Summer Hours are Bullshit
May 21st, 2007 by Brian
Today we received our annual notification regarding the company’s summer hours. From June 4th until August 11th employees may work 1 extra hour each day Monday through Thursday. If our supervisor approves we may then leave at noon on Friday.
So we get to exchange a piece of our evenings for a chunk of Friday afternoon. Would it have been so hard to simply let us go home a little early on Fridays with no strings attached?
This is a dumb idea for the following reasons:
- You decide to use summer hours but your boss does not. He goes home at 5:00 but you’re supposed to stay until 6. Assuming there’s no electronic time clock, what time do you actually leave? The correct answer is “5:05.” You might feel guilty walking out the door at Noon Friday but the feeling will soon pass.
- You faithfully work from 8:30 until 6 Monday-Thursday but 2 times out of 3 something will come up on Friday and you’ll end up working until 5. Congratulations: you just put in unpaid overtime.
This whole situation reminds me of how much I think the “40 hour work week” is a crock of shit for salaried personnel. I think the work week should be flexible and based on how much time your department needs to perform the tasks for which it was hired. In a healthy company this should typically work out to 40 hours but will occasionally allow people to kick off early without filing an ass-kissing email with the boss.
At my company salaried personnel are the overtime sponges. Why pay time+1/2 to hourly people when the salaried people do it for free? The only time anybody gets away early is when the owner skips out early to go yachting.
That’s what blogs are for. You kill company time by reading others’ blogs and making your own blog entries. If the Man wants me to work 40+ hours a week, then I’ll be damn sure to spend a fair amount of that time doing my own thing.
I’d like to address the issue of “overtime sponges” another day. I don’t have much perspective on that issue because my employer respects my time and I rarely work more than 39.75 hours in a week.
Overall, though, it seems like my workplace is the exception. Companies are hiring fewer people to do more work because they know that in entry/mid level positions most people will just put up with it.
People who get fed up and quit are replaced by someone who’s willing to work 55 hour weeks to pad their resume.