Are you one of those people putting in extra hours at work? Are you getting overtime, or are you just being allowed the privilege of keeping your job? Does a 40 hour work week seem like an impossible dream?
Sara Robinson has news for you and your employers: you're both getting LESS not MORE by working extra hours. This is something even management knew and accepted once upon a time, but the same mental miasma of Reagan's morning in America has led to a collective memory loss.
More past the Orange Omnilepticon.
Ever since Robinson got back into gear, over at Alternet Visions, she's been writing some excellent articles. There's plenty of commentary out there rehashing the latest news kerfuffle; Visions is one of the few places where you will find people deliberately looking beyond the usual narrow focus to the Big Picture and the Long Now. If you're not looking over there on a regular basis, you're going to miss some thought provoking stuff.
Robinson's latest is one that sounds like heresy: Want to Increase Profits & Productivity? Bring Back the 40-Hour Week. Jerry Pournelle once put together several SF story collections around this idea: what did our predecessors know that we've forgotten or never learned? Robinson's article is firmly in that territory. I'm going to just pull out a few clips: the whole piece is a keeper. Here's a few snippets:
It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits -- starting right now, today -- is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.
By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result. In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe, and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.
emphasis added
Here's why. By the eighth hour of the day, people's best work is usually already behind them (typically turned in between hours 2 and 6). In Hour 9, as fatigue sets in, they're only going to deliver a fraction of their usual capacity. And with every extra hour beyond that, the workers’ productivity level continues to drop, until at around 10 or 12 hours they hit full exhaustion.
So, to summarize: Adding more hours to the workday does not correlate one-to-one with higher productivity. Working overtime is unsustainable in anything but the very short term. And working a lot of overtime creates a level of burnout that sets in far sooner, is far more acute, and requires much more to fix than most bosses or workers think it does. The research proves that anything more than a very few weeks of this does more harm than good.
Think this only applies to people working on an assembly line? Guess again.
After WWII, as the GI Bill sent more workers into white-collar jobs, employers at first assumed that the limits that applied to industrial workers probably didn’t apply to knowledge workers. Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them?
The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls, and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he's really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.
emphasis added
So what happened? Somewhere around the time of Ronald Reagan, what everyone knew, what unions and management both accepted, got thrown down the memory hole.
The rapacious new corporate ethic was summarized by two phrases: "churn ‘em and burn ‘em" (a term that described Microsoft’s habit of hiring young programmers fresh out of school and working them 70 hours a week until they dropped, and then firing them and hiring more), and “working 90 hours a week and loving it!” (an actual T-shirt worn with pride by the original Macintosh team. Productivity experts estimate that we’d have probably had the Mac a year sooner if they’d worked half as many hours per week instead.) And this mentality soon spread from the technology sector to every industry in every corner of the country.
I'm doing Robinson and you an injustice if you don't go look at her entire article. She has facts and history on her side. We're crippling our economy, burning through our workers health, leaving too many people sitting on the sidelines, and promoting management policies that institutionalize this idiocy. (And the same idiots who made this happen think raising the age of retirement is the answer!)
Go read the whole thing, and pass it on. I'll give Robinson the last word:
But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done. Our bosses are depleting resources from of the human capital pool without replenishing them. They are taking time, energy, and resources that rightfully belong to us, and are part of our national common wealth.
If we’re going to talk about creating a more sustainable world, let’s start by talking about how to live low-stress, balanced work lives that leave us refreshed, strong and able to carry on as economic contributors for a full four or five decades, instead of burned out and broken by a too-early middle age. A full, productive 40-year career starts with full, productive 40-hour weeks. And nobody should be able to take that away from us, not even for the sake of a paycheck.