The only way to change culture is through law. Look at seatbelt use: decades of public awareness campaigns did nothing, but once it became a legal requirement people switched.
In France working 35h/week is actually enforced by law. I personally think it's good for productivity (France is still considered a very productive country, more than Germany for instance) but this law remains regularly critiziced. Many want it removed or updated.
It's very hard to measure human productivity unfortunately. It's much easier to measure the cost of an employee working less hours for the same salary.
There's a very weird and irrational belief that more hours on the job means more productivity. Projects are often goal-based now.
But management hasn't entirely caught up with the idea that jobs are no longer about clock punching - and longer clock times can mean less real worker value.
This is partly about power dynamics in the workplace. In many corporations control of time and personal freedom are perks that are only available as you move up the hierarchy. Dysfunctional cultures are much more interested in explicit displays of limited freedom for the worker bees than in true increases in productivity.
Not entirely true (I'm French BTW). In a lot of companies if you're engineer or similar you're "cadre", and not subject to the 35h/week limitation: you have flexible work day hours. There's still a maximum limit, I think you must have at least 10h of rest a day but don't quote me on that one.
To compensate for the more than 35h/week work days you do have more vacation days call RTT for "Reduction du Temps de Travail" (Work Time Reduction). It's about 8 days per years, on top of regular vacations.
Not at all. For gay marriage or pot legalization, large shifts in public opinion have preceded changes to laws.
If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them.
The Moloch post is excellent, but it doesn't really apply here. Productivity isn't a zero sum game; unless you're in a dysfunctional stack ranking environment like Microsoft used to have, being more productive doesn't hurt your coworkers.
And for tech workers in particular, it's impossible to prevent you from working "off the clock" in your spare time. Yet people generally don't, probably because as others have noted just adding hours doesn't actually make you more productive.
I think the point of the Moloch reference wasn't that individuals would work longer hours, it's that companies that have people who work longer hours will be more successful.
Also laws are the way to prevent a race to the bottom. If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them.
Oh, is that why almost everyone earns minimum wage?
That's exactly why. Because minimum wage puts a floor on the 'bottom' that's being raced to. Otherwise, people would be earning considerably less than the current minimum wage, because the 'bottom' would be even lower.
The question was sarcastic (poor form, I know). More than 90% of workers earn above minimum wage, despite this supposedly inevitable race to the bottom.
> Every full-time job is 40 hours, which is the maximum allowed without having to pay overtime.
Categorically false. I'd wager 90%+ of the (American) readers here are exempt FTEs, meaning they are paid a salary which is based on calendar days/weeks/months/year, not hours worked.
Very few jobs offer 35- or 30-hour weeks (which would still be called full-time). There are part-time jobs that have much shorter hours, or often no contractual hours, but they're a different thing.
Changing the law is not the only thing that would need to be done.
You would also need an executive order to change the way that federal contracts are handled. Currently, huge numbers of salaried professionals employed by contractor companies have to punch the clock as though they were wage-earners in order for the company to get paid for their work.
If you don't log X hours during a given week, your salary for that week may be docked by N/X. If you log more than X, you are not necessarily paid any more for overtime. The contractor-employer could set X to be 40, or 45, or 50--whatever it wants.
If an executive order said that no individual could work more than 30 hours total in any calendar week on any combination of federal contracts, unless that person is paid an additional 10% of their normal weekly salary for each hour in excess of 30 (aka triple-time OT), while the company still gets paid the same rate, then lo, nearly everyone in the military-industrial complex would suddenly have a 30-hour work week.
As it is now, the contracting arrangements dance around the fuzzy edges of labor law, to the detriment of the workers and to the benefit of their employers, and possibly also to the benefit of several additional layers of middlemen. Changing the law is meaningless if you can't enforce it.
Education just changes the rules of the game when it comes to working time. In the US, once you have your college degree, you morph from an hourly employee where overtime is paid, to an 'exempt employee' where extra hours are unpaid.
Over the years, the federal government has added more jobs to the exempt employee list. This means we get things like fast food store managers making $26K/yr putting in 60 hour weeks. There has been a push to change the minimum salary to $50K/yr for exempt employees, but employers have successfully delayed the implementation of this till late 2016.
Ideally, the US needs to rewrite the Fair Labour Standards Act to be more in line with the EU working time directive which limits the working time to an average of 48 hours over a period of several weeks. This allows overtime to be used in bursts, but not chronically.
I'm confused. That proves his point. Every state at a secondary enforcement seat belt law before 1998. Every state aside from Maine and South Dakota (both of which had relatively high seat belt usage before the law) saw an increase in seat belt usage post-law.
I think you might be confused by the 1998 number. That year came after the after law percentage. Meaning that enforcement immediately after the law also worked.
No, the law only brought the 17% of change. The law change is binary and sudden, but the change in culture brought all the rest, gradually, year after year, before law and after.
You are making assumptions based on zero evidence. The change is binary, enforcement is over time. You are assuming the change from 48% to 65% (which is also a 17% increase) can be explained sans law, but there's zero evidence that's the case.
In the interest of not citing 12+ year old studies relying on 17+ year old data, 2013 usage was 87% and since 1995 there have only been two years of decreasing average usage[0], '05-'06 (82-81%) and '10-'11 (85-84%).
To truly see any trend, we would need to look at not just before the law, but many years before the law.
This is one of those sneaky tricks advocates for government intervention use (or fall victim to). To prove the efficacy of OSHA, for example, proponents will show a chart of workplace fatalities or accidents where there are a few or only one data points before the law and then show some spectacular trend that follows after the law was passed. In reality when you go back many more years it is clear the law had little to do with the trend as workplace safety had been increasing for years prior to the law.
Also laws are the way to prevent a race to the bottom. If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them. Compare OHSA, see http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ .