Proponents of a shorter workweek say that productivity should not be measured in hours, but in actual output.
Narayana Murthy, the billionaire founder of IT powerhouse, Infosys, and father-in-law of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, caused quite a stir recently when he said that young Indians should work 70 hours per week to help the country develop.
“India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world,” he said on a podcast. “Unless we improve our work productivity … we will not be able to compete with those countries that have made tremendous progress.”
He added that his request is that “our youngsters must say, ‘This is my country. I’d like to work 70 hours a week.’”
Seventy hours a week? I just spoke to some youngsters and they said, “This is my country. I’d like to work 7 hours a week.” Unfortunately for them, it’s not easy to get a job in the government. Too much competition.
Is it realistic to expect youngsters to work 70 hours a week for the benefit of their country? I don’t think so. They’re more likely to work 70 hours a week for the benefit of their bank accounts. If they’re making good money for all those extra hours, they might be tempted to do it.
Entrepreneurs are known to work around the clock as they get their companies started. They don’t count their hours because they’re working for themselves. They’re investing their labor into their companies, knowing that if the companies are successful, they will be rewarded handsomely. They might even become billionaires like Narayana Murthy, allowing them to sit back and tell others to work 70 hours a week.
It’s not just entrepreneurs who work many hours a week. People work endlessly in various fields. An aspiring author may spend countless hours working on a book, with no guarantee that even close family members will read it. (No, I’m not speaking from personal experience. I’m writing from it.) An artist may spend hundreds of hours on a single painting, hoping that it will be appreciated while the artist is still alive. A doctor may work from morning to night, knowing that while healthy patients aren’t guaranteed, a healthy bank balance is.
Seventy hours a week is the equivalent of working from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. five days a week, and 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. on the sixth day. That may not seem like much, but what if you are one of those lucky people who has a life outside work? What if you have children and would like to get to know them?
“No time to socialize, no time to talk to family, no time to exercise, no time for recreation,” Dr. Deepak Krishnamurthy, a Bengaluru-based cardiologist, wrote on X in response to Murthy’s suggestion.
Can’t disagree with him, but if Murthy were creating a poster to recruit youngsters for a 70-hour-per-week job, his list of benefits might include “no time to talk to family.”
While Murthy wants youngsters in India to work more hours, many people around the globe are trying to work fewer hours. Those who are working 50 hours a week want to work 40, and those who are working 40 want to work 32. Indeed, autoworkers in America are campaigning for four-day, 32-hour workweeks. They want to replace TGIF with TGIT. (TGIT is also what a lot of NBA players say — “Thank God I’m tall.”)
Proponents of a shorter workweek say that productivity should not be measured in hours, but in actual output. No point in being at work from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. if you run out of energy at 3 p.m. and your only output the rest of the day is nothing you’d want to present to your boss. Better to just flush it away.
