The contract is basically saying that you ought to be available.
01:13 So in that sense, it actually violates the notion of a specific working time.
01:18 So the work then actually spills over into the leisure time.
01:23 And there is no way you can escape or say that, look, I'm no longer at the workplace,
01:28 so I have no obligation to really render you any service.
01:32 This is not something that is expected of an employee.
01:37 Long working hours can have serious health consequences.
01:41 Among those who work more than 55 hours a week, 745,000 people worldwide die of a stroke
01:47 or heart attack each year.
01:49 The figure is highest in Southeast Asia, with over 318,000, followed by the Western Pacific
01:56 with 208,000, the Eastern Mediterranean region with 77,000, and Europe with 57,000 deaths
02:03 per year, America as a whole with around 43,000, and Africa with just under 40,000.
02:14 They spend less time doing things that we know are good for their health.
02:18 So exercising, spending time with friends and family, sleeping, taking time off when
02:24 they're sick, right?
02:25 A lot of people feel pressure to keep working when they're ill.
02:30 In most European countries, people work less than 40 hours a week.
02:36 But how did this figure actually come about?
02:40 The eight hours is fairly arbitrary.
02:42 It comes out of a worker movement to have eight hours of work, eight hours of rest,
02:47 and eight hours to do what you want.
02:49 So that eight hours, which we've come to think of as being the standard, is really not something
02:55 that was ever established as the right number of hours for people to work.
03:00 Today there are many working hours models around the world.
03:03 Germany is currently considering reducing its work week to four days.
03:07 Other countries are sticking to longer working hours, depending on the culture, economic
03:11 situation, and employee rights.
03:14 At 52.6 hours, the United Arab Emirates has the longest average work week.
03:19 In India, it's five hours less.
03:21 In China, people work more than 46 hours per week.
03:26 In the U.S., it's 36.4 hours.
03:30 While Germany is one of the countries with the shortest work week, at 34.3 hours.
03:39 This has been hard won over the past century.
03:42 And yet many Germans still feel that their work-life balance is not right.
03:51 We need to depart from the idea that if you reduce working hours, the worker will win
03:58 and the employer will lose.
04:00 That's not how things work.
04:03 After all, employers also benefit.
04:06 It has long been proven that less work does not necessarily come with the expense of productivity.
04:11 On the contrary, a good work-life balance makes happy employees.
04:16 And they often achieve more in less time.
04:19 [MUSIC PLAYING]