Unews World
CHENNAI: Younger employees are reluctant to relocate to different cities or work from office, and the older generation is at a loss trying to cope with this, L&T chairman and managing director S N Subrahmanyan said on Tuesday.
“When I joined L&T in 1983, my boss said if you are from Chennai, you go to Delhi and work. Today, if I take a guy from Chennai and tell him to go to Delhi and work, he says ‘bye’… The situation is worse in the IT world… If you tell him to come to office and work, he says ‘bye’,” he said at a CII event. Recently, he had created a stir by advocating a 90-hour work week. Subrahmanyan said the older generation is trying to roll out flexible policies, but labour mobilisation needs to be addressed.
Tough to mobilise workers for large projects: L&T chief
He said that there was a huge challenge for the construction industry in mobilising workers, who were refusing to move from rural parts of the country to urban areas, despite providing decent accommodation.
The L&T chief attributed it to multiple factors – from availability of direct benefit transfers, welfare schemes such as free foodgrains and MGNREGA – apart from the economy doing well. “We have to employ four lakh labourers and the attrition rate is three to four times a year, so we employ about 1.6 million,” he said. In the past, too, the conglomerate has pointed to worker shortage as a major challenge.
Referring to apps to reach out to workers, who then choose projects based on their interests, Subrahmanyan said it is difficult to mobilise workers for large projects. “Imagine mobilising 1.6 million people every year. So, we have created a separate department called HR for labour,” he said.
He listed out the efforts by the company like partnering with ITIs and other institutes for skilling the workforce, community building through CSR activities. He said the per-square-foot cost of 3D concrete printing is a little higher compared to traditional methods, but companies may have to adopt those methods if labour gets scarce.
