Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy has once again called for longer working weeks has returned, this time with an emphasis on schedules like the 996-pattern used in parts of China.
Murthy’s comments revive a debate which began in 2024, when he argued that Indian employees should work 70 hours a week.
I don’t understand why these assholes insist on people working more hours. What’s the difference to them between 1 person working 70 hours a week or 2 people working a combined total of 70 hours if they’re both paid the same hourly rate?
if they’re both paid the same hourly rate?
That’s the fun part: you only have to pay them for 40 hours!
You just aren’t thinking like a billionaire, man. What you do is get the two people anyway, and still force the 70 hour work week.
Your job is not to find a reasonable steady state of operation. Your job is to exploit the resources before you (even the ones with emotions and families) to extract value for the shareholders in the most efficient way possible, before somebody even more evil and clever than you figures out a better way and we direct future fresh meat to his meat grinder instead of yours.
Not only is it your job, you’re legally required to, and your shareholders can sue you if you don’t as per Ford v Dodge
He gets less profit this way
Benefits can be expensive, and they only pay you for the 40 hours because it’s a salaried rather than hourly position. They just want free labor at the expense of the employees’ sanity.
Insurance, benefits and labor expenses. Even in places with little worker protections there are costs that scale with the number of workers instead of the number of hours.
A brief look indicates employers in India can expect to budget on the order of 18% of an employees take home per year for those expenses.There are some circumstances and places in the US where you don’t need to provide as many benefits to employees who work below 40 hours. Then you see employers hire more people and schedule them for just under the threshold to give them benefits.
The answer is always because it’s cheaper for them somehow.
Overworked peasants have neither the time nor the energy to revolt.
Iceland made theor 4 day workweek experiment permanent…because it was actually more productive.
They don’t even want all the money, they just want us to suffer
These people may as well tattoo “slave owner” on their foreheads by now.
You could replace most management people with a rack of GPUs and nobody would notice. Mostly they are a very unimaginative lot parroting the same misguided group think that devalues the employees that create all their companies value. Infosys is a consulting company. They don’t make anything or own valuable IP. They pimp out Indian labour to undercut the labour rates and conditions in developed countries which already makes them a shitload of profit.
You would think with increasing options to Indian professionals, their recruitment people would be shitting bricks trying to hire talent with this bullshit out there but they have probably sacked them as well. Though, if I wasn’t poor I would probably say all sorts of shit to pump share prices and cash out before the AI bubble bursts.
So what I’m hearing from that headline alone is that he’s a psychopath who doesn’t work more than 5 hours a week, and what little “”“work”“” he does consists of getting drunk at lunch and moaning to other CEOs about how lazy his workers are.
It’s not just saturday morning cartoon villain evil.
It’s also incredibly fucking stupid.
Anything that you get better outcomes from by making people work longer, like assembly lines, can be done better by robots anyway, and of course you as capital owner don’t have to live life after your dominant hand gets crushed and amputated.
Anything that isn’t pure rote work, you get better results when people are not overworked and spending thirty hours a week sticking fucking pencils in your acoustic ceiling because nobody’s fucking brain works that long and hard.
Also automation is getting better and better all the damn time. The only reason why we haven’t hit 30 hour workweek is due to declining unions and and exploitation politics.
I learned that China had basically made this shit illegal years ago, but work hours in China are still insane. I am willing to bet that they will still have incredible growth and prosperity even if those workhours are strictly enforced.
People like this dipshit need to be stripped of all possessions and wealth and immured alive.
Yes they are illegal but companies will use workarounds to get people to put in more time. it’s a fake law basically
I guess even in authoritarian police states where the government will disappear or execute you for any opposition businesses still get away with being assholes.
if you do business in any authoritarian police state, you will see that laws are arbitrarily enforced. and you will regularly be paying fees that don’t exist.
Well, thank you for the warning. So you are saying people should avoid working for you at any cost.
