"An epidemic of overwork among ordinary Americans"?

Thomas wrote:

The terms of your `work contract', which you negotiated with yourself, reflected what you thought was the optimal tradeoff between your costs and your benefits. If you're like most self-employed people I know, you worked sixty hour weeks and took maybe a week a year off, most of it on long weekends such as Thanksgiving, taking Friday off when July 4th is on a Thursday, and the like. [..]

Now, if these conditions are the optimal tradeoff when people work for themselves, why wouldn't it be the optimal tradeoff when the work contract is between distinct employers and employees? Why .. aren't Europeans the ones whom their governments force into needless slackerdom?

You're confusing end and means. The hours you mention Soz having made can be the "optimal tradeoff" when people work for something they are passionate about. Which is more likely if they are self-employed - in the situation where they have employed themselves to (presumably) do what they really wanted to do. But academics are an example where people find the same optimal tradeoff in work for an employer.

The clue being, here, that its not the working 60 hour a week itself that constitutes "the optimal tradeoff". It is the work the people in question have managed to find, and how it fits in with their passions, that makes working 60 hours an optimal trade-off for them, with that job.

The worker in the average job on the other hand finds little "optimal" about being pressured into working 60 hours a week, putting in unpaid overtime, or never taking off. There are only so many dream jobs that allow people to really go for what they are sincerely passionate about to go round. The perspective here is elitist: you'll be hard fetched to find a cleaner or security guard or fireman who thinks 60 hour-weeks actually constitute "the optimal tradeoff" for his life. (We'll get to your builders in a second.)

Hell, even in those privileged situations where people manage to find work that creates the optimal trade-off for their life even if it takes 60 hours a week - or where doing it such long hours actually is the optimal trade-off - it is usually a life stage thing. Soz is not still working 60 hours a week, and for a reason. To borrow from my sister's line of work: there are five 20-something film production assistants working 60-hour weeks for every 40-something producer still doing so. She became a producer but, dream job or not, is not willing to put those hours in anymore either.

If even most people, exceptions accepted, who do what they really think is important and/or what they really enjoy will either voluntarily drop off somewhat or burn-out after X years, you'll be hard fetched to ever make 60-hour weeks an "optimal tradeoff" for life for a secretary or salesperson.

I was surprised about that poll I posted here about Europeans wanting to work longer in exchange for higher wages, because typically, at least in Holland, surveys show the opposite. Show that people would like to work less and even be willing to do with less money for it. There are more people, especially women and most especially parents, wanting to work part-time than there are part-time jobs.

Parents are a particularly strong example, and I think thats what Walter might have been alluding to as well. Most parents who work a combined 80+ hours a week would, surveys generally show, love to spend more time with their children, instead of bringing them to full-time daycare, after-school programs etc. But what they want, rather than sacrificing half the income for one of the parents to then be at home all the time, is part-time work. Women more than men but increasingly men, too, say they would like to be able to spend a few hours extra at home with the children.

But job and career environments are not designed to accomodate this: part-time work still automatically means giving up on the competitive go at more than a mediocre job - if it is possible at all.

Thomas wrote:

What do they do with all that leisure time Germany's strong trade unions fought out for them? Why, they work. When we first got to know them, on weekends and in their vacations, they showed up on their slot of land with their relatives and built their houses together. When the houses were finished, they spent their free time building and fine-tuning their Ikea furniture.

Yes, the "leisure time Germany's strong trade unions fought out for them" means that they actually have the time to build their own houses and weekend houses, which they can then enjoy, live in and visit to for years to come. Rather than still being pushed to do all the labour they have in them in extra hours in the factory, to create products they never see again. (Roughly what Pdog said about rather cutting his own firewood than sitting behind a desk working to pay the gas company.)

Now I know that you are on record here as saying that "about the best" you could "say about Government involvement after 1910" is that it didn't hurt workers. But even if you dont appreciate the distinct difference there, I'm sure those builders do, and are most grateful for it to both those unions and the governments that established working hours legislation.

Similarly, I'm sure, from previous discussions, that Soz may have enjoyed voluntarily choosing the 60 hour week and working year without holidays as optimal trade-off for her at that particular point in life - but passionately supports that legislation, and those union-achieved arrangements, that guarantee that, for example, a pregnant woman gets a minimum maternity leave. (Another of those new-fangled government measures from after 1910). That secure a guaranteed minimum of free days, and a maximum of hours someone can be expected to work, for those who work in jobs that are not the embodiment of their dream. Which all of us, bar the most talented and lucky, might end up in some time, after all.

