WEF 2025: Amid the 90-hour work week debate, triggered by L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyam’s statement, a World Economic Forum report states that employees place higher value on working hours than on policies.
The WEF Future of Jobs report highlights key factors and priorities that would make workers want to stay in a job from the employees’ perspective. “The findings also highlight areas of misalignment between employee and employer expectations. The divergence is most pronounced around supporting health and well-being and upskilling and reskilling, which are viewed as essential by employers, but less so by employees, who rank them 8th and 7th, respectively. By contrast, employees place higher value on working hours, which tops the list of desired policies, while employers rank this measure the eighth most effective strategy to boost talent availability; and pension policies, which rank 5th for employees – 10 places higher than for employers,” the report stated.
Both employees and employers placed less emphasis on supporting workers with caregiving responsibilities and articulating business purpose and social impact.
The report added that countries like Bahrain employers are focused on improving working hours and overtime policies and expecting to leverage government wage subsidies. Many employers in countries like Slovenia are planning to review the working hours.
Sectors like consumer goods production are planning to support workers’ health and well-being (73 per cent) and improving working hours (52 per cent) to assist them in addressing talent shortages.
The findings of the report comes amid a debate triggered by L&T’s Subrahmanyam statement in an undated video: “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. What do you do sitting at home? How long can you stare at your wife? Come on, get to the office and start working."
Not only has his statement been criticised for not considering work-life balance, it has also been panned for its sexist tones. Social media has been abuzz with his statement that seems to indicate that wives do not go to office to work and only the man does.
L&T later issued a statement that the Chairman’s remarks reflect their larger ambition, “emphasising that extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary effort", which was once again panned by netizens.