> An analysis of the emails and meetings of 3.1 million people in 16 global cities found that the average workday increased by 8.2 percent—or 48.5 minutes—during the pandemic’s early weeks.
For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.
> For comparison, companies in the EU have to abide by a time-tracking law that requires employers to have an objective, reliable, and accessible system in place for measuring employee working time. This is to prevent employees working excessive extra time without compensation.
Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country):
- Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...)
- Jobs where they make you track X hours but you get the job done in Z (Z<X) so people do all sorts of tricks like clocking out remotely, or having a workmate clock out for them (of course, just staying and reading a book or surfing the Internet is also a thing).
- Jobs where time tracking is pretty much impossible so it's all fake. For example, I'm a university professor, I sometimes meet at 11 PM with people from different timezones, or have to rerun an experiment at night, or rush on Sunday to meet a conference deadline and then rest on Monday morning (maybe). You can't track that, so all my time tracking is pretty much made up (and it gives me extra work because I have to make it up in such a way that it adds up and conforms to the theory).
I suppose the law can be helpful for some people, but it's just annoying for most people I know.
> Jobs where they make you clock in X hours but actually work X+Y. This of course can be reported, but not many people do (lack of inspectors, fear of losing the job, slowness of the justice system...)
I would add that there are also cases where it’s the other way around—where the employer actually insists that employees work only a set number of hours (X), but the staff voluntarily puts in additional time (Y) without tracking it.
In fact, I’ve seen this happen more often in European companies than situations where employers pressure staff to work longer hours.
In Germany it's the state-run education system that has no measuring system for teachers yet (the federal states have to implement it but seen to be afraid to do so). So one of the biggest violators is the state itself.
> Yeah, that's the theory. The practice (at least in my country):
- You sign a waiver on day 1.
The law is most helpful to the people that need it the most.
Tracking time of people in shit call center jobs, or with highly repeatable tasks is very straight forward.
I’m planning to have someone from Australia do some work and was computing the amount paid per hour etc and the numbers didn’t add up. “This is too small.” Then I got a reminder their workweek is 38 hours (basically 8 hour shifts with unpaid 24 minutes’ of breaks). In America we tend to have 8.5 or 9 hour shifts with 30-50 minutes of lunch break.
Now with RTO, employers want the same productivity they had with WFH (basically more people on call, available outside of regular hours, and a standard workday almost an hour longer).
For a lot of tasks, productivity does not scale linearly with the amount of hours worked. When your shift is an hour longer, that doesn't necessarily mean that you get an hour more work done.
Almost no tasks!
There’s some fascinating data from factories producing munitions during WWII (a highly motivated workforce doing skilled work) showing that total productivity plateaus at about 45 hours per week.
> without compensation.
Aren't the lower European salaries to be considered not compensating the worker?
Not when it's same by ratio, for example when someone in the US earns 100k a year for 50 weeks of 50 hours vs someone in EU earning 75.2k for 47 weeks of 40 hours.
And then we haven't even taken cost of living, lifetime healthcare costs, retirement benefits, and social security into account.
> Not when it's same by ratio
Of course, but if we consider ground truth, there's very few salaried workers in Europe making 75k unless they have political positions.
So if the American employer is cheating their workers out of 20% of their salary by making them work unpaid overtime. What should we say about the European employer who follows overtime rules to the book, but pays their workers 50% of what the American employer does?
> And then we haven't even taken cost of living...
Irrelevant. This is a transaction strictly between employer and employee. Reimbursement should be according to what the worker delivers to the company, and European workers are probably on about the same level of productivity as American.
Perhaps the European employer doesn't make as much profit? That could be due to higher taxes, higher cost of doing business, treating their employees better, etc.
But should the workers pay for that? American companies manage to combine higher profits and higher salaries – while still paying more for healthcare. As for "treating their employees better", there's no better way to treat them well than paying them more.