The topic of work-life balance has come under the spotlight again after comments made by SN Subrahmanyan, the chairperson of India’s most prominent infrastructure firm Larsen & Toubro resurfaced on the internet.
Subrahmanyan said he would be more happy if he could make his employees work on Sundays.
“I regret I am not able to make you work on Sundays. If I can make you work on Sundays, I will be more happy… What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife?” he had said in an interaction with employees.
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This comes after the tragic death of Anna Sebastian Perayil, an Ernst and Young (EY) employee who succumbed to excessive workload in September last year, causing widespread outrage and discussion on social media over the topic of overwork in India.
Subrahmanyan however, is not alone who has made statements favouring long working hours, there are several other top executives and entrepreneurs as well. The following is a list of other such examples.
- Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy triggered a huge ongoing debate on work-life balance in 2023, when he said Indians have to put in 70-hour work weeks for India’s development.
- This is not just restricted to India of course. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person is known for his strict work ethic, believing that to achieve success, one has to “work like hell” and “put in 80 to 100-hour weeks every week.”
- Coming back to India, Ola founder and CEO Bhavish Aggarwal also supported Murthy’s statement, saying he had put in 20 hours of work every day on “all seven days” of the week and that weekly offs were a western concept and not initially done in India.
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“We had the Lunar Calendar and we had holidays basis that,” he said in an interview with YourStory. “We had one or two days monthly. Then it became a Western cultural import and then the industrial revolution happened.”
This triggered severe online backlash as can be expected.
- Anupam Mittal, the founder and CEO of Shaadi.com, as well as prominent Shark Tank judge also said that people should put in about 80 hours of work in a week, but early on in their career.
“The actual number is less important,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post. “What matters is you work long enough during the week so that it is the only thing you have time for.”
However, his Shark Tank colleague Namita Thapar, Executive director of Emcure Pharmaceuticals disagreed, saying it was unfair to expect salaried employees to work like that since only founders and top management make the kind of money that could incentivize this many hours of work a day.
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India’s Factories Act and the Shops and Establishments Act dictates that the standard working hours for employees is 48 hours per week or nine hours per day.
Long working hours have always been linked with higher chances of stroke, depression, obesity and even premature death.
