The 90 Hour Work Week Equation

What should have been a light hearted comment has turned into a full scale public relations crisis for Larsen & Toubro, one of India’s largest conglomerates, after its chairman said at an event that he would want employees to work 90 hours a week, and even on Sundays, adding as a joke what could anyone do at home except look at spouses. A video clip of it went viral online and the fallout could still have been managed if it was passed off as casual banter and humour that misfired. Instead, a company spokesperson gave fuel to the issue, telling the news channel that the company was all about nation building and at this juncture to exploit India’s potential ’extraordinary effort’ is necessary. It suggested that the company really expected employees to do 90 hours.

Divided by five, that is 18 hours a day. If you are working six days, it is 15 hours daily. In a city like Mumbai, assume at least three hours for commute, which means the employee will have six hours at home, into which he must fit sleep, food, time with family members and whatever else human beings do. This seems like an impossible routine and therefore the only option to have some semblance of home life is to actually do what the chairman recommended, which is to work seven days a week. That is 12 hours a day, which only looks reasonable in the light of the alternatives offered.

It is somewhat surprising that the company so easily walked into this mess, given the response to Infosys founder N Narayanmurthy saying sometime back that people should work for 70 hours a week. That is not all that impossible. It is only 11 hours daily if you work six days in a week. Life will not be easy but a bare minimum of leisure can still be squeaked in. And yet, it got a lot of social media disparagement. The doyens who make such comments are hard workers and see no reason why everyone can’t be like them. But if everyone were as driven then everyone would be a CEO. Human beings are constructed differently and companies set benchmarks that are neither too low nor too high for that reason. When a CEO says 90 hours, he might mean the ideal, but what it is taken for is the minimum expectation and hence the reaction against it.

90 hours a weekInfosysLarsen & ToubroNR Narayana Murthyworkwork ethics