India has more Restrictive Labor Law than Germany

In Premature Imitation and India’s Flailing State, Shruti Rajagopalan and I discuss how India has essentially all of the laws of a developed country but at much lower state capacity–this mismatch creates what we call premature imitation, with a host of negative consequences. What is even more amazing, however, is when a country like India regulates beyond most developed countries. Anand, Chandra, and Pradeep provide a case in point at Prosperity Insights–India regulates labor hours more than Germany.

Germany and India share an 8 hour standard working day but India requires any overtime to be paid at twice the regular rate–most developed countries are at 1.5 and a few have no statutory cap at all. In fact, Germany has no statutory overtime rate–it can vary depending on bargaining. Germany is also more flexible than India on the number of overtime hours. India has a cap of 144 overtime hours a quarter. Technically, Germany doesn’t regulate overtime hours but it does cap total hours at 10 a day and 48 a week on average. The average is crucial. In Germany overtime hours can be moved between weeks within a 6 month period while India regulates each week. In other words, long weeks in Germany are legal as long as short weeks offset them before the period ends–while in India each week has a cap. The weekly cap and the double overtime pay make it very costly and difficult to meet rush or large seasonal orders.

Consider a hypothetical 500-worker electronics factory, working a single shift, in each of the 16 countries studied. Ahead of a September iPhone launch, each factory receives an order for 10,000 devices to be completed in three months. Say the factories are identical in productivity, wages and technology; only the rules on working hours differ. How fast and at what labour cost would the Indian factory deliver compared to elsewhere? The results are stark. The factory in India cannot match the pace of its global peers. It takes 13.7 weeks to complete the 10,000-iPhone order, 23% longer than the fastest factory…The Indian factory falls behind because it cannot keep the same pace throughout the production cycle. Without the option to rearrange regular hours, the only way to go faster is overtime…The Indian factory cannot compete on cost either. To complete the iPhone order, it pays for 49.3 labour-hours per unit, at least 18% more than factories at the cost frontier. India’s unit cost is high because 144 of the 800 production hours per worker are paid as overtime at 2x the regular wage, pushing paid labour to 985 hours for 800 hours of output. …The combination of slow delivery and high cost makes India an unattractive manufacturing destination.

Amazingly, on an equal-wage basis producing iPhones in Germany is actually cheaper and faster than in India! Of course, wages are not equal but neither is productivity–the key point is that the chart isolates the cost of India’s regulatory inflexibility.

Returning to premature imitation, it won’t surprise you that many firms and workers in India evade the overtime rules and come to their own understandings but this applies mostly to small Indian firms and not the Foxconns and big international firms that India wants to attract but which must obey the laws as written.

Hat tip: Paul Novosad.

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