36-hour shifts, 80-hour weeks: Workers are being burnt out by overtime | Hacker News Reader

36-hour shifts, 80-hour weeks: Workers are being burnt out by overtime

nbcnews.com

42 pointsbikenaga30 comments

> Still, Jen Burke, a nurse at Vassar Brothers Medical Center in Poughkeepsie, New York, said it has become routine for her and her colleagues working in the cardiac catheterization lab to have their 12-hour shifts extended because of a lack of staff or beds in other parts of the hospital.

I bet if the government mandated triple over time pay for safety critical procedures such as in medicine, the problem would rapidly fix itself.

It's ilegal for airplane pilots and truck drivers, because tired people make more mistakes that can kill someone.

It should be ilegal for nurses and medical doctors, because ...

the only thing worse than a tired nurse or doctor is no nurse or doctor at all.

you can cancel a flight or a truck shipment (not great but feasible) -- you can't quite just cancel patients that are in the hospital.

Remember. There's no worker shortage. There's only a pay shortage.

Workers can organizer or quit. There is no other path, and they have the wind to their backs due to structural demographics.

Or they can lobby

That’s worthless in the near term for labor rights issues with regard to action in Congress. We can barely keep the government functioning from a funding perspective. Republicans and the US chamber of commerce will keep trying to grind workers and their attempts at getting agency.

The NLRB continues to enact pro union and worker policy; that is the lever to apply maximum force with until representative turnover in Congress can occur.

I repeat myself for emphasis: workers must organize, and failing that, quit to starve the business or industry of labor (depending on their means, location, other potential employment opportunities, etc). Otherwise the beatings will continue as long as the workers keep showing up (as this very piece the post is referencing describes). I see no other options, having worked back from first principles and systems analysis. If the economy or its subcomponents must be pushed towards failure, that is reasonable. Just as in tech workplaces where dysfunctional business systems continue to function due to unseen (sometimes Herculean) effort, if you allow the dysfunction to occur, no change will be made. You either let the system fail, or you push it to failure.

Examples:

https://news.yahoo.com/entire-police-department-quit-over-10... ("An entire police department quit over $22-an-hour pay, saying there is 'zero incentive' to work there")

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the... ("Many school districts around the U.S. are moving to a four-day school week to retain teachers. Districts that don't want to raise taxes to pay teachers more are using the long weekend as an incentive.")

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/school-districts-4-day-week-tea... ("Nearly 900 school districts in the United States currently use a four-day weekly academic schedule. That number rose from 650 districts in 2020 to 876 districts, across 26 states, in 2023. While smaller, rural districts have been more likely to favor the schedule, larger districts are now shortening their school weeks in an effort to recruit and retain teachers. It's a selling point in an era when schools are facing a national teacher shortage.")

https://www.deseret.com/2023/5/3/23709769/one-third-us-nurse... ("30% of the nurses are planning to quit their career, which is 7 percentage points over the 2021 percentage")

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/11/1207991399/4-four-day-work-we... ("A manufacturer tried the 4-day workweek for 5 days' pay and won't go back")

TLDR There is no labor shortage. There is a shortage of labor willing to take the abuse they historically have.

There was a historical market correction of labor wages upwards after the 1918 pandemic. Strange to think, but it sure seems those days had fewer factors pushing labor down than now, but here we are.

You’re absolutely correct. Price/wage is how to incentivize people to work for a company. Though also these jobs (medical, law enforcement, firefighting) have always been high stress but seem much worse after the pandemic. The answer would probably be less hours worked for higher pay and making sure they have all the resources they could ever need.

You don't even need to quit to see the effects of this. As people become poorer, demand is going to drop. Only so much blood you can squeeze out

I agree mostly, but disagree about demand dropping, as this is industry specific. With regards to teachers, students and families will simply be stuck with whatever resources can be provided (in the citations I provide above, some parents are unhappy with a 4 day school week, but if taxpayers don't want to pay more for a mandated service, too bad so sad, you get what you get). Speaking of police protection, you will get degraded services or no services. Most critically, if there are not enough nurses, CNAs, and other medical practitioners, care delivery will degrade and people will potentially die. These are all services and systems with mostly inelastic demand. Where demand is elastic, there is more flexibility in the feedback loop. Labor is not fungible, so expect this to continue in a lumpy fashion for at least the next decade.

They should definitely raise the exempt salary amount and the minimum wage. It has been too long.

In the very least , tie it to inflation.

Tying wage to inflation is unfortunately a bad idea because it drives a feedback loop. People have tried (including in the US in the 70s) and it always ends in tears.

Tying thresholds like exempt thresholds though sounds like a good idea.

or they can choose not to work at all in a shitty job. That's what's happening here.

I'm burnt out and frustrated, the whole covid era has really taken it's toll on my mental health. Hard to see a way forward when we're hell bent on degrowth as prices spiral out of control.

Much of what I read in this article is outright illegal in many parts of the world.

American leadership? Nope.

This is largely illegal here in the USA too. This article neglects to point out the fact that everyone except for the railway workers are either police, fire fighters, medics, or nurse which are professions that have legal exemptions from laws governing overtime and such.

