I have about a 45 minute commute, and I work the 9/80 schedule** Anne Neville** describes. I dig it. It’s a great compromise between 10 hour days and 3 day weekends. Enough of my rugby buddies work at the Labs, also, so some of our longer trips are scheduled around Good Friday. Makes life a lot easier, and saves a lot of vacation days.
I worked a 4-10 schedule for a summer internship years ago and I loved it. It was more efficient than a regular schedule would have been (for me) because it saved me a day’s worth of startup/shutdown time every week. (Not to mention the commute.) Another huge advantage was that I only needed to assemble four work outfits per week.
The weekly day off rotated. Mondays or Fridays off were fantastic. Wednesdays were pretty good. Tuesdays and Thursdays were my least favorite, although any weekday not spent at work is a gift.
I was doing a show at the time, so I had to be pretty disciplined about getting to work ridiculously early so that I could leave on time to make it to rehearsal.
I have worked 4x10 shifts, 8x5 shifts, and my personal favorite, 7/7 shifts, wherein you work 7 10 hour days in a row, then you get a full week off. You work 70 hours every two weeks, but get paid for 80. In exchange for that extra 10 hours of pay, you get no paid time off and are expected to work any holiday that falls on your week. I did 7/7 evening shifts for years and loved it. I NEVER had to wake up before 11, and I could get all my errands done on my off weeks in the middle of the day when I was practically the only person in the city not at work.
4x10s were not quite as nice, but still pretty good. I had to stop as I got closer to marriage, because I needed more time at home with the wife- and stepson-to-be. I’m a regular 8-4:30, M-F type guy now, which is all right for how my life is now.
My wife and I each worked four tens, then three-and-a-half nines, when we were easing back to work after our daughter was born. It helped a lot with childcare costs.
I officially work five eights now, but in reality, it’s more like two elevens and three sevens. (My work has two “events” per week.)
In the US some jobs are required to pay time and 1/2 for overtime and some are not required to pay for overtime. In general, managerial and professional jobs are not required to pay for overtime. There really is no “overtime”, salaries are set on a weekly, monthly or annual basis for those jobs. Some state laws require more overtime payments, such as California with overtime for over 8 hrs/day vs. the federal requirement of overtime over 40 hrs./week. For details, see the Fair Labor Standards Act.
On the main topic, I think 4 10s is a good option to offer if it’s consistent with the work that needs to get done. I don’t know if I would prefer it, personally. If you are trying to negotiate it but are concerned about being required to work more than 40 hours, see if you can do the OT from home to avoid extra, unplanned commutes. From the employer’s perspective, they could in theory save on whatever amenities they provide to employees on a daily basis, such as parking, morning coffee, lunchroom facilities. For a large enough employer, reducing usage by 20% could be significant.
I worked 4X10 on a semi-permanent basis in a call center. The first few weeks were great because of the 3-day weekends. The next few weeks were horrible because the long days finally caught up with me. After that I got used to the longer days and just enjoyed the schedule. Fortunately, our work shifts were 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. anyway, so management saw my 10-hour days as a partial solution to having to stagger 8-hour shifts. I worked the 4X10 shift for almost a year; really missed it when I changed jobs and had to go back to 5-day weeks.
To continue the hijack, is overtime pay mandatory (even for salaried workers) if it is required? It’s always been officially voluntary all the places I have worked. Unofficially is another matter - at one performance review a guy who left at a reasonable time for a carpool got zapped.
I’d love a 4x10, 'cause I’m basically working a 5x10 now. It’s been a long time since a 10-hour day in the office wasn’t considered the norm where I work.
The money is good though, and I get five weeks’ paid vacation not including holidays, so I’m not complaining. My point is that a 10-hour day isn’t particularly arduous as long as you’re actually doing challenging stuff and not “busy work” (though regularly doing 11- or 12 hour days would get draining), and I’d rather have a three-day weekend every week than, what, get in an extra hour or two of TV a night?
For employees who are exempt from the FLSA (the managerial and professional) any amount of time can be required, and it does not affect the amount paid to the employee. (Technically, it is exemption, not “salaried” status that means no overtime pay is required. The details of this are complicated and boring.) The concept of “overtime” just does not apply (legally) to exempt workers–there is no set amount of time to be over. Except for industries where maximum hours apply for safety reasons, such as airlines, there is no legal limit on what hours can be required. The law only mandates that workers covered by the FLSA (non-exempt) be paid time and 1/2 for overtime. These are the US federal laws, state laws can be more generous to workers.
That’s what salary is here. Whether I work 10 hours this week, or a hundred, my pay will be exactly the same… it will be 1/52 of my annual salary.
In reality it means being pushed to work a hundred hours every week because that’s how you show your worth for bonuses and raises and promotions, and the company can cheap out on even those because if you don’t work 50, 60 hours a week you’re not dedicated and they will get rid of you.
The exemption typically has something to do with your job being integral to the stated mission blah blah etc. What it has meant for me is the second I went from being paid by the hour to being paid a salary, I no longer got overtime. Some places will offer comp time as your ‘overtime benefit’, but then of course if you actually take that time off… you get dinged on your reviews for taking too much time off.
Ask anyone who’s ever been called by their boss while on vacation, and they’ll tell you all about it. At one point recently I worked 40 hours in two days, and then was asked why I was late to the 8 am Monday meeting. That 40 hour stretch ended at 5 am Monday. I hadn’t slept, and I was supposed to drive 30 miles to the office to be at a meeting for 20 minutes so that my boss could tell everyone that I got the project done just a hair ahead of the deadline, made him look really really good to a lot of bigwigs, and he was mad that I missed a 20 minute rah-rah meeting.
Never again, no matter how bad they ding me on reviews.
Thanks for derailing the thread