Why Work Hour Limits?
Many laws discourage and limit work hours. Laws require holidays and vacations, limit hours per day and week, and require extra payment for work over these limits. And of course income taxes discourage work more generally. The standard economic explanation for these limits is to prevent inefficient signaling. People motivated to gain relative status, to show their extra dedication to success, and to appear more able, work extra hours, for a net social loss. Work hour limits can reduce such losses. (Academic articles here, here, here, here, here.)
This argument makes some sense, but it would make a lot more sense if we set broader and more consistent limits. Yet we don’t at all limit housework, and place few limits on self-employed work. Furthermore, high status occupations are especially exempt. Doctors, lawyers, managers, financiers, artists, writers, athletes, academics, and software engineers often work crazy hours. Yet the signaling argument would seem to apply nearly as well if not better to such high status work. Why are we so selective in our limits?
One explanation is a battle for relative status between professions and activities. Areas where work hours are limited produce less, and so look less impressive. Ambitious folks who want to show their high abilities then choose other areas, leading to an equilibrium were observers reasonably less respect folks who work in limited areas. On this story, work hour limits were set in manufacturing and manual labor in order to reduce the status of such activities.
A second related explanation is that each society is eager to look good to other societies. So each society prefers to encourage, not discourage, activities that are especially visible to outsiders. When outsiders evaluate societies more on the basis of their athletes than their shop technicians, societies naturally subsidize the former relative to the latter.
Another third explanation is that voters support limits on work hours in some jobs mainly as a way to defy and “stick it to” employers, who are seen as evil and in need of taking down. Firms who employ low status workers may themselves seem lower status and “exploitive,” and thus more acceptable targets of ire. Work hour limits serve as a quantity limit which raises wages and thus employer expenses. Any reduction of signaling losses is nice, but mainly a side effect.
So, it is almost 10 years following this article and less for many of the comments. Well, sorry to day we have not moved on this issues. In fact, we seem to have slipped farther down this road. Working longer hours for less compensation for the people that really do the work. Employers are now doing more with less, this includes employees. This includes time to conduct each task. Employees choose to work more hours to get the overtime, but at what cost, their health, safety, and less productivity. Any time employees work long hours there is a proven reduction in the quality and quantity of work. Working 6 hours with no breaks is better than working a 8 or 10 hour day. The average working working 12 hours, produces about 7.5 hours of work. Managers and leaders in the company look at production as number of hours times the normal productivity equals higher out put at the end of the day. This would be a false assumption. Between fatigue and incidents, production is lost and sometimes completely stopped for extended periods. Employers must look at the employee's ability to conduct their task and weight the value of the time spent working. We need to plan our work based on a schedule that accounts for quality and safety vs just production. Production will follow when we have a well planned schedule. Four 6 hour shifts over a twenty-four hour day, will be more productive and cost less. It does require more employees, but with the 30 hour work week there are other benefits that reduce cost. Back to what a few of you had discussed, of course companies must pay employees for their time as legally required. This shorter schedule helps to avoid these issues. Employees are less likely to take time off, other than scheduled vacations, moral will be elevated, production will increase, and cost will be reduced. This is a win for everyone. Consider a change in the mindset that we need to make people work more to get more done.
private companies always push everything to the very limit they can regardless of workers. The laws are the little and only protection left.