The Karnataka state government recently enacted a measure to alter the Factories Act, increasing the daily working day to 12 hours (including of breaks), allowing women to work night shifts, and raising the number of hours of allowable overtime from 75 to 140 per quarter. These revisions not only demonstrate a lack of understanding of the eight-hour movement’s worldwide nature, but also go against the general trend of shorter work days.
Source: BufferThe lengthening of the workday creates significant hazards for workplace safety. The 12-hour shift increase will make workers more fatigued, which will raise the risk of workplace accidents. It is well known that working the night shift reduces productivity and increases the risk of workplace accidents and worker injuries. Around 1.23 am during the night shift, mistakes were committed that led to the Chernobyl nuclear tragedy. Studies by the WHO and ILO link lengthy workdays, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation to an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, depression, and anxiety. The 12-hour night shift proposal would have major long-term health and safety repercussions.As a general guide to global standards, it might be useful to look at the working hours in the other G20 countries. The weekly restriction has been lowered in some European countries to 40 hours, in others, like France, to 35 hours, and in Australia, to 38 hours. None of the G20 nations, including China and the United States, have daily work hours that are more than eight hours. Portugal changed from a 44-hour workweek to a 40-hour workweek, which had a favourable impact on job creation. The overall tendency worldwide is to cut back on working hours (daily or weekly) in order to profit from increased productivity and job creation.
Source: Govindaraju NSKarl Marx briefly put it this way: The determination of what is a working day presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, i.e., the class of capitalists, and collective labour, i.e., the class of workers, with the State firmly supporting the capitalist class.
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