conventions - Can units be plural?

I was in a conversation with my senior engineer where he kept on insisting that we can use plural when we write down any unit. I argued that it is not the 'common' practice or even throughout my whole academic career (unfortunately) I haven't found any instance where there was any plural unit used in the text books. He argued that if I said that it was not correct then it should have a good reason for that.

When I searched for this topic I couldn't come to any conclusive decision. Such as this thread and the other links those have been referred there (some leads to English.SE). These answers gave me the impression that it is grammatically acceptable provided the right circumstances.

But I felt that it would be rather ambiguous to accept plurals on scientific and engineering notations.

For example we were talking about output rate of a boiler which is measured in $\mathrm{kg/hr}$. My senior said that it is okay if anyone writes $\mathrm{kgs/hr}$.

To me it looks ambiguous. If anyone writes $\mathrm{s}$ after $\mathrm{kg}$ it may give a plural sense but as well it may refer to second also. Moreover if anyone argues that this is acceptable in some cases (like $\mathrm{kgs/hr}$) then what would be the yard stick to find out accepted cases? For instance can we add $\mathrm{s}$ in $\mathrm{m/s}$ or $\mathrm{km/hr}$ like $\mathrm{ms/s}$ or $\mathrm{kms/hr}$?

There is The NIST Guide for the Use of the International System of Units, which has this example.

the length of the laser is $5\ \mathrm{m}$ but not: the length of the laser is five meters

But I want to have more conclusive answer to which one is acceptable i.e. $\mathrm{kg/hr}$ or $\mathrm{kgs/hr}$ (or other similar instances).

Answer

According to the International System of Units (SI)

Unit symbols are mathematical entities and not abbreviations. Therefore, they are not followed by a period except at the end of a sentence, and one must neither use the plural nor mix unit symbols and unit names within one expression, since names are not mathematical entities.

as well as to the international standard ISO/IEC 80000 Quantities and units

Symbols for units are always written in roman (upright) type, irrespective of the type used in the rest of the text. The unit symbol shall remain unaltered in the plural and is not followed by a full stop except for normal punctuation, e.g. at the end of a sentence.

it is not acceptable to use the plural of unit symbols.

By the way, it is also not permissible to use abbreviations such as “hr” for unit symbols (“h”) or unit names (“hour”).