Bring Back the 40-Hour Work Week

Barbara, not Barbie writes with this quote from an article at AlterNet about how the average work week is becoming longer, and why that's not a good thing: "... overtime is only effective over very short sprints. This is because (as Sidney Chapman showed in 1909) daily productivity starts falling off in the second week, and declines rapidly with every successive week as burnout sets in. Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition, and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can't focus. They spend more time answering e-mail and goofing off than they do working. They make mistakes that they'd never make if they were rested; and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they're fried. Robinson writes that he's seen overworked software teams descend into a negative-progress mode, where they are actually losing ground week over week because they're so mentally exhausted that they're making more errors than they can fix. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there's one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn't. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we're supposed to by law. We will not turn this situation around until we do what our 19th-century ancestors did: confront our bosses, present them with the data, and make them understand that what they are doing amounts to employee abuse — and that abuse is based on assumptions that are directly costing them untold potential profits."

Comments

Re:Meh

[Stargoat]

Two very good examples:

www.dol.gov/whd/regs/compliance/fairpay/fs17e_computer.pdf

http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml

Re:That's what America needs to be competitive!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh and further down I read a lot of people talking about better salaries in the us etc.. so let me just break that down by my job, just for the fun of it..:

I'm 28, have a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and work as an IT Systems Engineer - Exchange, Unix, VMWare, this kind of stuff.

This is how I get compensated:

40 hrs/week, 30 days of paid leave a year
A salary of $65.000 a Year (before taxes, after taxes I still keep about $40.000 a year,
but note this is Germany - after taxes, I already paid my healthcare, my pension fund, etc)

I also get a $2000 bonus based on how the company performed at the end of the year.
(We also have subsidized meals at the company cafeteria)

Also, every hour I work over my 40hrs/Week is getting billed to one of two time accounts:
one for "necessary, but incentive" overtime, the other one for "ordered" overtime, which get handled like this: For the incentive overtime, I can take absence hours if business is low, for the ordered ones, I HAVE to take absence hours as soon as possible to get my compensation in free time.

Also, I get paid 25% extra on every hour I work after 8pm, 40% on every hour I work extra after midnight,
50% for work on Saturdays and Sundays, and 125% for work on bank holidays - i can choose if I want to have this bonus in money equivalent or time equivalent.

also, I work on flextime, so I can more or less come and go as I please (there is no clock to punch, you just book the time you did on a tool based on your own recalling) as long as business needs are fulfilled and we have the necessary staff on site at all times.

Also, if I have to travel on business - all the time I spend traveling, be it at the wheel of a car, on a plane, on a train, waiting for a connecting flight on an airport etc pp - is considered worktime. so if I leave my home at 6am in the morning and arrive at a customer site at noon, I actually "worked" 6 hours going there - minus the time it would usually take me to go to the office, which is substracted by law.

I guess some people can understand now that we Europeans don't really consider the US to have a good work environment..

P.S. no cubicles, I share my ~220sqft office with only one colleague. And they allow ICQ and headphones at work officially.

Re:Nonsense! 70% of US billionaires are self-made!

[cretog8]

The US is one of the few countries, unlike Europe, where social mobility is very possible.

You apparently missed the news: Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs