Are we done with the 40-hour week?

Still, longer hours are a reality for many Americans. Economist Peter Kuhn at the University of California, Santa Barbara, finds greater numbers of men now work over 50 hours a week — most of them highly educated, well paid, white-collar workers. Though numbers leveled off in the 1990s, one-fifth of American men work those hours, up significantly from 25 years ago. At the same time, most get bigger salaries and bonuses, part of what Kuhn calls “the incentivization of white-collar work”: more compensation for longer hours and more job commitment, with implied penalties if you don’t give your all.

Indeed, that pressure to perform may have flipped the hourly balance. “It used to be that when you got a college degree you could get a white-collar job and take it easy,” Kuhn says. “It’s just the opposite now. It’s blue-collar folks who have more time for leisure.”

But that divide doesn’t mean what it used to.

'Management empathy'
Some companies still put workers and managers in different camps, but human-resource executives have argued for years that shared corporate goals are what’s truly important. “There are some companies that are what I would describe as Neanderthal,” Meisinger says, “because they don’t see the value of getting everybody on the same page.”

Working women do more chores than men House votes to block new overtime rules Workers feel overworked, overwhelmed CEOs of firms outsourcing got biggest pay Democrats criticize new overtime pay rules A gender split in the executive suite

Many do get the gospel, though. International Survey Research, which surveys employees on their views about the workplace, has found corporations thriving on “management empathy.” These firms embrace feedback and let employees help set goals. It has to go beyond simple slogans and corporate can-do spirit, but when it works, productivity can soar and employees easily forgive extra hours. “They’re seeing tangible results, and they know that their management up the chain understands that they’re putting that in,” says ISR director Will Werhane.

In fact, employees at such companies — like Nokia, Microsoft (a partner in MSNBC) and Southwest Airlines — would often put corporate success before their own pay, in part because it meant they could gain more down the road.

In a way, that concept foreshadows the new overtime rules, which halt extra pay requirements for anyone in a “position of responsibility.” In companies where employees help set priorities, that could include a lot of people — and labor unions are worried it could mean even more work for many junior white-collar workers already burdened with heavy schedules.

To them, empowerment requires more than just shared goals. “If an employer tries to structure a workplace that in some sense does make employees owners … that’s one thing,” says Chris Owens, the AFL-CIO’s director of public policy. “It’s another thing altogether to think that, just because Wal-Mart calls its employees associates, that they are anything but hourly workers who need to get overtime.”

At the same time, many employers feel work laws are strangling their ability to be flexible — that, for example, they must either pay a worker overtime for a 50-hour week, even if the following week is just 30 hours, or break the law. Ron Bird, chief economist at the business-funded Employment Policy Foundation, argues that new regulations are needed to provide effective flex time or comp time. “The worst thing we could do is to try to enforce a one-size-fits-all solution for the workplace.”

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