‘Work 70 Hours A Week?’ IIT Professor Asks Corporate Bosses To Pay For Overtime First

Imagine this: Your boss asks you to work 70 hours a week (Hello, Narayana Murthy!) because, apparently, that’s what the nation needs from you. No, wait, make that 90 hours (Hello, SN Subrahmanyan!). You’re doing it for the country, after all! Now, let’s fast forward to payday – do you get paid for those extra hours? Spoiler alert: You probably won’t. Welcome to the great Indian corporate circus, where your hard work is “appreciated” with a pat on the back, but not a single extra rupee.

This ongoing debate about long working hours has taken a rather interesting twist, thanks to an IIT professor who has called out the glaring hypocrisy in all of this. Nirmalya Kajuri, an assistant professor of Physics at IIT Mandi, has pointed out the one thing our beloved corporate bosses conveniently forgot: overtime pay.

Image source: Unsplash

He took to X to write how if India strictly implements a policy that demands extra pay for 40+ hours of work a week, bosses will start advocating for work-life balance.

Believe it or not, India does have laws to protect employees from being overworked like machines. According to the Shops and Establishments Act, if you work over 48 hours a week, you are supposed to get overtime pay. The law varies by state, but the principle remains the same: extra work = extra pay.

Image source: Unsplash

But here’s the kicker – this law is rarely enforced. So, while your peers in the US, Europe, or even China are raking in overtime money for working beyond 40 hours, you’re burning the midnight oil for free.

Several people online agreed with what Kajuri had to say. In fact, if we were to get extra pay for the extra time we put into work, we wouldn’t be complaining of long hours as well. We can work long hours, as long as we are compensated fairly for it.

Be it Murthy or Subrahmanyan, neither of them said a word about overtime pay. Because why compensate employees when you can just slap a “for the greater good” label on it and call it a day?

📣 Storypick is now on Telegram! Click here to join our channel (@storypick) and never miss another great story.