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Return of the Long Working Day!

Anjana Kesav

The Maharashtra government, following in the footsteps of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and Tripura, has resolved to address their widely prevalent issue of over-working by legalising it. The state cabinet has given the go-ahead for extending working hours from the current 9 hours to 10 for the private sector by amending the Factories Act, 1948 and the Maharashtra Shops and Establishments (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 2017.

Good old Karl Marx red-flagged (pun intended) this text-book practice of exploitation centuries ago. The lengthening of the working day was the easiest way to squeeze out surplus value.

I have lived in Mumbai for a short duration as part of its workforce, but long enough to recognise its toxic relationship with time; the city, in fact, never sleeps.

I had quit engineering because I foolishly believed I could escape the corporate world that had seemingly enslaved my friends by moving to the social sciences, only to wake up to the bitter reality that the job market here was corporatised, perhaps even more, that it posed a contradiction.

My job was at a start-up providing ESG consultancy solutions to Fortune 1000 companies in India and abroad so that their annual reports could look greener. ESG was supposedly the next big thing, consultancy firms were now in the business of solving the climate crisis, one sustainability report at a time. I told myself this was the most socially conscious job I could land that would help me meet the high living expenses of Mumbai.

My flat in Chembur, which I rented with my friend and colleague, ate up a huge part of my earnings, yet left me just enough to live the life of a “corporate girlie” in Mumbai. We bought fancy food, occasionally dined at high-end restaurants, and bought expensive clothes.

Corporate slavery was more expensive in India’s finance capital than it was in the country’s Silicon Valley. There was no other way to feel gratified at this job. We occasionally discussed the politics of it all to make the only possible use of our Development Studies degree.

When friends claimed that my corporate life contradicted my past political affiliations, I bought The Capital off of my first salary to prove them wrong. But our working hours were flexible (for the company), leaving me no time or mental space to read anything apart from what was required at the job.

I realised my career choice did not contradict my politics, it merely helped me theorise it better. Our flexible working hours, a part of which was spent at the office three days per week, were classified into billable (chargeable to the client) and non-billable (paid for through the salary), always extended well-beyond the legally mandated nine hours per day in Maharashtra. This, added to the close to three hours (going up to five on busier days) spent on the short 17 km commute during which laptops were to remain on, meant that idle time was minimal.

Our initial plan of only eating “healthy home-cooked meals” had to be compromised within a month as we shifted to a tiffin service to have some free time, apart from sleep.

Every employee is assigned a performance manager who is to ensure that the minimum eight hours is met, and all of it are billable. The project manager, tasked with a contradicting responsibility is expected to ensure the employees under them finish assigned tasks well-below the agreed-upon time. As a result, there exists a tussle of sorts between the two managers, one wanting to maximise your billable hours and the other struggling to minimise it.

Everyone was time-stressed. Four out of the six of us who joined the organisation from our campus, resigned within a year due to various forms of work-stress-related medical contingencies. Even though HR-instituted and legally-mandated norms on workplace harassment exist, these time-related targets are held and adhered to religiously by fair means or foul.

During my first 1.5 months at the company, in the absence of new projects being sanctioned, most of my hours were to be categorised as unbillable. I was proving to be a liability.

My first-ever project that came in my second month had too few billable hours to justify the actual hours I spent at work. I was assigned 15 billable hours of job out of the 120 hours I actually had. There was nothing they could assign me with for the remainder. Within almost four months of my joining, the company realised its folly of over-hiring, even as it faced serious attrition at the managerial level.

I was soon relocated to the HR (human resources) division, to be looked down upon by the self-perceived office smartasses. Neither my Engineering degree nor my Development Studies degree had any contributions to make in this new role. Many, from even within the office, suggested resignation. However, I decided to put myself through it. This was around the time the one-year-old company was formulating many of its HR policies, given my interest in labour studies, this seemed to me, an educating experience.

