There is no magic to working 8 hours every day or any other number for that matter.
Before the industrial revolution, most people were farmers. They got up at sunrise and typically worked long, hard days in the fields - workdays that were not circumscribed by any arbitrary time limit but rather defined by whatever it took to deal with the exigencies of each day.
The 8-hour day, as some sort of idealized goal, came about as a direct result of the industrial revolution. With people moving to cities and taking up factory work, reformers began to characterize such work situations as exploitative, particularly of children but also of adults in terms of length of hours worked in physically demanding situations. The answer for reformers lay in having governments prescribe maximum normative work periods, with anything in excess of the prescribed maximum being deemed extraordinary and warranting extraordinary compensation. Hence, in America, we eventually got the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week. (See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day for an overview).
I don't think "corporate America" has any particular stake in the 8-hour day. If anything, employers would undoubtedly want to have the power to shape the work schedules of employees in more flexible ways, especially by being able to freely demand longer work hours at normal compensation as a condition of continued employment. Of course, this would require repeal of the wage-and-hour laws that today proscribe any such thing. My point, though, is that it is those laws and not any scheme by employers that keeps the 8-hour structure in place as the normative work environment.
Bottom line: given pure freedom of contract, people could work any schedules they want and, in fact do so (that is what it means to be in business for yourself); however, given the problems arising from pure freedom of contract, the law imposes rigid limits deemed beneficial from a societal perspective on what may be expected of employees. That, I believe (and, I don't think, any other major factor), is what requires most people to work 8-hour schedules as their normative workday, at least in the U.S.
On a final note: the typical startup environment is really a throwback to the freedom of farming days because, in the earliest stages, there basically are no formal employees but rather just founders working round-the-clock like madmen for what might often be described as "below dirt wages," and, in later stages, there are large numbers of "exempt" engineers who are not subject to the overtime rules and hence who are also working insane hours - thus, not too many 8-hour days in your prototypical startup. I don't think most of the participants regard this as exploitation, probably because most of it is self-driven, i.e., most such people want to drive themselves hard in order to succeed.
Great comment. One thing I'd point out however -- you make farming sound like the hardest job one could have. Perhaps it is durring the summer. However, many northern famers used to 'hibernate' all winter. Here's a great description of the phenomenon:
> In 1900, The British Medical Journal reported that peasants of the Pskov region in northwestern Russia “adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. ... The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.” http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html
That may have happened and have been possible in 1900, but I grew up in a farming family and there is no way any farming people who wish to be profitable and have a good business do this today.
Today it's more like you have a job for year round income like hardwood flooring or whatever and then in the Summer you have 2 jobs: whatever job you have year round and then your additional farming work.
I guess it depends on what you are farming. Where I grew up the farmers grew commodity crops like wheat and soybeans and did mostly take the winter off. Sometimes they'd have a 2nd job as a pee-wee hockey coach or something like that.
I seriously doubt anyone in rural Russia in 1900 was hibernating because there life was so easy that they could manage to sleep half the year.
The peasants in such an area were probably only a generation or so away from serfdom so their living conditions were probably pretty grim and this is north western Russia we are talking about - not exactly a region famed for its gentle winters.
Before the industrial revolution, most people were farmers.
And before they were farmers, most people were hunter-gatherers, whose work estimates range widely as measured by anthropologists and others; some may have "worked" in the sense we think of it in the neighborhood of four hours a day.
(I don't have a great citation on it, but I know I've read variations on it before, perhaps in Napoleon Chagnon's work or Robert Wright's The Moral Animal).
Still, "workdays that were not circumscribed by any arbitrary time limit but rather defined by whatever it took to deal with the exigencies of each day" is still true.
Note that many grad students and profs live similar lives -- they don't have much allocated time when they must teach, but they still have to get their work done.
