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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."
Mandatory overtime for like the last 3 years - it was fun until they stopped paying for any overtime. Only way I escaped was to work remote to pursue an MBA. And now what do I have to look forward to? Management Consulting or Investment Banking careers that have 60+ hour weeks as the norm.
Please... Don't listen to this drivel. I have kids and an angry wife at home. I want to be at work 80 hours a week.
We can whine all we want about the 40 hour work week, but no one is willing to unionize in order to get back to it. Can you imagine a white collar middle-management union? People would rather put in 80 hours as an "assistant manager" at McBurger Queen rather than be classified in their own minds as a worker.
As for IT, goodness no. It would require a reshaping of the laws that have been created. There are many laws in place that keep IT workers down. The luddites couldn't dare have an intellectual revolution on their plates, after all.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Until we have a health care system that is not tied to employment, this will never happen. It is MUCH cheaper for an employer to squeeze more hours out of several workers than to higher an additional worker.
The argument in the summary should have stopped at using the argument based on productivity. If your worker will make less mistakes and be more productive by working less, you want your worker to work about 40 hours.
"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."
This, however, doesn't follow. If a 40 hour a week worker is more productive I might not need the extra worker if I'm getting more from my team. However, that may mean I can put my capital to better use in a different area, not necessarily software development.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
On the contrary, it would be more work, more efficiently. If you honestly believe hours working correlate to product you have no idea how knowledge work works.
we will let the market decide what the proper work week is for our workers. it solves all that ails. workers who cannot keep up will die and be replaced by those who can.
three comments and I am forever at terrible karma
That's not what the article is saying (it's not talking about the Greek welfare state model). It's pointing out that if you work too much overtime, you get burned out, less productive, and more prone to error.
Well, duh.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
This facile analysis falls for the trap, so brilliantly outlined in The Mythical Man-Month , that throwing more people at the same software problem will result in increased productivity. Because of networking and communication problems, the reverse is often true. While I don't doubt the problems of overtime are a serious issue (and should be minimized), the reality also is that his "cure" isn't. It continues to amaze me how people know so little of our own history in this realm.
Lets move away from an hour based work schedule to a task and accomplishment based work/pay system. Base salary and flexible hours. Penalties for work not completed or as a corrective measure. We don't measure lives in hours, why should our job's measure what we do for them in hours?
Mandating an "hours per week" for employee's is the problem, not the solution.
Careful what you say around me.. I will assume you mean it.
In European counties such as Denmark where on the whole the standard of living and quality of life are better than the US, people work less than we do. They have more time with their families enjoying life instead of killing themselves at the office. Americans are trained to feel like they have to overwork in order to get ahead, we should really strive towards following the European model.
I worked in IT since 1986 and I have never had any fixed hours or overtime. It has always been about performance - how much you do.
Fixating on one factor that affects productivity is stupid. Let people decided themselves. If someone can do more in 40 hours than in 80 hours - fine. Let him do it. If someone wants to work 80 hours, fine let him doing. Ask about project progress, not how many hours he was logged in or occupied the chair.
Unless you are talking about Chrysler shop in Detroit.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I don't expect many people would disagree with the assessment, except those pesky "people" called corporations. For many companies, their workforce is paid a flat salary and any concept of "overtime" doesn't mean more money paid out, let alone time and a half.
To hire an extra worker for those extra hours means spending more money, something that does not align with the capitalistic goal of earning as much as possible.
rather than hiring new employees. Why incur the cost of more overhead then? The largest overhead is medical benefits, about $10K a family. then comes other benefits, office space, computers, etc.
I'm on a 35 hour week and I make sure I stick to it, partly because I don't know when I'll ever be on one again but also because I'm of the opinion that after 7 or so hours in front of a screen your ability think logically diminishes and no amount of over-time is going to fix the bug.
Leave the office, the chances are that you'll figure out the problem on your commute home, during dinner or on the john and you can fix it the following day.
I've found there are three main reasons why people may end up working beyond their contracted hours:
1) The work that they have to do cannot be done during the hours they are contracted to work.
2) The work that they have to do can be done during the hours they are contracted to work, but the organisational or office culture puts pressure on people to be seen to be in the office outside those hours.
3) They have their own reasons for wanting to be working, which may range from a genuine passion for their work through to problems at home they would rather get away from.
Of these, 3) is generally not something the employer/manager should get involved in (unless home problems are starting to bleed over into the office).
I think that in most non-militant workplaces, people accept that 1) will occur from time to time and that, if it's for short periods, it's not a huge problem (particularly if the employer takes steps to recognise it and reward employees accordingly, be it financially, via time-in-lieu, or some other method). If it's not for short periods, then it absolutely will lead to morale and productivity problems and the employer/manager needs to think again about resourcing, or accept high staff turnover and problems with the quality of their outputs. This seems to be an endemic problem in certain industries (such as video games development) which are seen by outsiders as desirable places to work - meaning that there are always lots of eager young things waiting in the wings to replace burn-outs.
I suspect that the most common cause, however, is 2). Certainly, in the decade or so that I've been in full-time employment, I've come across quite a few offices where the work could be handled within contracted hours, but where the nature of the workplace culture meant that people were "padding" their working day; making tasks take longer than needed, or spending lots of time browsing the web in the afternoon. It's particularly noticable that workplaces like this seem to prize "being at your desk late in an evening" over "being there early in the morning". In part, I blame the shift to open-plan offices for this - there can be a "walk of shame" factor to leaving the office when your colleagues are still at their desks.
In one of my early management posts, I did try to tackle a culture like this in the office I was managing. I made a big thing about tracking how heavily loaded each team-member was and getting people to report when their workload reached the point where it would require them to work out of hours. I also made it gently but firmly clear that if your workload wasn't at that point, I expected you to get it done during normal office hours (happily, there was a wider organisational push at the time to reduce our power/lighting bills, which I could hook that onto).
For a while, it worked reasonably well. There was a bit of grumbling from a couple of people who, I suspect, thought that being seen in the office doing very long hours was a substitute for being any good at their job, but most people were happy to go along with it - and the quality of the office's work (which was mostly casework, requiring little creativity, but a lot of attention to detail) actually rose.
Then word got out (falsely, as it happened) that there may be redundancies headed in - and despite reassurances to the contrary, everybody assumed that they way to avoid being singled out was to be seen in the office every hour of the day - so all the work I'd done went to waste anyway. Overnight, things went back to being as bad as ever - and productivity fell off again.
Managament can be a pita at times.
You can always work the 40 hours, then spend the other 40 somewhere else.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
In the UK it wasn't far off that.
It wasn't statutory, but the average working week for a software guy was around 37 hours. Sure, we were paid less than in the US, but we weren't expected to be there all hours, we got five weeks of holiday a year which we were expected to take, and well, life was good.
Not quite as good as Australia. Australia is currently swimming in mining money, so the salaries are as good as the US but the hours are European.
1 is untrue. The 80 hour employee is going to cost you much more. Paying for negative productivity is very expensive in the long run.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Greek people work more hours per year than anyone in the world (other than Korea)... it's just that they are less productive...
http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS&utm_source=weibolife
In my current job it is the bosses :)
But I've been in many jobs where it's the workers. Where workers constantly and repeatedly overcommit (I can do this in 4 weeks). Then the customer is waiting and the boss (not unreasonably) expects the date to be met. The boss could do better at limiting this but the workers do usually deliver then commit again.