The word “labour” and “workmen” were to be used with a lot of caution, if not, completely avoided in the policy documents. This was important, as law dictated rights be available to labour. Funnily, the word aroused emotions bordering on contempt among many, as if it relegated us to an undesirable position. This was not specific to my office, even in general, people in these circles refused to be thought of as workers or labourers. We were above them. Nobody “worked” anymore, “resources were allocated to tasks”, working hours didn’t matter as long as we had “bandwidth”, there was no need for organising, as we could just as well “synergise and leverage”, and if that didn’t work, we could just “circle back”.

This distinction between “us” and “them” was deemed quite important. But we all fused into one homogeneous mass on the roads, at vegetable shops, the bus stops and the railway stations; whereas our bosses sped past us in their luxury SUVs.

Timely performance award ceremonies, office parties, possibility of overseas posting, and other forms of HR intervention kept employee resentment in check. Everyone’s allegiance was to the bosses, the company and its performance. But funnily enough, we had more in common with the security staff and janitorial staff, who, like us, were also temporary workers, with no job security.

Second, solidarity even among the white collar workers was absent to the extent that one could not confide concerns to a colleague in the next desk, without the fear of being reported to the management for extra brownie points.

We were still debating whether the company needed a work-life balance policy when the news of the EY employee’s suicide took social media by storm. Inner HR circles sympathised with EY for the bad publicity the dead employee’s mother caused them.

It was finally decided that a work-life balance policy had no place in a consultancy firm where time was money. Working during the weekends was considered an aspirational goal, and a special privilege afforded to the boss’s favorites. If you weren’t working beyond office hours, you were not working enough. There was no question of overtime pay, with the unspoken rule being that our high salary already paid for all the overtime work.

Additionally, if one had to work beyond the stipulated hours, one was just not efficient enough and could soon be put on a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan). A six-month PIP can convert into a dismissal if deemed necessary by the management. Being on a PIP, needless to say, was deeply humiliating, and more importantly very anxiety-inducing. Many often quit while on PIPs.

My final set of tasks included creating story boards to educate the employees on company values of which there were quite a few, but in summary said the same thing — work hard and the company will be rewarded, and you in turn will get to keep the job. Several of them glorified over-working through stories of multi-tasking employees, employees who worked round the clock, and worked on unrealistic deadlines.

These comic strips were to be displayed on a TV at the office to boost employee morale, and guide them towards further self-exploitation, should they begin to question it all.

I quit the job after seven months of joining with a life-time supply of corporate experience. My experience, of course, is not specific to the company or the city, or a particularly new revelation in any sense.

My friends in Bengaluru have shared scarier stories of retrenchment, over-work and exhaustion. These included WFH (work from home) employees who were suddenly logged out of the company networks, fired employees who were escorted through the backdoor so that their colleagues don’t see them crying, employees who were fired two months after a promotion and so on. None of them, however, have ever spoken (or were possibly even aware) of the successful organisation efforts led by IT/ITes employees in the city, nor have they seemed to identify with their cause. Unionisation was always thought to be the resort of the toiling masses, a category they could never put themselves in.

Mumbai, despite its rich history of working-class movements, has so far steered clear of any such (successful) attempts by its burgeoning white collar workers (who refused to see themselves as part of the working class). Its seemingly woke crowd is a sorry, largely apolitical mess, that has so far proven incapable of such political organising.

Karnataka’s retraction of a similar proposal was achieved following efforts led by KITU (Karnataka IT/ITeS Employees Union) . In the absence of a concerted working-class movement, Maharashtra can and will boldly go forward with this retrogressive policy that negates centuries of proletarian struggles, even as the rest of its employees continues various forms of “strategic re-alignments”, fashioning new “KPIs” to enhance “ROIs”, and gladly welcome the return of the long working day.

[The writer is a PhD scholar at the Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum. Courtesy: Newsclick, an Indian news website founded by Prabir Purkayastha in 2009, who also serves as the Editor-in-Chief.]

