
If nothing else, the chairman of L&T’s inappropriate 90-hour work-week comments have been a huge relief from corporate boredom. Ever since S N Subrahmanyan (SNS) held up the ideal of a 90-hour week and trashed his employees for not working on Sundays, social media has been on fire.
From memes drawing on bedroom scenes to modified renditions of Bollywood numbers on the joys of staring at one’s wife, it’s been a field day for part-time humour mongers. One doesn’t know if he used AI, but one songwriter captured the mood thus:
Sleep deprived
And barely awake
Living for the next coffee break
Mr Chairman grins from
His towers high
Sees us cogs
But never asks, why?
The backlash to Mr Subrahmanyan’s comments has been so severe that the PR division of L&T has been scrambling for damage control.
L&T’s Head of HR, Sonica Muraleedharan, said in a recent statement: “…SNS never implied or mandated 90-hour work weeks. His remarks were casual in nature, and have been misinterpreted.”
There have been serious responses too.
Corporate seniors like M&M’s Anand Mahindra and former HCL CEO, Vineet Nayar, have pointed out that good-quality work has nothing to do with long hours and relentless schedules. They have emphasised that optimum work-life balance needs to combine high output with happiness and recreation with family.
12-hour day is the norm
These reactions make a point, but they miss something significant. The L&T chairman was being smug, holding out his own long working hours as an ideal to his employees, while his working conditions and remuneration are a hundred times more than those of an assembly line worker.
We are still waiting for answers after Ernst & Young (EY) intern Anna Sebastian dropped dead in July last year from overwork and stress in her Pune office. In a heart-rending letter written by her mother, Anita Augustine, to the EY chairman, Anita described the bullying and toxic work culture her daughter had been subjected to. Infosys’ N.R. Narayana Murthy, a votary of the 70-hour week, had remained silent.
In a statement that makes you think, the Karnataka State IT Union (KITU) told Mr Subrahmanyan: “We are not ready to die for your profits.”
The fact is, most Indians today are overworked—some beyond 90 hours a week—and exploited.
Perhaps Mr Subrahmanyan does not know this: entire industries in the country—the powerlooms in Bhiwandi and Surat, security guards, gig workers in the app-based delivery system, domestic workers like maids and cooks, and agricultural labour—work 12 hours a day as a norm, including Sundays.
That’s 84 hours a week. The day they take leave, they are not paid.
This does not take into account the vast army of unpaid workers—those who slave away at homes and family farms without remuneration. In 2023, unpaid work in India contributed 7.5 percent of the country’s GDP.
Worse, the system is disproportionately weighted against women. Women spent as much as 36 hours per week on unpaid work, while for men, it was about 16 hours. Indians work very hard, Mr Subrahmanyan!
Lurking misogyny
In his casual shooting from the hip, L&T’s Subrahmanyan also quipped: “What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife?”
Read it carefully, and this is nothing but soft misogyny.
Is the ‘wife’ so inconsequential that doing grunt work in the office is superior to spending time with her and the family? Or does he mean the ‘wife’ has limited functions—in bed and in the kitchen—and therefore cannot compete with the ‘cerebral’ vistas of the corporate world?
While skewering him for endorsing 18th-century exploitation, most critics seem to have left the L&T chief off the hook on his misogyny.
For years, counsellors have been researching the importance of family time as a necessary counterfoil to work stress. By pitting family, home, and wife against office time, Mr Subrahmanyan has drifted back to the sweatshops of the Industrial Revolution and turned our learning of progressive work culture on its head.
Finally, where did the 90-hour ideal work week come from?
The L&T chief pointed to China, drawing lessons from its work ethic as the key to its economic dominance.
Should we seriously replicate the dormitories of Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Tianjin, where thousands of young boys and girls are crammed without light or air to slave away 12 to 18 hours a day?
China Labour Watch, which studied the practices of Foxconn’s Chengdu iPhone factory between 2020 and 2023, said workers labour around the clock to meet impossible production targets.
In 2010, the cover on these slave shops was blown after a spate of suicides linked to low pay and brutal working conditions at the Foxconn City industrial park in Shenzhen. Mental illness and breakdowns became so common that nets were hung outside the overcrowded dormitories to prevent workers from jumping out!
We have come a long way since the Industrial Revolution. Decades of trade union battles and humanitarian legislation have sanctified the 8-hour day—or a maximum of 48 hours a week. The most progressive and economically advanced countries have the shortest working hours: European Union countries average 36.4 hours per week.
In India, forcing more than 48 hours a day, without a weekly day off, is illegal. How are Mr Subrahmanyan and others allowed to publicly advocate a violation of the law?
Perhaps the government should not remain silent and clarify its position.