In other places, a few workers want to "get ahead" or just enjoy what they're doing and work more hours. Many of these people CAN and want to work 60 hours (actually around 50 is the limit I've seen and there's less productivity increase doing more month-after-month). The problem is that other worker start to try this to compete for the next promotion - and they can't do it.
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
Ah, now you're talking! Manservant! My eugenics rifle! We shall see to it that the workingman of tomorrow is fit for a 50-hour week, and his offspring capable of 60! In time, perhaps even 80 or 100 shall not be beyond the glorious reach of Science!
Actually, as a norwegian, my first thought was "Why would you want to increase work time?" - As our laws are very strict on those things, and is set to 37.5 hours a week (lunch is calculated as half an hour off each day).
The rules allow working overtime, but only in short periods, and only to a maximum amount over a certain period (don't recall exactly now).
In fact, I know people who were forced to take two weeks paid vacation because they've worked too much, and had to stop working a period to not break the law. The companies usually puts this in quiet periods when needed, so they have the option of overtime when they need it.
Seems to work well for us, at least :) You know, as a civilized country and all that.
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Don't worry. Our financial chicanery skills are way better polished than Greece's.
The idea that you could end unemployment by spreading the work around assumes that people are fungible -- that they are completely interchangeable -- which they most certainly aren't. While it may sound like a good idea for Craig and Nate to share the job of coding System X, the fact is that Nate is 10X better at programming than Craig is.
In fact, it's arguable whether Craig can even do the job at all.
I have good news.
The CEOs of the fortune 500 companies have all just met and decided they are going to push for a 40 hour work week. The only slight catch is- they're pushing for a week to be redefined as 3 days long and weekends are being abolished.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
How dare these people suggest that the One Percent must hire 20 percent more development staff and cut further into their already meager profits! Just who do they think they are?
This has got to be one of the most obviously nonsensical submission summaries I have seen. Firstly it talks about how people would get more work done if they didn't do overtime. Then it suggests that overtime is responsible for cutting down number of jobs. The second points very existence relies on the first point being false. If people doing 40 hrs are more effective then less overtime would increase the work done per person and thus decrease the need to employ more people.
That's just not correct. The employer is not paying for negative productivity. The employee is welcome to burn himself out and the employer can just hire a new one. Employees are easy to get these days. Even ones with hard to get qualifications. There's more population than there is demand for labor. Expect this trend to continue and wealth to continue to concentrate in the hands of the capital holders.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
No, no... America needs to work harder for lower pay!!! I mean it's working in all other countries, such as in southeast Asia and all other poor countries.. why no here??
Previewing comments are for sissies!
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."
He left out the actual means used to do this - unionization.
If we're worked to death, does it really matter whether it's by people who speak English or Chinese? The only allegiance that really matters is worker solidarity.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Seriously? Any time someone mentions that some people are better at certain things than others we immediately jump to eugenics? That's a bit disingenuous to say the least. I've been working 50 hour weeks for pretty much my entire adult life, and it's never really bothered me. If I cross 60 hours for a couple consecutive weeks, I get pretty shot and need a day or two off. My brother works 60 hour weeks almost every week, and it doesn't seem to affect him, but if he crosses into 65-70, he becomes an intolerable prick. Meanwhile, if my ex girlfriend worked a single 50 hour week, she was an incoherent bitch by the end of it. Now, I wouldn't argue that the average person's productivity drops off after a 40 hour work week, but only a fool would actually draw the conclusion that every single human being on earth is somehow hardwired to be unable to work more than 40 hours in a week.
Please... Don't listen to this drivel. I have kids and an angry wife at home. I want to be at work 80 hours a week.
Have you tried golf? You can swear all you want, and young, pretty women drive around the courses offering you beer. It's a win-win, and a lot better than being at work.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Yes, we'd never compete with those other industrialized countries ... most of which mandate 40 hours a week or less.
If you're competing for jobs with unskilled Chinese farmers, you're doing it wrong.
-GiH
I am an American and I also work 37.5 hours a week. I work in the IT department of a large well known manufacturing company, and our hours are typically 8:30-5. And people here are almost always gone at 5. However, before this place I worked at a few different small consulting shops, and they worked tons of overtime. That is probably why I didn't last long in those places and ended up here.
How about instead of focusing on eliminating the 40 hour work week we look at the vacation time given instead. Germany is probably the best example of this, given they get a lot of paid vacation time and are STILL one of the best off countries in Europe!
Practice Static Safety - Hack Naked
Not married to an angry wife, are ya?
To the creature that is the angry wife, the ONLY justification for not being home, catering to her every wish, unloading the dishwasher, and cleaning the garage, because you're lucky to have her to cook shitty potatoes for you, buddy, is if you're out bringing in more money so she can buy more things for you to carry home for her. Any other activity is tantamount to infidelity. This is one of the major reasons my angry wife is now an angry ex-wife (which still sorta sucks but not nearly as badly).
I kid, but some people (of both sexes) really do live this way.
Have you ever worked with Chinese people? Like real Chinese people, from China. My wife has - she's a graduate student, and a lot of the other grad students came from over there. She's even been to a Chinese university for a couple of months, to do some field and lab work over there on a grant.
At first, she was really disappointed in herself; she could see that the Chinese kids got to work before her and left really really late, and they'd even have lunch at their desks instead of going outside to eat.
Then she paid a bit more attention, and realized something: those Chinese students weren't getting shit done. Even though she put in fewer hours and would take a break for lunch, she was getting at least as much work done, if not more.
It's not that they're lazy or incompetent or anything like that, it's that they push themselves so hard they're all in this steady state of being half burnt out.
The thing is, it doesn't matter how hard you're willing to work; there's only about eight hours per day of physical labor in you, or six hours per day of mental effort. Sure, you can put in more work for a week, maybe two, but after that the quality goes way downhill.
I'm from the UK, too, and I also do a 37 hour week, and get 25 days holiday, plus the 8 or 9 public holidays.
I wouldn't want to work more than that. I work to live, not live to work.
Dear GOD please use pinyin! The sounds in chinese correspond to different works depending the accents used!
Similar to how the word Oh can be used differently in english.
Oh? soft sound with a lifting to the end of the sound
Oh! Sharp sound, clipped ending
Except that in chinese, the different sounds correspond to completely different words.
If you don't indicate the right tones, both of you just left yourselves open to some seriously nasty jokes......
"playing with lasers"
"eventually got burnt out"
This stuff writes itself.
Go look at the mortality numbers of who lives longer. Those who immerse themselves in work and never retire live to 90. Then go look at the people who die a week after retiring. People need a purpose when they wake up in the morning to stay vital and healthy.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
That's very much like saying "For every copy of Photoshop that is pirated, Adobe looses $1000." And it's wrong, for very much the same reasons.
I have certainly worked on projects where if we'd hired enough people to make everyone work 40 hour weeks, the project would have been horribly over budget and would have been canceled. Of course, those projects are usually unsustainable anyways (mine was - it was canceled. :)
I'm not arguing with the basic premise that the 40 hour work week is a good thing, keep in mind.
Yes, then we'll be poor like Sweden, Denmark and Finland... oh wait...
