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.
Well, thank you for the warning. So you are saying people should avoid working for you at any cost.
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.
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.
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.
The sooner we start eating these motherfuckers the faster things will improve.
Billionaire is a mental illness that isn’t compatible with civil society,
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
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
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.
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.
Overworked peasants have neither the time nor the energy to revolt.
These people may as well tattoo “slave owner” on their foreheads by now.
CEO: has lunch and answers a phone call. “I’m working!” Writes a proposal from a yacht “I’m working!” Goes golfing with industry buddies. “I’m working!” Paid tens of millions not including stock options. Spends time in the c-suite. Actually is working. Writes a letter about his cubicle slaves who are chained to their cubicle at work, their phone at home, unable to actually use PTO due to fear of negative performance reviews, working 50+ hours on the clock and uncounted hours off the clock “You need to work more!!” With their pay and benefits constantly under assault by managers.
Like hell the CEO is writing a proposal himself on a yacht. That’s what his secretary, Sugartits or Kathy or whatever, is for.
He read the proposal. That’s his work for the day. Claimed 18 hrs.
I’ve never seen it written so concisely before. The truth hits that much harder because of it 🫠🥲
🖕
Crunching does not work!
Instead, it reduces productivity to a fraction (often 10% of normal), countering any time added.
You want to improve your productivity, you make your workers happy. Make sure they can eat, have good healthcare, have adequate family life, etc.
We now have studies that counter the crunching myths and time theft myths.
The cruelty is the point
They’re not invincible. We’re not our ancestors. Look at this little dweeb. Is anyone really intimidated by him?
So go get him, tiger.
I’m not in India. These dweebs almost always have personal security nonetheless.
Is maxxing the productivity top priority?
They might value control over their workforce above productivity.
In actuality, yes, their job is to maximize productivity for the dollar spent, hence maximizing profits, and the best way to do that for most job pools is by improving the QoL of the workforce.
They likely do value control over productivity, but that’s not the job of upper management. A lot of jobs (the bullshit jobs ) are to fulfill a personal need for an entourage, the illusion of business activity. That is a – human – trait.
Our c-suite execs might believe it controlling the workforce is their job, though, if they’re inadequately educated about the current state of the art. Hopefully, their AI replacements will be more current and won’t be interfered with by the BoD or shareholders.
Imagine if every muscle cell in my biceps wanted to self-actualize. I want to grab a cup of coffee, but every muscle cell in my arms has their own ideas. Something that normally takes a second, now takes 10 years of negotiations. It would not do me a lick of good if I had the strongest muscle cells in existence if I could not control them.
Of course people should not be regarded as mere muscle cells, but the point here is to show how obviously valuable and vital control can be when you want to serve some ambition.
Should workers be controlled like they are soldiers?
Whose interests does the business prioritize? And how heavily?
In a worker cooperative workers are the owners. Workers hire and fire their managers at every level of management. All power flows are bottom up. The workers are the entourage. In this case workers are better positioned to self-actualize, because there is no capricious, lazy, ignorant, spoiled silky pants tyrant at the top.
But what about a more typical business? Well, there is either one owner or a tiny cabal of owners, and everyone else is just a resource, a means to an end. And you have to exert control over the means of labor to benefit the entourage at the top. If the entourage can figure out how to produce things without workers, they will get rid of them immedeately, why? Because the workers are just a means, they are incidental, they exist because slavery was deemed too toxic, and because no one figured out a way to get rid of the workers yet. That’s the only reason workers exist in capitalism.
Managers want to give orders and see those orders followed immediately. They don’t want debates, challenges, counter proposals, etc. If workers want to self-actualize, that’s a huge problem for a top down power flow. That’s why it is essential to beat the desire to self-actualize out of workers early. That way mindless servility is assured, which is good for control.
Also, if your workers work 80 hour weeks, they won’t start competing ventures in their spare time. Again, control.
I kinda feel sorry for all the workers out there, because self-actualization is a heavenly mandate for every sentient being, and yet they are plugged into and slotted into a structure where worker (out group) self-actualization is a huge obstacle for the (in group) entourage.
Getting everyone happy can be a slow and messy process. What if you make weapons and your workers decide it is unethical to make weapons? You are a manager of youtube and you order workers to censor channels for entourage’s benefit, but they have their own ideas, and they pretend to be censoring while actually not censoring? There is no end to such possibilities. Hence why the soul of many people MUST be crushed if the top down power flow is to be served in full measure.
Every so often there is an oddball manager like Ricardo Semler. But Ricardo Semler is the exception.
They actually think it’s more productive. They’re so good at gaslighting, they even do it to themselves.
If the workforce makes a pittance and is too exhausted to rebel, the bosses win.
The bosses win if winning is continuing to manage the company poorly.
The shareholders lose since cruel treatment reduces productivity and weakens profit margins. It depends on how seriously the business controllers want to actually do a capitalism and create a product and turn a profit.
If you pay low enough wages and workers are too exhausted to do anything about it, lower productivity is profitable. It’s about the bottom line.
Luigi’s work is piling up, isn’t he about to be acquitted?
“Infosys co-founder suggested slavery could be brought back with updated terms and conditions”
This is how this news should be titled
Why, so they can write even more shitty software?
