Her constantly fluctuating schedule left her so exhausted and stressed that there were days “where I would go in the bathroom and just cry,” Nardy said. “I was always running around like a chicken without a head…”
One of the apparent victims of the pandemic is the 40-Hour Work Week, according to a July 13 article by Anna North on VOX.com
The 40-Hour Work Week, in spite of its apparent health, had been encouraged to get vaccinated… by the Biden administration, the CDC, and others.
But it didn’t listen. And it has now succumbed to COVID.
Back in the 1930s, organized labor somehow convinced the federal government to put legal limits on the number of hours an employee could be asked to work, before ‘overtime pay’ kicked in. Employers had been perfectly happy demanding 14-hour work days with no overtime pay, vacation or sick leave, but the federal government sided with labor. No one can remember exactly why. Perhaps it was labor’s catchy slogan: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”
The world turns on catchy slogans, especially when they add up to ’24 hours’.
Surprisingly, the overall result was increased productivity. It turned out that stressed-out, overworked employees are less productive than those who feel well-treated.
This discovery — that happy employees are productive employees — has become much less important as robots and computers have taken on a growing workload. Machines seem to care very little about weekends and vacations… although we might have been tempted to say the same thing about human employees, prior to 1930. We will see what happens when Artificial Intelligence really kicks in, and the machines finally realize they’re entitled to overtime pay.
Of course, today’s machines are still a bit like children, as we head into the third decade of the 21st century, and for the time being, human supervisors are needed to make sure the robots and computers are punching the clock, and not spending too much time hanging around the water cooler.
And there actually might be a few jobs that robots will never be able to do, even with the full development of AI. Some of our Daily Post readers may be able to imagine which jobs those are, because I can’t.
Despite the arrival of robots, however, many humans are still working two or three jobs to try and make ends meet, or are working as contracted labor without benefits or overtime pay. Weekends are a thing of the past for many workers.
We vaguely remember what the word “weekend” meant, once upon a time, but the memory is hazy.
Then the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into the labor market, even though hardly anyone nowadays knows what a monkey wrench is used for, other than for throwing into things. Millions of Americans were laid off or furloughed; millions more were expected to work from home. Going to work was a frightening proposition for some people, especially when everyone had been told to ‘just stay home’. And wearing a mask all day long, while doing a job you didn’t really like… well, those kinds of disagreeable conditions caused many people to question the very idea of even a 1-Hour Work Week.
Why not just stay home? Like they told us to?
Record numbers of Americans across all economic sectors have quit their jobs, with nearly 4 million people handing in their notice in April alone. I assume this phenomenon has been accompanied by a sharp increase in Netflix subscriptions.
But maybe America is behind the curve, so to speak? In recent years, companies in Japan, New Zealand, and elsewhere have experimented with shorter work weeks, often reporting happier workers who actually do better work. One of the more high-profile experiments took place in Iceland (which certainly qualifies as “elsewhere”). Local and federal authorities, working with trade unions, launched two trials of a shortened workweek, one in 2015 and one in 2017. In the trials, about 2,500 workers shifted from a 40-hour work week to 35 or 36 hours, with no cut to their pay. The trials included day care workers, police departments, hospitals, office workers, and a variety of other occupations.
The results? Better work-life balance, lower stress, greater well-being. Worker productivity, in most cases, improved or stayed the same. (Sadly, it did not include humor columnists.)
Encouraged by the results of the trial, many Icelandic workplaces have embraced shorter hours, with 86 percent of the working population either working shorter hours already or on contracts that will phase in the reduction in the coming years.
Could such a reasonable change happen in the US?
Not any time soon, I suspect. Americans are more the ‘all or nothing’ type. And at the moment, ‘nothing’ seems to be the preference for many folks, who were, until recently, trudging through the 40-Hour Work Week.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Or a work week, for that matter.