Salon.com: Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them?The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight.
4 comments:
personally when I hear that someone refer to the 40 hour work week my mind roams to straight to the ideas of the 9-5 mon- thurs. but this article brings up an interesting idea. film and theatre works have come to expect to work 8 to 12 hours at least. the entertainment industry in my opinion has always been used to excessive hours. With the Economy the way it has been for the past few years yes people have had to put in more and more effort to keep their jobs which is disappointing. a friend of mine once pointed out that into days economy if you want to keep your job you have to do your job and the next guy's job.
I'm tied on this whole 40 hours work week thing. While I feel that the 40 hours is a good amount of time to be spent at work, I also feel that these times do not apply to the theatrical or film industries. With our line of work, we often just work til we get done what needs to get done. This often calls for hours that grossly exceed the 40 hour wrok week and most definately exceed for 9 to 5 times limits. But this should not come as a surprise to anyone who wants to get into the industry. This is a standard for almost every type of entertainment business.
Sure, a 40 hour work week is a nice thought. But it's irrelevant for most people in this industry. Tasks need to be completed by a hard deadline, and that's that. While I'm sure the studies they've conducted on productive work time are valid, what is more important is not the exact amount of hours one spends working in a single, but how someone maximizes what they accomplish in the amount of time spent working. Having some downtime is truly valuable, and finding a way to sneak some into a schedule is fantastic, but a 40 hour work week in this industry is not the answer. Definitely in other fields it is. In entertainment, the only solutions are finding a way to be more productive to cut down on the amount of time spent working. Deadlines are deadlines and everyone entering the industry is aware of that.
A forty hour work week in our profession just doesn't happen. Even in high school, we worked, without getting paid, until ten or eleven at night to get ready for a show. I guess it got me ready for what the real world would be like. Working long hours in high school did help prepare me for college and the long hours we work here, but only to a certain extent. I knew going in that my work life would never be ordinary, so not working a traditional 40 hour week never crossed my mind. I do like the mandatory time and a half for over forty hours though. I also think that the article made sense about the lower productivity of working over forty hours on a consistent basis.
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