Where I currently work, there’s a culture of insisting you don’t need a break. Of course, I see people’s faces at the end of the day and think, “you need a break”. I’m going insane.
I’ve once worked an entire year with no breaks whatsoever during the 8 h shift. High speed, intense, no-errors-policy. After a year, it had taken a huge toll on my health.
In my country, when the state finds this out, even if YOU want and enjoy doing work for more than 6h without a 30min break, your employer will get a fine because of you.
But I don’t want to be at work another unpaid half hour. Can’t I just die instead?
Yes. You can’tn’t.
Yes, same here. I suppose it’s to stop any plausible deniability.
Well that’s nice. I’ve worked multiple salaried positions where the unspoken rule obviously was “We can’t explicitly tell you to work more than 40 hours per week, we’re just going to strongly imply that you have no potential for advancement here if you don’t put in extra time.”
I worked a job where not getting your tasks done would result in termination. Working overtime required permission from management, who never gave it. Working overtime unauthorized was also a fireable offence. The way it was phrased was “lots of employees work unauthorized overtime to get their work done, but they don’t ask for payment, so we look the other way.”
Holy crap. I hope he Labor Board fixes on them like freakin’ Sauron.
The corporation is Service Corporation International. You can scroll down to their controversies section to see how they regularly skirt laws and regulations and receive little to no penalty to their billion dollar a year operations.
Last time I applied, I filtered out anyone requiring 40h/week.
I now work 35h/week, with 42 days PTO I can (actually, have to) take.
Pay is for a full time position and supports my wife and me comfortably.
Flexibility is given, I just (at 8pm) told my team leader I won’t be coming in tomorrow.
My resumé isn’t exactly an HR department’s dream, I got a BSc in Ecology when I was 31.I guess what I’m trying to say is, what you’re describing isn’t normal. And it shouldn’t, and doesn’t have to be, either.
So where do you work?
edit: Though, based on some of the terms you used and the fact that you got a favorable employment agreement, I doubt it’s a country that would consider me.
A German newspaper
You live in hell. Go somewhere else.
I have. But, in construction engineering, that expectation is pretty commonplace. To be fair, they offered straight pay for OT. I’ve never heard of anyone giving time and a half for it.
Your choices are hell and hell+
The 40.00 is only what they are legally allowed to say/propaganda. Otherwise even 80 would be depicted as barely chad.
We had protests and deaths to achieve that 40.
Actually, we had protests and deaths to achieve 40 hours a household. Now it’s 80 hours a household. They’ve scammed us. We’re working twice as much for less pay.
Isn’t it just someone else watching the kids and cooking the food? Except now that daycare worker or cook might be a man.
It’s certainly an efficiency improvement (different people different skills) but not double the work IMHO.
Now when covid hit and we had to educate our own kids and cook our own food, while holding down our jobs - that was double the work.
No. Most people can’t afford to have someone else do it even on 80 hours for the household.
It’s a privilege to still have a house servant even if they are paid.
How much death and destruction to get that down to 20?
A tragedy of about 2 dead billionaires?
Bcs 20 is plenty.
Most companies would comfortably survive doubling their wage costs. And the ones that wouldn’t could still just live with a lower production.
Pshh places that want to avoid hiring full time will gladly take your 39 hours.
30 hours is what’s normally considered full time, but there is no federally mandated minimum, so it’s really up to the individual employers.
Correct: I have had two jobs where I only worked 32 hours/week, but was considered a full time employee with benefits and all that.
However, just because your employer considers you full-time doesn’t mean other organizations will. When I was getting my mortgage, it was with one of those 32 hr/week jobs, and my loan company would not sign off on an approval until I could show a paystub with 40 hours/week.
I told them I’m considered full time at my company at 32 hours, and they basically said that’s great, but their policy is 40.
Employers hiring for 40 hours a week (empty line)
Employers hiring for 35.9 hours a week (crowded queue)
this is something I didn’t expect would bother me until it did
growing up I thought “part time” hours meant you could just pick a set of hours and work but that’s “contract work” instead (don’t get me started on time sheets)
and so for full time in thought you get to pick your days or schedule or any, nope, all HR and company policy.
I’d work 4x10s if I could and have a nicer and longer weekend if I could
A 10 hour day leaves me drained with no energy for anything after work
White collar, I’ll take one 40h block please. 2 20’s if necessary. no rest for the wicked…
Turns out most people would actually, there have been multiple surveys done now and that’s always the winner, but then how would businesses cope?
By actually being better than their competition and “let the free market decide”? Oh wait, no, that’s just for deregulation.
Plenty of employers do take this approach. 4x10 isn’t an unknown work schedule. But a lot of firms are client facing and demand business hours coverage. What do you do when a client needs something on Friday (or Saturday or Sunday)?
What do you do with staff for the back half of the 10, when clients aren’t around demanding support because the business day is over?
4x10 works best when everyone you work for is either also 4x10 or on such a time delay that it doesn’t matter.
Or you just stagger your workforce. Some are off Mondays, some are off Fridays, some can choose a midweek day as their regular day off. It’s not super complicated; managers just don’t want to put any effort into changing this.
Or you just stagger your workforce.
Definitely possible but also harder to manage. You need more redundancy in your workforce. You need good documentation of workflow and roles. You need a system for handing off work between staff and people roll on and off a project.
It’s all possible. But it takes effort and some marginal degree of expense that a lot of admins don’t want to put forward. Bosses are naturally cheap and lazy. That’s why union leadership is necessary to improve the workplace.
Agreed on every point. It’s possible. Bosses are bloated in that they’re largely ineffective and are more costly to the salary chunk of budget. If they were expected to accomplish things like workers are, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
In reality, we should be implementing 4 8s as full time since study after study has shown that productivity actually increases when executed properly. There is measurable incentive for companies to transition to it.
In reality, we should be implementing 4 8s as full time since study after study has shown that productivity actually increases when executed properly.
Raising my little red and yellow flag with “Technocracy” spelled out in hammers and sickles.
The business has more than one person working so there’s adequate coverage.
We run some 10x4 but also a lot of 9x9. This is gonna leave some days with reduced coverage if it’s one person but, well, we aren’t one person. Everyone chooses a different day to be their “flex” day when they’re off. Everything is covered.
Is it that companies are stuck thinking small?
The business has more than one person working so there’s adequate coverage.
Unless everyone had identical knowledge, there is not. Good luck getting your HR lead to fix a server error or your pipeline engineer to submit your quarterly financials.
A fella down the street across the county line by one of the lakes is a radiologist who works 14 weeks a year and get $780,000.00/year.
And they bragged about it on /r/salary.
The United States is still a slaver nation if you adjust for inflation.
And tell any doctor that says they, too, want “medicare for all” to STFU. They lying.
Speaking as a professional carpenter with a pretty nice lifestyle, 25 hours a week is pushing it. You guys work too much.
looking forward to leaving the tech industry for farming or woodworking
We have a standard 40 hour work week where you come in at 8am and you are on call until 8am the following morning.
Well two days and the rest of the week off. Nice!
More blood for the machine!
42.5 a week due to forced unpaid breaks. I’d rather just skip the unpaid break, but no choice.
Same, just let me go home 30 minutes earlier
Fuck that I need time to rest. Pay me for my break.
That works too. If you can’t leave the premises you should be getting paid.
Depending on the workplace and the labour laws in effect, they could well prefer you to work 39.7 hours a week so you’re not considered full time which would cost more for the company.
A lot of grocery stores around where I live schedule you just under the 40hr full time threshold so you get no benefits.
