New | Group wants to shun Silicon Valley and revive 40-hour working week
An advocacy group is calling for companies to revive the eight-hour day, saying Silicon Valley geeks have distorted how long one must work
A small but impassioned group of psychologists and business academics have made a plea for changing the daily working routine – moving away from the ethics of the nerds and geeks of Silicon Valley and towards common industrial sense. “Bring back the 40 hour working week” is the way that one of them summarises it.
In an emotionally charged article on AlterNet, Sara Robinson claims that “the single, easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits – starting right now, today – is to get everybody off the 55-hour a week treadmill and back onto a 40-hour (working week) footing”.
She also has academic backing. Professor Teresa Amabile, the Edsel Bryant Ford professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and a director of research there, also compares modern working life to a treadmill and says that good managers must do more to take their workers off it to release their energy and innovation. “Often, it would be better to do less,” she told a recent issue of Harvard Gazette.
Other studies have given indirect support with findings that long work hours and consequent deprived sleep habits mean that tired workers tend to behave like drunks on the job.
Knowledge workers have fewer good hours than manual labourers do
Robinson recounted the historical background to the 40-hour week, pressures for which started in the UK and US in the early 19th century. “While it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them that this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision.”