Asserting that “A Healthy Work-Life Balance is Every Employee’s Right,” hundreds of tech workers protested in India's IT hub Bangalore on March 9, demanding enforcement of labour laws, regulation of work hours and implementation of "Right to Disconnect".

STOMPING over IT tycoon Narayan Murthy’s cardboard portrait scrawled with his call for a “70-hour work week”, angry tech workers set it on fire following a protest on March 9 at Freedom Park in India’s IT hub, Bangalore.

As the flames crept up, slowly incinerating the picture of Infosys’ co-founder, glorified by Times magazine as the “father of India's booming IT sector”, protesting workers stood around in a circle with red flags of the Karnataka State IT/ITeS Employees Union (KITU), sloganeering: “Hey, Mr. Narayan Murthy, we are not slaves anymore!”

The cops, who had scuffled with the union leaders earlier in an attempt to seize the portrait to salvage it from fire, had been overpowered and forced to retreat by the protesters who crowded around them, shoulder-to-shoulder, to hold ground and resist.

Standing behind the circle of protesters, policemen solemnly watched Murthy's portrait burn down to ash, while the sloganeering continued, “We are the workers, we are the flame!”

Such was the dramatic conclusion to an otherwise peaceful protest drawing hundreds of IT and ITeS employees – men and women, juniors and seniors across the working age groups.

Asserting that “A Healthy Work-Life Balance is Every Employee’s Right,” they demanded the government must enforce the labour laws the sector has been exempted from, implement the ‘Right to Disconnect’ after work, and regulate the working hours.

VICIOUS CYCLE OF INCREASING WORK HOURS; MASS RETRENCHMENTS

The IT industry’s top CEOs like Narayan Murthy “are lobbying for 14 hours work-day”, complained Sahil, a developer in his 20s, who has migrated from Madhya Pradesh to work in product support. Even though his work hours on paper are nine a day, he works almost 12 hours, “because even after reaching home”, bosses call up and assign more work.

No overtime is paid. But no employee dares refuse to do the unpaid work. Everyone is "in a survival mode”, fearing that their jobs might be next on the chopping block amid the mass layoffs that have continued in the industry “despite record profits after COVID”, he said.

It is a vicious cycle tech workers are trapped in. Fearing job loss, employees work longer hours for no additional pay, allowing employers to slash even more of the workforce.

"I have two kids. I cannot afford to lose my job,” said Prathap, a mid-aged technical support engineer in a startup, which recently slashed 60 of its roughly 200 employees.

Fearing for his own job, he approached the union which, formed only in 2017, has since successfully reinstated hundreds of terminated employees to their jobs, winning several industrial disputes, including against giants like Wipro and Tech Mahindra.

It is often the senior employees, who have laid roots in the city with families including school-going kids, that are victims of retrenchments, adds 52-year-old Mahesh, a solutions architect.

With “no understanding of technology”, the top managerial class “doesn’t value the experience and skill of senior employees. They only want to profit by what they call ‘bottom line management’,” reducing the number of relatively higher earning senior employees in their workforce, while forcing those they retain to work longer.

This saps the creative energies out of the workforce, he adds, lamenting, “There can be no innovation like this. But then, the industry leaders are not really concerned about innovation. They are only concerned about profiting by brutally extracting labour.”

After working in the office for 12 hours from 8:30 am to 8:30 pm, Mahesh often has to carry pending work home, “because they assign a month’s work for, say, 15 days. They know the timelines assigned are not realistic. But they do it to keep us in constant fear of underperforming and losing our jobs. So we push ourselves to work longer and longer to please them,” he explained.

 “Eight to nine hours of work has really become a myth. We all work longer than that,” said KITU General Secretary, Suhas Adiga, in his opening address to the demonstration.

The general clauses in the contracts often mention eight to nine working hours, but “overriding clauses in the bottom state that they are subject to change by management decision,” Mahesh explained.

Such contractual practices are prohibited by the Industrial Employment (Standing Orders) Act, which mandates that employers must clearly state the terms and conditions of work in the contract, which they cannot change unilaterally.

However, Karnataka’s IT industry has been exempted by its state government from this Act. “It was in 1995 when I was working in IT” that the argument was first made for this exemption on the grounds that it is an infant industry, whose employers require additional maneuverability, Vasantharaj, advisory board member of KITU, told the protesters.