> I don't think "corporate America" has any particular stake in the 8-hour day. If anything, employers would undoubtedly want to have the power to shape the work schedules of employees in more flexible ways, especially by being able to freely demand longer work hours at normal compensation as a condition of continued employment.
This is already in place at many non-startup tech companies now. There is nothing on the books stating that if you only work 40 hours/week you will be fired or demoted, but at every company I've worked for, it is known that if you want to be "in favor" with management, you best make things happen when needed.
> the typical startup environment is really a throwback to the freedom of farming days
It sounds like you are romanticizing the life of a farmer a bit here. Are you? There is a clear distinction between having to work 15 hour days and wanting to (in order to succeed).
Most people were still farmers. Greater than 90% of the population had to be farmers, because if that wasn't the case the people would starve, because farming was so inefficient. While many improvements in agriculture throughout history had vastly increased the agricultural surplus and the capacity for non-farm work nevertheless the bulk of the population had been farmers. Only since the late 19th century has that changed.
> Greater than 90% of the population had to be farmers, because if that wasn't the case the people would starve
That's quite a bold statement. Do you have a source to back it up?
If that was the case, there wouldn't be such a thing as a city or a civilization.
From what I understand, most people in Europe were peasants because the ruling class wouldn't let them be anything else, not because it was the only sustainable choice economically.
I think you are thinking about serfdom - which ended at different times (15th Century or so for what is now the UK) and a recently as 1861 in places like Russia.
I happen to agree with the premise, but really, this is not a well-stated case.
But thousands, if not millions of people commute to work every single day.
Come on. Thousands, if not millions? They say that the number of people in Manhattan alone increases by a million during the day. More importantly, though, this has absolutely nothing to do with the 8 hour workday.
You still need to travel from wherever you live to wherever you do your work; the only way to solve this is to move those places closer together (maybe even to the same place).
In fact, I’m willing to bet that most people aren’t doing anything for 40% of the working week.
Assuming that this is true, there are a variety of alternate hypotheses. For example, this problem is pretty much exclusive to knowledge workers. Perhaps knowledge workers need "breaks" just as physical laborers do, but because the culture discourages it, they invent their own "breaks".
Today, human creativity is at an all time high because less and less people are working in offices.
This is self-contradictory: either human creativity is at an all-time high, or it's reduced by working in offices. After all, there was a time when nobody worked in offices. I'd wager that the proportion of humans who work in offices is actually increasing, even if you only look at Western cultures. Of course, I'd hardly say that human creativity is at an all-time high either (even for Western cultures alone, that was during the Renaissance).
I have no doubt that creative output is higher now then it was during Renaissance. At that time they started to give more value to creativity and they have a few people that were able to live from the creative endeavors, thanks to the patronage of the rich. Nowadays wehave several thousands or even millions of people that are able to live from their creative efforts.
Agreed. As one data point, the different in my mindset between struggling through London rush hour at 8.30, crammed in on a tube with my body pressed against the throng, versus coming in at 9.30 when the tube is empty, I can get a seat and relax, read a book, and be calm, is absolutely massive.
move those places closer together (maybe even to the same place).
I found that picking a work contract, then housing close by works very well. No commute, and when my car breaks down (often) I can just walk to work. It helps to work for places that are either design-centric (and in livable city neighborhoods) or corporate campuses (which are generally in residential areas.)
That assumes a flexibility which isn't the case for many outside the young and single though. As soon as you introduce extra people and responsibilities into the equation you can't just up sticks and move because your job has changed.
A few years ago I accepted a job in downtown Chicago. To minimize my commute, and to buy me time to learn the city without having to make a big commitment upfront to a particular home or long-term lease, I got an apartment just a few blocks walking distance from my new job. I liked it enough that I stayed there for 3 years. About a year or so into it, my employer moved their offices to a new location that was closer to my apartment: literally across the street from my apartment building. Insane luck. It gave me so much more free time and reduced commute stress it was worth it. In my mid 20's I had a few jobs where my commute was 1-2 hours, one-way, twice daily, M-F. By my 30's, I vowed "never again". After leaving the Chicago job I reduced my daily required commute down even further: I do independent contracting and therefore can work in my home, or wherever my body+laptop happens to be at the time. Saves money, saves time, less pollution, less stress. No going back, baby.
