The good news, while I should be working now after hours, Iām pretending to work and reading BB instead.
The downside is if you donāt work longer hours, if you donāt keep yourself on call 24/7, some other maniac will. The upside is that by the time they die of stress related illness in their late 40ās, robots will be primed to take over all the jobs anyway.
I sure as hell donāt work more than 40 hours. Overtime is verboten cause they donāt have budget and hell if I am gonna put in more time and not get paid.
f that. 32 max. I have too much real work to do to waste my time on a job.
That aināt workinā, thatās the way you do it
Money for nothinā and your chicks for free
I am reminded of an old joke from the Soviet Union:
They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
Did Dire Straits teach us nothing?
Thereās been a trend towards stretching the definition of āmanagementā to avoid paying overtime. The Department of Labor is creeping towards making that a more expensive option. Thereās actually no legal limit on the number of hours an exempt employee can be required to work. Except maybe the 13th Amendment.
Dead in the UK as well I think. Iāve never had a job that expected more than 37.5 hours a week. Generally 35 is the norm.
Itās 2 AM and Iām on a work call, but I also work in online services and people keep using our stuff round the clock. The one saving grace is that my boss is pretty good at letting people comp time/etc so Iāve been mostly able to stick to around 40 hours. Mostly.
This is a big part of why I decided not to move back to the US and stayed in Germany. That said, the thing that bugs me about the article is that it only talks about the hours managers work, probably the one class of worker most willing to put in overtime so that he or she can look good at the next performance review. And if they makeup a significant part of the workforce, then I guess itās just another sign that we have too many chiefs and not enough indians.
Iām paid to work forty hours a week, so I work forty hours a week, no more. Why would I work if Iām not being paid?
/sarcasm on
'Cuz thatās how you show how smart you are, by working for free for bosses who make 250 times more than you do.
/sarcasm off
āā¦arenāt in such dire straights.ā
I weep for us poor managers who have to work 9, 10 hours per dayā¦ the horror, the horror! Oh to be working on a construction site, getting paid a fifth of what I get paid, doing dangerous, physically demanding work, but getting paid hourly.
A colleague was complaining about the hours we work (9 or 10 per day) and I asked him āwhen were you ever told that this was a 40-hour a week job? Was it ever written down?ā
(BTWā¦ my European friends consider working 9-5 an 8 hour dayā¦ because they get paid to eat lunch. The standard American 8 hour day is 8-5.)
No, here weāre working more than 40 hoursā¦ or half of full time employees are doing so, at least.
There could be any number of reasons - some people work over out of a sense of obligation or out of pressure from the employer. An overt or covert threat could be involved. Not everyone is lucky enough to be able to limit their work hours to 40 a week.
Correct me if Iām wrong, but productivity has improved since the '80s. 1880s.
So if we focus on the work that needs doing and helps people, and cut out the work that only creates more work and/or more trouble and hurts other people, then it shouldnāt take 40 hours per person. It shouldnāt take 16 hours per person either any more.
But then as a society we expect kids to put in 35+ hours of school 7 1/2+ hours going back and forth and 12 1/2+ hours of homework every week.
Thankfully I have a Union that fought for the right to only work 35 hours a week.
Yeah, itās very easy for a workplace to develop a culture of praising people who work extra hours to ājust get it doneā, covering up for bad project management or deadline setting - despite the fact that thereās a fair amount of evidence that working more than 40 or so hours a week is generally going to result in less overall work being done due to increased mistakes and productivity loss.
