Narayana Murthy and 70-hour work week: A narrow idea of nation-building
Narayana Murthy and 70-hour work week: A narrow idea of nation-building
Infosys founder Narayana Murthy touched off a debate when he advocated longer work hours for India’s youth. He argued that “India’s work productivity is one of the lowest in the world […] so therefore, my request is that our youngsters must say, ‘This is my country. I’d like to work 70 hours a week’.” A sense of ownership and commitment to one’s country is indeed a sentiment worth inculcating in our young and old alike. However, two questions arise: Have we done enough to facilitate a sense of shared destiny at a national level necessary to inculcate this ownership? And, what does it mean for a young person to contribute to nation-building?
On the first question, we are arguably falling short. The lives and views of the top 10 per cent dominate our popular culture — the lived reality for a vast number of young people diverges at birth from these aspirational narratives. Segregation based on class and other markers of social capital are rigidly maintained and it is difficult to think of egalitarian spaces where people mingle as relative equals across these divides. It is also not evident that there’s a readily available path to socio-economic mobility.
As per the “State of Working India 2023” report, over 40 per cent of graduates under 25 years old are unemployed while incomes among the salaried have remained stagnant. The inability to productively employ educated youth is a top-down failure both because often mass education is subpar and because there are not enough jobs. There is thus a case to be made to absorb more people in employment to give them a foothold in the formal economy and an opportunity to learn instead of artificially reducing open positions by extracting overtime from those who are employed.
Consider too, the nature of work we are creating for our young people. One of the most visible and accessible avenues of employment for our youth is becoming gig work — driving a taxi or delivering packages. Set aside for a minute the important issue of fair compensation to focus only on the learning potential and growth prospects of such work. There is none, unlike other jobs where even if one starts at the lowest level on the assembly line, there is some ability and opportunity to interact with others, acquire new skills, build out a larger perspective and advance. Instead, the defining characteristics of tech platform-driven gig economy jobs are their fungibility and repeatability but also atomisation which makes it impossible for anyone performing these roles to gain larger responsibility (within the framework of the platform) irrespective of performance or capability.
Yet, a small segment of India is booming. Our rich and successful are part of the global elite and are feted around the world. There are other reports that chronicle how the benefits of growth are disproportionately being cornered by the top 10 per cent of the population resulting in a K-shaped growth where the rich are getting richer and the poor, poorer. Set against this context, an ordinary young person may not feel that s/he is an equal participant and stakeholder in national progress. The onus is thus on those of us with power and platform to first make a tangible effort to create that sense of shared belonging and ensure equitable growth before we exhort our young to work harder in the name of nation-building.
The second question about what it means to contribute to nation-building as a young person also needs answering. Nation-building is an act of citizenship and “productivity” measured narrowly in economic terms cannot be a constitutive element of citizenship. This logic, if allowed to stand, will render some citizens more valuable than others in principle, not just in unfortunate practice. Instead, we should encourage and facilitate our youth to learn about their own country, develop empathy and build the skills required to navigate the diversity and complexity of our country, and engage in their community. These are real acts of citizenship and nation-building.
Murthy is correct: “Youngsters form a significant majority of our population and they are the ones who can build our country”. However, he errs in putting the onus solely on our youth to “shoulder the responsibility for India’s progress” without talking about the role — and indeed responsibility — of those who have the power and privilege to give back to their country. It is rhetorical to exhort our youth to contribute to nation-building if we don’t empower them with the requisite skills or facilitate them with avenues for productive engagement. The Indian elite has benefited enormously from India’s growth and success but sometimes there is a faint sense of smugness that their unprecedented success is itself their outsized contribution to India thus earning them the right to advise and admonish those less fortunate. Yes, India needs to improve its productivity and we may need a cultural shift towards discipline. But equally, we need corporate India to have a sharper sense of its responsibility towards our country beyond tax monies and CSR projects. Instead, what is required is to foster a sense of national purpose and a visible attempt by our top 10 per cent to give to our country and move everyone forward.
