Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) on Saturday condemned the statement of the Chairman of Larsen & Toubro (L&T) urging for to extending the working hour to 90 hours per week. “Similar satanic statement was earlier made by the Infosys Head N.R. Narayan Murthy, urging for increasing working hour of 70 hours per week through statutory measure. It seems that there is a rogue competition among the corporate messiahs to rinse the blood and sweat of Indian workers and they are in active connivance and collaboration with the corporate-communal regime in governance by Modi-led NDA,” said Tapan Sen, general secretary of CITU in a statement.
“Indian workers, even the permanent ones in the formal sector, are deployed in much more hours of work compared to more productive countries like China, Europe and even the U.S. The stretching of working hours is very disastrously impacting upon the health and social life of the Indian workers. Despite that, these sort of satanic exercise are being made by the corporate class only to further minimize employment as well as labour cost with brutal working conditions to facilitate more intense exploitation on the workers for profit, cost cutting, in the guise of efficiency and productivity, which have led to 11486 suicides in 2022 as per records of Crime Bureau. The extent of severity of inhuman extraction from labour can be seen from the share of wages in net value addition going down sharply to 15.94% in 2022-23 from 27.64% in 1990-91 while share of net profit jumping from 19.06% to 51.92% during the same period as per Annual Survey of Industries report, besides aggravating joblessness,” pointed out CITU.
The major Left trade union said that such desperate and filthy competitive bid by the leading corporate houses one after another to increase working hours is in conspiratorial connivance with their obedient Government at the centre. CITU accused the Central Government for changing the Labour Codes which envisages working time to 12 hours. “Although the Labour Codes could not yet be notified owing to resistance by trade union movement, we have seen numerous attempts/moves by the BJP ruled state govts and some non-BJP state govts too making exercises to increase working hours to 12 hours a day, which are also being resisted by united trade union movement in many states,” said CITU demanding 7 hours work a day and 5 days work a week.
