The country cannot move forward without adressing labour mobilisation, said SN Subrahmanyan, chairman and managing director of Larsen and Toubro.
Speaking at an event organised by the CII at Chennai on Tuesday, Subrahmanyan noted that younger employees are reluctant to relocate to different cities or work from office.
"When I joined L&T in 1983, my boss said if you are from Chennai you go to Delhi and work. Today if I take a guy from Chennai and ask him to go to Delhi and work, he says 'bye'. I couldn't do that. It's a different world today. The situation is worse in the IT sector...If you tell him to come to office and work, he says bye.
Subrahmanyan said the older generation is trying to understand it and bring flexible policies, but the country cannot move forward without addressing labour mobilisation.
He also said that the construction industry faces huge challenges in mobilising labourers, as workers from rural parts of the country are unwilling to migrate to the urban areas despite providing decent accommodation. This, he claimed, according to a report in the Times of India, is due to various reasons "like availability of direct benefit transfers, welfare schemes like Garib Kalyan Yojana, MGNREGA and maybe the economy doing well..."
A few weeks ago Subrahmanyan was in the eye of a storm after he advocated 90-hour work week.