Mind the Gap: Why L&T’s SN Subrahmanyan needs to talk to more women

Larsen & Toubro chairman SN Subrahmanyan’s advocacy of a 90-hour work week is deeply problematic on so many levels that it merits examination beyond the usual 24-hour social media cycle. SN Subrahmanyan In a video on Reddit apparently during an employee interaction the 64-year-old was asked why the multibillion-dollar conglomerate was making employees work on Saturdays. “I regret I am not able to make you work on Sundays…because I work on Sundays,” the CEO retored. Then, he added, “What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife?” A 90-hour, seven-day week works out to just under 13-hours a day. For Subrahmanyan in 2023-24 this resulted in a neat renumeration package of ₹51.05 crores—a 43.11% raise from the previous year and, as pointed out many on social media quoting L&T’s annual report, 534.57 times more than the median salary of an L&T employee. But it’s not his compensation package as much as the obvious tone deafness of Subrahmanyan’s remark that really bothers me. Women already work two shifts Got 90 hours to spare? It’s clear the chairman needs to speak more to his company’s female employees. He might learn of how women work two shifts: One at the workplace and the second at home. That after putting in eight/10/12-hour days, they come home to children, parents and putting dinner on the table. That Sundays, that blessed staring-at-wife day, is for stocking up on groceries, doing laundry, cleaning up the house, childrens’ school projects, and attending to the needs of parents. This labour is unpaid and often glorified (maa ke haath ka khaana, mom’s cooking). But it is this burden that keeps women away from the workforce. An October 2024 brief the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that globally, unpaid care work prevented 708 million women from joining paid work. I am sure Subrahmanyan has read weighty policy papers on India’s asmal female labour force participation rate and on why government and policy makers are concerned about this slide. I spent a year tracking declining female labour participation. The #1 reason for the least educated and most educated was, you guessed it, housework. Yet, from his excerpted video it is clear that Subrahmanyam is talking to and about only one gender. “Your wife” makes it evident that the chairman of a company with 54,300 employees is not addressing women, either because he doesn’t care or because he is, like so many male bosses, oblivious to the reality of our lives. And, yes, passing it off as a ‘joke’ would only make it worse. If employees are judged the number of hours they put in, then what penalty will women end up paying because they simply do not have the hours to pledge? Subrahmanyan does not say (to be fair, nor does billionaire Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy who has consently pushed for a 70-hour week). Or are we to continue assuming the default gender for employee is male? What for so many people is work-life balance, is for many women just life. Juggling, struggling, compromising, cutting corners, riding a perpetual guilt trip. So many, including those in the precarious informal sector, barely hang on. To quit is a privilege not everyone can afford. Yes, things are changing, but not fast enough. In India women still do four times more unpaid work than men, finds ILO. Dads need to step up This week, Claudia Goldin who won the Nobel Prize for economics published a working paper looking at declining fertility with the rate of economic development. To boost fertility rates in countries like South Korea, Japan and Turkey where economic growth has been rapid but social change slow, fathers need to become more hands-on so that the “motherhood penalty” is more equitably shared. “If fathers and husbands can credibly commit to providing the time and the resources, the difference in the fertility desires between the genders would disappear,” she writes. How to build a nation Psychologs Magazine Leaders should be measured if they cannot be inspiring. Instead of passing gratuitous remarks about men staring at their wives, messrs Narayana Murthy and Subrahmanyam who are in positions of considerable influence might think of asking them to spend their legally mandated weekly off days chipping in and helping with the housework. Instead, L&T’s PR machinery (definitely working overtime) has issued an explanation. A 90-hour week is to fulfil the core of its mandate, which is “nation-building”. The statement is erroneous and misleading. No nation is ever built without taking its women along. In fact, as the World Bank unfailingly points out, women’s workforce participation has a positive effect on a nation’s GDP. If the 90-hour week is a stepping stone to nation-building, then a more efficient building block would be to pull back working hours so that men can contribute more to housework, freeing women’s time so that they can participate more in the workplace. I’m rooting for five-day weeks. That’s how you build a nation. taking everyone along. The following article is an excerpt from this week’s HT Mind the Gap. Subscribe here.