Old hag still at it… Him and his wife are insufferable man
🖕
Why, so they can write even more shitty software?
Higher taxes on the rich don’t go far enough, because they can just leverage their assets to corrupt democracies and roll everything back.
Corporations need to be banned.
Oh fuck off, asshole… you need to be thrown in prison.
He needs to take a long walk, on a short pier.
Into the warm embrace of a hungry octopus…
Cthulu, we have our next offering for you…
Needs to be shot into the sun. Return his atoms to the foundry
There is a large body of research out there regarding 12h shift work in healthcare. I’m only linking 1 article, a quick search will yield more, easily.
A TLDR on it: 12h shifts decrease performance. Stacking them decreases safety and performance, cumulatively. Car accidents pick up significantly on day 4.
It’s utter madness that healthcare professionals are allowed to work (in many countries) longer than truck drivers. It’s even more ridiculous that many countries have a medical doctor internship program that is designed by an absolute cocaine fiend assigning 30 hour days - and see nothing wrong with it.
Capitalism protects the capital (goods, and equipment, on a truck), and values human lives at approx $3 million (based on financial cost for the company when a life is lost).
The value of the truck and the contents of the trailer are frequently greater than the value of the driver for a given trip, and therefore justify more caution and care than any given patient in a doctor’s office.
It’s almost like the collective bargaining of a union works.
There’s less errors overall in having consistency in who healthcare reports off to between shifts. The 17% is balanced out by that (math wise). The errors in having 3 people reporting around an 8hr clock are significantly higher than with the 12hr clock.
But a 4th shift? Staying over to 16hrs? The 36hr week, I feel, is the extent to which you can safely take the 12h shift.
Additional madness is in that, in 26 states, the administrators of hospitals can hold shift workers over into double shifts. I don’t know about you, but I lose the capacity to read words around hour 18. Yet, this practice is engaged routinely in health care, without regard to sleep patterns. Maybe it is an 8h shift. Maybe that person spent day shift in school then went to work for an evening shift. Now is being held on their license to stay a night shift. And expected to drive home after more than 24hrs awake. Maybe their babysitter leaves at midnight. How good and safe is that patient care going to be?
US: Truck driver crashing causes property damage, patients dieing causes the bed to open up for another paying customer.
Rest of the world: Shortages due to cost of education along with not enough spots available for said education.
probably the shortage problems, and unwillingness for the industry to alleviate the problem. and the pipeline from college to health professional is long and grueling. MD IS heavily gatekeeped by the license certification association.
Am I missing the article link?
Let’s try this one
It’s not showing on my client either, hopefully they edit their comment.
Yes, I failed to paste the copy. After a 12 hour shift.
Apparently it’s about reducing shift changes, which is when most mistakes happen. You would have to hope that someone has done research into mistakes caused by fatigue vs. mistakes caused by shift changes.
In the healthcare environment that is true. 12h shifts retain consistency between back and forth reporting, while with 8hr shifts things get lost or missed or misinterpreted in the handoff.
My point is that 3 is the sweet spot, it’s the 4th and fifth shifts that become cumulatively bad and result in increased car accidents on the commute.
Someone told me that the reason for 12 hour shifts is that most medical mistakes and accidents happen because of shift changes. Reducing the number of shift changes from 3 to 2 results in fewer mistakes, despite longer working hours.
This is true. It also results in less intershift rancor. But it doesn’t change the difficulties of 4th and 5th shifts in the same week.
I’m all for turning a 40hr/5day work week into a 36hr/3day work week. It works well in 24hr professions.
What I’m not for is this 996 nonsense.
Not really, a huge cocaine user came up with the system, and we use it since then because “it’s as we always have done it!!”
“You worked really hard this year. 60 hour weeks. Impressive but you can do more. See that rolls Royce in the parking lot? If you work 80 hour weeks next year and everything works out, I’ll be able to buy a second one.”
