20 Hour Work Week

[angus]

There are plenty of 20-hour work schedules.  They just don't pay very well.

I have two folks working with me this summer.  I tell them that I expect them to be in about 9ish and to be here till around 4:30ish or later.  Except on Fridays.  I understand that folks like to cut out early on Fridays.  I'm usually gone by 3.  So, considering a 30- to 60-minute lunch break, this amounts to about a 33- to 35-hour workweek.  Unless there's a holiday, like Monday was, that's sort of the norm in my lab.  It's not that I consider 35 hours a magic number, but it's just that I'm here during those times, and I think that they would be most productive if their hours overlap with mine.  This way we can meet if necessary, or if they need my help I'm here, or if I have questions for them, they're here.  But I have colleagues that work 40 hours or more, and I assume they want their paid summer researchers doing that as well.  

Apparently your colleagues are working 40 hour weeks, maybe by tradition, maybe by necessity, or for any number of reasons, but presumably they have been doing this a long time and they have determined that this is the amount of time it takes for the average worker to perform what they consider to be a reasonable amount of work.'

And some folks work 60 or 70 hour weeks.  My neighbor is an attorney and he's working all the time.  He leaves before I wake up and returns long after we have eaten.  Even on Fridays.  then again, he also makes buckets of money.  Different priorities, I suppose.

but you can certainly have a 20-hour job if you want it.  I had quite of few of those in my younger years.  Be advised that they don't pay much.  

[angus]

Anyone who isn't a lazy is a conditioned rat in a wheel, by the way.

No, there's a such thing as laziness.  And if you're too lazy, or retarded, you'll not survive.  I'll stipulate that your shock and dismay at what you consider to be an unreasonable demand by your employers doesn't mark you as truly lazy.  Then again, no one's forcing you to keep this job.

But man must build fire to provide warmth and cook foods.  Unless your gods will do that for you.  It's quite simple.  Work is the application of force through a distance.  (one joule is one newton times one meter)  And if you want to survive, you must work.  Even kings and emperors work, grasshopper.

[angus]

In the 1960s this idea was explored in The Jetsons.  Do you remember that show?  George Jetson worked for the slavedriving Mr. Spaceley.  "These nine-hour workweeks are killing me!"

Obviously that show was produced in the Great Society era when it was more popular to submit to the idea of government-mandated work schedules.  I'm not sure people are as eager to accept such government mandates now, even if they did encourage more leisure time.  The thinking may be that productivity per worker would fall so much that the living standard would fall as well.  Or maybe we're more ideologically driven than in the past, and are simply offended at the notion of such government mandates. 

I guess you could say that the owning class wealth would fall under such a system, so they don't support the 20-hour mandate and they dream up ways to convince the rank worker not to support it.

I wouldn't necessarily couch it in that language, or emphasize such aspects.  There is economic and social mobility, and leisure time is not viewed as important by some as by others.  And you are still free to change your employment situation if you find that it doesn't suit you.