My privilege is showing here, but this is a real frustration for me.
I don’t really want to make a ton more money. Between my wife and I we were able to afford to buy a reasonably nice home in the Seattle suburbs (or, well, are in the process of doing that) - we don’t have kids and aren’t planning on it. My wife expects to get a raise up to normal paying rates soon and that’ll put us comfortably in the upper middle class.
All the conversation at work is around promotion and moving up and I really just wish the promotion was for less hours at the same pay. I’m unfortunately not the kind of genius that can just roll in to a company and say ‘I work for these hours because I’m literally the guy who wrote Ruby byeeeee’. Talking about spending more time at home is seen as lazy and antithetical to the goals of business, and it’s a real frustration.
[/whine]
Edit: the flipside is that I guess I’m at least glad that we’re no longer working the poor to death AND not paying them anything. It sucks to struggle to make ends meet when you can’t find work, but it sucks even more to work 80 hours a week and still not put food on the table.
I’m in a similar situation. I have a good job that I earned by getting a decent education in a field with considerable demand that I researched before hand instead of just picking whatever seemed fun at the time. I make enough money to provide my family’s needs and quite a few wants without living paycheck to paycheck. I only have to work 40 hours a week. I’m very content. Any promotion from where I’m at would involve managing people instead of machines, with more hours and stress. It’s not worth it to me. The other option would be to try and start my own business, but again… more hours and stress. The risk is not something tolerable with a family involved either. It would at least offer the potential of maybe getting rich. That’d be nice, but I don’t really believe money makes people happier once they adapt to having it. Certainly not having enough money can make life miserable. But I have enough. I think working less hours could make me happier though. I’d honestly rather work less hours than have more money.
It would be nice if we had a big cultural shift towards less hours. That would help employment I think…particularly as automation accelerates. With our current political environment, I don’t see any positive change on that front happening any time soon regardless of how elections play out. Very few of the people in charge seem qualified or deserving and our governments do not keep up with technology.
Could have stopped there, and pretty much covered it. All ethical considerations aside (these are MBAs we’re talking about, after all) the central conceit of MBA training is the idea that, with proper training to be a manager, you can manage people who are doing anything, regardless of your level of subject knowledge. This it utter bullshit on the face of it, and anyone who doesn’t realize that is probably not competent to do much of anything. At least in my industry, the situation I’m in, where everyone from my manager on up to the CEO started out as an engineer, is typical. Not to say, by any means, that it prevents all management bullshit, but I shudder to think what it would be like if they were all MBAs.
Back in the day folks complained about the “nine to five grind.” Dolly Parton had a hit song about it in the 80s. Now it’s a rare privilege to work those hours: “What! You get to see daylight both before AND after work? You get weekends off? And your hours aren’t cut to zero when business is slow? Lucky you!”
I had that conversation with a potential client today. I said that I work from 8 or 9 until 5 or 6, and I try not to work weekends if I can help it. She said I was lucky, but it’s self-preservation. I didn’t say that, but it’s the truth.
I’m a freelancer as a result of some major burnout a few years ago, and there is nowhere to go from here. If I get to that same place again, I’m screwed. So I ignore the phone and the computer on weekends.
I used to get after the younger team members when they talked about overtime and doubly so for not recording it.
I was good about taking a long lunch the next day if I worked an extra hour the previous evening. We were all exempt (though with the new rules a bunch of them won’t be anymore) but I would tell them look you start being stupid after so long also if you need to work the extra time then put it in cause nobody is going to figure out we need more heads unless they ask hey why is everyone putting in 45-50hrs regularly.
My understanding is that the 9 to 5 workday happened in part because Henry Ford tried different things at different factories and found that when he worked people longer than 8 hours they didn’t produce any extra. Henry Ford didn’t have a bleeding heart for his poor workers, he used A-B testing to figure out the right length for a workday, and 8 hours was it. Of course that was for factory work, presumably it varies. But for thinking work I wouldn’t be surprised if the best workday was considerably less than 8 hours. It’s not like you stop thinking about your job when you leave the office anyway.
“Something they agree to do” is a pretty broad swath. I’d lose if I agreed to give my wallet to a mugger, but given the situation I’ve already found myself in it might be my best choice. I know economists like to draw a circle around coercion and theft like they are boolean rather than a spectrum but that’s just bad modelling.
Increasing hours didn’t happen because of market forces - generally people don’t actually produce more when they work longer hours, and that point of diminished-to-nothing returns is hit long before many workweeks end. Paying for almost no additional productivity while breeding ill will is bad business, and if employment markets were “efficient” then it wouldn’t happen. The long hours happen because working longer hours has become a status symbol.
A few years ago (I think it was around the time of the Occupy movement), one of the local charities that helps families at Christmas put out an article saying that for the first time ever, they were seeing more employed applicants who still met their criteria for eligibility than unemployed applicants. Some were working as many as 4 jobs but were still eligible for charity support based on the poverty limit. It was kind of a shocking thought.