On the other hand, those who have been working overtime for years wouldn't be able to handle the pay cut they now depend on. So they end up looking for a second job and therefore work even longer hours. Catch-22.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
I've heard that people who have lived in Greece and observed how many hours people actually work think those numbers are a joke. It is entirely possible that Greek people just are more willing than anyone else to lie about how many hours they work.
I figured that the ridiculous tone of my post would make the fact that I was joking pretty obvious.
That said, the minimum requirements for jumping to eugenics are 1. Heritable variability in some ability(or, if one is feeling looser, stochastic variability and a willingness to overproduce and cull every generation. Not strictly eugenics; but similar) and 2. An incentive to improve the population level capability in that ability.
Ability to work long hours does fit, as do a wide variety of other work-related human attributes.
All the nordic countries have similar laws regarding overtime.. They don't have much in the way of natural resources. Seems to work out for them as well.
Perhaps he's taking time away from his angry wife to spend it with your angry ex-wife?
I am officially gone from
Ever heard of The Government Pension Fund of Norway? Wikipedia it.
Norway hasn't been pi**ing it away like us in the US. It should hit a trillion dollars by 2019, before the oil runs out; that for a population of only about 4 million, comes to a quarter million dollars per person, in a country with a low population growth.
Maybe a smug son of a bitch, but a smart one. I'd hate to be in Saudi Arabia in 20 years. Norway will be just fine, barring an Atlantic current shutdown.
When the fake, corporate controlled news this week was saying "how could the unemployment rate possibly be going down and the private sector adding jobs when GDP growth is only 2%???" as if they don't know full well why. It's because the private sector has squeezed every drop of productivity out of every stressed out worker it possibly can and finally HAS to hire (at huge discounts from a few years ago, since you're desperate now). Since there's no labor organization, nobody can go to their boss as a one person union and demand less working hours (they'd laugh in your face), corporations go by different measures of productivity because they know you don't dare. Yeah, that's the reason the hiring doesn't exactly match GDP growth. It's a rotten arrangement and until everyone gets the anti-union sentiment they've had hammered into their brains by *massive* corporate propaganda campaigns for 40 years, this is how it's going to be, so wise up or deal. Luckily the company I work at is privately owned and not subject to the torture of the merciless shareholder whip. That's really the problem with society overall. Corporate charters...and that's what is so confusing to people. They meet their CEO and he's such a nice guy and he cares about the environment and homeless people PERSONALLY, but in his INSTITUTIONAL ROLE, he's subject to INVESTOR LAWSUITS, if he doesn't operate like a psychopath and squeeze every drop of productivity out of everyone and every drop of profit out of anything at ANY COST. All externalities, like people, the environment, morals aside, he is BOUND BY LAW which is clearly spelled out in almost every corporate charter to do anything he can, screw anybody he has to, to get as much money as he can. If you don't get that, you don't understand how things work. Until the structure and mission of corporations are changed, you can whine all you want and nothing is ever going to change. GET IT? Seriously people stop being so pathetically naive. When it's profit first at any cost, problems ensue.
You'll be comforted to know that a good deal of the worlds oil production in is done by thousands people who are contracted to work 12 hour days, 6.5 days per week, for 4 to 6 weeks per hitch. This is usually after killer jet lag, since the majority of them fly 8-20 hours to get to work. I know, I did it for a couple of years.
All that explosive, environmentally dangerous stuff managed by people who are impaired due to continuous overtime and lack of sleep? How could that be a problem?
Well, 32 hours per week in Germany? That would be exaggerated I think..
but, a lot of other stuff is true: Germans usually have a minimum of ~25 days of paid vacation a year, the average is more close to 30 (the minimum by law is 20 if you are on a 5 day workweek, or 24 if you are on a 6 day workweek). We also have a crapload of public holidays, which are always off (or you get paid mandatory bonuses above 100% plus)
The typical worktime in Germany I would say is still the 40hr/week.. with a lot of businesses doing 37 or 38, and in seldom cases, 42, so let's say it's around 40.
Also, the regulations on overtime are a lot stricter here than in the US, like a guy above said about Norway.. and, at least for me as an IT guy, I can say that I never had to work an unpaid hour of overtime in my life (even though I'm not paid by the hour, I'm on a flex time model where I'm supposed and encouraged to take off any hour I worked overtime as soon as it is convienient for me. It is even prohibited by law to offer me a payout of my vacation days in the case that I couldn't take it all because I have so many overtime hours to get rid of - they have to give me the whole thing in days off (but for special cases like switching jobs))
Add that to the local social security, healthcare etc. and you have a compelling case of a decent work environment (as long as you are doing qualified work of course, unqualified labor sucks over here about as much as anywhere else..)
Or German, which has a strong and vibrant economy and does not over work its people.
douche bag.
Arguably, the USA already has adopted the Greek model. That is to say, excessive overtime combined with low productivity, and resulting higher unemployment.
Facts, eh?
Python coder | PyQt Applications | Writer
The employer doesn't think they are paying for negative productivity. What they are actually getting is a different story.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"My brother works 60 hour weeks almost every week, and it doesn't seem to affect him"
How do you know? How's the quality of his work? You're only knowledge of the affect is their personality change but you are assuming their work is not suffering.
Stop pulling shit out of your ass.
Yup, national statistics from the OECD are easily countered by anecdotal evidence from your friends. That's the scientific method alright!
Football Odds
What you need is a change in the "exempt" laws. Here in Norway the only people that are exempt are those in management and particularly independent positions, simply being a white collar worker is not sufficient. As long as you have fixed or semi-fixed working hours, as long as you have no power of delegation or to organize your own work (really free like where, when, how you want as long as you meet your deliverables) you are not exempt. There are also some laws on maximum overtime but in all honestly both employers and employees often ignore that as long as they get their overtime pay.
That gives the right incentive that employers would rather hire people at full rate than have people work for time and a half. That penalizes inefficient workers and slackers who can't make up for it by working extra time - forcing you to work extra time to stay "even" because employers lose money when you need overtime to finish what others finish in regular hours. As long as the US is full of "exempt" workers whose work is still measured in wall clock hours, you will continue to get screwed because another hour is a free hour. It's like trying to keep the flies away after dipping yourself in honey.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
Go back to your cubicle, little drone, and let the big boys ruin the world.
FTFY.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's not that they're lazy or incompetent or anything like that, it's that they push themselves so hard they're all in this steady state of being half burnt out.
I've also heard the same thing said about the Japanese. Hugely long work week, but totally shit productivity, but their society is so geared up to it that rebelling is nigh impossible.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
The employer isn't getting 80 hours of work, that's certain. But from the employer's point of view, they do not care. They are not paying hourly, so for them the marginal benefit reduction in hour 80 versus hour 40 is not that big a deal, because it is still all positive for them.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
People need a bigger purpose to work for than squeezing out trinkets for the ultra rich, or persuing empty materialism. This is why capitalism is fundamentally inhumane. When people are free from having to work to live, they will be free to live to work.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This doesn't apply to everyone, of course, some people are wired to handle it.
No, they are not. There are a lot of self-assessed "high performers" that think they are, but they are not. What really happens is that these people become so incompetent that they cannot see all the mistakes they are making anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If he is, I truly and honestly wish him luck.
However things shake loose, he's welcome to apply for membership in the "She spread her legs for me!" club, currently 1500+ members strong. Free swab tests upon membership approval!
Bitter humor is the best kind.
