On December 30, 2025, the Ministry of Labour and Employment notified the draft Code on Wages (Central) Rules, 2025. Rule 9(c), buried in this text, alters the relationship between workers and their time. By expanding the definition of “essentially intermittent” work, the rule threatens to erode protections for everyone – from the ATM security guard to the high-rise software engineer.The rule exempts employees whose work is “essentially intermittent” from the limits on the “spread over” of working hours. To understand this, one must peel back the layers of bureaucracy that disguise the raw drive for profit.The fiction of the idle worker“Essentially intermittent” work is a feudal relic wearing industrial clothes. It posits that in some jobs, a worker is present but not engaged in continuous physical or mental effort. Because there are periods of “inaction” – the gatekeeper waiting for a car, the caretaker waiting for a bell or IT support staff waiting for a server ticket – the law decrees that this time does not fully count.Also read: What Labouring for One Day at an MGNREGA Worksite Taught MeThis is a deception. It conflates Labour (the active expenditure of energy) with Labour Power (the capacity to work and the time sold to the employer). When a human enters the factory gate or logs onto a server, they surrender their autonomy. They have sold their time. Whether the employer uses every second for production is a management problem, not a moral justification for extending the workday.By labeling “waiting” as “intermittency” instead of “work”, Rule 9(c) allows the employer to extend the “spread over”. This is the duration from when a worker clocks in to when they clock out. The rule allows this to stretch beyond the standard eight or nine hours to 12, 14 or 16 hours – without the cost of overtime wages.The captive body of the poorThe immediate victims are the invisible armies that protect and build our infrastructure: security guards, office boys, caretakers and railway porters. Consider a private security guard at a housing society or mall. Under Rule 9(c), his 12-hour shift is legitimate because he is not “actively” fighting intruders the entire time. The State argues that because he sits in a chair at intervals, he is resting.But this is a tethered rest. The guard is in a state of perpetual anxiety and vigilance. He cannot leave his post. He cannot attend to his children. He cannot sleep. His body is captive. By labeling this work “intermittent”, the law creates a fiction that “passive” labour (the labour of being present) has no value. It returns us to a pre-modern servitude where the servant’s waking life belongs to the master. The master pays only for the moments of visible motion.The trap for the middle classThe English-speaking middle class should not dismiss this as a problem for the “semi/unorganised sector.” The logic of Rule 9(c) is spreading to the white-collar world, aided by the technology promised to liberate us.In the “knowledge economy“, the line between activity and inactivity is blurred. For the software engineer, the consultant or the digital creative, work is often cognitive and punctuated by waiting – waiting for code to compile, waiting for client feedback or waiting for a video conference link.Under this rule, a corporate employer finds a legal weapon to enforce an “always-on” culture. If a coder works for four hours in the morning, pauses for four hours while remaining “available” on messaging platforms, and then works another four hours at night, their “spread over” is 12 to 14 hours.Rule 9(c) provides the cover to argue that the gap was “intermission”, not work. It legitimises the fragmentation of the professional day. It validates the idea that if you are not frantically typing, you are not working. It ignores the reality that the mental burden of being “on call” – the cognitive load of the digital leash – is labour.Also read: The Comforts and Discomforts of Watching Time Pass Us ByThe State hands the employer the rights to the employee’s entire day while paying only for specific hours of “active” output. This is the Uber-isation of the formal workforce. The risk of downtime shifts entirely from the purchaser of labour to the seller.A question of dignityThe Code on Wages is being sold as a way to simplify and provide “Ease of Doing Business”. We must ask: Ease for whom? And at whose cost?When the law creates categories like “essentially intermittent”, it performs a specific violence. It carves out spaces where the standards of human dignity – the right to rest, to a private life, and to a workday with a clear beginning and ending – are suspended.It reduces the worker, whether wearing a khaki uniform or a corporate lanyard, to a resource that can be toggled on and off like a light switch. But a human being is not a machine. We do not cease to exist when we are not producing value for a shareholder.Rule 9(c) is not just a wage rule; it is a license for the theft of time. In a democracy, time should be valued equally. To allow the State to legislate that the time of the worker is worth less than the time of the employer is to enshrine inequality in the law. We must reject this bureaucratic categorisation and assert a simple truth: Waiting is work. Presence is labour. And time, once taken, must be paid for.