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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

Nobody is forcing anybody to work 12 hours a day?

> Nobody is forcing anybody to work 12 hours a day?

Do you have a source for this claim? Normally when I hear about workers at factories like this, they are treated like shit in all kinds of ways, given few other options, physically abused, and strongly coerced in to the longest shifts legally possible, or longer.

See this documentary about global garment workers. Hopefully Foxconn is better, but we can't just assume people are not being abused.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxFwA-jw3X4

I didn't say don't take abuse seriously. I questioned whether allowing a 12 hour workday implies abuse.

It's unfortunate that economics is pushing many people to work 12 hours a day, leaving them with little time for anything else. These long work hours can take a toll on both physical and mental health, and many people are struggling to make ends meet despite their efforts.

In countries like India, unemployment is a significant challenge, and for those who do have jobs, the wages are often insufficient to afford basic necessities like housing, education, and healthcare. This situation can be especially difficult for families with children who are trying to provide a good life for them.

This comment lacks either empathy or ignorance.

Many employers effectively force exempt employees to work 12 hour days.

Then don't take a salary. Nobody is forcing you to work for a nice salary. If you want to be paid by the hour so that every hour is accounted for then go for it.

Of course, in practice that is not a possibility for most people. You can't just choose to work hourly if nobody is willing to hire you on these terms. Without regulation the balance of power is strongly in the hands of capital and inevitably leads to employers working employees to death. We have plenty of examples of this in our past.

You can go work at McDonalds right now for $20/hr where I live. You can structure your work as a consultant and bill hourly. No you can't walk into a company that is looking for a salaried employee and tell them you're going to work hourly (I mean you can try, it might work). But you have plenty of options and there's plenty of work out there.

I don’t think they were complaining about being paid per hour or not, just the expectation in many salaried jobs you work arbitrarily long hours in a competition with the nerd next to you for how much you can sacrifice for your employer.

I later in my career learned you can actually invert it by just being really effective in a shorter number of hours and work 6 hours a day and just leave the nerd next to you to expire from burnout. But it helps being later in my career and knowing how to be more effective in a shorter time.

Except most tech and quant jobs I’ve had where 80 hour work weeks are expected, but not required. It’s really only required if you want to keep your job.

There's stories and there's reality. I've seen 60 hour weeks occasionally but not 80 and not de-facto required. Most places have decent managers that understand work/life balance. Find one that does.

My story comes from my life experiences starting at SGI, Netscape, Wall Street, etc over 30 years. What you deem reality i extrapolate from my reality as a recent emergent reality based on broad social trends that may or may not stick. I think the work life balance stuff is really recent and coincides with employers trying to convince people they’re not really evil and part of the recent wave of liberal humanism in western societies. It’s a great trend. But it’s neither concrete reality nor proven to be permanent.

Dcow says this in a discussion about a company that has to put suicide nets in their factories to prevent their workers from killing themselves.

this was in china and not a thing anymore

Oh, all right then!

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