No More 9-to-5: Ending the Eight-Hour Workday

America, the land of opportunity, is filled with workaholics. A country that has always valued hard work has become overworked and brought to the brink of exhaustion. This was unintentional, of course. When the nation’s factory workers pioneered the now-common eight-hour workday in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, their goal was to escape the drudgery of a repetitive shift that could see them working for anywhere between ten and sixteen hours per day to maintain the machine they were assigned to operate. Yet, the modern American worker doesn’t necessarily need to be working for eight hours a day in order to be fully productive and effective. Modern work is becoming more automated and less hands-on. Since many companies do their manufacturing overseas, offices have become the new factories, with workers sitting at desks in cubicles instead of standing at an assembly line waiting for the next part to land in front of them. We’re becoming too bored, distracted, and unhappy to be productive the way we used to be. How do we solve this predicament? The answer is simple: we must modify our current work schedule to better accomplish our needs. The eight-hour workday is not only unpopular and increasingly outdated, but additionally creates environments that foster unproductive habits, and also makes employees more physically and mentally unhealthy.

The eight-hour workday has a long history in the American workforce. While the nation’s workers were finally getting into the swing of factory work, which had become the new norm after the industrial developments in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, they weren’t happy. The workers were assigned absurdly long schedules, with shifts typically ranging between 10 and 16 hours (Widrich, The Buffer Blog), and they also had to deal with a whole host of other problems from their often-dispassionate employers. The general labor union the Knights of Labor, led by Terrence V. Powderly, began to rise, showing a rarely-seen fervor in favor of changing the way a workday was structured. The eight-hour workday, already advocated by union leaders in Britain, became the goal for American workers. However, the union’s reputation was harmed by violent strikes such as the Haymarket Riot, and the eight-hour-day movement ground to a halt. (“Today In History”) Although further attempts by organized labor to effect legislative change in favor of the eight-hour workday were fruitless, in 1914, when Henry Ford implemented an eight-hour system for his automobile factories, business leaders finally saw that the plan could succeed. Ford’s workers displayed increased productivity on the job, and the company’s profit margins doubled within two years of switching to an eight-hour workday. (Widrich, The Buffer Blog) Workers nationwide were ecstatic; they had finally achieved their dream of eight hours for work, eight for rest, and eight for recreation. Yet, most of them didn’t know Ford had competition in the innovation department.

As described by Jeffrey Kaplan, in 1930, cereal producer Kellogg implemented a mandatory six-hour workday for all employees. The company’s leaders – owner W.K. Kellogg and president Lewis Brown – made the decision for two reasons: to provide more jobs for the region their processing plant operated in, and to try and make their employees more satisfied with their jobs. Their seemingly radical plan worked with flying colors. Workers did get an overall pay cut, but they received higher hourly wages and were incentivized with production bonuses. More importantly, they had more time to spend how they chose. Some worked on beautifying their homes through gardening or housework, some focused on raising their children, and some found more eccentric pursuits, like the female employee who began practicing ping-pong in her spare time and went on to win the state championship. Journalists gushed over the success of Kellogg’s plan, which also received support from then-Alabama Senator Hugo Black, who proposed legislation that created a nationwide thirty-hour workweek. Unfortunately, President Franklin Roosevelt sided with the dozens of business leaders and union bosses who didn’t support the Kellogg-inspired plan, instead choosing to champion the New Deal legislation creating a nationwide standard of a forty-hour workweek. Even Kellogg employees couldn’t escape government regulation, despite backlash at the plans their new managers forced upon them. The higher-ups, in both the unions and the company, claimed that their co-workers were happy to earn the extra money from those additional weekly hours, but employees and their families lamented the change, with one man claiming, “everybody thought they were going to get rich when they got that eight-hour deal and it really didn’t make a big difference.” (Kaplan) The promise of something even more effective than the eight-hour workday at improving employee productivity and attitude was wrestled away from the American worker almost as quickly as that promise was made.

