Narayan Murthy might be the face of advocating hard work in India, but he seems to have competition.
L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan has advocated a 90-hour work week in an internal video that was leaked on Reddit. In the video, Subrahmanyan says that he’d want Indian employees to even work on Sundays in order to compete with China.
In the video, Subrahmanyan responded to an employee’s question on why the company mandated work on Saturdays by saying that if he had his way, he’d make employees work on Sundays as well. “I regret I am not able to make you work on Sundays, to be honest. If I can make you work on Sundays, I will be more happy because I work on Sundays also,” he said.
“What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife? How long can the wives stare at their husbands? Come on! Get to the office and start working,” he added.
Subrahmanyan said that Indians needed work these long hours to compete with the Chinese who worked similarly hard. “I was meeting with a Chinese person recently, and the gentleman told me that they would beat America any time. They said that Americans worked 50 hours a week, and they worked 90 hours a week,” he said. “You’ve got to be on top of the world. You’ve got to make the fastest, biggest, longest, the largest — everything like that. You have to work 90 hours a week. Get going guys,” he said.
There are now two distinct camps develping in the work-life balance debate in India. On one hand are people like Narayan Murthy and L&T’s SN Subrahmanyan, who believe that India needs to work as hard as the Chinese in order to be able to compete and help develop their country. They do have a point — China has the famous intense 9-9-6 work culture, in which tech workers work from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week. But then there have been other voices as well. Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu has said not everyone needs to work so hard, because it causes people to neglect their families. This in turn leads to people having fewer children and thus results in the population collapse that several Asian nations like South Korea, Japan and China are facing. Another argument for not working as hard has been made by Shark Tank’s Namita Thapar, who said that while founders worked hard because their efforts provided them unlimited upside, it didn’t make sense for employees with no equity in their companies to work as hard given how they didn’t get to participate in the gains if the company did well. There are persuasive arguments on both sides, but for now, it appears that L&T’s SN Subrahmanyan might have one-upped even Narayan Murthy in how hard expects India’s corporate workforce to work.