It shows the “incompetence of the IT industry captains” that 30 years later, they still demand such infantile treatment, he added.

Successive state governments – led by BJP, Congress and the regional JD(S) party – have all succumbed to this demand of IT industrialists. This has had serious consequences on the health and well-being of the workforce.

Employee health insurance provider Onsurity and the Kanara Chamber of Commerce & Industry (KCCI) said in a joint report last year, "It's alarming that over 50 per cent of tech professionals in India are clocking an average of 52.5 hours every week,” which is 10.5 hours a day on a five-day workweek.

HEART DISEASES; ORGAN FAILURES

“Working 55 or more hours per week is associated with an estimated 35 per cent higher risk of a stroke and a 17 per cent higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease, compared to working 35-40 hours,” the WHO and ILO have warned. Long working hours cause hundreds of thousands of deaths each year globally, according to a joint study they published in 2021.

Unmoved by these dangers to the workforce, Murthy, who has retired with a net worth nearing $5 billion, called for a 70-hour work week in late 2023. He went on to cite as a model the collaboration between the state and corporate leaders in post-war West Germany, which “made sure” that everyone “worked extra hours”.

The state government led by Congress, which has often criticised the BJP-led central government's anti-labour policies, was nevertheless keen to please Murthy. It proposed an amendment mid-last year to extend the official work hours of IT employees, currently capped at 10 including overtime, to 14 hours a day, adding up in a five-day workweek to the 70 hours Murthy had called for.

However, the government was forced on the backfoot after protests by the union, which has since been relentlessly mobilising tech workers around this issue with regular street campaigns in areas with a high concentration of IT employees and public meetings at the gates of the companies and tech parks. It has intensified these campaigns in recent months after renewed calls for longer hours by corporate India.

In January 2025, SN Subrahmanyan, the chairman of Larsen & Toubro Limited (L&T), outdid Murthy, calling for 90 hours of working hours over a seven-day work week. "I regret I am not able to make you work on Sundays," he reportedly said in an internal meeting. "What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife? Get to the office and start working."

“Narayan Murthy and SN Subramaniam have the audacity to tell us that we are not working hard enough, that we are responsible for the country’s underdevelopment,” protested KITU Vice President Rashmi, employed as an Application Development Analyst.

“They are shamelessly telling us that spending time with our family and loved ones is a waste… Instead, we should work (even) on Saturdays and Sundays to fatten their wallets and die.”

Adding up to less than 4 per cent of Karnataka's workforce, IT employees make up a disproportionate 20 per cent of all patients seeking transplants in the state due to organ failures, attributed to long hours of sedentary work.

A study recently published by the University of Hyderabad, another IT hub of the country, revealed that nearly 85 per cent of all the surveyed IT employees suffer Metabolic Dysfunction Associated Fatty Liver Disease (MAFLD), also linked to long hours of sedentary work and high stress. A "proper work-life balance and stress management may reduce the incidence of fatty liver," it said.

The union's demand for “the right to work-life balance… is very closely linked with our right to life,” emphasized Rashmi. “There is a major health crisis in our sector. Over 70 per cent of us are experiencing burnout, suffering from anxiety and insomnia. These things are spilling over into our physical health.”

The corporate dons using their financial might to deny this right to the tech workers “do not think of us as human beings, but as disposable cogs in their profit-making machines,” she protests.

“We are not just corporate slaves. We are integral to the functioning of the entire society,” Ram, KITU state committee member, added in his speech. “It is because of us that there is a smoothly-running banking system,” where payments can be made with a few touches on the phone.

Banking, transport, healthcare etc, all depend on IT’s “continuous process industry” never pausing, added VJK Nair, veteran trade unionist and president of KITU.

Although “your employers are… millionaires and billionaires,” who “make the governments of the day dance to their tunes”, the tech workers are not powerless, reminded TKS Kutty. Another veteran of Karnataka’s trade union movement, he has been fighting KITU’s cases in labour court as a lawyer after his release from prison after serving 17 years.

If organised and unified in action, tech workers will only have to “shut down the laptop and sleep” to force the big corporations and the governments to “come to your knees. You can make them succumb,” he asserted, drawing cheers from the protesters.