"Unhappiness: It seems that the typical 9to5er is living for the weekends. Radio stations say things like “it’s hump day, you’re almost there.” Almost where? Why are we constantly trying to get a destination other than where we’re at?"
This is an interesting point that I realized myself not long ago. A lot of people want to get from weekend to weekend, from vacation to vacation. It is a great escape. Their everyday lives somehow seem not very worth living to them. What I find amazing is how many people admittedly live that way, instead of changing something about their everyday life (especially work). Regarding the percentage of our awake time that we work over the course of our lives, it cannot be very healthy to say: Come saturday everything will be alright.
There is nothing wrong with working at something you do not like in order to support that which you love. I have known people that aspired to be painters or authors who worked a much less interest day job to pay the bills unless and until they succeeded.
I have also known people to work a job they do not like to support hobbies they love. And of course, if you have a family, you may reasonably choose a job you do not like that pays better than one you like more but that does not pay well.
I do not understand those people who go through life with no passion, moving from a job they do not care about to TV with the occassional party. I do fully understand those who work jobs they do not like in order to support something they love or are passionate about though.
Valid point, but still: I there are things you love, do more of them. Incorporate them into every day. Do not create a mystical double life that is divided into work and pleasure. Try to make room for one in the other.
Mmm. Your job doesn't have to be what you love. Those jobs don't tend to pay very well, and may stress you out by making you compromise your creative vision (or just leave you sick and tired of the thing you once loved). But it should at least be a job that you're okay with and doesn't leave you miserable.
This is so very true. I'm back working at a place that my life is just like that - I look forward to the weekend throughout the workweek so much that now when Sunday comes around I can't enjoy it fully because I know that I'm back to the office on the next day. It's really not a good way to live.
It hasn't always been like that - when I did try my start up I worked far more, but enjoyed it far more. I've been blaming my discontent on me maybe not liking technology as much as I used to, but I'm coming around to the re-realization that maybe I'm just not doing something with it that is fulfilling.
What works for me is having hobbies and activities that I'm enthusiastic about. So instead of looking forward to the weekend I'm only looking forward to end of the workday so that I can practice piano or exercise or go to an improv workshop. In my experience, passive things like watching TV/movies or listening to music don't count.
Of course a better solution would be, as you say, to do something more fulfilling during the day.
In the case of unhappiness you could try doing more things that make you happy. How to do that is an individual decision I think. I, for one, founded a startup and am much happier than before. I do not long for weekends to come anymore, same with vacation. If you like what you do, the desire to flee subsides, and I think that improves your quality of life big time.
I think there is sometimes a distinction missed in these "you should do what you love"-arguments: it should be formulated "you should try to do what you love"…and it has to be taken to account that many (if not most) will fail at the attempt. This is very hard to do without some type of social support structure.
> from the OA: "Unhappiness: It seems that the typical 9to5er is living for the weekends. Radio stations say things like “it’s hump day, you’re almost there.”
Been there, done that, have t-shirt. I now live a life where I don't necessarily look forward more to the weekends. Also, I generally don't look forward to going to sleep because it means I stop being happy (or stop being conscious of being happy, anyway), though I don't mind waking up because I don't always dread forcing myself to slog into some 9-to-5 job working for The Man. Now I work for myself, essentially, even if that means I may rent myself out sometimes to others to earn money. Since I'm more in charge of my own time and body location, and what I work on, I'm much more happy.