The rail workers are not pulling 80 hour weeks, the article says they can only work 4.7 hours of overtime in a week, so 44.7 hours a week. Only emergency services and hospital staff are exempt from the laws that protect people from this sort of stuff.

There are some extraordinarily broad exemptions to overtime requirements. From memory, it basically boiled down to anyone whose job can be described as spending a majority of their time on a computer.

In my last corporate retail job, we had mandatory unpaid overtime. Assistant managers were required to work 44 hours and managers had to do 48, but got paid for 40.

Though those same overtime exemptions had their own counter-exemption if you had less than some number of employees as a manager. Because corporate wouldn't raise starting wages or approve new hires, many stores were below that limit and it was a huge scandal when some of them started demanding overtime pay. By then we were looking at 50 and 60 hour weeks with no overtime pay.

Can you expand on how this works? Presumably retail workers have to log hours and clock in/out. Did the company demand you falsify your hours? Or did they just not pay for some of your hours? The latter seems clearly illegal, it's wage theft.

Managers are salaried and get paid a flat 40 hours a week. We did have to track our hours to ensure that we were meeting the minimum hour count.

So yeah, they basically just didn't pay you for all of your hours. It might technically be legal, but the company doesn't actually care about that. Wage theft is rampant, we all know that already

Agreed, wage theft is definitely rampant, but with this it seems like you can very trivially report this to the state and get free money? You've got the hours and pay documents in writing, showing that to the state should get an immediate response. Or does the state labor department just not care?

As far as I can tell, this is not true at all.

“There is no limit in the Act on the number of hours employees aged 16 and older may work in any workweek. The FLSA does not require overtime pay for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, or regular days of rest, unless overtime is worked on such days.”[1]

“In general, federal mandatory overtime laws follow guidelines set by the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA establishes the primary regulations for overtime pay affecting employees working in the private sector, as well as in federal, state, and local governments. The FLSA outlines the following guidance about overtime:

-Nonexempt employees must receive overtime pay for hours worked over the 40-hour workweek. -Pay for overtime must be a minimum of 1.5 times the regular rate of pay. -There are no limits to the number of hours employees 16 years old and older can work during a workweek, other than the fact there are obviously a finite number of hours in a workweek. -Overtime pay is not required on weekends or holidays unless overtime is worked on those days.” -Employers may penalize employees who refuse to work required overtime. Though the penalties can vary by employer, there are no federal guidelines for employer penalties on employees refusing to work mandatory overtime. In some cases, employees may be subject to discipline, reassignment, demotion, or even discharge. -Employers can require nonexempt employees to work beyond their 40-hour workweek hours without any notice, such as requiring employees to work another shift without any notice.[2]

So basically there is no limit to how much an employer can ask their employee to work mandatory overtime, as long as they are paid for their over time hours at a minimum of 1.5x rate.

[1]https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/overtime#:~:text=There%20is....

[2] https://blog.namely.com/mandatory-overtime-laws-for-each-us-...

I work in a industry that is not at all related to any type of emergency services, supply line or transportation sector. People in my industry still regularly work at minimum 50-60 hour work weeks and very often 70-80 hours a week (in often relatively physical jobs). We are usually guaranteed a turn around time of 10 hours (how many hours we can have between our shifts— which is really just 8 hours if you factor in travel time), and that is only because our union recently fought for that in our last contract negotiation.

US labor laws are still very much the Wild West of labor laws.

The FLSA is a joke. You can be forced to work unpaid overtime if you work with computers and your salary is over $35k/year among other nonsensical exemptions.

It needs to be completely rewritten without any exemptions. If you’re expected to work, or be available to work on short notice, you should be getting paid full or more salary for the time.

This is a huge problem for IT workers as companies expect computer systems to run 24/7 but frequently refuse to pay for more than one shift to support them so people end up working 24/7 and can’t live their lives because they’re tethered to computers.

This, among other things, is why IT workers need to unionize.

Always refreshing to see someone on HN with a properly forward-thinking head on the shoulders. My first tech job taught me a lot, and none of it was tech-related.

Mandated overtime in fire and EMS is common.

36 hours though?

The private ambulance company near me only requires 8 hours off-duty after SIXTY hours on-duty.

Most professional (non-volunteer) fire fighters work 24 hour shifts. This includes three meals and an 8-10 hours of down time. It wouldn't be too uncommon for a fire fighter coming off his day to et mandated another 12 hours, totalling 36 hours.

Sucks, I agree, but this is not 36 sleepless hours. Likely he had 10-12 hours of rest in his 36 hour shift. It is not the same as if a desk jockey worked 36 hours straight.

Assuming no fire over night yah? Could be a very long day but won’t always be.

Yes that's right however usually shifts get moved around to accommodate. My father worked for a large fire department, so my understanding is probably skewed by a department with a lot of resources.

It reminds me my project manager works up to 10 hours a day, sometimes even on the weekends.

He's sacrificing his life to The Group, and expects me to do the same.

Thank God I'm still studying, so I can claim this day I really gotta do my homework etc (which is surprisingly mostly true).

Capitalism eventually becomes Japan. Corporations and 80 hour work weeks.

Japan speed ran the game, we're just catching up.

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