Extended working hours are legitimised by the common management which gives the employee freedom to choose his/her working hours. Give the common nomenclature of this process.

Flexi-Time

‘Time Slavery’ in the IT Sector: 10-12 hours is an average workday, and it is not uncommon for employees to stay overnight in the office (known as a ‘night out’), when faced with a project deadline. Long working hours are central to the industry’s ‘work culture’. In part this is due to the time difference between India and the client site, such that conference calls tend to take place in the evening when the working day in the U.S. begins. Another reason is that overwork is built into the structure of outsourced projects: project costs and timelines are usually under-estimated in terms of mandays, and because mandays are based on an eight-hour day, engineers have to put in extra hours and days in order to meet the deadlines. Extended working hours are legitimised by the common management practice of ‘flexi-time’, which in theory gives the employee freedom to choose his or her working hours (within limits) but which in practice means that they have to work as long as necessary to finish the task at hand. But even when there is no real work pressure, they tend to stay late in office either due to peer pressure or because they want to show the boss that they are working hard.