Also the problem of living for the weekend, and toiling away miserably for the sake of the steady paycheck is that, for me at least, when the paycheck comes you're more tempted to spend it on things that give you quick short-term boosts to happiness -- in order to drown out your default unhappy state of mind. If instead your default state of mind is happiness and freedom, then when you get checks you're more likely to do something wise and/or non-emotional or non-transient with it. Typically converting it into something that buys more long-term happiness or security, rather than short-term transient happiness or excitement.
Inefficiency - "You should blame the system that forced you to work within the structure of the 8 hour work day."
When you are expected to work 8 hours a day, the problem is not that you fill your time with useless shit and then become unproductive.
The problem is that you feel like you need to demonstrate or show to the world that you're doing work for the whole 8 hours, or more specifically, you need to show that you're not slacking off for too long.
So, let's take programmers as an example. I've had colleagues who alt-tab A LOT. Basically, 15 minutes in the IDE, tab out, 5 minutes of chatting. 15 minutes back to the IDE, 5 minutes back to browsing. For a 8 hour day, that's 75% of the time working. Good right? NO.
Context switching is expensive. A large part of the 15 minutes of work in the IDE is resetting the frame of mind to work.
Now why do people context switch. Simple. Micro-management from project managers, team leaders, bosses ...
If I, as a team leader, look over at your screen and see you surfing the net for 1 full hour, I'll get pissed. But if you alt-tab a lot, there is a good chance when I'm spying over your shoulder, you're on the IDE. Good worker!
I hate it. Which is why when I had my own team, I told my guys, you want to surf, sure, spend as long as you want. But when you code, focus on the coding for a full X amount of time. So, I tell them, you want a break, surf for 30 minutes. But make sure you get full one and a half hours of coding done first. Plan what you need to do, tell the team what you aim to achieve, and do it.
I also find that when people don't need to pretend to work, and can rest in peace chatting, surfing, they tend to be less stress.
Another example, sleeping in the office is a big no-no. So what do people do? They run off to the stairs to sleep. Or to the toilet. Ridiculous. If my guy has been pulling all nighters, I think it is perfectly fine for him to rest his head on the desk for a while.
Pomodoro and variants thereof prescribe exactly a context switch in some intervals, quite successfully. 25-30 minutes of work followed by 5-30 minutes of not working. I personally tend toward a 30/10 split with a longer break halfway through the day and it works very well.
I probably should not be telling you how to do your job, but I will nevertheless suggest that you concentrate more on daily or weekly progress than monitoring things minute to minute.
Henry Ford found that his factory workers were more productive per week at 40 hours than 48 hours. It's not a big surprise that what worked in his factory isn't ideal for every job almost a century later.
IIRC Ford essentially doubled average pay to encourage more workers to keep coming to his factory. Essentially for working 6 months, you could take 6 months off and make the same yearly as you had at another job. He then, around a decade later IIRC, dropped it to a 40-hour week, which then killed turnover. He had a near permanent staff, making great wages for reduced hours.
Would you be willing to work 50% fewer hours, for 50% less pay?
Most employers are willing to soak up the waste, in order to have access to their staff throughout the work day. And most employees are eager to get the extra pay, even if they aren't spending the extra hours productively.
As an entrepreneur, I would love a 20 hour a week job that paid $40K a year -- it would provide financial stability and free time, allowing me to bootstrap businesses indefinitely. Most people aren't looking for that type of position, however. They're looking to maximize take-home pay.
I am currently enjoying this. Work between 25-30 hours, and my salary was reduced by 25%. I am thinking about reducing it more and working less hours.
It is quite tricky though. You want to work 4 hours a day for someone, not 6, because by the time you are done with 6 you usually need a transition period and before you know it you are feeling tired.
I agree. I started contracting recently. At first I imagined getting 7-8 hours of billable work in every day. The reality is I've been able to do 4 - 5 hours of billable work every day before feeling burnt out and a bit crazy.
Depends. Am I salaried or hourly? If I'm hourly, I guess that's just the way it works. If I'm salaried, how is it that I can be expected to put in 50% more hours for 0% more pay, but if I want to work less hours I have to take a pay cut?
