Ahmedabad: On 1 July 2025, the Gujarat government issued the Factories (Gujarat Amendment) Ordinance, 2025, amending key provisions of the law and introducing sweeping labour reforms.
These changes extend permissible daily work hours from nine to 12, though the weekly cap of 48 hours remains unchanged. Employers must obtain written consent from workers for shifts exceeding 9 hours.
The uninterrupted work period was increased from five hours to six, subject to a formal notification. Overtime wages remained at double the standard rate, but the quarterly overtime cap was raised from 75 to 125 hours.
Women workers were allowed to take night shifts between 7 pm and 6 am, provided they gave written consent and the employer complied with 16 safety safeguards. These included 24/7 CCTV surveillance, the presence of female security personnel, secure transport, a minimum of 10 women on-site, and a redressal mechanism for sexual harassment.
A National Trend
Although the Indian Parliament passed and notified four new labour codes in 2019—aimed at consolidating 29 existing labour laws—they were never fully implemented. One major roadblock lay in the fact that their enforcement required state governments to frame and notify the corresponding rules.
With different political parties in power across states, uniform implementation remained elusive. Yet, some states went a step further.
Apart from Gujarat, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu introduced independent reforms to existing state labour laws permitting the extension of daily working hours.
These actions were not merely efforts to align state laws with the Centre’s labour codes, but signalled a deeper breach: the erosion of a core labour right that had been protected for over decades—the regulation of the eight-hour workday.
In June 2025, Karnataka, for instance, proposed increasing working hours from nine to 10 in amendments to the Karnataka Shops and Establishments Act, 1961. Andhra Pradesh in June 2025, and Telangana in July 2025 also made similar changes. Tamil Nadu, in April 2023, had already allowed employers a 12-hour workday instead of eight hours.
These changes come amid increasing public calls from India’s business elite to intensify labour productivity.
In October 2023, Infosys founder N R Narayana Murthy urged the country to embrace a 70-hour workweek, while in January this year, L&T Chairman S N Subrahmanyan suggested 90 hours.
In February 2025, the CEO of HCL Technologies, C Vijayakumar, argued that India should aim to “generate twice the revenue with half the workforce,” and advised firms to adopt a “paranoid” mindset for growth.
The changes in the laws brought in by the four state governments previously mentioned may not have legitimised these opinions, but it seems certain they took cues from these suggestions.
Post-Covid Precedents
These policy shifts build on precedents set during the post-Covid labour crisis.
In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, 12 Indian states issued temporary notifications increasing work hours, citing labour shortages and economic recovery.
These orders violated the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 1 and Convention 30—issued in 1930—which prescribe an eight-hour day and a 48-hour week.
Though not renewed, these three-month notifications laid the groundwork for broader and more lasting legal reforms, introduced quietly through ordinances and obscure amendments.
In the post-COVID phase, changes in rules and policies enabled five state governments to go several steps further—introducing substantial legal shifts that favored employers. These changes included more competitive relaxations and a steady push to raise the threshold for daily work hours.
Informal Workers: Precarious Conditions
While state governments framed these reforms as efforts to modernize labour laws, improve gender inclusivity, and attract investment, the reality for most industrial workers—especially migrants and informal labourers—remained far from regulated.
In Ahmedabad’s Narol industrial zone and Surat’s powerloom units, workers have long been working beyond the legal limits.
In Narol, most earned below minimum wage, worked nine-hour days, lacked social security benefits, and were denied overtime pay. According to a June, 2021, study by Aajeevika Bureau, an advocacy group, contract workers in these areas did not receive appointment letters, payslips, or proof of employment.
These workers laboured in hazardous environments with little recourse to complaint or legal protection. By officially expanding employers' legal authority over working hours, the reforms deepened existing inequalities and exploitation.
Contractors Control Work & Wages
Informal workers, comprising nearly 90% of India’s workforce, also dominate industrial employment. Within many factories, only 10% of workers are formally employed with regular pay and entitlements. The rest work under short-term contracts or daily wage arrangements.
In Narol, for example, textile factories outsource wage payments and recruitment to contractors. Women workers in stitching and packaging units are paid per piece. This leads to arbitrary wage deductions and opaque accounting practices.
In March, 2023, Razia (name changed), a 34-year-old migrant worker from Bihar, recounted to CounterCurrents how they were paid per piece of work.
“There is no system to verify how much we should receive,” said Razia. “Even when we produce more, the supervisor claims many pieces are rejected due to poor quality.”
“We know our work is good, but they still cut our wages,” she said.
This piece-rate system gives employers and contractors extensive control over wages and suppresses workers’ ability to demand fair pay or safe conditions.
Women Workers Already Work Night Shifts Without Protection
Although the Gujarat government claimed to promote gender inclusivity by allowing women to work night shifts, this reform overlooks the realities of thousands of migrant women already working nights in hazardous and informal factory settings.
In textile boiler units of Ahmedabad, many adolescent women migrate with their husbands and work as helpers. They live on-site, working night shifts, and lack access to healthcare, maternity benefits, or safety measures.
In June, 2024, Jenju Dawar, 29, who works in the Vatva industrial area, told the author during his fieldwork, that her husband had taken a loan for their wedding.
“He told me I had to work with him to help repay it,” said Dawar. “Then came other family events, so more loans. We never escaped the debt. That’s why I stayed working at the factory.”