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Government of Maharashtra’s Decision to “Reform” Labour Laws is Highly Regressive and a Clear Attack on Labour Rights

People’s Union For Civil Liberties

People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), Maharashtra is deeply concerned about the Cabinet decision taken by the Government of Maharashtra to “reform” labour laws. The proposed amendments are highly regressive and a clear attack on labour rights. If legislated and implemented, this decision will be disastrous for working people in the state – shrinking the organised workforce and rolling back labour protections to the exploitative norms of the colonial era.

On 3rd September 2025 the Maharashtra Cabinet approved a series of labour law amendments to increase the length of the working day, working hours without rest intervals, working hours per week, and limit of the overtime period. These amendments are based on recommendations of a central task force on labour reforms in order to “attract investment, expand industries, and create more employment opportunities.” The Maharashtra decision aligns with states such as Karnataka, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh, and Tripura – which have already enacted similar “reforms.”

It must not be forgotten that the State is the biggest employer both in industries and establishments and is therefore required to ensure that workers are not exploited and their fundamental rights to a decent, safe and healthy work environment are protected. Yet it fails to do precisely that.

The State Government has made many lofty claims in support of these “reforms,” that are presumably in the interests of both labour as well as capital. The amendments will facilitate “protection of labour rights” while “improving the ease of doing business.” They will help “attract investment” as well as “increase employment opportunities in the state.”[1] But it is obvious that extending working hours, and removing smaller establishments from the purview of the law is meant to reduce or remove protections for workers, not to expand them. Today, even in the industrial sector in India, contractual workers are already working 12-hour shifts (without overtime). In effect, the amendments aim to legalise what is already happening in fact – depriving workers of the legal safeguards against super-exploitation. They seem to be a way of coercing a shrinking permanent workforce into this inhuman work regime. Besides, far from increasing employment, as is claimed, this step will reduce the organised work force to two thirds of its size by replacing 8-hour shifts with 12-hour ones. It is no surprise that the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU) labelled similar amendments proposed in Karnataka as “inhuman attempt to impose modern-day slavery” upon them.[2]

The proposed amendments will be carried out in the Factories Act of 1948 and the Maharashtra Shops and Establishments (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act, 2017. In the Factories Act, the amendments proposed are: (a) Under Section 65, the workday shall be extended from the present 9 hours up to 12 hours; (b) Under Section 55, the rest period which was half an hour after the first five hours shall be made half an hour after six hours; (c) Under Section 56, the maximum number of working hours (spread over) in a day from 10.5 hours to 12 hours; (d) Under Section 65, the maximum number of hours of overtime in a quarter shall be increased from the present 115 to 144 hours (the original limit had been laid down as 75 hours). Under the Shops and Establishments Act the government intends to (a) increase working hours from 9 to 10 hours; (b) exclude establishments having less than 20 workers (the current number of 85 lakh establishments covered by this Act will be reduced to about 56,000).

While the State Labour Secretary has claimed that overtime work will be paid at double the rate of basic wages and allowances for every such increase in working hours, and that such overtime shall be subject to worker’s consent, these assurances have to be tested upon the actual language of the proposed amendments, particularly the fine print. While the decisions have yet to take the shape of a bill/ordinance for amending the Factories Act in the state, it is very likely that the amending bill/ordinance shall be on the lines of similar amendments made in Rajasthan and Gujarat.

In the Gujarat Ordinance No. 2 of 2025, issued on 1st July 2025, for instance, at Section 6, it is stated that Section 59(1) of the Factories Act shall be substituted by:

“Where a worker works in any factory:-

• for more than nine hours in any day or for more than forty-eight hours in any week, working for six days in any week;
• for more than ten hours in any day or for more than forty eight hours in any week, working for five days in any week;
• for more than eleven and a half hours in any day working for four days in any week, or works on paid holidays; he shall in respect of overtime work be entitled to wages at the rate of twice his ordinary rate of wages.”

In effect this means that overtime will not be calculated on a daily basis, but on a weekly basis, and a worker may work for eleven and a half hours each day for four days in a week without being eligible for overtime. This amounts to squeezing out the maximum from workers, and if they do not consent to overtime, subjecting them to artificial breaks in service jeopardising their permanent status.