For many of us fulltimers, I believe, overtime compensation is exempt under FLSA Section 213 (a)(17). This gives our employers no incentive to prevent overworking, especially if we are (and "lucky" enough to be) salaried. Therefore I expect nothing to "vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we're supposed to by law". The law protects these abusive workplace habits, cultures, and practices.
do you dig holes in the ground or pick potatoes for a living ? only there this might work ...
Employee churn is expensive in training and lost productivity costs; it happens all the time, but it's stupid, the shareholder does not gain by it; the manager might get one bonus for showing "determination and initiative" and finishing one project in time, but gets fried with the next project ...
Labour hours were lowered from 12h/day to 8h/day not because of the labour unions or the SocDems, but because 12h/day does not work with tasks that need skilled labour and expensive machinery.
it certainly is not valid in all. Hell a five day work week isn't exactly valid for many either. I regularly put in past forty hours in IT but I can tell you this, it certainly doesn't feel like it all that much.
With very manual labor jobs I can see issues being raised. However I see more problems occurring the more hours worked in a row than how many in a week as threat to safety, accuracy, and whatnot. I know I am pretty much need a few hours after a long stretch.
Then again I started out on a farm, forty hours would have been a blessing.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
If my wife ever did plant a tracker in my skull, I would take great pleasure in letting her know EXACTLY when and where I was cheating on her.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Ha! Well said, sir. You and I should drink many beers together.
The law is 40 hours per week. 37.5 hrs/week is for unionized employees. However, most employers extend this to cover non-unionized labor as well.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
Angry wives? I love that game!
Not entirely true. There are times when working (for me) is more fun and relaxing than almost anything else I could think of doing with my time. If you've got the right job and the right temperament it can work. That said, I would fall out of love with my job if I was REQUIRED to put in the hours I put in freely. Its a psyche thing.
40? How will I be able to keep up with Slashdot on such a short week?
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
I worked for a Japanese company for 10 years. It was always super-important to be SEEN to be working - even if there was really nothing to do. If caught idle the boss would usually find some menial task for the idle drone to perform. Often quite demeaning. On the other hand, what was good about this attitude is that if there was some menial shit that really did need to be done the bosses and managers would pitch in and work along side the rest of the staff. So there was a sort of equality - all parts of the same machine (not saying that the machine part is good). It is a clearly different cultural attitude to work. As to my Japanese colleagues productivity, I'd guess mediocre at best. My impression is that in a company setting the best way to survive for Japanese workers is to be just average regardless of your real capabilities. The nail that stick up gets hammered down.
http://www.acetonestudio.com
And here I am yet again without mod points when I really need them. I've said for a long, long time that the best societies are a healthy mix of both capitalism and socialism. Socialism for things that private industry cannot or is ill-equipped to handle (for example, major infrastructure projects, things such as health insurance in which free enterprise has a perverse incentive to screw its customers over, and things that are deemed essential for life or meaningful societal progress), capitalism for everything else.
This doesn't mean that the petty bickering that goes on now wouldn't happen; people would still argue over what private industry cannot handle and what is considered, for example, "meaningful societal progress." Still, the sooner people stop thinking of socialism as a bad word, the sooner we'll actually be able to regain and retain our position as the global superpower. Unfettered capitalism is just as bad for society as unfettered socialism. Look at a place like, say, Somalia, where there is virtually no government to speak of and individual liberty is taken to an extreme--if you want your neighbor's stuff there's absolutely nothing stopping you from simply taking it, provided you have a band of mercenaries that are skillful enough to go get it. Is this really any better than a place like, say, Cuba or China?
That's what's being lost in today's political discourse. The notion of a happy medium, the idea that both systems have things to offer and lessons to learn.
Speak for yourself. You must be in a piss-poor qualification job. For several times, people that were working with me left for other jobs and it costed me an arm and a leg to replace them. A stable, qualified, trained team is an invaluable thing. Bosses who think otherwise are as greedy as they are stupid. Unless the job is flipping burgers, of course. And even in those shit jobs replacing a hard-working, responsible employee is very hard.
if we simply worked the way we're supposed to by law
Most of the world already does, including virtually everyone in the US. More importantly, just because something is a law, doesn't make it morally right or wrong.
Hmm. I know quite a few rich people, because part of my job is working with donors to my University.
/.
*Most inherited their wealth.
*Those who didn't came from well-off families, who got them jobs out of college or funded their businesses.
*Those who are self-made generally made their fortune selling real estate, or on Wall Street (so they produced nothing).
*There are a handful (out of hundreds) who started a business (bars, dry cleaners, etc.) and made their fortune by working really, really hard, then buying out the competition, which put all those other small business owners out of work.
But it's all immaterial; it's very rare for Americans to move out of their parents social class, because the people who surround you make up you safety net. Poor people who fail have nothing to fall back on, and will go from having a little to being destitute. Rich people who fail will still be rich.
But let's face it, if all it took to be wealthy was hard work, you wouldn't be posting on
My only purpose is to work. At the office I work for money. At home I work to keep my home clean and pleasent. I work to raise my children well. I work to keep my marriage happy -- work work work.
-GiH
So that's the attraction with golf!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
I work for a "Right to Work" company. I manage 36 employees. Even though we are RTW, I must have clear documented evidence of why I want to let someone go before HR will even think about acting. The potential lawsuit is just too costly. It is true that I can let someone go without cause, but that does not stop the potential lawsuit. Companies will settle before they litigate and the settlement is generally $35k. So, the first thing they ask me, "do you have clear documentation of all offenses and corrective actions?" And after that, "do you have supporting evidence from other employees?"
We show geeks how to get their dream girl at EyesOfOdessa.com
Work consistent 80 hour weeks and you are a wrecking ball. Everything you touch has to be redone. That's bad if you are an assembly line worker. If you are an engineer it's much worse. If it goes a while before it gets redone it will cost much more.
Productivity goes negative. I've seen it many times.
Some people start with negative productivity. I've never seen one of them overworked to the point they become productive though.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
An 80 hour a week average lawyer might not do any more actual work than a 40 hour average but they generate double the income to the firm.
Bottles.
There is a significant difference between being at work 60-80 hours a week and working 60-80 hours a week. I have many people who do the former, very few who can maintain the later, at least not long term or without suffering serious consequences. I'm not saying it's impossible or it doesn't happen, but most people who work 60-80 hour weeks for any length of time are doing it for show after a point.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
I have a hard time understanding why a single recent graduate with no family responsibilities and a high-enough salary wouldn't be able to handle more than 40 hours per week continuously. When I was at that stage I would have taken the higher-paying job even if it required 60 hours per week, and maybe more. But if your peers are making about the same as you are and going home at 5pm every single day it leads you to wonder if the grass may be greener at the other companies pasture. Things change once you add a spouse, kids, and the responsibilities of home ownership. Again, if salary is high enough to afford a nanny, lawn mowing crew, and prepared dinners, then long hours might still be manageable and possibly attractive if the salary minus these personal expenses still leaves you with a net gain. The problem is that unless you are a high paid consultant working your own hours or the boss of your own company with the potential reward of windfall profits, it can be hard to find the 60-70 hr/wk job that really pays substantially more than the 40 hr/wk alternative. And you still need time out of the office for your own professional development, continuing education, staying fit, and managing your finances.
