Mr. Murthy has stepped into a lively debate with the 70-hr-week declaration. He’s not the only old man to ask the young to work harder, of couse — there’s Jack Ma espousing the 9–9–6 rule (which is 2 hrs more than Mr. Murthy’s ask), Elon Musk asking workers to sign on to long hours or take a hike and so on. 

In short, many important business leaders believe that longer hours lead to more output. Even if the extra hours are less productive, it seems intuitive that overall output will be more with a longer working week — what important people call increased marginal production.

But, is life that simple? I’m going to squeeze in three ideas.

French Fries

Sure, french fries are not French but that complicated country is consistently put up as a counter-argument with its dedication to the 35-hr-week, half of what Ma and Murthy want to do. The French 35-hour week is actually the standard 9–5 five days a week that most people are used to — the 35 (instead of 40) comes from excluding the 1-hour lunch break. 

35 or 40, the French are stubbornly productive, more than most of their European neighbours — 1.4% more than even highly regarded Germany (which has a legal six-day week). And it’s been like that for decades, though it should not be as per Mr. Murthy; by now those Franch slackers should have fallen far behind. 

There is, of course, the fine print. First is, the 35-hour week is an annual average — no one says don’t work more during crisis times. You can ask a worker to do more than the 35 hrs even at normal times but you have to pay overtime. The crux is that more work for the same pay is not an increase in productivity, it is sweatshop labour that India has tried very hard to eradicate. If you want people to slog day and night at the expense of all else, one way to find such workers is to pay well above market (McKinsey, Reliance, Wall Street … France). If you just want longer hours for low pay – ironically the poorest countries in thr world are the ones that are best at it.

What workers get paid matters. After all, a country is its people, not its roads. Excellent expressways and starving people – we call that North Korea. The whole point of economic productivity is to increase the well-being of the workers. 

Conundrum

Of course, today’s business leaders are hardly the first people to come up with such an idea. This is where the conundrum comes in — it seems longer hours do work, but only up to a point. After that production seems to peak, and productivity seems to drop. The Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research, a part of Stanford University right in the middle of Silicon Valley published a detailed study on this in 2013, and their key conclusion (Page 17, if you don’t want to read all 82) is that productivity peaks at 49 hours per week, and production (output) peaks at 63 hrs, after which marginal output is negative. Working 70 hrs (as Ma and Murthy want) would actually produce only as much as working 56 hrs so if you really are paying by the hour — Ma and Murthy (and the country) will lose money. Factories should indeed stop at 49 and not 56; all hours after 49 are less marginal utility; you’d be better off paying for a different shift of fresh workers. 

How well does this hold? Well, a lot of research on this was done in the UK on munition workers during World War I, when there was a significant inclination to work long hours — indeed even 100-hour weeks were tried. There was no fear of industrial action and no shortage of motivation whatever the level of pay or health of the worker, but productivity suffered with overwork and even more in the absence of rest days. If you wanted more bombs, 49 hrs was your best bet. 

Are knowledge workers different? Probably not — a key part of the Agile manifesto is to work at a sustained pace (which is decidedly not 70 hours a week). Even more than muscle workers, knowledge workers need rest and recreation to produce output. If forced to work long hours, they will fill it with mindless fluff.

Parkinson mentioned, all the way back in 1955, that work tends to stretch to fill the time available. If you have 70 hours available, well, work will stretch to it without much fuss. The digital, hyperconnected world of midnight emails and 8am Zoom calls gives everyone the illusion of productivity without doing much for output. Meetings are more frequent than ever, and full of slides that contain hours of beautification, not to mention traffic lights, Gantt charts and all other stuf. Yet projects still take just as long and fail just as often. The reality is that at least in the IT industry most workers are already working long hours – just not with that much to show for it.

Supplyshock

Its not a word (yes my spellchecker is all angry red lines) but the thought here is — is a shortage of labour hours really what is holding our country back? We have the largest workforce in the world (now more than China even) so if everyone did even a relaxed 40 hours a week, we should be able to overwhelm France and make Japan shiver in its japani shoes. The USA should, with one-third the population and plenty of hippie-dippie slackers be far behind even Bangladesh, not sitting on top at eight times the GDP of India. Hardworking China should be able to output more per person than notoriously relaxed Italy, instead of 70% less. The GDP numbers are from the IMF, conveniently summarised by Forbes India.

In a country with a huge unemployment problem, making people work longer hours sounds completely nonsensical. Increasing labour supply in a country awash with surplus labour sounds like a recipe for disaster, not a way to faster progress. Mr Murthy didn’t point to the education system or the lack of infrastructure as the driver – his sole solution was longer working hours.

India has no shortage of labour, but bottlenecks lie elsewhere. Our crop production per acre is lower than global average, not because our farmers are lazy but because farming methods and seed quality and a hundred other things get in the way. Our factory productivity numbers are similarly unimpressive, and can’t be blamed only on lazy workers. Indeed, Indian labour productivity (output per hour of available labour) is one of the lowest in the world, at least among the countries that provide statistics. If hours of work per person are primarily what is needed for India to overtake the USA, we would have to work not 70 but more like 360 hours a week – which may be a bit difficult. 

Even the vaunted Infosys (along with the rest of the Indian IT industry) has below-average revenue per employee. Accenture is 50% better than Infosys, Deloitte nearly double, Google some 30 times more. And think of this — much of the famed talent of Silicon Valley is India-educated Indians. Sundar and Satya and Shantanu and Vinod studied in the same colleges that you and I did, so the seed stock is not much different.

The last thing one associates with Silicon Valley is long hours of slog; indeed marathons and cooking classes and “work-life balance” are very much part of the culture there. Jack Dorsey, who arguably ran Twitter better than Musk, was fond of his meditation retreats. 

What makes the ones who went to the Valley produce so much more value per head than the ones who stayed back? If we stop falling back on easy tropes like “lazy youngsters”, the answer is blowing in the wind.