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Thomas wrote:

fishin wrote:
Another aspect of all of this popped into my head just a few minutes ago. "Work" in this context seems to be directed at "income producing" expense of energy (whether the person is actually paid overtime or not).

I wonder how much of that is a shift in how we live?

On reflection, I think it actually isn't that much of a shift to begin with. Then as now, there are projects in your life that you care about, and you are working to get them done. For example, suppose you're a lawyer who wants his lawn mowed. One way to do this is to mow your own lawn. Another way is that you pursue somebody else's lawsuit, and somebody else mowes your lawn. It barely matters to you that money changes hands in the latter case but not in the former. The basic deal remains the same: you work so your lawn gets mowed.

Your last statement there is true but misses the entire point.

The point is that labor outside of the job, like mowing your own lawn, doesn't get counted in surveys or reports like the one that started this discussion. When someone is questioned as to "How many hours did you work this week?" they think about their paid job - not what they do outside of that job.

So if you are working 40 hours in your job and 20 hours at home most people would respond "40 hours". If they work 60 hours at their job and pay someone to do the labor at home they'll respond "60 hours".

60 hours get reported on the survey for the 2nd respondant where the 1st actually labored the same number fo hours but only reported 40 of them.

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nimh wrote:

You're confusing end and means. The hours you mention Soz having made can be the "optimal tradeoff" when people work for something they are passionate about.

As I said -- hours like the ones Sozobe mentioned are common among self-employed people. And I don't see why freelancers would necessarily be more passionate about what they're working on than wage earners.

nimh wrote:

The worker in the average job on the other hand finds little "optimal" about being pressured into working 60 hours a week, putting in unpaid overtime, or never taking off.

In that case, I have never had an average job in my life. Neither has my father, my mother, my two sisters, and at least half of the people I hang out with. It's possible I guess, but it's just as possible that your rheoric about "being pressured into" long-hour jobs is less firmly grounded in reality than you think.

nimh wrote:

Soz is not still working 60 hours a week, and for a reason.

I bet against it. She may not be paid for 60 hours a week, but her job as a mother, though unpaid, is still serious work. Even by itself, her mothering isn't a 40 hour a week job with weekends off. So if you counted a mother's work for what it is, and add it to her editing job which she does get paid for, her week likely contains more than 60 hours of work, not less.

Thomas wrote:

But job and career environments are not designed to accomodate this: part-time work still automatically means giving up on the competitive go at more than a mediocre job - if it is possible at all.

Again, I see no evidence that this is true in my own work environment. I work as a research scientist for a global technology conglomerate. My employer offers so-called sabbaticals where you get lower pay for part of a year, then stay on paid leave for the other part of the year. Few people ever take it. Also, my colleagues could work part-time, and some mothers with little children do. But the rest of us doesn't -- because we don't want to.

nimh wrote:

Yes, the "leisure time Germany's strong trade unions fought out for them" means that they actually have the time to build their own houses and weekend houses, which they can then enjoy, live in and visit to for years to come. Rather than still being pushed to do all the labour they have in them in extra hours in the factory, to create products they never see again.

You are presenting a false choice, as I outlined in my latest response to fishin. In a free labor market, there would be two ways to build your own house. One is to show up on your own construction site and lay bricks on top of each other, 60 hours a week. Alternatively, you can work on some employer 60 hours a week and use your wage to pay a professional brick layer. (Of course, any intermediate division of your time would be possible too.) The point is, in each case you work 60 hours a week, and in each case, your house ends up getting built. No one way is inherently superior to the other.

nimh wrote:

Now I know that you are on record here as saying that "about the best" you could "say about Government involvement after 1910" is that it didn't hurt workers. But even if you dont appreciate the distinct difference there, I'm sure those builders do, and are most grateful for it to both those unions and the governments that established working hours legislation.

I stand by that record, and , with respect, I think you are substituting passion for analysis here.

nimh wrote:

Similarly, I'm sure, from previous discussions, that Soz may have enjoyed voluntarily choosing the 60 hour week and working year without holidays as optimal trade-off for her at that particular point in life - but passionately supports that legislation, and those union-achieved arrangements, that guarantee that, for example, a pregnant woman gets a minimum maternity leave.

I would have said that women care about maternity leave, but don't care if they get it as part of their work contract or as their employer's response to legislation. And then again, I never said I agree with Sozobe on everything. Life would be too boring if I did. Very Happy

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fishin wrote:

Your last statement there is true but misses the entire point.