There's also the importance of having flexible time that you hold in reserve, the same way that a military commander keeps some of his forces held from battle so he can deploy them to mitigate an unexpected threat or exploit an opportunity. Anybody can have personal problems pop up, and these are usually manageable at 40 hr/wk, but not so easy when you constantly work longer hours. If you're already expected to work 60 hours each week, then you may burn out fast if a short term crisis pops up at work. How many weeks will you work 100 hours each week for $0 in additional pay when your peers are going home at 5pm and apparently take home a relatively close salary to what you already make? The 40 hr/wk worker will likely be more willing to work 60-80 hrs/wk to overcome a short term crisis as long as it doesn't interfere with his family responsibilities.
Finally, quality of life is an important factor. Some people are happy living their lives without children, or in some cases, even without a spouse or similar close relationship. Some careers, such as medicine or public service, may have intrinsic rewards and something that a person can devote their lives to and be passionate about. Their work may be the reason they get up in the morning. But after years and years, even these types of jobs can wear you down if you don't have a personal outlet. Even then, may people can sustain 50-60 hours continuously. There is also the possibility of working a high-pressure job in your early years while you build a nest egg or establish yourself into the fast track for executive promotion, with the intent of slowing down and enjoying life later. But for most of us, while we may "enjoy" what we do, we do not derive our life's purpose from our work. Even those of us who enjoy working with technology need some personal time to enjoy it our own way rather than following the schedules, deadlines, and division of labor handed down by management. So for the average person 40 hours per week is probably ideal. Expecting everyone to happily work longer hours will lead at least a significant portion of your work force to resent the hours you require. Some of us are not convinced that we will live until retirement or that we will be healthy enough to enjoy retirement. Myself, I would rather work 40hrs/wk on average for the rest of my career and retire when I can't work anymore. I have a spouse, kids, and a home to maintain. I have the occasional personal crisis (health, legal, etc.), but I am also willing to put in more hours during the short term when the company needs it.
If the corporation crumples like a paper bag every time he takes a sick day, he's not doing his job right.
In Norway, I reckon when the oil runs out they'd choose to maintain their standard of life, but not their personal wealth. They'd have less stuff, but the scandinavian attitude to what matters in life means they're not going to flog themselves to the bone to let them have shiny toys.
I'm baffled by how many hours some people are willing to work (at a job they often don't greatly enjoy) to pay for their shiny new Mercedes.
jh
Doctors are protected by the AMA, which keeps the number of medical schools and doctors in practice limited. No matter what motivation you assign to doing so, it helps protect the income of members.
Young lawyers, on the other hand, are screwed.
http://www.newsobserver.com/2011/03/01/1021123/young-lawyers-scrape-to-find-work.html
It should be pointed out that the Germans are also strongly Socialist. Much more so that in the US. The differences between Greece and Germany are many: Greece has a much smaller population, many fewer natural resources, quite a bit more corruption in government, and their finances were poorly managed for decades; but the government safety net is the same in both countries. Honestly it's probably better in Germany now, with all the cuts the Greeks have had to make. It's certainly true that the Greeks are looking for bailouts mostly from Germany, and that the way they were running their government was unsustainable; but if you're pointing at the Germans as a model of how it "should" be done I want my socialized medicine, awesome state sponsored public transportation, employee-centric employment laws, 5 weeks of vacation... well you get the idea. I'd be pretty happy if the US swung far enough to the left to look anything like Germany.
Before you start accusing me of wanting other people to do my work for me, I should point out that I'm a skilled, well paid, degreed worker. I'd probably lose money paying taxes like the Germans do, it's true. I can live with that. Taxes are the price we pay to live in civilization. (That said, I'd be pissed if my government managed the tax money I put in as poorly as the Greek government did)
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Yup. People think they can multi-task when in fact we mentally can not. What we call "multi-tasking" is actually task switching. The distinction is important. It's one thing to be multi-threaded in cognitive thinking which is impossible for most people than it is to time slice our actions. Time slice too much and you start dropping balls and making all sorts of careless mistakes. Basically, the human brain functions like a single core CPU. It can only process so much data at any given time. We're also horrible about real-time task scheduling because of external environmental distractions.
We suck at computing. That's why we invented the computer.
Life is not for the lazy.
Speaking of things I'm bad at, properly proofreading my posts. ;) The key thing that really set me off was when you said "They're doing poorly but they don't know it." The "but they don't know it" part is key to the code phrase. I've been excessively fatigued and very, very drunk enough times (and um other...yeah, public forum ;) ) to know when I'm doing poorly. If that's egotistical of me to assert, then I'm egotistical. But I know myself at least that well.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
If you need to work overtime to provide for your family, you aren't middle class. Sorry .
You're working poor, just like the rest of us.
Who came off with the idea that having doctors work for hours that would be illegal for truck drivers? It's not like the lack of sleep and concentration could harm patients. It might be really interesting to find out how many people die each year, because the doctor could think straight anymore. Lack of sleep has a lot in common with being drunk, but a truck leaving the road makes a far easier news story than a doctor messing up medications because he just had another 24h shift.
The world would be a far better place if those responsible for such things had to face the consequences instead of those who don't really have a choice if they want to keep their job. I'm still dreaming of the day when an executive goes into jail because he risked the life of others by letting doctors (or other critical proficiencies) work insane hours.
When women are young, slim, and unwrinkled, they can get what they want by flirting with or marrying powerful men. Why should they be feminists? When their charms fade, their ability to manipulate bosses fades until it reaches the vanishing point. When they get dumped for a younger trophy wife, their chances for another marriage are, under the best of circumstances, about 2-1 against. If they've gained weight, lost confidence, and don't know how to get asked out for dates, the odds are more like 7-2.
http://www.calculatorslive.com/Chances-Of-Getting-Married-After-40-Calculator.aspx
If you're a programmer over 40, your mental powers and ability to concentrate begin to fade. Your ability to keep up with current technology trends, relative to younger engineers, fades until it reaches the vanishing point. Evidence for this is mostly anecdotal, but try not to be an anecdote and see what happens.
http://www.silicon.com/management/cio-insights/2004/05/28/ageism-in-it-over-40-forget-about-getting-a-job-39120958/
When you're young and female, you can bargain for the best deal at work or in your personal life. Why should you join a union?
When you're young and a programmer, you can bargain for better wages and shorter hours. You've got four or five other potential employers waiting in the wings. You can bargain for yourself. Why join a union?
Moral: If you're young, don't worry. You'll never get old. You don't need collective bargaining. The web has changed everything. Why join a union?
However, if the 5 are humming along at much greater productivity than the 4, and the work output and thus the profit of the division increases, then the 5th person has justified the same benefits as the other four, without anyone losing any benefits at all. If you have a more productive team and don't provide them with additional work, then you're not really expanding at all and doing it wrong. And if you don't have enough work to justify increasing the productivity of everyone, why are you having them slammed with overtime in the first place?
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
All major public accounting firms have 60hour minimum work-weeks for Jan-April ("busy season") every year. If you enter only 58h during a week, there will be a follow-up inquiry on monday morning for why you missed your quota by 2 hours. This is only a minimum, you are also expected to be available to work all nights and all weekends. Further, such work conditions are not restricted to busy season, and the majority of employees should expect these conditions for at least 6 mo. of the year.
