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Member Submission

"I Work Too Hard"
by Mark Levy

I don't know about you, but I think I work too hard. On average, I go to my office eight hours a day, five days a week, if you can believe that. Man, that's 40 hours per week, minus some time for lunch, of course, and coffee breaks, birthday celebrations, anniversaries, and Monday morning quarter-backing.

Now that I think of it, the expression I used, "work too hard," may not be entirely accurate. After all, pushing pencils and pounding keyboards doesn't qualify as hard manual labor. It's not as if we white collar workers actually sweat, unless we're being interviewed by an IRS agent.

But still, doing anything for 40 hours per week seems too long -- really excessive. So it's not that my work is too hard, exactly, as much as too long. If I put my mind to it and I weren't working, in a 40 hour week I could watch about 24 feature length movies, or I could prepare 600 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or I could brush my teeth 800 times. Gives me a different perspective on what 40 hours really means.

I know some people would love to work only 40 hours per week -- people with second jobs, for instance. I've even heard of some folks who work up to 100 hours every week, which doesn't leave much time for playing golf, preparing chocolate soufflés or doing inconsequential things, like sleeping.

The 40 hour work week has been our standard for 70 years, since 1938, when Congress, during Franklin Roosevelt's administration, passed the Fair Labor Standards Act as part of the New Deal to help eliminate sweatshops. By the way, 1938 was also the year that oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia, but I guess that's an essay for another time.

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, time working beyond 40 hours was to be compensated at at least one and a half times the regular rate of pay, so employers would be dissuaded from forcing their employees to work too long. Ironically, nowadays many of us look forward to working overtime to make ends meet. In fact, over three fifths of us in America work more than 40 hours a week, and 40% of us work more than 50 hours a week. Let's face it, the cost of ingredients for chocolate soufflés is increasing all the time, to say nothing about the cost of Saudi oil.

About fifty years ago, in 1961, a published prediction*, presumably by a reputable source, said that by now the standard work week would be only 29 hours long. That prediction also included the belief that 5% of the world's population would be living in space, that common colds and cancer would be eliminated, and that, by now, cars would float on air, being powered by engines the size of a typewriter. Predictions don't always come true, I guess, so I'm not banking on a four-hour work week, as recently predicted for Generation Y people by a woman named Penelope Trunk.**

There was a concern a few years back that we workers wouldn't know what to do with all of our free time. Of course, that was before the invention of reality T.V. shows.

The point is, we've had the 40 hour week standard for the better part of a century now. Isn't it time that Congress adjusted it downwardly to -- oh, I don't know -- maybe to the number of hours Congress itself works on those rare occasions when it's in session?

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* www.pixelmatic.com.au/2000/
** http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2007/12/12/the-end-of-work-as-we-know-it/

Although the members of Mensa can be opinionated, the Mensa organization itself has no opinion and remains neutral on issues.