60 Minutes ....repeat

[serryjw]

Obviously, working 9-5 is gone for many. It appears that 60-80 hours is the norm in corporate american. I have turned down many jobs in the last few years because I will no longer commute to work and then work 40-50 hours. I choose to work on commission out of my house and have less stress. WHY do people do this? They don't have the time to spend/enjoy the money they are making.

quote......
Americans work longer hours than nearly anyone in the developed world, even the Japanese. For many professionals and corporate managers, the 40-hour work week is history; 60- to 80-hour work weeks are now the norm.

Signs of our addiction to work are everywhere. For one, rush hours are starting earlier and ending later. When 60 Minutes first broadcast this story a few months ago, the first train for commuters from the suburbs into New York had just been pushed back to 4:45 a.m., by popular demand.

Why do Americans work so much? The simplest answer is because we can.
end quote........

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/31/60minutes/main1460246.shtml

How many hours do you work weekly? Don't include commute

[Selatius]

1. You're lucky to get down to 45 in some of my previous jobs

My last job, you could push 60 easy, and that's just the warm-up run. They will push you as high as the upper 70s if they can. I'm not going to name this employer, but it is a Fortune 100 company. The CEO recently retired and was replaced by a successor whom the original CEO had bought out back in 1996 or so. When I was hired, they had recently liquidated a division of workers and replaced them with temp workers. The temp workers were, indeed, higher paid than the original force, but they had no job security, no pension, no health care, no benefits whatsoever. The previous CEO had set plans into motion long ago to have the entire operation run with temp workers only. His successor, the current CEO, will, from what I can tell, continue forward this progrom of breaking workers. I was a temp worker. The workers who were unionized said we had some of the shittiest labor contracts around, and I knew it; I felt it in my aching body.

The only workers who will be left who do have benefits will be nothing more than a skeleton staff whose purpose will be relegated to simply training the incoming batch of new temp workers, while the contract with the old temp workers expires. The problem is labor unions have slowed down this transition process; there is a fight, but I don't feel they will be able to hold out forever against this goliath corporation. They are so big they can easily buy out the state legislature and destroy politicians who dare to challenge their authority.

This is corporatism. The game is profit, and workers are in the way of more profits. They intend to crush worker resistance and strip them down to the bare bones so that less money will be expensed in "labor costs." More money for the shareholders, the owners of the means of production, is what they desire.

[Freedom_Aflaim]

2. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real,

actual, work.

:)