Speaking to business leaders in The Hague, Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal said that nobody in India “will tell you it’s 5 o’clock” and that no Indian will ever point out that it is the weekend. RPG Group chairman Harsh Goenka then defended the line. The minister may have been joking, he wrote, but there was a serious point in it. In much of Europe, the last meeting of the week ends by Friday 4 pm, whereas Indians will work late into the night and through weekends when the job demands it, and that is an edge. Here the goods belong to people who were not in the room, and what was offered as a feature was their own silence.AdvertisementAn employee’s silence at five o’clock says little about enthusiasm. The people least able to refuse are the ones with the least bargaining power, those early in their careers, on probation or on fixed-term contracts. A fixed-term contract simply lapses at the end of its term and is not retrenchment under the Industrial Relations Code, so the usual retrenchment notice and compensation do not apply.Also Read | Best of Both Sides: Working 70-90 hours isn’t the answer – more equity isPRS Legislative Research warned in its analysis that because renewal lies with the employer, such workers may be deterred from raising issues like extended work hours. A yes from someone who cannot afford a no is a symptom of dependence, and calling it work ethic flatters the employer. The penalty for refusing seldom needs to be a reprimand. It can arrive as a lukewarm appraisal, a good project handed to a colleague, a remark about attitude. Responsiveness gets praised in reviews and boundaries get recorded as a lack of commitment, which is how an unwritten duty to be reachable becomes part of the job. The demand is then called flexibility, though flexibility has run in one direction only. Employees bend to overseas time zones, sudden deadlines and understaffed teams, and nobody bends to the employee’s evening.On paper, India limits what the minister described. The Central Rules of May 2026 under the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code set a 48-hour week with overtime at twice the ordinary rate. Those Rules apply only to central-sphere establishments such as railways, banks and telecom. Most private corporate offices fall under state governments and their own rules. As summarised by PRS, the Code treats double pay as owed to workers who willingly exceed the limit. Everything depends on that word, because willingness is hard to establish when refusal is costly. The Industrial Relations Code builds its retrenchment and dispute provisions around “workers”, a term that excludes managerial and administrative roles and supervisors above a wage threshold, and the Code does not define “manager” or “supervisor”. A salaried professional can be left unsure whether the statute covers them at all. India also has no general statutory right to disconnect from work messages after hours. A Right to Disconnect Bill is pending, but it is a private member’s bill and very few of those pass.AdvertisementPractice already runs ahead of the law, and the state has been a participant. Government survey data show salaried men in India working over 50 hours a week in every year since 2018-19 except the pandemic years. Karnataka floated longer working days for IT employees in 2024 and again in 2025, and dropped the second proposal only after the state’s IT employees’ union campaigned against it. The ceiling survived because some workers did tell the government what time it was.If India wants to win investment on the strength of its workforce, availability is the weakest thing to sell. Stanford economist John Pencavel, studying British munitions workers a century ago, found that output rose in step with hours only up to a threshold and at a diminishing rate beyond it. The WHO and ILO link weeks of 55 hours or more to a 35 per cent higher risk of stroke and a 17 per cent higher risk of fatal heart disease.An investor who buys unlimited availability buys tired people and their mistakes. The offer also works against India’s own need for jobs. An employer who can stretch existing staff has less reason to hire another person, so the promise of workers who never object to overtime can also mean vacancies that never open. A country that says it wants skill and reliable institutions should be selling those.you may likeThe audience makes the pitch stranger. Eurostat records the Netherlands as having the shortest average working week in the EU, 31.9 hours in 2025 with part-timers included,11 and Statistics Netherlands ranks it fourth in the EU for GDP per head in 2024. Short Fridays have not stopped that economy from being rich. Four o’clock on a Friday in Amsterdam is half past eight in the evening in Bengaluru during Dutch winter time, so much of the “edge” on sale is the Indian employee’s willingness to carry a Dutch client’s clock on top of an Indian working day.Governments usually compete for investment with things they control, such as land, power, tax terms and approvals. Here the state is offering something it does not own, and the whole cost falls on the person who does. Employers hear the offer as well, and conclude that no one in government will ask how it is being used. The Commerce Ministry could put the statutory week, the double overtime rate and the weekly day off into its investor material, so that compliance becomes the pitch.Parliament has a Right to Disconnect Bill before it, and the government could adopt it as its own. Corporate leaders who defended the minister could publish how much after-hours work their firms ask for and how much of it is paid. Labour departments could audit overtime registers and after-hours demands without waiting for complaints, because the people with the most to report are the least likely to file, and an inspection regime that depends on them filing will keep confirming the minister’s sentence.The writer works in the corporate sector