The point is that labor outside of the job, like mowing your own lawn, doesn't get counted in surveys or reports like the one that started this discussion. When someone is questioned as to "How many hours did you work this week?" they think about their paid job - not what they do outside of that job.

Fair enough. And my response to your point is I don't believe that figures in surveys are the important thing. What people actually do with their lives is what counts. And from that perspective, labor for a purpose is labor for a purpose, no matter how you organize it specifically.

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I think we are assuming that the only people working those long hours are ambitious, success-driven career people. There are many millions who must work two and three minimum wage jobs to pay the rent and put food on the table. Those kind of jobs don't come with vacation packages.

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Yes.

As I was reading the exchange between nimh and Thomas, I was thinking something about how choice is a central concept here, but hadn't/ haven't quite figured out how to focus that idea. Your observation ties into that, too.

I definitely agree with Thomas that I work every bit as hard now as when I was working as the director of my agency -- much harder in fact for the first several years (easing up somewhat now). But there is something about the inherent privilege in me being ABLE to do this job -- which is of probably the most fulfilling one I'll ever have -- that makes me hesitate to compare it to people Swimpy talks about. We may work equally hard and for the same number of hours, but there is a huge difference.

But I get muddled in trying to take that idea and make something useful out of it in terms of this discussion.

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sozobe wrote:

Yes.

As I was reading the exchange between nimh and Thomas, I was thinking something about how choice is a central concept here, but hadn't/ haven't quite figured out how to focus that idea. Your observation ties into that, too.

I definitely agree with Thomas that I work every bit as hard now as when I was working as the director of my agency -- much harder in fact for the first several years (easing up somewhat now). But there is something about the inherent privilege in me being ABLE to do this job -- which is of probably the most fulfilling one I'll ever have -- that makes me hesitate to compare it to people Swimpy talks about. We may work equally hard and for the same number of hours, but there is a huge difference.

But I get muddled in trying to take that idea and make something useful out of it in terms of this discussion.

Absolutely...imagine if you also had to do an eighty hour PAID job.

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Some people( very few) do an eighty hour paid job, even a hundred hour paid job. They are "investment bankers" Some of them retire at 35 and then do what they wish!

Freedom is doing what you like!

Happiness is liking what you do!!

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dlowan wrote:

Absolutely...imagine if you also had to do an eighty hour PAID job.

That's true of course but not quite what I'm getting at.

The closest I can come to it now is the factoid that carpal tunnel syndrome is an occupational hazard for ASL interpreters, but pretty much a non-issue for native ASL speakers, who sign even more than interpreters do. Something about the stressors of that which is externally mandated rather than a more internal motivation.

Though that doesn't quite work either because part of what was so stressful about parenting in the earliest phase was the externally mandated reactivity to this infant, and the lack of control over taking breaks, having to be "on" well past one's desire or ability to do so, etc.

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Thomas wrote:

I don't see why freelancers would necessarily be more passionate about what they're working on than wage earners.

You dont? Honestly? Even on average? (Because yes, exceptions, there are also plenty of passionate wage earners, and some bored freelancers..)

But I mean - re the average - isnt the entire point of being a freelancer - the reason why people become freelancers - that, yes, it often involves crazy hours, no, it involves little life security - but you have more freedom? More freedom to do what you're really interested in?

The average wage-earner is not a graphic designer or a text editor. He's a shop clerk or an account manager. And although there surely is the occasional passionate employee to whom managing accounts is his hobby, I'm sure you can appreciate the difference.

Thomas wrote:

In that case, I have never had an average job in my life. Neither has my father, my mother, my two sisters, and at least half of the people I hang out with.

No kidding. Have you considered the thought that we political debatants on a knowledge exchange website are maybe not exactly representatives of your typical social environs?

Most of my friends and family (also) have creative or academic or idealistic or etc jobs, yes. Direct family, in any case.

But the variety of temping jobs Ive had to do during and after my student life has taken me to a range of wholly different workplaces, as well. I've stocked shelves, picked orders, delivered mail, worked in a bakery, etc -- like lots of people. And we 'explored' those jobs again when A came to Holland and had to find a job - any job - and tried a bunch.

I also have to only reach a little beyond my direct family, to find, for example, my aunt. She works in "thuiszorg" - what is that in English - like people who work as nurses for old and ill people who still live at home - but without the diploma.

Shes not unhappy with her job.. its a job. Fine, as far as jobs go. Pays OK. She does her best, works her hours, goes home.

