One of the many achievements that modern human civilization can claim in the late 19th and early 20th century is the development of cities, the embracing of urban life, the seeding and expansion of collective action, and the demanding of rights. The melting pot that cities eventually became led to new ethnicities and the growth of diversity, the exchange of cultures and norms, new forms of creativity, and an expansion of what we might call the human spirit.
Elements of urban life were newer forms of social interactions, recreation, and cultural and technological innovations, different from those in rural areas, that evolved and kept evolving over time. Cinema, music, books and reading, libraries, museums, art galleries, playgrounds for different sports, higher educational institutions, research labs, and so on are distinct markers of urban life. A part of living in cities meant taking some or all of these at different points in one’s life.
This time, the time that could be called one’s own time beyond work to be spent on recreation and self-realization, was hard-won through people’s struggles. This is worth recalling when neoliberal corporate bosses in India, like Infosys founder NR Narayan Murthy and L&T chairperson SN Subrahmanyan, are urging young people to give up the idea of self-time and slog a 70- or 90-hour work week. To be fair, others like Anand Mahindra, chairperson of the Mahindra Group, have mocked this and defended doing other fulfilling things—including “staring at one’s wife or husband on Sundays.”
Back in the early 19th century, people in cities of Europe and the United States worked for 80 to 100 hours a week despite calls for a more balanced work-life as part of better working conditions. In the US, the National Labor Union demanded, on behalf of workers and farmers, that the 8-hour workday and 40-hour workweek be mandated. This was in 1866—a good 158 years ago. Three years later, the US government proclaimed that government employees would work an 8-hour workday and encouraged the private sector to follow, but in vain. When did the private sector put employee welfare above profits?
But the juggernaut could not be stopped. Thanks, in part, to the sustained agitations by labor and trade unions, the 8-hour workday and 40-hour workweek was made law—initially in Illinois and later, in 1940, all over the US. In between, in 1926, automobile mogul Henry Ford helped popularize the 8-hour workday and is widely—though inaccurately—cited today as the first mover of the concept. The concepts of overtime and compensatory holidays too are outcomes of hard and long working-class struggles for a dignified life outside the workplace.
This context is important when some of India’s corporate czars, besides Elon Musk and others in foreign lands, have urged people to clock in 70-80-90-hour work weeks. Are we, in our cities, just going back to a repugnant past that should have been left behind? Is this out of ignorance of all the working-class struggles and agitations that went into the making of the 8-hour workday and 40-hour workweek, or is there something more ominous here, like a reversal of hard-fought wins?
In India’s large metropolitan areas, where presumably men like Murthy and Subrahmanyan want to see their dream take shape, people in the formal sector are already spending 12 hours or more every day on work; add to that the grueling commutes twice a day that nearly everyone except the likes of Murthy and Subrahmanyan have to do from home to the workplace and back, and the total number of hours is an unhealthy high. Add to that, especially for women, the care work that must be done—household chores, child care and elder care, school drops and pick-ups, and so on—and the work burden rises further, giving them barely 5 hours of rest and recreation a day.
In the informal sector, where work hours do not apply and presence means earning for the day, people are already putting in long and taxing hours, with just a couple of hours left for themselves, that too in cramped and inhospitable living conditions. I know dozens and more of rickshaw and taxi drivers in Mumbai, to cite an example, who do two shifts or work 7 am to 3 pm in a formal place and then drive till midnight. More informal workers than we know do two jobs, or double kaam as they call it, to make ends meet and send remittances back home for families and villages.
Given that the majority of workers in cities are in the informal sector, it means that most people are already living the wet dream of corporate czars like Murthy and Subrahmanyan—though these men, wrapped in their Ultra High Net Worth cocoons, may be unaware of it. This is already unacceptable; people should not have to struggle so much for a basic and decent life. To ask the few relatively fortunate ones in the formal sector to work longer hours—because, as Subrahmanyan stated, what else is there to do on Sunday—is to go back to the past that the men need to read about.
Or they can look at Denmark, as an example. In the country that consistently ranks high on quality of life and happiness indices, only 1.1 percent of the population works 50 or more hours a week compared to the nearly 10-12 percent in the UK and the US in the formal sector. They also enjoy flexible work hours to fulfill home-family needs, five weeks a year of paid vacation, and six months of maternity and paternity paid leave. Janine Leschke, a professor at Copenhagen Business School, recently told the BBC that Denmark is “definitely not a work culture where you have to show up and be available all day, all evening, to show that you’re working hard all the time.”
The BBC also cites an interesting concept or rule at work, exemplified at the Tivoli Gardens amusement park in Copenhagen, which is called the three-meter rule—irrespective of your position or job profile, you are the CEO of everything within a radius of three meters. This empowers workers and allows them to take ownership; this, along with the factor of trust and minimum hierarchy, makes happiness at work possible. Of course, Denmark’s population is barely six million—a third of Mumbai, less than a third of Delhi-NCR—but its lessons should be sent to Murthy and Subrahmanyan.
The most significant aspect of their demand is that people become corporate slaves and eschew all dreams of a life filled with regular joys, family time, recreation, and self-fulfillment. Someone needs to tell them that we are in the 21st century, and they cannot reverse the gains of working-class struggles.
Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and won the Laadli Media Award 2024 for her writing in this column.
