Also laws are the way to prevent a race to the bottom. If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them. Compare OHSA, see http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ .
It's very hard to measure human productivity unfortunately. It's much easier to measure the cost of an employee working less hours for the same salary.
But management hasn't entirely caught up with the idea that jobs are no longer about clock punching - and longer clock times can mean less real worker value.
This is partly about power dynamics in the workplace. In many corporations control of time and personal freedom are perks that are only available as you move up the hierarchy. Dysfunctional cultures are much more interested in explicit displays of limited freedom for the worker bees than in true increases in productivity.
Not at all. For gay marriage or pot legalization, large shifts in public opinion have preceded changes to laws.
If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them.
The Moloch post is excellent, but it doesn't really apply here. Productivity isn't a zero sum game; unless you're in a dysfunctional stack ranking environment like Microsoft used to have, being more productive doesn't hurt your coworkers.
And for tech workers in particular, it's impossible to prevent you from working "off the clock" in your spare time. Yet people generally don't, probably because as others have noted just adding hours doesn't actually make you more productive.
Oh, is that why almost everyone earns minimum wage?
I think it's fair to assume companies will do anything for increased productivity. That has nothing to do with wages.
Categorically false. I'd wager 90%+ of the (American) readers here are exempt FTEs, meaning they are paid a salary which is based on calendar days/weeks/months/year, not hours worked.
You would also need an executive order to change the way that federal contracts are handled. Currently, huge numbers of salaried professionals employed by contractor companies have to punch the clock as though they were wage-earners in order for the company to get paid for their work.
If you don't log X hours during a given week, your salary for that week may be docked by N/X. If you log more than X, you are not necessarily paid any more for overtime. The contractor-employer could set X to be 40, or 45, or 50--whatever it wants.
If an executive order said that no individual could work more than 30 hours total in any calendar week on any combination of federal contracts, unless that person is paid an additional 10% of their normal weekly salary for each hour in excess of 30 (aka triple-time OT), while the company still gets paid the same rate, then lo, nearly everyone in the military-industrial complex would suddenly have a 30-hour work week.
As it is now, the contracting arrangements dance around the fuzzy edges of labor law, to the detriment of the workers and to the benefit of their employers, and possibly also to the benefit of several additional layers of middlemen. Changing the law is meaningless if you can't enforce it.
Not true. What about education?
Over the years, the federal government has added more jobs to the exempt employee list. This means we get things like fast food store managers making $26K/yr putting in 60 hour weeks. There has been a push to change the minimum salary to $50K/yr for exempt employees, but employers have successfully delayed the implementation of this till late 2016.
Ideally, the US needs to rewrite the Fair Labour Standards Act to be more in line with the EU working time directive which limits the working time to an average of 48 hours over a period of several weeks. This allows overtime to be used in bursts, but not chronically.
That's not true.
http://web.stanford.edu/~leinav/pubs/RESTAT2003.pdf
Page 835. Total average of seatbelt usage, before law: 31%, after law: 48%, in 1998: 65%.
I think you might be confused by the 1998 number. That year came after the after law percentage. Meaning that enforcement immediately after the law also worked.
Your assumptions are without standing.
This is one of those sneaky tricks advocates for government intervention use (or fall victim to). To prove the efficacy of OSHA, for example, proponents will show a chart of workplace fatalities or accidents where there are a few or only one data points before the law and then show some spectacular trend that follows after the law was passed. In reality when you go back many more years it is clear the law had little to do with the trend as workplace safety had been increasing for years prior to the law.