ARTICLE
9 September 2024

Policy Suggestions: Balancing Working Time Arrangements Without Ruffling Workforce Sentiment

J
JSA

Contributor

JSA is a leading national law firm in India with over 600 professionals operating out of 7 offices located in: Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Gurugram, Hyderabad, Mumbai and New Delhi. Our practice is organised along service lines and sector specialisation that provides legal services to top Indian corporates, Fortune 500 companies, multinational banks and financial institutions, governmental and statutory authorities and multilateral and bilateral institutions.
Labour arbitrage has always been highlighted as India Inc.'s strength, but in reality, it reflects India's poor economic situation where there is a lack of opportunities and abundance...
India Employment and HR

Labour arbitrage has always been highlighted as India Inc.'s strength, but in reality, it reflects India's poor economic situation where there is a lack of opportunities and abundance of people to do any job thus, driving the costs down. This presented a unique opportunity to shift global operations to India to save on costs and deal with lack of resources and increasing costs elsewhere. While IT companies, GCCs and GICs have capitalised on this for long and the story may well continue 10-15 years in the future, our growth model cannot excessively focus on labour arbitrage and needs to shift from labour arbitrage to building capabilities in innovation, quality, differentiation, and agility. It is high time we start focusing on revamping the education system, skilling the population with cutting edge technology and incentivising R&D and entrepreneurship. This is vital for shaping India's economic landscape on a world stage.

It is true that for specialised skills in some pockets, salaries are hitting the roof whereas at a larger level, there is a sense of lack of opportunities for the growing working population.

If and when India emerges as a developed economy, the per capita income and labour costs will become comparable to the developed world.

Labour laws need to balance the interest of employers and the workforce –

With many countries worldwide moving towards a 4-day work week, the Karnataka Government's proposal of 14 hours workday and 70 hours work week in the IT sector, is on the other side of the spectrum. This is approximately 56% increase in the daily working hours limit vis-a-vis the current 9-hour daily working hours limit (excluding overtime). The objective of the proposal is to focus on quantity rather than quality and give flexibility to employers to earn more revenue from existing workforce instead of hiring new workforce. Apparently, this is not what the industry had asked for – it just wanted flexibility to structure and streamline work timings within the existing 48-hours work week framework. The Karnataka Government's proposal does not seem to consider the short-term impact or the long-term repercussions of proposed changes on the workforce. In an era where questions are being raised on productivity of workforce and quality of resources in India, it is important that new laws or amendments to it, focus on creation of new jobs, retention of existing jobs, promotion of training and upskilling and maintenance of occupational health of employees.

In a culture of burn-out, statutorily backed long working hours may invariably add more fuel, triggering other issues for employers such as higher attrition rates, more mental health concerns, encourage moonlighting by employees of employers who do not wish to extend daily working hours to 14 apart from contributing to creation of mundane jobs and/or leading to job loss for some. A balance needs to be struck. Perhaps, extending the maximum daily working hours limit (exclusive of overtime) to 10 hours and maximum weekly working hours to 50 hours would be more plausible. Karnataka could also take a cue from Telangana where IT/ITES establishments have been given operational flexibility to structure their daily working hours as long as they do not exceed the statutory maximum weekly working hour limit of 48 hours. This will ensure that the labour laws promote and safeguard interest of the employees while giving flexibility that the industry is seeking and also allay some very valid concerns raised by the trade unions.

Originally published by ET Insights

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