It seems to me that programmers simply aren't paid according to the hours they put in.
Within the limits of "what they already know how to do" and of "what risks they are willing to take." That is why there are so few creative and self-employed types - most people would far rather work longer hours than have to learn anything new or take any real risks.
Salary is only half of your compensation- the other half is benefits. Employers don't often do half weeks for salaried employees with benefits because you are getting 50% of the work for 75% of the cost.
The system is broken by this need to have everyone available at one specific time frame. The best experiences I've had working for tech companies is when the culture is basically "We don't care if you come in or not, or when you work, just get stuff done." Of course there's a few exceptions, for example if a in-person meeting is required, everyone is expected to attend (unless you're in a different area/country, in which case just use video chat to 'be there').
When I'm on a roll I don't want to stop working, as a matter of fact, I once got to the office at 6am (I avoided traffic commuting at this time) on a Monday and left at 2pm Thursday. Although I didn't sleep at all, which was not a healthy thing to do, not only did I finish a three week task in 80 hours, but I ended up automating a bunch of processes, and fixing a bunch of bugs. I easily did a months work (probably more) in that time frame. Not only was I awarded a bonus, but I was expected not to work for a 15 days, of course I was till being payed as if I were still working. In contrast, I've had days where the only productive time I've had are two or three hours, and that's OK to, as long as you're reaching your goals.
How does commuting fit in this? The problem of commuting is related to the fact that majority of commuting is synchronized to within 2 ~2-3 hour periods. As long as we have this happening, the 'naive' argument is that commuting actually argues for longer work days with less days of work. 4x10 or something, so the travel:work ratio is better.
Even a more flexible work schedule (for everyone) is not necessarily the solution. The fact that most people will be working during the day will mean that there will always been surges ~8-10 and ~4-6. It might lessen it's effect, but it'll still be there, and after the initial adjustment period, will seem every bit as unproductive and annoying.
Commuting isn't going to get better unless a very large percentage switches to work at home, or lives within walking/biking distance of their workplace, or everyone accepts some great overlord who coordinates everyone's travel and work time to minimize peak traffic (I'm sure the relevant algorithms already exist).
Not necessarily. I work in a relatively small town with 2 companies in it, both companies employee >10,000 people each. You'd think that there would be horrible traffic but there isn't. One company starts the day at somewhere between 6 and 8, while the other company starts the day between 8 and 10. It is just a coincidence I think, but it really works out for traffic.
I know most people are horrified at the thought of showing up at work at 6am, I went from a job where I started the day at 10am to this one and was shocked. I typically get in around 7am even though my boss is in earlier. But we're leaving at 3 or 4pm, and I get to go surfing after work (helps to be 5 minutes from the ocean). It has its advantages.
The problem of commuting is that it exists. Instead of a reliably short walk to work, with a detour to the coffee shop included, commuters have to drive an hour in heavy traffic. Each alone.
Why is that then? Because offices and homes are built so far away from each other, and if you wished you couldn't easily build mixed use office+apartment+commercial blocks under many of the typical zoning laws.
There is a hypothesis out there that says that this phenomena, at least here in the US, may have been the result of an intentional conspiracy by parties that had a strong financial incentive to require millions of people to commute in vehicles over very long distances each day. Who would benefit? Oil companies and car manufacturers, primarily, though also suburban home builders and real estate speculators, road contractors, etc. Who helped promote the conversion, in this scenario? The preceding, in partnership with the government and mass media. There were legitimate "non-conspiratorial" reasons why someone might want to live in a suburb rather than a downtown urban area (such as White Flight or new married couples wanting to raise their kids in an area far away from the perceived dangers of city life, such as bums, gangs, "perversion", etc.) But at the same time, there were certain industries and companies that stood to gain very well financially if the whole suburb-highways-long-commute-and-back system took off.