It’s a true shame that the eight-hour workday has become the norm because we live in a time now that has been defined by the constraints of the forty-hour workweek. “Under these working conditions,” says lifestyle design author David Cain, “people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends.” Writing shortly after he accepted a typical 9-to-5 position once more, he discovers that he loses the energy to pursue the fulfilling activities he did in his free time before, such as exercising, reading, and meditating. He admits to having a lot more money than he did before, but tempers that admission by lashing out at the consumerism borne from a forty-hour workweek: “Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy…we buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.” (Cain, Raptitude) The nature of work in America has changed, with less focus on manufacturing and higher segments of people working either in service industry jobs, which maintain irregular hours anyway, or in offices, sitting in cubicles and staring at screens, but this change from hard labor to tapping at keys hasn’t made us any happier with our jobs. With such a fragmented workforce, the eight-hour workday already feels woefully outdated. Two-fifths of the working population in America is employed outside of the traditional 9-to-5 schedule, with many working-class jobs requiring employees to work “evenings, nights, weekends, or rotating shifts” to keep up with demand. (Johnson & Lipscomb, 924) Employees increasingly desire scheduling flexibility but may be unable to obtain that flexibility based on factors like their line of work or their position within a job. Companies constantly struggle with their workers to strike an ideal balance between the amount they are required to work and the amount they’d like to be working. While success stories do exist of folks who successfully were able to achieve that balance from, data shows that nearly 60 percent of American workers desire to change their work hours to better fit their increasingly complex lives, and 37 percent of workers want a reduction in hours. (Reynolds, 1191) Some of the reasons behind this imbalance appear to be appropriate, albeit arbitrarily so. For instance, college-educated workers tend to work longer hours than their non-degree-holding co-workers, and decreases in working hours for those possessing a high school diploma or less have been occurring since 1940. (Costa, 157) Yet, just because it’s true doesn’t mean that it should be the state of things, and more employees should be able to experience flexibility in their workday since it is becoming not only more popular but also more necessary for the modern worker. Methods such as the gliding schedule, where employees are required to work for a set of core hours but can vary their clock-in and clock-out times, and the implementation of “flexitime” scheduling, where employees have to work a set amount of hours per pay period, have become increasingly popular, especially for young employees or those with familial commitments or second jobs. (Beers 34) There has also been a spike in jobs requiring some degree of working away from the actual workplace, also known as telecommuting, because of the increasing prevalence of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets in our daily lives. The pervasive nature of technology has made it more common for the average American worker to get their job done anywhere – even while on vacation, as two-thirds of Americans do, according to Accenture. The numbers also show that telecommuting increases worker job satisfaction and productivity, shores up the company’s bottom line, and allows workers to save on commuting costs and child or eldercare. (Petrecca, USAToday.com) Although there are critics of this new factor determining how we do our jobs, there are many who support this new, always-connected lifestyle, with some like sociologist Martha Beck interpreting this change as “a move away from the factory to a move back to a state that is more natural to us. We’re now more free to create natural work spaces.” (Petrecca, USAToday.com) Moves like this empower workers to take control of their workday and not be limited by the constraints that a strict 9-to-5 schedule imposes upon them. Furthermore, the workforce itself is changing, with more and more members of the “millennials” demographic finding jobs and forcing employers to adapt to the working style of this young group by implementing more flexibility programs similar to the ones described above. “[Millennials] are spearheading this change because they don’t want the same work environment their parents had,” writes career expert Dan Schawbel. (Time.com) Young people want their rules to be followed at work, which means access to social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, unfettered Internet usage, and the ability to have shift flexibility. “More than one-third (37%) of [millennial] workers would take a pay cut if it meant more flexibility on the job,” Schawbel continues, highlighting that millennials are more motivated, productive, and loyal if they are given schedule flexibility. (Time.com) If more people and companies were willing to be pioneers and break loose from the 9-to-5 nightmare, they could experience the same increased productivity and improved attitudes that those who have flexibility get every day they work. For now, though, it appears that the American workforce is stuck in the past instead of gazing towards the future.

We are unhappy employees, stuck in a 9-to-5 rut, and our productivity is suffering for it. This isn’t necessarily any fault of our own. It’s just science. Our bodies don’t care about how much we’re getting done, they care about how much energy we have to do it. There’s a reason why the average office worker only gets three actual hours of work done in a standard eight-hour workday: it’s too difficult to focus. Our bodies and minds operate on cycles called ultradian rhythms, which dictate that we as humans can only focus on a given task for between 90 and 120 minutes before we experience lapses in performance. We also multitask far more often than we should, and our brains divide that focus within the work window even further, creating a less-than-effective strategy for getting work done. (Widrich, The Buffer Blog) The modern American worker has been programmed by their boss to try and get more done every day, so workers scramble to look busy by doing menial tasks in a subconscious effort to avoid what actually needs to be done. In Timothy Ferriss’ bestselling The 4-Hour Workweek, he effectively sums up the problem with the 9-to-5 standard: “There is often no incentive to use time well unless you are paid on commission…time is wasted because there’s so much time available.” (75) This is another shameful side effect of the eight-hour workday. Employees have become less concerned with getting their work done and more concerned with appearing to be hard at work, even if it only means they’re delaying the inevitable. In lieu of receiving pressure to perform from our employers, we instead place pressure on ourselves to do what we think we need to do, making us all poor judges of how to properly implement our time.

