Are 8+ hour workdays unreasonable?

[Purpelia]

8h would be reasonable if commuting didn't exist. Plain and simple. As it stands those 8 easily become 10 or for some unfortunate people 12 or more hours a day. And that is just completely wrong on every level. Think on that.

[Herador]

8h would be reasonable if commuting didn't exist. Plain and simple. As it stands those 8 easily become 10 or for some unfortunate people 12 or more hours a day. And that is just completely wrong on every level. Think on that.

I work with a lady who commutes from near Baltimore to DC and back again every day. Management position, she took what she was offered because it made her money and the company won't transfer her to a closer location. her commute is roughly an hour there and back on good days, and she works 10+ because she's salaried. Commutes really do need to factor in. ~9 hours for salaried management is... fine. If you want to sign up for it, go wild, but 11 hours a day? All the while having to take care of a kid and house with a husband who works in the FD so he's gone for days at a time? Shit sucks man.

[Esternial]

8h would be reasonable if commuting didn't exist. Plain and simple. As it stands those 8 easily become 10 or for some unfortunate people 12 or more hours a day. And that is just completely wrong on every level. Think on that.

I work with a lady who commutes from near Baltimore to DC and back again every day. Management position, she took what she was offered because it made her money and the company won't transfer her to a closer location. her commute is roughly an hour there and back on good days, and she works 10+ because she's salaried. Commutes really do need to factor in. ~9 hours for salaried management is... fine. If you want to sign up for it, go wild, but 11 hours a day? All the while having to take care of a kid and house with a husband who works in the FD so he's gone for days at a time? Shit sucks man.

I'm kinda split on it. I agree with the sentiment, but the commute is part of the equation you make when getting a job or moving on from one. It's not something that (usually) gets thrown on you out of nowhere. I knew I'd have a 2-3 hour commute total each day (in Belgium, that's quite a bit) but since I get 2 days to work from home, a nice company car and a good salary, I don't mind so much. I could move closer, yes, but the reduced commute doesn't compensate for the disconnect from my social circle and significantly higher rent I'd have to pay.

[Esternial]

It's not wasting it if that's how they choose to spend it that way. It's their life.

I'm not saying it should be illegal to work more than 8 hours, but shifts and proper pay for people who don't want to or can't work that long should be widespread. Because it's not just a matter of I don't want to, I also physically cannot. I have autism and get extremely stressed out if I have to focus on something for more than 3 hours (sometimes, even just one hour without a 15-20 minute break, depending what it is). I put a lot of energy into whatever I'm doing, but that energy depletes quickly, and I can't half ass something unless I'm running out of energy. Burnout comes very quickly for me and it makes me depressed, agitated, and sometimes even suicidal if it's really bad.

I am also autistic (Aspergers/high functioning). I have execute dysfunction as one of my symptoms. I also have ADHD and GAD. I have difficulty with work. If I were asked to work 40 hour weeks, I would self-destruct. Here are two articles that I use to try to explain how it feels to neurotypicals. They don't explain everything, but I feel like they are a good introduction.

1. https://everydayfeminism.com/2015/09/sy ... sfunction/
2. https://blogs.psychcentral.com/not-robo ... aspergers/

Fair enough, but that is still not convincing me that employers should pay you the same as someone who works the full 8 hours.

However, I do think you should qualify for some kind of financial disability aid to compensate for the apparent issues you have with working a full 8 hours. I don't know about that state of this in other countries, but in Belgium it's allowed to work part-time and receive a supplementary pay from the health fund/insurance. When a psychiatrist says letting you work a full 8 hours does more harm than good, I don't see why you should be forced to work and shouldn't receive some kind of disability benefit.

It wouldn't be the exact same as someone that works 8 hours, of course, but society can at least provide some financial support.

I have ADD myself, which can be very detrimental when I'm not taking my medication - which I try to avoid, since it has a very hard comedown. It's difficult, since my performance varies greatly and comparing myself to colleagues would not do me any favors. It's not easy working a full 8 hours sometimes, and having companies that allow you to "slack" a bit from time-to-time are definitely good for plenty of people's mental sanity, myself included.

[Unstoppable Empire of Doom]

If I recall correctly, the average work day in The Netherlands is about 6.2 hours, the average person works 4 days a week, for about 30 hours a week. And yet, they aren't any less productive than Americans, Canadians, or anyone else expected to work more for less pay.

Got to call bullshit on this. Even with a decline in productivity working long hours more shit does get done. Americans tend to be a helluva lot more productive than europeans because of longer hours and a higher percentage of women working.

