CEOs want us to work weekends without overtime. Don’t we ask the same of our cooks, cleaners?
We are back to that time of the year when a man who earns Rs 51 crore tells the rest of us that we need to work harder. At least once a quarter, India’s business leaders poke their heads out of their luxurious offices, and scold us into believing that a 40-hour work week represents the very pinnacle of laziness.
This time, it was the turn of the chairman of L&T, SN Subrahmanyan, to tell his colleagues—who earn 535 times less than him—that they need to work 90-hour weeks. On an internal call that was later made public, Subrahmanyan also wondered aloud what people do with their time at home. “How long can you stare at your wife or husband?” he asked, because apparently, the purpose of human existence is to generate quarterly profits for shareholders.
The breathtaking combination of patriarchal condescension and capitalist exploitation would make the zamindars of feudal India blush. Naturally, corporate India’s workforce – already stretched thin between endless Teams meetings and “Do you have time to jump on a quick call” messages – responded with the derision these comments deserved. The internet turned Subrahmanyan’s words into memes faster than you can say “toxic work culture”.
India’s most respected business leaders and start-up founders have made a habit of displaying just how deeply disconnected they are from the realities of working people’s lives. Subrahmanyan is hardly the only culprit. Just months ago, Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy prescribed a 70-hour work week as the cure for India’s productivity challenges. While the rest of India ridiculed that view, Murthy drew support from Bhavish Aggarwal, the founder of Ola, who labelled work-life balance a western concept.
Here’s what I find most fascinating about these periodic sermons from India’s business elite. Not once do they mention overtime pay for these extra hours. Not once do they discuss additional benefits or support systems for workers who are expected to sacrifice their personal lives at the altar of corporate growth. Instead, they wrap their demands in the flag of patriotism, speaking of “India’s decade” and “nation building” as if working people into the ground is somehow serving the country.
The outrage that we’re witnessing from India’s professional class is entirely justified. A 90-hour work week is a blueprint for collective burnout packaged as ambition. Overnight, dozens of people are speaking the language of Marxism. Still, this moment of solidarity and empathy among urban professionals goes only as far as a corporate boardroom. It does not extend to our homes, and the workers who toil to run it for us.
Also read: We don’t need millionaires telling us to work harder. L&T’s Subrahmanyan is in wrong century
A centuries-old ‘tradition’
The real conversation about labour rights in India crashes into a wall of hypocrisy the moment it enters our homes. Corporate employees who would file harassment complaints if their managers spoke to them in a stern tone, see nothing wrong in verbally abusing their cooks, cleaners. The same people who demand mental health days and workplace dignity conspire in building WhatsApp groups to ensure their domestic workers remain underpaid. Urban professionals who bristle over the idea of workplace surveillance and the ruthlessness of swiping in, think nothing of installing cameras to monitor their domestic workers. The architects of progressive HR policies in their glass-tower offices return home to enforce feudal hierarchies that would make their own corporate overlords proud.
This selective application of labour rights, which are conveniently forgotten in domestic spaces, reveals something far more insidious than mere hypocrisy. It exposes how India’s professional class has mastered the language of workers’ rights while perpetuating the very exploitation they claim to resist. Once we clock out, we transition easily from being the exploited to the exploiters, carrying forward centuries-old traditions of domestic servitude.
I’ve witnessed this hypocrisy play out so many times that it rarely surprises me anymore. Around Diwali, a debate raged on a WhatsApp group populated by the people who went to the same prestigious (and upscale) college I had the privilege of attending: Was paying the cooks and cleaners double their monthly salary as Diwali bonus too much? While a spirited set of women argued that this was only fair, an equally spirited bunch argued against it.
A few years ago, in the fancy Santa Cruz building that I used to occupy, an affluent family summarily decided one day that the cleaners, who kept our home and society spotless, could no longer use the elevator. No reason was given – the banishment was swift and unquestionable – but I suspect it was because unlike the “service elevators” of Delhi and Gurugram, our building had only one. In Bandra, a neighbour’s first words of welcome included the unsolicited advice to not pay our shared domestic worker more than the pittance she was receiving. When I questioned the advice, I was told, with practiced ease, that an enforcement of class boundaries was essential to preserving peace.
In apartment complexes across our cities, domestic workers navigate a maze of unwritten rules and casual humiliations that reveal the deeply entrenched architecture of class violence in urban India. They’re expected to use separate utensils and barred from “common” spaces. Watch any apartment complex around lunchtime and you’ll see domestic workers huddled in corners or sitting on stairs to eat their meals, out of view of the sirs and madams, while the lawns and benches they maintain remain out of bounds. The segregation is spatial, but the message is clear: you can clean these spaces, but you cannot occupy them as equals.
Also read: Cinema wronged domestic workers — Hum Aapke Hain Koun to Kal Ho Naa Ho. The script’s changing
Legislative vacuum
The scale of this exploitation is staggering, even if we can’t pin down its exact dimensions. Government data places the number of domestic workers in India at 4.75 million, though other more realistic estimates suggest anywhere between 20 to 80 million workers. In Bengaluru and Chennai, a domestic worker needs to work in six different households just to earn the legal minimum wage. Think about that for a moment: six different homes, six different sets of rules, and six different ways of being reminded of their place in the social hierarchy.
Our legal framework is equally vexing. While urban professionals can quote chapter and verse of workplace harassment policies, domestic workers remain excluded from critical national labour laws. India voted in favor of the International Labour Organization’s Convention 189 for protecting domestic workers’ rights in 2011, but 14 years later, we haven’t bothered to ratify it.
This legislative vacuum isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. In the micro fiefdoms we run, employment terms are set by whim. Written contracts? Fixed working hours? Clear job descriptions? Rest and recovery? These basic rights suddenly become radical suggestions when applied to our homes. Nowhere was this feudal mindset laid out in as brutal clarity as the pandemic. When wages were cut or jobs were lost because employers feared their domestic workers would be carriers of the virus, there was no severance package, no notice period.
So as we mock Subrahmanyan’s comments, maybe we should turn the gaze inwards. His suggestion of a 90-hour work week has provoked our outrage because it threatens our privileges, not because we fundamentally oppose the exploitation of labour. Many of us already treat domestic workers like permanently on-call service providers who should be grateful for whatever scraps of dignity we choose to throw their way—not so different from the people we love to hate on.
After all, what’s the tangible difference between a CEO demanding a 90-hour work week and an urban professional expecting their domestic worker to be available at all hours? None at all. In our clean, beautiful homes, we are all minor Subrahmanyans.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
Disclosure: Ola founder Bhavish Aggarwal and Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy are among the investors of ThePrint. Please click here for details on investors.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)