It just becomes the new normal. A 60-hour week becomes a treasured vacation, you get to go home and eat with your family, maybe even talk to them a little before bed. When the hours creep up to 70, 80, and beyond, you have no choice but to eat at your laptop in a conference room with the rest of the team, get home after everyone is already asleep, then wake up and leave before they wake up. Hopefully you can work from home on the weekends and at least have breakfast with your family.
Can hardly complain when I see some clients who have it worse though. SVP of Finance hasn't left the office in 4 days. The finance department just collapses onto a couch for a few hours a day.
These work conditions are demanded by the market. There are set filing dates for public companies, and they, as well as their auditors from the public accounting firms, need to work to match those deadlines. The client I mentioned above missed their filing deadline and filed for a 1 week extension. Their stock price fell by 10% that day.
It's just accepted. This is standard industry practice, and everyone is expected to suffer through it for years, because public accounting experience is the most rapid way to accelerate a career in accounting. Ultimately everyone hopes to leave for private accounting after accumulating 3-6 years of public accounting experience. Nobody was forced to take jobs in this line of work, everyone chooses to give up 3-6 years of their life for the promise of a better life when they can someday quit and take an advanced private accounting position. I hate my life during these stretches of insanity, and I definitely wish I could work more reasonable hours. But like everyone else in public accounting, we take on these ridiculous hours because we know it's the best way to move our career forward. I fantasize about quitting all the time, but I need to make as much money as possible so that I can take care of my family. If I give up early so that I can have it easier, my family won't be able to afford the same kind of lifestyle. I wish I was more clever, or had some valuable talent that would allow me to make a lot of money with a more reasonable workweek, but that's just not the case. In a few years, I will be able to have time with them, and I'll have the money to take care of them. We're all just chasing the American Dream I guess.
By which point your family will have already grown-up.
I'd quit now and learn to live with a lower-cost lifestyle. You don't need cable; free TV is good enough. You don't need unlimited cellphones; $5 or $15 a month for a few hours calling is good enough. I'm not sure if you can sacrifice on internet but I do: it only costs me $15 a month. ............ Otherwise you might quit your 70 an hour week job circa 2020 and discover your wife is a stranger, and your kids are teens who don't want anything to do with you.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
There are some bosses with a rather different world-view. I had a friend who told me about the time when he worked at a Scandinavian company. Soon after he started, he stayed in the office after everyone else had left. Did the same thing for a few days. He didn't really have anything left to do, I guess he just stayed late because it was what people did in his previous job.
;).
;) ).
Then one of the bosses came up to him and asked whether anything was wrong, did he need extra training to do the job? Did the project need more people? Was the project going ok? Was the job a good fit for him? etc.
So after that he stopped messing around and went home on time
I gather the view is if people are having to work longer than standard working hours for extended periods then something is wrong. I can agree with that. If most people need to work longer hours than farmers in the bad old days (before the agricultural revolution) then isn't something wrong somewhere? That's not progress is it?
Why should we work towards a world where most work long hours so that a few can live a life of excess and leisure? I can understand having to work long hours in times of war or great disaster. But looking at the world situation, this really is not the case at least in the West- there is plenty of food and wealth around (just not that distributed that evenly
"It was always super-important to be SEEN to be working"
I know several people working at Microsoft and Google who set up auto-email scripts to fire off random report emails to their reporting supervisors at random times between 1-3am every night.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
No, don't believe this. This is actually a shallow depiction of the magnificence that is golf.
Golf is a sport that is several hundred years old and beloved by nobleman and commoner alike. It is truly the essence of man enjoying the peaceful tranquility of nature. The swipe of a 5 iron on a cool Spring day. A majestic Titleist ball floating serenely though the air as if it were your very own personal, fluffy cloud. The light "thonk" sound as it descends perfectly on the green, setting you up for that perfect putt that will bring you one under par for the hole. Truly, golf is a sport for OF COURSE IT'S ABOUT THE BEER-SERVING BLOND WITH BIG TITTIES!
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Well, of course no one is "wired" to handle "excessive" work (since, by definition, "excessive" is just that -- but varies from person to person, environment to environment).
Einstein often worked long hours - perhaps he would have been more productive if he had taken five weeks vacation a year and worked Monday through Friday 8AM-5PM with lunch from 12 to 1 and a ten minute break at 10AM and 3PM the rest of the time?
People who truly enjoy what they are doing and have certain personality types can often work very long hours and be more productive per hour by doing so. I've had jobs (at startups) where I loved what I was doing and worked effectively 70+ hours a week (usually engrossed in interesting or puzzling problems when I realized I'd been at work for 14 hours and should probably go home). I've also worked at boring and unrewarding jobs where productivity dropped precipitously within 30 minutes after I walked in the door.
I only recall a few days in my life where I was "mandated to work overtime" - it just happens. In those cases where it was mandated by a misguided VP or Director, myself (and others) began to work 40 hours a week plus just the mandated overtime. Within a couple weeks the VP or Director stopped mandatory overtime, apparently having realized that those who were getting the work done were now working less and those who were not getting work done were just around the office more hours distracting those who usually got work done (and both groups were substantially grumpier). So, yes, in these cases individual and team productivity did drop.
Basically, if work is an interesting hobby that someone happens to pay you to do and you're a healthy high energy individual, 40 hours a week is a cinch. Working on an assembly line (or the IT equivalent) rarely falls in that category.
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
All major public accounting firms have 60hour minimum work-weeks for Jan-April ("busy season") every year....
So what are you doing fucking off reading Slashdot for?
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
The real mistake here is the idea that articles from AlterNet are likley to be remotely factual.
For example: The linked article has this bogus narrative about how Silicon Valley broke overtime taboos etc. Really? That's how it happened?
It's more likely they just make this stuff up.
Well, where am I supposed to pull shit out of, then?
Per Capita GDP of...
Finland: $34,585 Denmark: $37,585 Sweden: $47,934
Norway: $84,443
Citation needed. The correct per capita GDP figures are:
Norway: $53,300
Sweden: $40,600
Denmark: $40,200
Finland: $38,300
How the *hell* did the parent comment get modded "+5 Informative"?!?! It mentions some *very* specific and *very* dramatic figured with absolutely no attribution. At least give it a cursory google for fuck's sake!
Social mobility is empirically higher in Europe. There is a good body of peer-reviewed data on this. Your sample of under 300 wealthy Americans is not appropriately sized for a population size of 300 million, plus you are beginning by selecting for upper class members in the first place, ultimately reinforcing, if anything, the parent's post.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
This is why capitalism is ultimately doomed, just as communism and fascism and all the other isms failed. The simple fact is that thanks to technology the people here right now, much less those just being born? Well about 40% of those are simply not needed, their labor is no longer required thanks to automation and technology. We are playing IQ musical chairs when the average IQ is barely 100 and more and more simply won't get a seat.
In the old days one who couldn't pass college could work in a factory and feed themselves and their families but not anymore, those jobs are gone to Asia where the corps can pollute to their evil heart's content. and soon even college won't help, I was talking to the dean of our local college and he figures about 35% simply won't find a job in their field once they graduate, no matter what field they choose. there is simply more labor than is required and thanks to H1-Bs the market is even more skewed thanks to stuffing the channel with even more workers. Hell I'd argue about 40% of the low end jobs in the USA are being subsidized by the American taxpayer as "make work" for example if you go to work at Walmart one of the first training videos you will be shown is how to apply for food stamps! Now how many think that if Walmart was forced to pay a living wage they wouldn't automate many of those jobs, nothing about stocking or scanning products that couldn't be done by machine. Same thing with fast food, its all a limited choice set anyway and that kind of assembly line work, using pre measured ingrediants in a line, hell you'd probably cut down on waste and screwups by just making the entire thing automated. you'd just slap the money or CC in the machine, push a couple of buttons and the food would pop out of a slot.