[Greed and Death]

8h would be reasonable if commuting didn't exist. Plain and simple. As it stands those 8 easily become 10 or for some unfortunate people 12 or more hours a day. And that is just completely wrong on every level. Think on that.

I work with a lady who commutes from near Baltimore to DC and back again every day. Management position, she took what she was offered because it made her money and the company won't transfer her to a closer location. her commute is roughly an hour there and back on good days, and she works 10+ because she's salaried. Commutes really do need to factor in. ~9 hours for salaried management is... fine. If you want to sign up for it, go wild, but 11 hours a day? All the while having to take care of a kid and house with a husband who works in the FD so he's gone for days at a time? Shit sucks man.

That's why she wont move the Husband has to live locally.

[Shaktur]

Five 8-hour work days adding up to a 40-hour week have historically been the default compromise between productivity and worker self-maintenance in post-industrial revolution society. For the better part of two centuries this has proven to work well; even with relatively basic industrial tasks humans experience drastically increasing fatigue factors both physical and mental around the 8-hour mark, and as has been mentioned a day can easily be divided into three 8-hour work shifts to run industrial equipment all day and minimise equipment redundancies.

However, recent research has indeed suggested this may not continue to hold true, and may not even be true concerning the state of the art workflow of many fields even today. The 6 hour work day, 30 hour work week option has become the most popular suggestion for change. As more tasks become increasingly automated, the labour demanded of human workers is increasingly complex and strenuous, mentally even if often not so much physically any more. This of course leads to an earlier burnout point, and in fact initial studies suggest in many high education fields the new tipping point is much closer to 6 hours than to 8.

Additionally, as people become more educated and their incomes increase, they experience diminishing utility from ever-increasing wages, and of course they have more money to use when they're not working on whatever they like. Many people, I'm sure, would prefer an entire 2 extra hours of free time in the day than 1.33 times as much pay.

Automation does, at least for now, create, minimum, as many jobs as it destroys in net, but these jobs aren't always immediately obvious at all, much less hired for by employers on a wide scale, leading to a lag and a structural unemployment problem. A 6-hour work day would of course mean more people are needed to output the same number of raw human-hours of work, which in the past would've been truly awful, but now may be not so much, and it would certainly smooth many of these temporary unemployment problems.

Of course, hard scientists tend to disagree with economists on one important point: if automation will eventually render human labour totally obsolete. Hard scientists argue against economics orthodoxy and say that it will. I would assume that, even if there's never strictly a point where there is no task a human can do that a totally autonomous machine can't do better for whatever reason, then the laws of economics would eventually mean that utility gains from extremely high-order jobs (truly unfathomably high-order by our current knowledge) would be so utterly negligible for all of humanity that they might as well be ignored anyway, seeing as we'd all already be millionaires, even billionaires or more, by today's standards of material wealth.

Edit: wording error in 2nd paragraph, *30 hour work week, not work shift.

[Aclion]

I want 10 hour days and three days off.

[Risottia]

I'd love to see medical certification for that.

I don't need a medical certification for that. That's what I need to get to feel my best, and that's that.

So it's an unsupported claim?

[The Blaatschapen]

I don't need a medical certification for that. That's what I need to get to feel my best, and that's that.

So it's an unsupported claim?

If a person claims to need 10 hours of sleep, which is a bit much, but not outlandishly weird, who are you to deny it?

[Zitravgrad]

8 hours makes the most sense in my opinion... it stops making sense at 10 or more hours.

Source: I have 16-hour shifts twice a week.

[Chestaan]

I want 10 hour days and three days off.

Really this kind of thing should be an option. Corporations are.mostly very inflexible with regards to hours.

[Risottia]

So it's an unsupported claim?

If a person claims to need 10 hours of sleep, which is a bit much, but not outlandishly weird, who are you to deny it?

Who is him, that I should accept his claims to be true without even a hint of a proof?

[The Blaatschapen]

If a person claims to need 10 hours of sleep, which is a bit much, but not outlandishly weird, who are you to deny it?

Who is him, that I should accept his claims to be true without even a hint of a proof?

It's a claim about himself.

I am willing to belief claims people have about themselves within reason.

PS. I am Barack Obama.

[O bama]

Who is him, that I should accept his claims to be true without even a hint of a proof?

It's a claim about himself.

I am willing to belief claims people have about themselves within reason.

PS. I am Barack Obama.

I am Barack Obama.

[Cekoviu]

It's a claim about himself.

I am willing to belief claims people have about themselves within reason.

PS. I am Barack Obama.

I am Barack Obama.

Looks legit to me.