Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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'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.
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!
The author also assumes that all man-hours are interchangeable. Someone with experience working an extra two hours on a project he's been tending all day is apparently only as productive as a new kid just starting his shift, groggy from sleep and unaware of the project's current state.
Then of course there's the issues of which industry you're working in, attitude, office politics, and so forth. Articles such as this one often consider all the many unemployed able people as interchangeable, but they really aren't. While so many people are looking for work, there are also many companies looking for employees already - the requirements of the two sets just don't overlap often enough to eliminate unemployment.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
Yes, then we'll be poor like Sweden, Denmark and Finland... oh wait...
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.
"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
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?
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.
Angry wives? I love that game!
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.
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.
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
So that's the attraction with golf!
http://www.acetonestudio.com
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.
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"
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
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.
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.
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