So we simply have to face the facts that capitalism is coming to an end and look ahead to a replacement, otherwise that end could be quite violent. Much of what we saw during the Arab Springs could easily happen here as we have "jobless recoveries" which is just a code word for "The rich are living like Gods while everyone else suffers" which of course breeds hatred and contempt. We simply have to accept the very basis of the entire system, trading labor for capital, simply no longer works. What do you do with those millions upon millions who simply don't have the IQ required to become doctors and lawyers? hell 25% of lawyers graduating can't find jobs as we have more lawyers than jobs now. In the end we simply have to face the fact that we are quickly approaching half a billion people in the USA and with just current technology we could get by just fine on 100 million, maybe less. What do you do with the other 400 million? without consumers our service economy collapses, do you pay them to just buy shit and watch TV? Do you make up "make work" jobs where they do some pointless task simply so they can get a check? Even in IT we are seeing the coming of smart gear that can take care of itself and call a parts monkey when something breaks, construction they are already testing a road building machine that uses GPS, no real humans needed there, and houses can be prefabricated.
So what do we do with all the people that simply can't trade their labor for capital when their labor isn't needed? we need to think of something or its gonna get nasty. The minorities are already looking at 25%+ unemployment and the whites won't be far behind, there are simply too many people and not enough work. What do you do? put them in camps? False flag an attack that can wipe out large numbers of them? Just leave them in the street to starve or create huge crime zones? gotta do something as time is running out folks, the tech just keeps getting smart while the average person stays the same or even gets dumber.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Oh Yeah, let's do it like the Chinese, kidnap skilled people by the thousands (make certain they know that their families back home depend on the money they make.) Put them up in massive dorms. Work them endlessly until they commit suicide like lemmings. Repeat.
I recently read an article quoting an Apple executive about how America can't compete with China. He recounted how they needed to completely rework the production of a product, and how the Chinese woke their work force up from the dorms at 4:00 am, put them on the line retooling and worked them straight for 48 hours until the entire line was completely re-engineered to the new work and that the same process in America would take a week or more. Think about it, this clown was basically arguing about how great slave labor is when your company is in a bind, and that to compete we need to make our workforce into hopeless slaves without rights or human dignity.
When all you see is short term profit, long term sanity becomes a distant mirage. Until we begin teaching things like ethics, strategic planning, classical logic, critical thinking and comparative philosophy to our business majors as opposed to schools which now attempt to crank out Ruppert Murdoch clones like sausage, we will continue to see an ever increasing lack of consideration for working people, greater concentration of wealth at the level of controlling corporate directors, and a general disregard for society, humanity and the environment we all need to survive. Profit is a terrible mistress and the addiction to her is killing us.
Friend you appear to have engaged mouth before utilizing brain. Of course there are more millionaires, the dollar is only worth 6 cents... do the math.
The question you posed is social mobility and it has never been worse in the United States. In fact social mobility is significantly greater in most of Europe than the U.S. and all you had to do was a quick search to find that, or perhaps you did and chose to ignore the truth to make your point.
The top 400 wealthiest people in this country now have the same wealth as the lower 170,000,000 citizens. Can you see the problem. The wealth is locked up in the hands of a vanishing few. That means there's nothing left for the rest of us. Your comment above about millionaires is precisely the problem. With a vanishingly few exceptions, the masses are being locked into futures unable to afford decent educations, social service or viable means to escape their condition and things are getting precipitously worse. Add age discrimination and a failing network of services for the poor and serious ugly is just around the corner. French Revolution style ugly. Why do you think we built up a private security army (yes, I know, make Dick Cheney one the super-wealthy.) Their use in Iraq was just the testing grounds.
This is a process of indoctrination. We've been trained since birth to want more, need more, eat, drink, and medicate more. We've built an entire society on the point of a pyramid which is just about to come crashing down around us all. The Wallstreetification of our society and the placement of a little box in every home which tells us what to think and who to like has resulted in a uniform social disaster. Society shaped by the stupid and narcissistic. It would actually take balls and vision to provide better for the future and I'm not at all certain we have the will or the intelligence anymore to see that goal. I mean we let Dubyah steal... er, borrow the presidency for 8 years. how stupid is that?
"These work conditions are demanded by the market.",
There are millions who have been laid off due to the financial crises out of work who have accounting and financial experience.
The market doesn't demand it. Your CEO and shareholders demand it. What time do they leave? My guess is 5. If they want people not to quit and work for private companies or start their own small accounting firms they need to hire more and lessen the hours.
It was necessary in 2008 to cut staff, but it seems they kept the hiring freeze and just made free money and probably more mistakes.
If you love your marriage I would quit and work elsewhere. The extra perks and pay are simply not worth it if you spend all your time at work.
http://saveie6.com/
Are they getting paid for all 60 of those hours?
If they're only getting paid for 40 of them, then it might be worth pointing out to the inquiry that their customers are probably paying for all 60 hours work, so that extra 20 should be passed on, or it won't be worked.
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People really need to learn this and take it to heart. Unfortunately the myth of social mobility through hard work is so ingrained in American culture that it'll probably never be rooted out completely and exposed as the lie that it is. It's too convenient a motivator for the masses for the rich to let it fade away easily or completely. It doesn't even require any kind of conspiracy. It's an emergent system that forms from each rich individual doing their own thing.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
By which point your family will have already grown-up.
There was a headline on The Onion: "Wild, Unattached 20s Spent at Work."
The "American Dream" = money? Not much of dream then.
I do not want to live in an economy. I live in a society. I agree that an economy is important but do not accept that money / profit should come before all else.
A dream is good. A plan is better.
So what do we do with all the people that simply can't trade their labor for capital when their labor isn't needed?
We aren't really at the point where extra labor is not needed - that labor only goes unused because people who could enjoy its fruits are not able to pay for it, because they are themselves paid too low.
Simply put, imagine that for all the people that do have jobs, their wages would triple tomorrow. How much would that change their consumption? How many more goods would they use? And how much extra labor would be required by the system to provide all those extras, leading to more jobs?
The problem is that most added value produced by labor ends up not in the laborer's pockets, but in the coffers of the owners of capital used to perform that labor. Stuffing their coffers doesn't lead to more jobs being created - it does not meaningfully increase their own personal consumption. And there's no point in them re-investing it into business when there's no demand to be covered by said business - you need an paying audience to target for new business, and their pockets are not infinitely deep.
Some capitalists have actually understood this - e.g. Ford, who specifically pointed out that him paying his workers more makes the overall market for his products bigger, which in turn makes it meaningful to invest more to expand business to cover that enlarged market. With a similar arrangement in place today, and with the right proportion of how created value is split between workers and capitalists, we could keep the existing capitalist system growing and benefiting everyone for a good many years now.
The only problem is that this requires rational long-term thinking to overcome basic greed. Which, unfortunately, is a rare occasion indeed.