Her story reflects a broader reality: economic necessity and debt often forced women into unsafe factory jobs, undermining the government’s claim that reforms will expand women’s choices.
8-Hour Workday, A Historic Victory, Now Undermined
Globally, the eight-hour workday and 48-hour workweek had been long-standing demands of the labour movement.
These benchmarks were first implemented in early 20th-century Europe and later adopted in ILO Conventions 1 (1919) and 30 (1930). The principle was rooted in a balanced division of time—eight hours for work, eight for rest, and eight for personal well-being.
The ILO defines work that exceeds pre-determined daily or weekly limits as “excessive work” — a condition it recognizes as one of the underlying indicators of forced labour.
In September 1866, Karl Marx declared before the Geneva Congress of the International Workingmen’s Association (later known as the First International): “We propose eight hours’ work as the legal limit of the working day.” This call came at a time when European society was undergoing a major transformation—from a pre-capitalist, feudal mode of production to an industrial, mechanised system driven by capital expansion.
During this period, working conditions were harsh and exploitative. Men and women alike toiled for over 12 hours a day in factories, earning little more than subsistence wages while facing dangerous and dehumanising environments. In the United States, workers faced similarly oppressive conditions: cramped workspaces, inadequate ventilation, exposure to toxic chemicals and metals, and frequent injuries from unsafe machinery.
These brutal realities gave rise to a global wave of worker-led demands, among which the call for an eight-hour workday and a 48-hour workweek became central. Over time, these demands came to symbolise the broader struggle for dignity, safety, and fairness in the workplace.
In India, this standard found legal expression in post-Independence labour statutes such as the Factories Act, 1948, the Minimum Wages Act, 1948, the Payment of Wages Act, 1936, and the Equal Remuneration Act, 1976.
While implementation often lagged, these laws at least recognised the need to regulate work hours for worker welfare.
How The World Works
Countries that cap daily and weekly hours of work generally prioritise the value of labour and stronger work-life balance, as much as they value economic growth and development.
The International Labour Organisation’s 2025 dataset of average weekly hours worked reveals that least developed countries have the longest work weeks. These include Bhutan (54.5), Sudan (50.8), UAE (48.4), Jordan (47.8), Pakistan (47.5), Cambodia (45.9) and Bangladesh (45.8). India ranks at 15th in the list, behind Bangladesh, in terms of average number of hours worked per week, clocking at (45.8).
In contrast, economically advanced European countries, rank lowest in the list. These include countries such as The Netherlands (26.8), Norway (27.1), Denmark (28.8), Austria (28.4), Finland (28.8), Sweden (29.3), Germany (29.6), and United Kingdom (30.9) are amongst those with lowest work weeks. Average work hours for the United States are 36.1.
Worldwide data clearly reveal that developed countries have legally kept weekly work limits to 40 hours per week or below, with some European countries advocating for a four-day work week. When working hours are kept below 40, actual hours worked by individuals are even lower.
Developing countries, in need of greater productive output, have kept legal limits higher, thereby raising actual work hours.
According to Oyster, a global employment platform which helps companies hire employees, India's legal working hours per week are capped at 48, similar to Mexico, and Argentina, but higher than Brasil (44), Colombia (44) and South Africa (45). This indicates India is already at a higher threshold even amongst developing countries. This is one reason why India cannot experiment with increasing weekly work limits beyond 48, though states are pushing daily limits without changing weekly limits.
While these comparisons don't reveal authentic country-to-country analysis due to varied working populations, sectors, and regulatory frameworks, they offer insights. In India, the union government drafts labour laws while states implement them, but multiple studies (ILO & Institute for Human Development (IHD)’s India Employment Report (2024), Azim Premji University’s State of Working India (2023), and Women in Informal Employment: Globalising and Organizing (WIEGO)’s Informal Workers in India: A Statistical Profile (2020)), reveal failures in labour regulations and pervasive informality in employment arrangements.
If India were to take cues from global trends, it cannot miss how European countries are advocating for lesser working hours while showing correlation between fewer hours and greater productivity. Developing nations have kept weekly limits unchanged without meddling with daily limits either.
New Amendments Violate Spirit Of Labour Protection
The new reforms of Gujarat and other states marked a departure from decades of legal protection and worker rights. They do not merely raise questions of enforcement; they challenge the fairness of the law itself.
While states implemented reforms introduced by the union government, the business class had already shifted the burden onto labour, accusing workers of not contributing enough extra hours of work required for "nation-building."
This shift also disregards the vision of Dr B R Ambedkar, India’s first law minister and architect of the Constitution, who famously said: “A labourer not only wants equality but he needs liberty also. It is really intolerable and detrimental where the system proposes equality but denies liberty.”
Earlier laws, though limited, at least provided formal equality in regulating work hours. With these recent amendments, both equality and liberty have been substantially undermined. No workers were consulted when they were drafted.
The balance once provided by labour law between economic growth and rights of workers now appears to be decisively tilted in favour of employers.
Disquiet over this situation was evident on 9 July, 2025, when 10 trade unions organised a nationwide protest of workers in the formal and informal sectors. An estimated 250 million workers joined the protest. A key demand: addressing the issue of longer hours, at reduced or stagnant pay.
(Bhargav Oza is a labour researcher. He writes on themes such as informal labour, housing for informal labour, migrant workers and work conditions, labour law and policies, amongst others)
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