Recently, even this sector of the economy has gotten caught up in the malestrom of motivational professionalism. She had to attend meetings, in which a boisterous, positivist trainer invited everyone to write down what it is they most wanted to achieve, still, in this job!

My aunt, in a Hague deadpan to us at a family birthday: well, I want to just finish these last four years and get to retirement already, hello.

Of course she couldnt say that.. everyone duly filled out ambitious desires.

What I'm saying: have you considered that your rhetoric - the whole construct about people choosing long-hour jobs as optimum trade-offs for satisfying lives - is less firmly grounded in the reality than you think? Beyond the rather limited realm of the sorta kinda semi-intellectual upper-middle class perspective?

Thomas wrote:

nimh wrote:
Soz is not still working 60 hours a week, and for a reason.

I bet against it. She may not be paid for 60 hours a week, but her job as a mother, though unpaid, is still serious work. Even by itself, her mothering isn't a 40 hour a week job with weekends off. So if you counted a mother's work for what it is, and add it to her editing job which she does get paid for, her week likely contains more than 60 hours of work, not less.

OK, look it. I'm not contesting any of this, you are right of course. Plus it will score you brownie points. But you are also either missing or wilfully ignoring the point.

My sister is like Soz. She was one of those 20-something production assistants, documentary films. She became a producer, and when one of her superiors started his own production business, he invited her to set it up with him, and over another few years, she became an executive producer. They had a few people working for them by that time, were making TV series, shows, documentaries.

The man committed suicide, the agency folded, and she was suddenly unemployed. At the same time she was, by then, mother of a little kid.

She is very clear that she would love to work again, but not at those crazy hours. She is now again looking for a job, but at the same time she will sigh, "I must admit I'm glad I dont have to work so hard anymore", or, "I wouldnt want to work that hard anymore".

Mind you, she is raising a kid, and yes, certainly, if you count the hours spent on that, and on the household, it is definitely no less than those 60 hours. Brusquely early mornings, brief respites. Especially with, now, a second kid on the way.

But there is a distinct difference, one that she feels keenly - much like those builders keenly feel the difference between building their own or brother's house, or spending extra hours on the company workfloor.

That difference doesnt seem, to me, a terribly complicated concept - sometimes life and quality of life involves more than you can deduce from comparing net numbers.

Thomas wrote:

Again, I see no evidence that this is true in my own work environment. I work as a research scientist for a global technology conglomerate. My employer offers so-called sabbaticals where you get lower pay for part of a year, then stay on paid leave for the other part of the year. Few people ever take it.

Again,

a) I think that as a "research scientist", you are speaking from a relatively specific, I dare say elite job environment. The "I see no evidence that this is true because its not like that in my work environment" therefore doesnt work.

b) I deliberately phrased my point so as to encompass more than only the formal opportunity of working part time (including "sabbaticals" etc) - though that, too, believe me, is often lacking. (Sabbaticals? How many people have the chance to take a sabbatical? Please, we're talking seriously privileged here.) (To mirror your approach, the job I do now is not available part-time; I asked.)

There's more involved. Competetive culture, peer pressure etc - a working culture focused around volume, around being there - all combine to create career environments where choosing part-time work will implicitly disqualify you from moving up much further, will keep you in a mediocre or less interesting job. This is only slowly changing.

Thomas wrote:

You are presenting a false choice, as I outlined in my latest response to fishin. In a free labor market, there would be two ways to build your own house. One is to show up on your own construction site and lay bricks on top of each other, 60 hours a week. Alternatively, you can work on some employer 60 hours a week and use your wage to pay a professional brick layer. [..] The point is, in each case you work 60 hours a week, and in each case, your house ends up getting built. No one way is inherently superior to the other.

If by "inherently superior" you refer to pure economic calculus you may be right.

In real life, however, you have Patiodog's answer above, which I already referred to.

People havent only fought for the 50-, then 40-hour week because they could not physically bear the additional labour. They also conquered the freedom to spend at least part of their life on their own command, rather than that of their employer.

If they want to chop firewood, or build a nice house for themselves, exactly the way they want to, so they can walk around it later and feel the edges of the wood and remember how they made it, then thats a lovely choice; if they prefer fishing or reading or going to the footie, thats fine too.

The equation you keep making that, if they choose to spend their free time doing labour of some sort anyway, they might as well have put the extra hours in at their workplace and it would make no qualitative difference, is one that even in these times only a rather distinct proportion of people - and most of them from a distinct set of professions - would agree with. Your sense that one is no "superior" to the other clashes with most people's experience of quality of life (see below).

