I have had many full-time jobs - cinema usher, theatre team leader, casino croupier, English teacher in Japan, salesman, call centre operator.
All these jobs were 8 hour a day jobs. Most jobs I can think of are 8 hours a day.
Surely with all the different types of jobs, they should not be based on time at the workplace, should they?
I don’t know about Australia but in most of the US the 8 hour day or 40 hour work week has been put in place by law. If you work longer than that you need to be paid overtime.
The eight hour day was a goal of the union movement in the U.S. that was pursued for many decades. This gave the notion of eight hours being standard an enormous historic and cultural legitimacy.
Eight hours is also convenient for businesses open 24 hours, since it divides the day into three equal pieces.
The 8 hour work day dates back to the industrial revolution. Workers were fed up with working really long hours, and started a movement for 8 hours of work, 8 hours of play, and 8 hours of sleep.
We fought damned hard for the 8 hour work week - it was “eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for what we will!”
Maybe I did not word my OP well. What I am asking is how is it possible that now in the 21st century it is the case that the workers are all happy to work 8 hours, the bosses want the workers to work 8 hours and 8 hours a day is right to have a decent salary and the right amount of time for workers to work to keep the business afloat.
Why not four shifts working 6 hours a day for businesses open 24/7 ? Why not 6 shifts working 4 hours ? Why not 2 shifts of 12 ?
I know all about the union movement of the 19th and early 20th century.
I want to know about now.
Wouldn’t that be “eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and 152 hours for what we will!”?
I couldn’t imagine a good salary enabling a good lifestyle with that kind of workweek, ya know.
Some people do work other schedules. Nurses, for example. EMTs. Some salaried people can work whenever they want as long as it gets done. Most of us work eight hours because it works well and is traditional, I’d imagine. I personally work 7.5, not counting lunch.
Well, that’s what I was agitating for. Those other guys, I dunno.
One reason to go with less days worked is commute time and expense. As for working less and still getting the same annual income, that comes down to productivity. The company isn’t likely to work you half your old amount and pay you the same annual income, even if they make the same profit off you.
In the 80’s I had co-worker’s that were asked to work two hour shifts Monday through Friday. At their wages and the cost of going to work they would have lost money before any taxes. It didn’t happen.
Inertia is a powerful force. So is “It ain’t broke, don’t mess with it” or its cousin “We’ve always done it that way.” Never underestimate the power of these two factors.
As for why a business running 24/7 wouldn’t want to move to six 4-hour shifts, they’d need to have twelve employees per position, rather than four, on the assumption that employees aren’t going to work multiple shifts in a day or that they’ll want to take the weekend off. (A person could work seven days a week, four hours a day, and not be in danger of violating overtime laws based on 40 hours a week/8 hours a day, but having to work every single day will burn a person out.)
If you were the boss, would you want to arbitrarily triple your administrative workload for scheduling all of these people? Also, some things (insurance, particularly) are based on the number of employees on the books, regardless of how many hours they work.
King Alfred the Great, right?
If I can get my 16 tons of coal mined in 6 hours can I leave early? :dubious:
Yeah, but you’ll still be another day older, and deeper in debt.
My schedule for next week:
Mon: Off; Tue: 8 hrs; Wed: 7 hrs; Thu: 6 hrs; Fri: 12 hrs; Sat: 14 hrs; Sun: 2 hrs
Adds up to 49 hours, but I’ll end up with 12 hours of overtime pay (assuming I don’t finish up early on Friday and Saturday) thanks to a union contract that stipulates I get paid OT for any hours in excess of 8 hours in a day. Which really adds up when I work back-to-back-to-back 18-hour shifts.
First, don’t underestimate the power of it being a standard. Imagine a business that needs to regularly interact with other businesses-- your office worker’s hours need to be during times when other businesses’ office workers are there.
Second, a lot of offices are offering flex time and various alternate work schedules. A big favorite is a regular nine hour day, with every other Friday off.
And here I thought it had to do with the FDR and the Fair Labor Standards Act - that among other things established a four hour week and time and a half for overtime. IIRC this was done to limit the hours worked so more people could work. This legislation being enacted in the days of the great depression.
blinkingblinking, apparently you missed the part where someone pointed out that, in many states, people who are not exempt from overtime wage laws, and who work more than 8 hours in a day, get paid bonus wages to do so. This acts as a tremendous disincentive to scheduling people for more than 8 hours a day, or more than 40 hours a week.
As states have slowly been liberalizing these overtime wage rules, employers have been taking advantage of this liberalization to change how they schedule. Many hospitals now schedule in shifts of 12 hours, and you end up working only 3 or 4 12’s (depending on the state’s overtime laws) a week. Other places schedule 4 10’s a week. and so forth.
In the 60s and 70s, my dad worked for Dept. of Defense. He worked 7:30 to 4:30 M-F, with an unpaid hour long lunch at 11:30. This was standard at the time. It might well still be.
So, in sum, it works well for many people, it’s the law in some states still (unless the employer wants to pay overtime), and it really isn’t as strong a norm any more as you would think.
You may thank the unions for fighting for the 8 hour day.
I worked as follows: Monday 10 hrs, Tues 8, Weds 7, Thur 7, Fri 9. But I am “exempt”. I am there until I am done for the day, more or less. Ture, on real slow days I still hang around for at least 6.5 hours, and a few days have got up to 12 hours.