Ruchi Gupta
The writer is executive director, Future of India Foundation
**Top CEOs received 9% pay rise in 2022, employees took 3% pay cut https://m.economictimes.com/jobs/hr-policies-trends/top-ceos-received-9-pay-rise-in-2022-employees-took-3-pay-cut/amp_articleshow/99901015.cms
It is a myth that Japan and Germany grew rich after World War II because their citizens worked long hours; India can become rich only after its workforce is equipped with enough capital
October 31, 2023 08:00 am | Updated November 01, 2023 12:12 am IST
Infosys team, from left, Jt. Mananging Director, Mr.S.Gopalakrishnan, Chairman & CEO, Mr.N.R.Narayana Murthy, MD & COO, Mr.Nandan Nilekani and CFO Mr.Mohandas Pai in a happy mood after seeing off Mr.Yoshiro Mori, PM of Japan, at Infosys Centre near Bangalore. | Photo Credit: Saggre Ramaswamy
Infosys chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy sparked a debate last week by urging young Indians to work 70 hours per week, which translates to about 12 hours of work per day assuming a 6-day work week, to develop the country. He cited Japan and Germany as examples of countries that grew because their citizens worked harder and for longer hours to rebuild their nations in the aftermath of the Second World War, and further noted that India’s worker productivity is one of the lowest in the world.
Mr. Murthy’s concern about low worker productivity in India is valid. Low productivity affects economic output and the standard of living in any country. However, the tech billionaire wrongly attributes India’s low worker productivity to the number of hours worked by Indians when the real problem lies elsewhere.
It is true that countries such as Japan and Germany did see a rise in average working hours, albeit temporarily, after the Second World War. Japan saw annual average working hours per worker rise from 2,030 hours in 1950 (earliest year for which work hours data for the country is available) to a peak of 2,175 hours in 1961. But in the case of Germany, the rise in average working hours after the Second World War was much shorter with the annual average working hours per worker peaking at 2,427 hours in 1950.
But this rise in annual working hours does not explain why these countries grew rich while other developing countries stayed poor. Germany saw its annual average working hours per worker figure steadily decline from 1950 onwards. Yet German per capita income grew steadily in the second half of the 21st century. From the 1960s, the annual average working hours of the Japanese started to gradually decline each decade yet growth did not suffer until much later, due to other reasons. Further, evidence does not show that the average Indian worker worked much less than the average Japanese or German in the past or the present. In 1970 (the earliest year for which work hours data for India is available), the average Indian worker worked about 2,077 hours per year and this figure has remained quite stable till date. In 1970, the average German and Japanese workers worked 1,941 hours and 2,137 hours, respectively. In fact, from the 1960s to the 1980s, when Japan witnessed fast economic growth rates, the annual working hours there was pretty much the same as in India. In 2017, annual working hours stood at 2,117 hours in India versus 1,738 hours and 1,354 hours in Japan and Germany, respectively.
Historically, a fall in annual work hours has been a marker of economic progress rather than economic stagnation. Most countries that began to industrialize early saw the average number of hours clocked in by their workers decrease steadily over the last 150 years as economic output and living standards rose. In 1870, workers in most countries clocked over 3,000 hours per year. Today, work hours in these countries has roughly halved. It should be noted that, generally speaking, there is disutility or psychic pain associated with work (which is why people demand wages as compensation for the psychic pain they incur). People in pre-industrial societies had no choice but to work more than 3,000 hours per year because it was necessary for their survival; the pain of losing their life was greater than the pain of working excruciatingly long hours. But as economic output and living standards rose with the rise of industry and technology, people had fewer reasons to work long hours and could afford to take it easy.
But this raises an important question: how do workers in modern economies produce far more economic output, and thus enjoy far higher standards of living, while actually working far fewer hours? This is the result of the rise in worker productivity (defined as output divided by man/person hours worked) as workers today have far more capital equipment to work with than their predecessors. A fisherman today, for example, can catch far more fish in far fewer hours using an advanced capital tool like a fishing trawler than his ancestors could with rudimentary nets.
Indian workers, as the data cited earlier show, do not actually lag behind other countries when it comes to clocking in long hours at work. What they really lack is sufficient capital that can help boost their productivity. As of 2015, India’s worker productivity stood was $6.46 per hour compared with $36.22 in Japan and $59.77 in the United States. Building capital to boost worker productivity requires investments, which are funded by savings. But the channelling of savings into investment can happen, as institutional economists such as Douglass North have argued, only when a country has strong institutions such as an independent and efficient judiciary. India lags the West on this count, which explains India’s low worker productivity when compared with the West and points to the need for reforms. Even though India’s worker productivity has risen since the 1991 economic reforms, the pace of its growth has significantly dropped since 2016.
Mr. Murthy’s comments come in the backdrop of the push by IT companies to get their employees back to office since the end of the pandemic. Stanford economist Nick Bloom recently noted that economic research shows that work-from-home saves costs for companies and also improves worker output. In fact, U.S. worker productivity has accelerated since the pandemic as more Americans started working from home. Yet India Inc. has been slow to recognize this trend and even seems keen to reverse it.
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