Thomas wrote:

nimh wrote:
Now I know that you are on record here as saying that "about the best" you could "say about Government involvement after 1910" is that it didn't hurt workers. But even if you dont appreciate the distinct difference there, I'm sure those builders do, and are most grateful for it to both those unions and the governments that established working hours legislation.

I stand by that record, and , with respect, I think you are substituting passion for analysis here.

My point is quite simple. You are saying - well, there you are, the union battled those extra hours of leisure for them, and what do they do in them? They just build things anyway. The implication: those silly unions. Those silly post-1910 state interventions on working hours, paid leave, etc.

On that count, I'd say: why dont you ask them? Ask them if they see a qualitative difference? If they consider their opportunity to spend their leisure time building their own houses "not inherently superior" to just spending the extra hours on the job and hiring someone else with the money they earn for the house?

My grandpa was a builder and my uncle was one, and I'll bet you most of 'em wouldnt share your sanguinity, or your smirk to the unions' achievement in question.

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Edited the top bit above (first 2 paras) for clarification .

(And then deleted this post again in order to go back to close a "quote" bracket Id left open, and am now posting this back up)

(Im such a nerd)

(But I made it in time)

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I thought that looked a little sloppy. Everything all right at home?

Anyway, look, I'm going to ask you to go to a seminar on mindfulness in typography. I really do hope you care enough about your work here to attend.

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This thread's got me thinking about Bukowski's "Post Office." Fine book, that.

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LOL!

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Hmm. Never mind me and my soliloquies about personal satisfaction from my delving in off time into art and the land - which I've made some money at from my paintings, but none to make any poster quit their day job.

But look at Edgarblythe who has a job he has stuck by in thick and thin, mostly thick.. he's now an accomplished poet and writer. Don't anyone dare call it a hobby, to me, anyway.

Farmerman, way high up there on the a2k knowledge chain, is quite an artist. Again, I don't see it as a hobby, but a pursuit of selfness, or the opposite, as I said earlier, a pursuit of looking.

Off hours can be very rich. I don't think my painting is work, or Edgarblythe's poetry is work, or Farmerman's or JL's art is work, except that labor is expended. Mostly it is all a way of personally looking out there, whether or not money passes hands.

Sozobe has strong art making facility....

Not to hallow art re other forms of time spending. Look at Ellpus and his farmhouse restoration...

There is a balance to be had for some of us who have yearnings for more than the job.

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nimh wrote:

Thomas wrote:
I don't see why freelancers would necessarily be more passionate about what they're working on than wage earners.

You dont? Honestly? Even on average? (Because yes, exceptions, there are also plenty of passionate wage earners, and some bored freelancers..)

But I mean - re the average - isnt the entire point of being a freelancer - the reason why people become freelancers - that, yes, it often involves crazy hours, no, it involves little life security - but you have more freedom? More freedom to do what you're really interested in?

Look at the classified ads in your paper: Lots of cleaning ladies, babysitters, bicycle couriers, and other people in low-paying jobs are free-lancers. I doubt they are passionate about sweeping our toilets, bringing our spoiled brats to bed, riding our mail through dangerous traffic, or whatever it is that they do. Moreover, although I choose to mope my own floor, wash my own laundry, and repair my own bike, I assure you I feel no enthusiasm about either.

nimh wrote:

What I'm saying: have you considered that your rhetoric - the whole construct about people choosing long-hour jobs as optimum trade-offs for satisfying lives - is less firmly grounded in the reality than you think? Beyond the rather limited realm of the sorta kinda semi-intellectual upper-middle class perspective?

Yes I have. Anyway, I'm glad we feel the same way about each other.

nimh wrote:

Plus it will score you brownie points.

I'm impressed by your psychological insight -- you are seing right through me.

nimh wrote:

But there is a distinct difference, one that she feels keenly - much like those builders keenly feel the difference between building their own or brother's house, or spending extra hours on the company workfloor.

That difference doesnt seem, to me, a terribly complicated concept - sometimes life and quality of life involves more than you can deduce from comparing net numbers.

