Russia's aluminum czar wants 72-hour workweeks to outrun economic collapse
Oleg Deripaska just turned the clock back to 1905. The metals tycoon who once floated Rusal on the London Stock Exchange now wants Russian workers shackled to factory benches for twelve hours a day, six days a week—a 72-hour grind he claims is the only way to keep the motherboard of the Russian Economy from short-circuiting.
The crisis is deeper than oil money
Deripaska’s telegram post landed like a blow-torch on already-scorched labor nerves. "This isn’t a rate-hike recession," he wrote, "it’s a forced reboot from global circuits to regional cul-de-sacs." Translation: sanctions have stripped Russia’s economic I/O ports, and the only remaining overclock knob is human sweat. His prescription—sun-up at 08:00 to sun-down at 20:00, Saturdays included—would push the average work year from the current 1,974 hours to roughly 3,120, catapulting Russia past Myanmar and Bangladesh on the global sweat index.
He calls it a "national feature"; labor historians will recognize it as Taylorism with a Cyrillic accent. The last time Moscow toyed with six-day weeks was 1930, when Stalin needed turbines, not TikToks.
Oil is up, budgets are down
On paper, Russia should be flush. Brent has surged past $100, futures up 70 % since January, and every extra dollar on a barrel feeds the Kremlin’s hydrocarbon vein. Yet the federal chest feels lighter: oil-and-gas revenues that once supplied one-third of the budget are being siphoned off by discount diplomacy—Moscow sells crude to Delhi and Beijing at knock-down prices, then funnels a chunk of the proceeds into a war that bleeds $300 m a day.
Official bean-counters admit GDP crawled at just 1 % in 2025, a cliff-drop from 2024’s 4.3 %. Deripaska warned earlier that Middle-East flare-ups could shave global growth even if crude stays elevated; his new memo doubles down, telling workers to "complete the transformation" before geopolitical sand totally clogs the gears.
From smelters to server racks
TechBloom contacted three Rusal smelter foremen in Krasnoyarsk. They already run hot-cell rotations—aluminum pots don’t cool for anyone—and predict the 72-hour schedule will spike fatigue-induced anode effects, the molten equivalent of blue screens. One engineer shrugged: "More hours won’t melt more alumina if we can’t import Canadian electrodes; we’ll just trade downtime for burnout."
Silicon Valley likes to whisper about 10x engineers; Deripaska wants 1.5x humans—the same biology, just dialed to 150 % duty cycle. The joke writes itself: Russia leapfrogs remote-work culture and lands straight in steam-punk presenteeism.
What the numbers refuse to say
Moscow’s labor code technically caps the workweek at 40 hours. Any extension requires "written consent" and overtime pay of 1.5× hourly rate for the first two hours, 2× thereafter. Multiply that across Rusal’s 61,000 employees and Deripaska’s calendar becomes an accounting supernova—payroll could balloon by $450 m annually, assuming unions still remember how to file claims.
But enforcement is elastic. Since 2022, the Kremlin has legalized "special economic measures" that let strategic enterprises rewrite contracts overnight. Courts won’t bite; workers can’t strike.
The last heat sink
Deripaska himself once championed automation, pouring $1.5 bn into AI-controlled potlines that promised to cut man-hours by 30 %. Sanctions froze those imports; now the fallback firmware is flesh. The paradox is exquisite: the same oligarch who flew to Palo Alto to court Stanford robotics talent now peddles manual brute force as national competitive advantage.
Outside the telegram bubble, Russian job boards already list "six-day availability" as default. Young coders in Yekaterinburg joke they’re switching from Python to Pickaxe. The meme writes its own punch line: ctrl-alt-del replaced by sledgehammer-and-sweat.
Whether the Economy reboots or melts down will depend less on hours logged than on which components can still be soldered back onto the global motherboard. Deripaska’s wager: if enough backs hold out, Russia can brute-force its way through the sanctions firewall. History’s wager: exhaustion rarely outruns innovation; it just rewires the burnout fuse. The clock is ticking—twelve hours at a time.