Brazil gives workers their lives back; India gives more work

Ricardo Semler, the author of “The Maverick” and a leading business tycoon based in Brazil, had reformed workplaces beyond our imagination decades ago. In this company, Semco, workers decide the time to work, choose their boss and write their own paychecks. And his firm had grown exponentially year after year.

Now, the country has done something dramatic: adopted a constitutional amendment that says workers should have time to live! Last week, it promulgated a constitutional amendment reducing the maximum working week from 44 hours to 40, with two paid days off. More than 30 million workers are expected to benefit. The reform will be phased in, but the message is clear: a human being is not a piece of office equipment that happens to require food, sleep and occasional family interaction.

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In contrast, the Indian employee seems to be a national resource whose full economic potential remains untapped because of an unfortunate biological defect: the need to go home. Brazil wants to give people an extra day to themselves. India Inc might use that day to hold a workshop on work-life balance.

Here, the average executive is expected to be in the office at 9 when the office opens only at 10. The official closing time is six, but leaving at six might raise questions on whether the executive is having a half day! At seven, the boss sends a message: “Just one quick thing.” This can mean three minutes to three hours in corporate India. The CHRO of a leading bank once explained to us how they assign new projects: They just assign it to an executive and he accepts that. This seems to be a survival mechanism.

By the time the laptop closes, the employee has spent the day serving the organisation, the client, the quarterly numbers and the boss’s personal ambition to be the last person online. The family gets just a physically-present individual whose mind is still attending a Teams call. As for the weekend, it is a corporate benefit designed to help the employee recover sufficiently to resume work on Monday.

The tag ‘corporate slave’ is historically inaccurate. Employees are paid, have legal rights and, in principle, can resign. Actual slavery is coercion and denial of basic freedom. But economic insecurity makes it difficult for employees to say no: the EMIs, school fees, ageing parents, medical bills and fear of becoming unemployable.

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This power imbalance is painful. Indian labour laws depend on the sector, state, employment category and legal protections available. The usual statutory framework includes working-hour limits and overtime provisions for covered workers. But managerial employees may fall outside some protections, while enforcement and workplace realities diverge sharply. Rights exist on paper but the employees hesitate to exercise them.

Workers everywhere have used collective bargaining, unions and protests to improve working conditions. In India, the ability to organise or protest depends on the applicable law, employment status and circumstances. It would be wrong to suggest that all employees are legally prohibited from unionising. But in workplaces where collective action is weak, precarious employment is common or dissent is penalised, the freedom to complain is considerably limited.

The myth that hours worked measure value created must be demolished. Being present at the desk is not necessarily great productivity. India Inc must learn the term “presenteeism”. India’s ambitions to become a high-productivity economy deserve better than this devotion to exhaustion. Long hours can conceal poor processes, understaffing, indecision and managers who confuse supervision with constant availability. Tired employees may make more mistakes, become less creative and eventually leave, taking institutional knowledge with them. The organisation then spends a fortune recruiting replacements and announces a transformation programme in the town hall.

What would happen if India tried being Brazilian with shorter working week? Employers might have to plan staffing properly, eliminate meetings that could have been emails, train managers to measure outcomes and stop treating every late-night message as a test of loyalty. Some sectors would need additional staff, revised shifts and careful implementation. Small businesses would have genuine cost concerns, which deserve serious consideration.

Every employee deserves a life outside work. Organise work so that economic growth does not depend on permanently borrowing time from people’s health, families and sanity. A shorter statutory week alone cannot fix toxic management. Nor can a wellness app compensate for unreasonable workloads. Enforcement, meaningful overtime protections, effective worker representation and a credible right to disconnect matter just as much.

Brazil’s reform also offers a political lesson. Workers’ time is a question of public policy, not just an HR metric. If millions of people want more time with their families, and to stare at their spouses, how can employers insist otherwise and hold wellness programmes explaining how to optimise time? India has no shortage of slogans about becoming a developed nation. Perhaps the next aspiration should be to develop a working culture in which an employee can leave the office without feeling that a pink slip is being drafted in the boss’s head.

Until then, the Indian employee will continue to enjoy work-life balance in its most innovative form: work during the week, work during the weekend, and life in the spaces between notifications. Perhaps in India, the 8-hour workday may be a legal concept, but the 24-hour employee is becoming a corporate aspiration.