Bankers Ask for Every Saturday Off, Say Two a Month Was a Promising Start

Financial Capital: There comes a point in every employee's career when a salary, benefits and the occasional weekend are no longer enough. For thousands of bank employees across India, that point appears to have arrived.

Bank unions have been pressing for a five-day banking week, under which all Saturdays would become holidays. Banks currently remain closed on the second and fourth Saturdays, which employees have apparently come to regard as a promising start, but not a sustainable long-term arrangement.

The demand has been accompanied by industrial action. Bank employees staged a one-day strike on September 11, while a three-day strike planned for September 28-30 was deferred after the United Forum of Bank Unions and the Indian Banks' Association agreed to form a high-level committee to examine the matter. The committee is expected to proceed at a pace consistent with the sector, and will also consider alternatives to extending daily working hours.

Union representatives have cited workload and work-life balance as reasons for the demand, and have noted that digital banking has reduced the need for customers to visit branches for routine transactions. This has raised the interesting possibility that banks could remain closed while customers continue doing most of their banking without them.

Critics, however, have questioned whether a five-day week is an especially radical demand. The Reserve Bank of India, central government offices and several other sectors already operate on that schedule, suggesting that bankers may simply be asking to join an arrangement the rest of the working world has had some time to become familiar with.

The government, meanwhile, has expressed concern about disruption to customers and businesses. Ahead of the proposed strike, public sector banks and regional rural banks were instructed to remain open on Sunday, September 27, to prevent the combination of a weekend and a strike from producing an effective five-day interruption to branch services.

For bank employees, the issue is about work-life balance. For customers, it is about whether the person explaining that their loan application is "under process" will now have one additional day each week to ensure that it remains under process.