In most Arab countries, the typical work cycle is 6 hours per day, 6 days a week. Recently it shrank to 5 days a week; I'm not sure if the hours-per-day increased.
Typically it was from 8 to 2.
The same goes for school. High school (IIRC) was from 7 to 1, or something like that.
When I was studying in Vienna, I found out about their interesting model for school day structure.
Students would go to school for half of the day. The second half would be dedicated to practicing a skill or trade e.g. piano lessons or culinary arts.
I'm not sure if this is institutional throughout Austria, but I know it certainly happened a lot in Vienna.
Employees want to earn the same amount every month and everything in their life is based on that, rent/mortgage, bills, loans etc. Employers end up meeting this need by making employees work a set amount of hours a month. People typically can't deal with less or more money a month in sensible way. Sometimes there isn't much for employees to do, but that's a risk the employer either takes or should fix. Some employers have a flexitime system to ease this a little.
The 9-5 is a result of those factors and there are alternatives, start a product business or do freelance work.
Sorry if this is a little off topic, but I have always wondered when Americans talk about working 9-5 for 8 hour days. Does that mean you get paid for lunch time? Or do you not eat lunch?
Swedish also work 8 hours days (or slightly less), but lunch hour is not included. Programmers, even at big companies, generally get to choose which 8 hours. 7-4, 8-5, 9-6, 10-7, either is fine.
I don't know of any American companies that pay employees to eat lunch. 9-5, I think is just an American colloquialism at this point. If you get an hour for lunch, then it's really 9-6.
I've not heard of anyone around these parts who are truly 9-5. We here in Kansas are 8-5 with a state enforced hour lunch break. We are not paid for the break.
Looking at the 8-hour day from the inside, employee, perspective is one thing. But it's not the only one.
There is another reason for the 8 hour workday, maintaining real-time business-to-business interactions with a single shift workforce.
An expectation has been built up that businesses will be open from 9-5. This allows businesses to handle person to person interactions on an expected schedule. As a rule, if you need to contact someone for business you call them during this time.
Some companies can do with the delayed response form of email but phone and face-to-face conversations still hold weight in non software centric companies.
Some companies might establish their own culture, between a limited number of parties they interact with. However, if businesses at large started shifting their hours all over the place it would make things very confusing for a new player to establish business with them.
True, but this still places some constraints on the rest of the company. Said random contacts will eventually need to pass some info on internally and get answers to report back to external organizations.
For white collar workers, that may have no impact on actual productivity per week. For blue collar workers, it's more likely to. Speaking in general terms.
I understand it's important... I just don't like criticism without offering an alternative. Sure, anyone can say something is wrong.. but what's the point of bringing it up without saying what a better way should be?
> I just don't like criticism without offering an alternative.
well sucks for you. god forbid someone should point out a fire without being a certified firefighter. raising awareness gets other people thinking about how to solve the problem you've noticed.
1. Many people don't say it's wrong, most people think the system is there for very good reasons
2. He's not only saying it's bad, he's attempting to dissect and analyze why it's bad
I actually like it when someone offers criticism without offering an alternative. If he offered an alternative, then people might be tempted to reject the whole criticism if they don't like the alternative. For example, if he proposed 4 hours work day (just for example), then someone could think "oh, he's just saying this because he's a lazy ass".
would a task based tracking system not be sufficient ? define a quantifiable high level abstract goal e.g. say implement high performance dhcp server. have an overall plan, with weekly (or some other granularity) checkpoints to assess progress etc. etc.
you get the idea right ? or am i just being too naive ?
Remember how seemingly everyone in university left assignments to the end? And that continued all the way to the end of school? Even 4th year when you really should have learned better?
Yeah. If you let everyone work that way, then you're ALL in for some heartache. At least when your forced to hour in, now the majority will be working somewhat all the time. They might not be working at full efficiency, but they're working.