The US has close to the worst social mobility in the OECD, and it's been getting steadily worse for decades (basically - and unsurprisingly - since the income increases of "normal people" vs "rich people" started dramatically diverging back in the '70s). In stark contrast to most of the EU countries, which have the highest levels of social mobility.
By which time being "a millionaire" won't be quite so impressive. At 3% inflation, a million dollars today will be worth the equivalent of ~$400k today.
Assuming a 5% return, to end up with a million dollars in 30 years you need to save $1,250/mo, or $15,000/yr. Which is around 50% of the median annual wage (a reasonable estimate of a "worker bee") of $30k.
It's ingrained because we American's that support it keep seeing it through out our lives. My grandfather was a farmer born in the 1800's in southern europe, my father born in the1930's was meant to be a farmer as well. He disagreed with socialism's precepts as he believed the harder you work the more you deserve. So he left and bounced around other countries. Within 20 years of being here in the states he had paid off both a primary home and a summer home while the neighbor who had been here his entire life had a mortgage until the day he died. If you define "social mobility" as being too poor to afford food and then becoming ultra rich were you burn $100 bills to warm the room, then yeah its pretty damn rare. But if you see it as someone able to live the life they want, in the way they want to live it, then we have oodles of it. My dad was carpenter, we're not talking high end education, just the ability to look at a problem and find a solution that worked. Even though he knows jackall about computers the critical thinking skills he imparted to me about plumbing and electrical work were the foundation for everything I know today. My father is today at best right in the middle of middle class for a retired 80 something, maybe you consider that a failure of 'social mobility', he doesn't considering where he started.
The Goal: A long simple life filled with many complex toys.
With the attitude towards working hours it's no wonder ageism is so rampant and the efficiencies experience brings is lost.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'm so relieved I don't live in America. In Australia we work 40 hour weeks and are a very wealthy nation with a great deal of equality, and well adjusted people as a whole.
So, you're advocating that customers be cheated? They should pay for a lot of unproductive hours just because you can bill them by the hour?
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
You hit the nail on the head with your comments. Bravo.
For a few years, when my younger son (3 siblings) was a teenager, I had to work for a long time as a consultant, supporting a product. The customers were in different timezones, (gmt-4 to gmt-8). You can imagine the 5:30am start and the 8pm end. My wife and I decided that the family was more important than this job, and I changed careers. I can say that saved my son, because dad was home to act as the role model. The son also needed to ask questions that mom could not answer, and I was there.
Today, my wife and three siblings and grandkids all live in my city. We do without tablets, vacations to the south or boat cruises, and we note that we do not miss these material based things. My wife and I have no lack of any essentials, and we have the love of our children and their significant others.
Bravo again to cpu6502. Call me rich.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
If you had bothered to read the find article, you would have found that the longer the hours worked, the more time people spend in non-productive activities. You simply can't be "in the zone" continuously, 16 hours a day, day after day, week after week, month after month.
Do you really believe those FoxConn workers are working at their peak potential during those 12-hour day 6-day shifts? The owners accept lower per-hour productivity in return for the employees not having free time for "distractions", like having a life.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
The thing I don't think you are getting is that the employer is also factoring in the training period for a new employee, when they are least productive. When you set that scale as your norm, then a burnout empoyee at 60 hours a week is still working as expected. The fact that they could be producing more at 40 hours a week than they do at 60 doesn't matter, they are meeting the expected ROI.
When I was a worker (and I mean that literally, as a carpenter, job superintendent and contractor) I and my crews were quite frustrating for my various employers. We could finish our days allotment of work in 3-5 hours. Then, because we didn't have the material to continue to work, we goofed off for the rest of the day. One company finally tried to get us material on our schedule and we were out of work in under 2 months (for what was scheduled as a 4 month job).
Rule 1: No overtime. We worked 40 hours a week, period.
Rule 2: No layoffs. Everybody comes to work every day and works 8 hours, even if it is just cleaning the jobsite.
Rule 3: Safety begins and ends in your head and your heart: Watch out for your buddy and trust them to watch out for you (25 years without a jobsite injury AND without hardhats and steel-toed boots)
Rule 4: quality is your job
That was all that was needed, we never ran out of work and I had men who followed me from company to company just to stay with me. They still email me and I've been out of that industry since 1996.
Personally, I believe that the destruction of the American work ethic came about because of the rise of the MBA. The change that this signalled, from labor as an asset to labor as an expense, destroyed the American work environment. Or, as Utah Phillips once said, "When they tell you that you are America's greatest asset, run for the hills! Have you seen what we do to our 'greatest assets?' Have you seen a strip mined mountain, a clearcut forest or a burning river? Those were America's greatest assets!"
Subversion of spatial scale luxury decoration ideas.
A CEO who shows up to work late and leaves before most of his employees is likely not going to be a CEO for very long as they will either run the company into the ground through bankruptcy (and not paying attention to the employees) or the board of directors is going to notice that things are being seriously neglected and will get fired. That isn't to say that a good CEO can't on occasion take the day off early to pursue something of a life, but my experience is that a typical CEO is very much a workaholic and tends to put in even longer days than most of the employees... usually in meetings to find out what is going on in the company or interviewing employees. Really good CEOs tend to even "get on the line" and do some occasional grunt work.
Examples of good CEOs in the past were folks like Dave Thomas (of Wendy's restaurants) who made it a habit to put on the apron and grill hamburgers at least a few hours each week, and Sam Walton (founder of Wal-Mart) who didn't hesitate to spend a few hours simply stocking shelves in some of his stores if for no other reason than to meet customers and find out the work environment of his employees. That is how you get to know your company and get it to grow.
Yes, there are lazy CEOs that also don't care about the companies they are running. Those companies are also ones I think you should look to short sell their stock if you know about them too.
Another example of a CEO that is a major workaholic is Elon Musk, the CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors. Then again he wrecked his second marriage (as well as his first) simply because he spent so much time at work that he hasn't been able to deal with his respective wives and their needs. I admire what he has accomplished, but his personal life is going to hell because of what he does to earn the money he is making. I'd also suggest that most successful CEOs are much more like Elon Musk than a lazy idle rich child working for "daddy's company".
You're assuming that there's any kind of consequences for these CEOs.
Well, if you want a rundown .. (Anonymous coward here, just didn't have my login creds at work..):
I live in Germany, Stuttgart, in the City center, and I have roughly the following col: (all monthly quotes, converted from Euro to $)
3 Room, 700sqft -> $950 (including heating, fees, etc)
Power -> $90
50Mbit Cable -> $40
Car Insurance -> $100
Gas (at $8/gal..) -> $250
Insurance (non-medi) -> $60
Food -> $250 (including eating at our cafeteria at work)
Of course I have a lot of other positions to take care of, but this is just to give you an overview on my cost of living on the salary stated above..
Oh, and for your added benefit, some information on how we are taxed in Germany, example me (not married , no kids):
Income: 5516 USD
Work Tax: 1223 USD
Solidarity Tax (to rebuild Eastern Germany): 60 USD
Church Tax: 89 USD
Healthcare: 415 USD
Retirement: 540 USD
Unemployment Insurance: 83 USD
Pay after taxes (all above are mandatory): 3106 USD
Yes, there are consequences for CEOs who don't perform.
No, there aren't. A CEO who doesn't perform gets to resign with a golden parachute, getting millions of dollars in severance pay. Then they simply lay low for a few months, and then take another CEO job at another company.