All opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the views of Her Campus.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at MUJ chapter.
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF
The exploitation of labour in India dates back centuries when the rich and classy exploited the impecunious since the aristocracy era. While those times are long gone, the mindset remains. The CEOs of big-shot companies expect the interns to clock in for extended hours while they print the notes. India risks reversing the little progress made over many decades towards the protection of workers’ rights to the idea of a hashtag-worthy hustle culture. In the past, such ideas were still attributed to the authorities’ poor judgement and ignorance of human rights but today it is being seen as arising from the lack of will and effort in the young workforce when they negotiate against such policies.
While the West is standardized at 40 hours a week, India is lacking productivity due to inadequate working hours limited to 48 hours weekly. The irony is flabbergasting. Surely, the problem lies not in the working duration of the people but rather in the system that prevents the fruits of labour by the hard efforts of the labour force not truly benefiting them.
REALITY OF HUSTLE CULTURE
Have you ever heard someone say Thank God it’s Monday? Where does this belief of Monday as the beginning of a week-long toxic grind stem from? Dare I say that it’s the result of the distorted idea that working more equates to more work getting done. The idea of devoting all your time to work without ever tuning out, although greatly celebrated as a means to achieve success, is nowhere as great as it is made out to be.
It is a pervasive culture that seems impossible to escape with even the most successful leaders like Elon Musk pushing for it to bring about actual change in the world. It glorifies constant pressure and workload often at the expense of one’s physical and mental well-being. Although marketed as ambition, it is just really masked exploitation. Burnout has become a hallmark of productivity, compelling workers to blur boundaries between personal and work life, leaving long-term impacts on their relationships and overall health.
LEADERS’ OPINION
Elon Musk once tweeted that:
“Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”
ELON MUSK
referring to employees in his company who work around the clock and recently, Indian industrialists like Narayan Murthy, too have spoken about their beliefs on the ‘need’ for youth to work 70 hours a week for our country’s progress, while some like L&T chairman S.N. Subrahmanyan went as far as to urge youth to work on Sundays, reasoning that they would be bored staring at their wife’s faces at home, advocating a 90 hour work week. Such statements, while marketed as a medium to match global competition, also reveal the underlying mindset promoting success at the cost of everything else and inadvertently normalising exploitative expectations from employees. So, on one hand, relentless work is being displayed as a productivity booster but also simultaneously raises concerns over people becoming boring, burned-out work zombies.
THE LONG HOUR DILEMMA
The advocates of the debate for longer hours believe it to be a means of bigger wins, whether it be completing projects, manufacturing goods, meeting deadlines, or being available to customers at the right times, longer hours serve all. It is like ‘why walk when you can sprint’ and outpace all the competition that exists. The opposition believes otherwise though. All of us have heard of the race between the hare and the turtle. The rabbit goes all the way, flexing its speed and success only to exhaust itself and lose to the turtle. The reality of longer hours is somewhat similar. Sure, the short-term achievements and instant gratifications are exciting but what happens when the employees are so burnt out that they cannot function anymore. Nobody wins if the participants quit midway. Thus, instead of squeezing more hours out of employees, it is important to focus on smarter solutions to increase productivity and outperform the competitors.
WORK-LIFE BALANCE
Despite the recent arguments favouring long working hours over personal life to get maximum output, in reality, our body needs adequate breaks to elicit the best performance. Work-life balance is generally associated with spending time with family, and friends or engaging in leisurely activities but it is more than just that. The above is just an oversimplification of the more critical aspects of the topic. It is more about creating an environment where both work and personal goals are achieved efficiently. It is important to improve work achievement as overworking not only leads to burnout, which affects personal health but only makes employees more prone to mistakes, attention deficit and decline in output. People are not machines. Not only can we not function efficiently without proper recreation, but we also need the right amount of mental and personal bandwidth to be able to reason, resolve, innovate and work in ways that distinguish us from robots. The ‘work till you drop’ mentality is not only unsustainable but also downright unhealthy.
As the world debates an increase in work hours, more focus should be on fostering a sustainable workforce rather than the achievement of economic goals as a means of measuring progress. It must be recognized that true growth and progress come from motivated people, working of free will and not from those forced to grind incessantly. As is mentioned in the ‘The Prophet’ by Khalil Gibran:
“And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.”
KHALIL GIBRAN
Thus, productivity is not measured by the number of hours clocked in but rather by the passion and efforts put in during those hours. It is ultimately the quality of lives of people that defines success and not how many hours the citizens work. So, here’s to hoping for a future with smart, innovative and happier workers rather than overworked, exhausted machines obeying orders.
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