I agree. But comparing net numbers and deducing things from them is exactly what the article in your initial post does -- and what you are doing based on that article. Quality of life does involve more than you can deduce from comparing net numbers. And the fact that the average American is working longer hours than the average Europeans, even longer hours than their work contracts say they have to, doesn't indicate "an epidemic of overwork among ordinary Americans", as the title of your thread suggests.

nimh wrote:

On that count, I'd say: why dont you ask them? Ask them if they see a qualitative difference? If they consider their opportunity to spend their leisure time building their own houses "not inherently superior" to just spending the extra hours on the job and hiring someone else with the money they earn for the house?

What method of asking them do you suggest? The first thing that comes to my mind is to look at migration rates between countries like Bismarck's Germany, which introduced workplace reforms early, with laissez-faire countries like America, who introduced them lately. I don't have the statistics ready at hand. But as best I remember it, net migration was from Germany to America under Bismarck, and most of the emigrants were poor people. On the face of it, it seems that our ancestors would have rather had American capitalists "exploit" them than let social reformers in Germany protect them against capitalists.

nimh wrote:

The equation you keep making that, if they choose to spend their free time doing labour of some sort anyway, they might as well have put the extra hours in at their workplace and it would make no qualitative difference, is one that even in these times only a rather distinct proportion of people - and most of them from a distinct set of professions - would agree with. Your sense that one is no "superior" to the other clashes with most people's experience of quality of life (see below).

Unlike you, I don't claim to know what "most people" experience. The reality, as our frequent disagreements on this site show, is that even two people of the same age, who both work in upper-middle-class techie jobs, can have extremely different outlooks on life. I expect that the variety gets even greater when you look at people in other lines of work. Thus, for some people, the optimal tradeoff turns out to be 20 hours of wage work and 60 hours of leisure or unpaid work; for others, it turns out to be 80 hours of paid work. My point is that you have no basis for saying that the "80 hours a week people" are necessarily worse off, exploited, or otherwise wrongly treated. I think that's what you doing when you compare American hours with European hours.

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Thomas- There is a very good book on this very subject--Juliet Schor's "The Overworked American" Schor( a Professor in Harvard's Economics Department has also written another book peripheral to this one called--"The Overspent American"

Her basic thesis in the first book is that Americans are working more and more adding about 9 hours to their YEARLY work load. Schor says this will soon put Americans working as many hours as they did in the 1920'2( Note- the book was written in 1993). Schor says the added hours are accepted by Americans because they, as a group, have bought into the idea that self-esteem depends on ownership of items deemed desirable by the society at large.

In her second book, Schor asks intriguing questions such as "Does a two member family really need a dishwashing machine"

Her basic thesis revolves around the point---"The association between consumption and social identity is forged when we are children and exerts a powerful pull on our psyches"

It is quite easy to say--I am very happy with what I have got and I am not going to work that many hours-- Yet, some claim that they achieve an epiphany when they climb into their new Porsche!

But you are correct, Thomas( as usual)--No one can know what other people experience.

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Kind of related:

Quote:

A new survey by Salary.com and America Online found the average U.S. worker wastes 1.86 hours per eight-hour workday--not including lunch and scheduled breaks. That's actually an improvement from last year's inaugural survey, which showed workers squandered 2.09 hours a day.

source: Chicago Tribune

A similar survey has been done in Britain with similar results [in all the firms I worked, private phone calls and especiaially the private use of the internet were strictly restricted.].

I really like this ironical comment in today's The Guardian (page 54)

Quote:

White-collar workers in Norwich are wasting hours of office time on the internet. Only hours? Amateurs!

Stuart Jeffries

Workers at a financial services company in Norwich spend so much time shopping online that their bosses have introduced a daily "e-break" to control their unproductive urges. Henceforward they will only be able to surf eBay during a designated 15-minute period. A sinister Virgin Money spokesman said: "We know what's going on at work." But clearly they don't. If bosses ever realised how unproductive their office workers really are, they would take them outside, shoot them and replace them with Romanians. Take my day. Could I be more unproductive? Consider the following the most public resignation letter in history.

Full report online

Laughing

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bm

(very interesting thread!)

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In Holland, the standard working week is 36 hours. How that works is like this: people work a 40-hour week, but save up 4 hours "ADV" (Labour time reduction), which they can take up in the form of extra free days.

Here's a striking indication of "what "most people" experience" on that topic, from an announcement of an article in Trouw [my translation]:

Quote:

40-hour working week / the Dutch are attached to their part-time day

The [Christian-Democratic] CDA wants to reintroduce the 40-hour working week. But the Dutch are attached to their parttime job. Only 6 per cent says they'd want to work longer hours - at least, if they are paid extra for it.

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"An epidemic of overwork among ordinary Americans"?

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