Most women across India have been belittled by the patriarchal statement made by L&T Chairman SN Subrahmanyan who said that he would make employees work even on Sundays if he could, advocating for a 90-hour work week.
Subrahmanyan made the remarks when he was questioned about the company's six-day work week policy. His remarks fuelled the ongoing debate on work-life balance, first triggered by Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy’s suggestion of a 70-hour work week. He seems to forget that the labour force includes women and can women bear the physical and mental stress with a 70-hour work-week?
Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra weighed in on the controversy over L&T chief SN Subrahmanyan's “90-hour work week” remark and responded by saying that he loved staring at his "wonderful" wife.
Both SN Subrahmanyan as well as Anand Mahindra are guilty of belittling women with such remarks. How do we know whether Mahindra’s wife enjoys being stared at on Sundays by her husband? How can we even assume that wives in India will be free on Sundays to be “stared at”? How do we gauge that wives who are overburdened with housework as the husband is at home on Sundays, will even have the time and space to be stared at? And what is the guarantee that working wives will not be working also on Sundays with the weekly holiday on a different day?
Mr. Mahindra as a multi-millionnaire may have a wife who is completely in a relaxED mood to enjoy being stared at. But does this apply to all women who work outside or at home on Sundays? Why does Mahindra make such a statement without his wife’s permission? How does SN Subrahmanyan further his argument for a 90-hour week by telling workers not to stare at their wives on Sundays and work right through the week? Is this not a very patriarchal assumption based on the belief that wives at home or in employment, have no business but being stared at by their husbands?
India’s female workforce participation was over 27 percent in 2022. The gender gap in India’s workforce, which has consistently narrowed down over the years, can be attributed to conservative social norms both in terms of demand (work opportunities), and supply (availability of women for work). So, the 70-hour-work week will affect women much more than men.
By tradition and by law, the homemaker/housewife is not considered to be a productive worker in the economic sense of the term. Her work is ‘non-productive’ because she does not get wages in exchange for her labour and therefore, her work does not have value-in-exchange. She is expected to seek her own reward in psychological and economic terms that comes from her work providing satisfaction to the other members of the family.
Some economists would point out that she gets ‘paid’ for her services in real terms, in terms of food, clothing and shelter, in terms of goods and services. This ‘payment’ in return for housework is said to determine her status within the family.
But in pure quantitative terms, isn’t the work she does greater than the goods and services she consumes? Is she then not creating surplus value for others to benefit from? She does not draw any salary, is not entitled to retirement benefits such as pension, does not qualify for superannuation and gets no leave from the daily responsibilities of housework. Housework is not included in computing the gross national product. But this in no way means that housework is an uneconomic activity.
“The countless chores collectively known as “housework” – cooking, washing dishes, doing laundry, making beds, sweeping, shopping etc. – apparently consume some three to four thousand hours of the average housewife’s year,” writes Ann Oakley in The Sociology of Housework, 1974. Startling as this statistic may be, it does not even account for the constant and unquantifiable attention mothers must give to their children. Just as a woman’s maternal duties are always taken for granted, her never-ending toil as a homemaker rarely occasions expressions of appreciation within her family.
The disparity between the male and female condition in capitalist society is the real problem. If our realization as individuals having 'value' in bourgeois society is only through our roles as buyers and sellers of commodities (or specifically as sellers of labour power and earners of a wage), bearing and rearing children is an obstacle to this realization.
Although part of the toll of being parents can be shared, bearing the child cannot - and, whatever her class, the woman is discriminated against in a man-woman world in capitalism.
Patriarchal norms attribute most responsibility for child-care and home management to the homemakers while they hold men accountable for the financial support of the family. These norms (i) limit women’s education and training, (ii) lower their employment aspirations; (iii) reduce the time and energy available for extra-domestic work; and (iv) restrict women’s access to technology and credit. Thus, within the labour market, women participate in an unequal competition for men for jobs.
Therefore, though the relationship between and among the members of a family is essentially non-capitalist, the housework done by the homemaker and the labour provided by the male members are the basic preconditions to the existence and sustenance of the capitalist system of production which has itself created and nourished this non-capitalist façade for its own benefit and survival.
But this is not basically about “housework”. It is about violating the privacy of a woman, any woman, by a husband who goes public about his admiration for his wife without taking her express permission. And if this can happen with a high-profile lady like Mrs. Mahindra, what about the ordinary housewife whose contribution to her home, husband and the economy is no less significant than the productivity of an industry where workers, both men and women, work with their nose to the grind right through the week, never mind the 70-hour work week?