This is good brouhaha down with the man confirmation bias feeding writing, but...
-The commute has nothing to do with the work day. If you work less or more, you still have to commute to get there to do the work.
-The author presents no alternative, except hints at the digital nomadic work style. If you're going to try to dismantle a structure that, as written in the article, has kept big business in America running for so long, please provide a reasonable sounding alternative so if we agree with you we can do something about it.
The idea around commuting is this: With the 9-5 workday, nearly everyone commutes at the same time which causes epic traffic jams. If we staggered the workdays so that some worked 8-4, 9-5, or 10-6, 11-7, etc then the traffic problems of most cities would disappear.
Yes, that's still an 8-hour workday. But it's not the same as the current 8-hour workday model we use right now.
I've worked 7-4 the last 3 years and it helps a little in the mornings but the afternoons are about the same (Los Angeles traffic). It's still worth it to have the office to myself for 2 hours in the morning.
Within the past few generations, physical labor jobs have diminished while knowledge worker jobs have risen. Along with that, more and more knowledge worker jobs have become creative.
The traditional norms of working hours, work environment, management techniques, etc. established from past eras where physical labor dominated work are no longer relevant (and in some cases actively harmful) when it comes to knowledge work and especially artistic and creative work. Worse yet, many people do not appreciate or acknowledge the creative nature of many of these new jobs (software development being an excellent example).
As a result most working environments for a lot of modern creative work are wholly dysfunctional. Is it any wonder then why job churn is so incredibly high in the tech sector? If you're working in a dysfunctional environment then you are much more likely to switch jobs for a little extra pay or merely for a change.
Unfortunately, a lot of labor law is also very heavily biased toward physical labor as the model for all work. It'll take a very long time for these biases, bad traditions, and legal hindrances to be replaced by systems that actually work.
> What’s amazing is that if we started to rethink the 8 hour workday in terms of a person’s creative capacity, instead of the number of hours they work, we may possibly tap into the best work that every individual has inside of them.
So he means we are now going to judge people by their output. Objectively. Like pay them for work produced, not time spent "working."
That's a great idea in theory.
What about the lazy, handicapped, and less-than-full-potential people? (I'm not at all clumping them as all equally bad.) They won't be able to produce as much, at least initially, and consequently receive less pay. Just wait until the ACLU hears about it.
We have a 9 to 5 structure because anybody can show up for 8 hours a day. If we don't change our value structure, our workday will never change.
Measuring output isn't quite as simple as you suggest. Which janitor was more productive, the one who cleaned more rooms, or the one who did a more thorough job? Or the one who had to clean up the vomit?
An interesting, but crucial aside: who still works a classic, 8 hour workday? It seems like an anachronism this day and age, at least in my experience. While companies technically demand 40 hours per week and no more, most corporate cultures unofficially pressure employees into 10 or even 12 hour days. 8 to 7 has been pretty typical of many of the firms for which I've worked. Sometimes those hours are extended on either end; sometimes they're condensed. But they're always more than 8 hours.
The 8-hour workday is in large part due to the efforts of the labor movement at the turn of the last century. Prior to that, 10- or 12-hour days weren't uncommon or legally restricted. Subsequent to the initial reduction to 8 hours in workday hours, it was thought that the trend would continue. Robert Levine touches on the 8-hour workday in his book _A Geography of Time_, where he briefly describes W.K. Kellogg's initiative in the 1930's to reduce the workday to 6 hours at his Michigan factory. He felt that hard work would replace long hours. According to Levine, "For nearly two decades, by nearly every yardstick, Kellogg's brainchild worked brilliantly"[1]. It only met its doom after WWII, when, as a result of a policy linking higher productivity to increased wages, workers began demanding eight hours again to increase their overall income.
Does anyone know the context this was written from? No sense compared to a 10 hour work day? 6 hour? Roughly 8 hours a day broken up as convenient? However long it takes to get a well-measured hunk of work done?
