Former Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Raghuram Rajan on Tuesday criticised L&T Chairperson SN Subrahmanyan's recent suggestion that employees should work 90 hours a week, dismissing it as a reflection of older generations' habitual complaints about the youth. He said it was very hard to prescribe an appropriate work week.
"If you're working on the shop floor in the middle of deafening noise and in unpleasant circumstances, there is a different work week. If you're reading interesting papers and books and you love doing research you can spend all the time you have doing that - which is sort of my job. It's very hard to prescribe (a fixed work week)," he said while speaking with Barkha Dutt for Mojo.
"It depends on how much you're enthused by the work that you're doing. How much you find the work meaningful in making a change. And I don't think that there's one size for all. I do think everyone finds their balance."
L&T's Subrahmanyan sparked a controversy after he in an official interaction suggested that employees should work 90 hours a week to stay competitive. He also said: "How long can you stare at your wife?" and, "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, because I work on Sundays also."
Rajan highlighted the generational aspect of such views. "If you go back to ancient Greece, the old people are constantly complaining about the young people and how they don’t seem to work and they have all these crazy interests. This seems like just a regurgitation of the constant complaint older generations have about younger generations," he said.
"I remember that we were somewhat frivolous by our current standards when we were young. We did crazy things. We'd be shocked by some of the things young people do today but I don't think that's any reason to keep lecturing them," the economist stated. "People have to find balance and if they're not working to the extent that you want them to work in your firm look to yourself what is it that you're doing wrong in incentivising them."
Rajan also said that people have other interests in life than just job and they have to develop them. "So this gets a lot of air when it shouldn't. it's old people complaining." He also suggested that such longer work week views should not be aired so much. "Not everybody in high positions has enlightened views about the world that you need to listen to. The fact that you have a bunch of skills which gets you to the right place doesn’t necessarily mean...and that applies to me also. I have no great views on GST because I haven’t gone into the micro details of it."
Rajan stressed that meaningful work cannot be reduced to a one-size-fits-all approach. "It depends on how much you’re enthused by the work that you’re doing, how much you find the work meaningful in making change. I don’t think there’s one size for all. People have to find balance," he said.
The former RBI Governor also reflected on his own work-life integration, sharing, "A lot of the work I do is either writing, speaking, or reading — all of which I like. This is my issue with my wife because when I spend time on this I say I’m working, and she says, 'No, you’re playing.' So, we have a debate on that."
Subrahmanyan's remarks have drawn backlash from various quarters, with Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy’s earlier pitch for a 70-hour work week adding fuel to the debate. Naushad Forbes, co-chairman of Forbes Marshall, downplayed such comments, saying, "They are made probably without the greatest of thought... It’s all actually about quality and not quantity."
Forbes underscored the importance of quality work over long hours, recounting his own company’s transition to a five-day workweek 50 years ago. “When we actually went to a five-day week, work didn’t suffer. We got just as much done. The company continued to grow at just the same rate," he said.
Meanwhile, L&T’s Head of HR, Sonica Muraleedharan, defended Subrahmanyan’s comments, asserting that they had been taken out of context. In a LinkedIn post, Muraleedharan wrote, "It’s truly disheartening to see how the words of our MD & Chairman have been taken out of context, leading to misunderstandings and unnecessary criticism."