Working Hours Equity

 

Working Hours Equity

- Bruhaspati Samal -

For decades, a curious contradiction has remained embedded in the working structure of the Central Government: employees belonging to the same broad public-service system are governed by different weekly working regimes merely because one category is described as “administrative” and another as “operative”. Administrative offices of the Government of India generally observe a five-day week, while large sections of operative establishments, including the Postal Department, continue to function on a six-day basis. The issue is therefore much larger than the question of whether Saturday should be declared a holiday. It is about equality of status, equitable distribution of working time and the dignity of labour. If five-day working is considered appropriate for efficient public administration, the rationale for denying the same principle to another category of employees performing essential public services requires serious examination.

The figures placed by the National Federation of Postal Employees provide a striking illustration. For Postal Operative Staff, the calculation is: 17 closed holidays + 10 days of Casual Leave and Restricted Holidays + 0 closed Saturdays + 52 Sundays/weekly offs = 79 days; consequently, out of 365 days, the operative employee has 286 working days. At eight hours a day, this amounts to 286 × 8 = 2,288 working hours in a year. For administrative staff, the corresponding calculation is: 17 closed holidays + 10 days of Casual Leave and Restricted Holidays + 52 closed Saturdays + 52 Sundays/weekly offs = 131 days, leaving 234 working days. At 8½ hours a day, the annual working time becomes 234 × 8½ = 1,989 hours. Thus, on this calculation, the Postal Operative employee works 2,288 − 1,989 = 299 additional hours in a year—equivalent to nearly 37.4 additional eight-hour working days. 

The immediate question, therefore, is not whether postal work is operational. Obviously it is. India Post provides counter services, mail and parcel processing, delivery, financial and other public-facing services that cannot simply disappear on weekends. But operational character by itself cannot become a permanent justification for an unequal annual working burden. If an establishment genuinely requires a service to remain open six days a week, there are modern alternatives—rotation, staggered duties, shift systems, rational deployment and compensatory arrangements—through which the institution can remain operational without requiring every employee in the category to bear a structurally higher annual workload. What needs examination is whether the six-day regime remains an operational necessity for individual employees or merely an inherited administrative practice.

The argument becomes even more compelling when comparable public-service institutions are examined. Banks are themselves highly operational establishments, with customer-facing counters, cash transactions, financial services and public dealing. Yet public-sector bank employees have been enjoying holidays on the second and fourth Saturdays, while the remaining Saturdays are still working days. Significantly, the demand for a complete five-day banking week remains a live issue. The Government itself acknowledged that the second and fourth Saturdays were declared holidays in 2015, while the remaining Saturdays continue to provide access to customers. As of 28 September 2026, the proposed three-day bank strike over the five-day-week demand has been deferred after the Indian Banks’ Association and United Forum of Bank Unions agreed to establish a high-level committee to examine declaring the remaining Saturdays as holidays and explore alternatives acceptable to stakeholders, including customers.

This development actually strengthens rather than weakens the case for a broader review. The argument advanced for a five-day week in banking generally rests on considerations such as changing customer behaviour, digital banking, productivity, technological transformation, employee welfare and rationalisation of working time. These are legitimate considerations. But if those considerations justify reducing the weekly working burden in one category of public-oriented financial service, the same principles deserve examination elsewhere. A principle cannot be logically valid for one operational establishment and inherently invalid for another without an objective reason. So the question for policymakers is why employees of comparable public-service status should bear substantially different individual working burdens without a transparent, evidence-based justification.

The constitutional principle involved is equally important. Article 14 guarantees equality before law and equal protection of the laws, while Article 16 embodies equality of opportunity in public employment. These provisions do not mean that every employee must necessarily have identical working arrangements irrespective of the nature of duties. Reasonable classification is constitutionally permissible. But classification must have a rational basis connected with the objective sought to be achieved. Therefore, the distinction between administrative and operative staff cannot be allowed to become an unquestioned formula whereby one category automatically receives 52 additional weekly holidays while another continues to work those days year after year. 

The matter also deserves to be viewed from the perspective of productivity and human dignity. Working time is a component of the real cost of employment. An additional 299 hours a year is not merely a statistical figure. It represents hundreds of hours that could otherwise be devoted to family, social responsibilities, education, rest, health and personal life. In an era when governments and employers increasingly speak about productivity, work-life balance, mental well-being, technology-enabled administration and efficiency, it is difficult to justify a system in which technological and organisational advancement coexist with a decades-old disparity in weekly working arrangements. In this context, the Confederation of Central Government Employees and Workers, Odisha State Coordination Committee, has raised this issue before the Eighth CPC during its visit to Bhubaneswar in August 2026 with request to examine the annual working hours of administrative and operative employees, the operational justification for Saturday attendance, staffing patterns, productivity, shift and rotational possibilities, compensatory arrangements and the practices followed by comparable public-sector and government institutions as a comprehensive Working Hours Equity Review. 

Therefore, either five days or six days may be adopted according to genuine operational requirements, but the principle must be applied fairly. If five-day working is considered efficient, productive and compatible with public service in administrative offices, banks, LIC and other organisations, the same rationale should be examined for Central Government operative establishments. If six-day functioning is genuinely indispensable in a particular service, employees should not be individually burdened merely because the establishment is operational. The annual burden needs to be fairly shared. What cannot be defended indefinitely is a system in which employees of the same public-service framework, with comparable employment status and responsibilities, are subjected to substantially unequal working time simply because of an administrative classification. The time has come to replace the five-day-versus-six-day argument with a more fundamental principle: equal work deserves equal status, and equal status demands an equitable distribution of working hours.

(The writer is a Service Union Representative and a Columnist.)

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