Is an 80-hour work week worth it? (Democrat & Chronicle)

[inanna]

2:32 p.m. EDT August 7, 2015

<snip>

Modern realities of work have squashed the idea established in 1938 by the Fair Labor Standards Act that work should be for eight hours a day and 40 hours per week. Smartphones and other devices have electronically tethered workers to the office.

A Pew Research Center survey showed in December that 35 percent of adults said the Internet, email and cellphones have increased work hours. Nearly half said such access has made them more productive at work.

But the added time might not add much productivity, according to Stanford University researcher John Pencavel, who published a paper last year on “The Productivity of Working Hours.” He wrote that employee output falls dramatically after 55 hours, and those who put in 70 hours a week produce nothing more with those extra 15 hours.

<snip>

The Obama administration has proposed changes to overtime laws that would affect 5 million white-collar workers by raising the annual income threshold for salaried workers to receive overtime to $50,440. The change, which could go into effect next year, would force businesses to cut hours or increase pay to comply.

cont'd...

Link: http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/money/business/2015/08/07/long-workweeks-becoming-norm/31287877/

[Turbineguy]

1. It's a great idea

if you want people to drop dead before they are eligible for social security. So it's perfect for a republican paradise. They can make it so that the middle and poor classes pay in, but only the rich can collect it. Besides, people will be too tired to have sex so you can also outlaw abortions.

[SheilaT]

2. When the 40 hour work week

was being proposed, all the business owners were horrified. They absolutely needed their workers to put in those 12 hour days to begin to make a profit. Well, their cries were ignored, and they were completely astonished when they discovered that their workers were now accomplishing more in an 8 hour day than they ever had in the longer day.

This was in virtually every single occupation.

A while back, probably two years or so, I read an article in the NYTimes (I think) that looked at the downside of working very long hours. It's not really breaking news to report that people become less productive after about six hour or so on the job. And that everyone working 16, 18, even 20 hours a day (common in the tech world) to finish a project, is extremely counter-productive. Mistakes go up. Efficiency goes down. According to the article, someone calculated that the first iPhone probably would have come to market two years earlier than it did, had the folks working on it simply worked normal 8 hour days.

I find that relatively easy to believe. We can't function at peak efficiency all the time, for many hours at a stretch. We really do need rest and down time. That's one reason why I find the move to nurses in hospitals working 12 hour shifts to be very disturbing. I don't really want someone managing my whatever I'm the hospital for when they're already exhausted from standing for 10 or 11 hours, doing a very stressful job.

I long ago thought that the 40 hour work week was too long. We should start trying to reduce it, and give people a decent living.

[Fearless]

3. How's cutting hours going to change a salaried person's income?

It doesn't.