The article doesn't really mean anything without this.
From years of consulting I'm always surprised when I feel like I've worked a full day over 8 hours, but am only billing an honest 5-6. Distractions, life responsibilities, break time, etc. all mean 8 hours is not 8 hours. I do think most employers know this and it's acceptable - after all salaried employees are not paid by the hour and being there can be as important for overall productivity as it is for the same person to be individually productive.
Personally I'd be in favor of a 4 day 10 hour work week. I think it could be similarly productive, cuts down on commute time, and yields a better quality of life.
I think the rational solution is to move to a 6-hour workday. You can argue that then people will still spend 2 hours not working, but I think that's not most people's experience.
8 hours doesn't make sense for knowledge workers.
Even if you're in a position like manufacturing or retail, the continued year over year productivity growth since the 8 hour workday became norm should mean that you can enjoy a higher standard of living while working 25% less time. Of course this is not true as workers' compensation has nothing to do with the surplus value extracted from their labor (a fact which works against you if you actually have to be accountable for your work; OTOH if you spend most of the work day goofing off on the Internet or being an incompetent manager, it really works in your favor).
No, I love my kids and they don't cloud my judgement. I mean kids work well with routines and what is wrong with going to work at the same time every day and coming home at the same time?
It's not your family that clouds your judgement, and I'm not saying "you" as in you, I mean the generic you.
One's judgement is clouded by his own sense of responsibility, it's common for SJ types[1][2] to value stability over enhancing the human condition. "if it works don't fix it".
Even more so when one feels he has an immediate, real, concrete, practical, measurable responsibility to provide for his family.
This could cloud one's judgement because:
The immediate need of his family seems real, while the need of society for better working conditions seems "out there", not really as important or as concrete as the need to provide for his family.
This is what I mean by the OP's judgement not being clouded. He can think clearly about the large-picture issues.
Before the industrial revolution, most people were farmers. They got up at sunrise and typically worked long, hard days in the fields - workdays that were not circumscribed by any arbitrary time limit but rather defined by whatever it took to deal with the exigencies of each day.
The 8-hour day, as some sort of idealized goal, came about as a direct result of the industrial revolution. With people moving to cities and taking up factory work, reformers began to characterize such work situations as exploitative, particularly of children but also of adults in terms of length of hours worked in physically demanding situations. The answer for reformers lay in having governments prescribe maximum normative work periods, with anything in excess of the prescribed maximum being deemed extraordinary and warranting extraordinary compensation. Hence, in America, we eventually got the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week. (See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day for an overview).
I don't think "corporate America" has any particular stake in the 8-hour day. If anything, employers would undoubtedly want to have the power to shape the work schedules of employees in more flexible ways, especially by being able to freely demand longer work hours at normal compensation as a condition of continued employment. Of course, this would require repeal of the wage-and-hour laws that today proscribe any such thing. My point, though, is that it is those laws and not any scheme by employers that keeps the 8-hour structure in place as the normative work environment.
Bottom line: given pure freedom of contract, people could work any schedules they want and, in fact do so (that is what it means to be in business for yourself); however, given the problems arising from pure freedom of contract, the law imposes rigid limits deemed beneficial from a societal perspective on what may be expected of employees. That, I believe (and, I don't think, any other major factor), is what requires most people to work 8-hour schedules as their normative workday, at least in the U.S.
On a final note: the typical startup environment is really a throwback to the freedom of farming days because, in the earliest stages, there basically are no formal employees but rather just founders working round-the-clock like madmen for what might often be described as "below dirt wages," and, in later stages, there are large numbers of "exempt" engineers who are not subject to the overtime rules and hence who are also working insane hours - thus, not too many 8-hour days in your prototypical startup. I don't think most of the participants regard this as exploitation, probably because most of it is self-driven, i.e., most such people want to drive themselves hard in order to succeed.