The Rajasthan Bill contains another dangerous clause, namely 6 (v):

• “A worker may be required to work for overtime subject to the consent of such worker for such work except worker required to work for safety activities.”

Thus, a maintenance worker may be forced to work overtime all the year round. Given the current situation in the country of a large informal sector, underemployment, low wages, and unpaid work – workers will give “consent” out of fear or desperation, not choice. The provision of “consent” will be little more than legal subterfuge to conceal a new form of servitude.

It is a serious concern that while average working hours in wealthy countries have reduced by roughly half over the last 150 years – moving from over 50 hours per week to around 25-35 hours per week in recent times – India is reverting to colonial era standards by increasing working hours. In France, for instance, the standard full-time work week is 35 hours, with a daily cap of 10 hours; hours beyond the 35 hour threshold are considered overtime.

The working class all over the world has fought a long battle to establish its right to an 8- hour working day so that workers may also have 8 hours of rest and 8 hours of personal time in which to achieve their full potential as citizens and as human beings. It must be recalled that the International Workers Day originates from the demand for an eight hour working day. Labour Day commemorates the sacrifice of union organisers – who were framed after the Haymarket protest on false charges of causing a riot – during a strike and demonstrations of Chicago workers in 1886. It has origins in the American Federation of Labour’s call: “eight hours shall constitute a legal day’s labour from and after May 1st, 1886”. After the International Labour Organisation (ILO) was founded in 1919, the first instrument ratified by it was the one regulating working hours. The second article limited working hours to 8 hours per day and 48 hours per week. India was one of the first signatories of the ILO’s “Hours of Work Convention” in 1921. India has itself witnessed valiant struggles of textile workers in the year 1911 to reduce working hours which finally under the pen of Dr B.R. Ambedkar were enshrined in the Factories Act, 1948 in the form of the 8-hour work day. The government’s decision in effect seeks to extinguish in one stroke the rights that working people have won with great sacrifice and struggle over more than a century.

It is widely acknowledged that long hours of work does not increase worker productivity, on the contrary, they drastically increase incidents of workplace accidents. Such long hours of work can only lead to sweat labour and hazardous work conditions. It will adversely impact health of workers by increasing exhaustion and stress, and increase their exposure to occupation-linked diseases and medical conditions. It is equally well known that workers in establishments with 12- hour shifts are rarely able to unionise. Longer working hours are discriminatory towards women workers because women bear a significant burden of care work in their homes. If the government was serious about increasing productivity, employment opportunities and welfare of workers, they would introduce progressive amendments to reduce working hours without any reduction in wages.

The PUCL Maharashtra therefore demands that the full texts of the proposed amendments be made available in the public domain in both in Marathi and English, and in all offices of the Labour Department so that trade unions and organisations can scrutinise the fine print of these so- called “reforms.” We demand that this decision to amend the Factories Act and the Shop and Establishments Act along the lines of other state governments be immediately revoked. Any proposed labour reforms in the state must only be considered after a series of consultations with trade unions and workers’ organisations, after which they ought to be opened to the broader public for suggestions and objections.

The PUCL in alliance with trade unions and informal sector workers organisations will campaign against the extension of work hours. It will also lobby with the Standing Committee in the Legislative Assembly and with opposition party MLAs to not accept these changes, and if required challenge these amendments in the courts.

Notes

1. See the post by the Chief Minster of Maharashtra on the social media platform X: https://x.com/CMOMaharashtra/status/1963309750000783630.

2. See the statement “12-hour work day in Karnataka’s IT Sector; Modern-Day Slavery in the Making: KITU Urges Employees to Unite and Resist” by the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union, https://kituhq.org/recent/6836e0f7e83575020247d3d1.

Statement issued by: Shiraz Bulsara Prabhu, President and Sandhya Gokhale, General Secretary, PUCL Maharashtra

[Statement courtesy: Countercurrents.org, an India-based news, views and analysis website, that describes itself as non-partisan and taking “the Side of the People!” It is edited by Binu Mathew.]