Burnout is a common mental side effect of the long, tedious hours of the 8-hour workday. Longer working hours lead to psychological burnout, the intermingling of personal and work issues as well as reduced creativity (James, Inc.com). To understand the extent of the mental health issues associated with the 8-hour workday, one must first understand the implications of ‘burnout.’ Christian Maslach, Michael Leiter, Wilmar B. Schaufeli define burnout as, “a prolonged response to chronic emotional and interpersonal stressors on the job, and is defined by the three dimensions of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy,” (397). The authors continue by stating that exhaustion is the most common symptom of burnout, and those who describe themselves as burned out often are describing exhaustion. The nature of exhaustion promotes the action of distancing oneself cognitively and emotionally as far as possible from work. This is a coping mechanism designed to deal with overload brought on by work. The emotional capacity required for work varies from field to field. In the human services sector, the emotional demands of the work lead to exhaustion and the worker’s inability to connect with service recipients. Once a human service worker becomes burned out, or emotionally exhausted, the worker often copes by way of depersonalization. Using depersonalization, the worker ignores attributes that distinguish the recipients as individuals. By using depersonalization, the workers are better able to complete tasks without the increased risk of exhaustion and burnout. In other fields, workers use cognitive distancing to disengage from the work subject. Disengaging may mean developing a cynical attitude or indifference toward work when they are burned out or exhausted. Because cognitive distancing often leads to cynicism, a strong correlation between exhaustion and cynicism has been found in burnout studies. Therefore, if you’re exhausted, chances are that you’ll view your work cynically. Research shows that inefficacy, or reduced personal accomplishment, is an effect of cynicism and exhaustion. A working environment that promotes exhaustion and/or cynicism, will often lead to erosion of one’s self-worth, or perceived impact in the working environment. Feeling accomplished is difficult when you’re disengaged emotionally from those that the work is directly helping, or when exhausted (Maslach, Leiter, & Schaufeli, 403).

Not only does work cause stress and exhaustion, but research has also shown that work-related issues seep into other aspects of the worker’s life, like their family life. There are three main types of what they call “work-family conflict”: time, strain, and behavior, with time and strain-related conflicts being the most notable. (Greenhaus & Beutell, 77) The first conflict that causes stress both at home and work is time. Because there is a finite amount of time during a day, and both family and work obligations are vying for time, the worker is subjected to stress from both home and work. Additionally, the number of hours demanded of the worker is not the only source of conflict; rather the sheer inflexibility of the work schedule is also to blame. Studies have shown that inflexible work schedules have led to greater at home conflicts, especially in cases in which the worker is the primary childcare provider for the family. Research also suggests that workers with younger children are more prone to experience increased conflict compared to those with older kids. Another group that seems to have increased work-family conflict is working married partners in which the wife has a managerial or professional role. Researchers have suggested that the cause for this work-family conflict is due to the stress of the wife’s leadership/professional role of her work. Her working role leads to more stress not only for herself but adds increasing pressure for her husband to contribute more at home to balance her longer hours. (Greenhaus & Beutell, 77-80)

Strain-based conflict is also a big problem caused by feeling overworked. Evidence suggests that strain leads to many health-related issues, including depression, fatigue, tension, apathy, anxiety and irritability. Conflict at home has lead to decreased mental capacity at work as well as stress in work-related communication. Some researchers have found that certain job stresses create an environment that creates difficulty for the worker to pursue gratifying non-work/familial life. These stresses – transitioning to a new job, inadequate job fit, and being ineffective at work – yield worry, tension, fatigue, and frustration thus creating an undesirable environment in which one seeks non-work life fulfillment. Those who experience fatigue from work often will become withdrawn and disengaged at home, creating more work-family conflict. (Greenhaus and Beutell 80-81)

Job dissatisfaction is also a source of mental unhealthiness. Research shows that those who long hours with little personal choice become dissatisfied with their jobs. Job dissatisfaction leads to apathy, strain, and burn out in the workplace. Other sources of dissatisfaction are lack of mobility for those who desire to rise through the ranks and lack of recognition from superiors. One way job dissatisfaction can be combated is by allowing workers to have more control of their working schedule. As previously discussed, flexitime has been proven to positively impact job satisfaction, as well as satisfaction with one’s work schedule. Conversely, telehomework, or office work completed at home, has been shown to have little effect on increasing job satisfaction in one study but provides positive effects in another. Telehomework allows greater autonomy for the work as he/she may choose when to complete working tasks; however, the line between work and home then becomes blurred. This blurring of work and home could result in increased work/family strain. Telehomework or telecommuting also leads to less time spent with coworkers, which could lead to greater work strain as less time interacting could result in more office conflict. Regardless of the negative effects, the choice ingrained in telecommuting allows for greater autonomy and, for some, greater work satisfaction. (Possenriede & Plantenga, 4-5)

We can all see that the old standard of an 8-hour workday isn’t working for us anymore. We’re feeling stuck in an unpopular, outdated system, overworked, unproductive, unhealthy, and unhappy. But Americans can rise above if we just band together and show how dissatisfied we are with what used to be the norm. We’ve already begun to do so, especially members of my generation, and hopefully, within the next ten years, the 8-hour workday will finally be a thing of the past.

Works Cited

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Widrich, Leo. "The Origin of the 8 Hour Work Day and Why We Should Rethink It." The Buffer Blog. Buffer, 11 June 2013. Web. 22 Feb. 2014.