Vengeful Cynic

I really don't think you're giving enough credit to the impact on society of having a corporate culture where career must not only be the most important thing in every employee's life, but literally consumes that life. This sort of thing really does tend to spread, and that being the case, whereas there may be alternate employment options now for people that consider this a deal-breaker, those options could shrink in the future if this sort of thing isn't discouraged.

It could also be somewhat disingenuous to say that overworked employees deserve what they're getting if they suddenly find themselves pulling crazy hours and won't walk. What if this job gave them a much-needed salary raise, they moved from far away to start it, enrolled the kids in school, got a mortgage on a house, etc., and then suddenly wound up never seeing said kids or the inside of said house? It's not really a case of being able to just roll up your sleeping bag and hop a train to the next town, even in a good economy.

Also, I really think that, for instance, employees ought to be required to take vacations and not permitted to work above a certain number of hours per week (except perhaps on a very limited basis). It seems to me that it would be better for society as a whole if employers not only didn't expect their employees to be workaholics consumed by their jobs, but actively discouraged it.

I think the points that you make about teachers and grad students only underline the problem. (On the other hand, most do, or could, ostensibly have a full quarter of the year off, not to mention extra time at Christmas, spring breaks, etc.)

There's certainly an ongoing buzz within the liberal arts community (which predates my own entry into higher education by a number of years) about an increasing trend among universities of expecting their faculty to produce at a level which is quantifiable by the standards of, say, the hard sciences; this despite the fact that fuzzy studies is a whole different animal. On a different note, I read a report recently that showed some community colleges are beginning to expect their faculty to teach 6-8 courses per semester based on the rather stupid claim that 8 courses plus 6 office hours is only a 30-hour work week.

All that to say . . . I think the issue of employee exploitation by way of expecting extreme hours is serious and likely to spread if those who disagree were to take your attitude. It seems to me to be well-worth battling at its source wherever it might rear its ugly head.

On the one hand, Jared's got a point. Waking up to find your boss saying "Surprise! We fucked up, and now you're working 60 hours a week" is a shitty thing and not really OK. As he points out, "voting with your feet" isn't really an option. If my boss suddenly sprung that on me, I'd start looking for a way out right away, but even in my line of work, that'd take time and might not work at all. I can't just quit in protest and hope that unemployment will pay my school loans for me.

On the other hand, if I apply to work for a game developer and they say, up front, "By the way, expect to be working 60-80 hour weeks for about a month around major content releases," it's on my own head if I take the job or not. If I take it, I need to assume that not only will that happen, it will happen a lot. It's the nature of the industry and something that I'm completely OK with, assuming the company is up front about it. If the companies are lying during interviews, well, maybe something needs to be done.

At the same time, I'm really not comfortable with over-regulating this, particularly not from the Federal government. Isn't this what we invented unions for?

See, I'm inclined to believe that in most companies where there is a product made and deadlines exist, there will be times where overtime (in many cases unpaid) will crop up from time to time. If you don't like that, stay away from those industries... and there are places out there where the only thing you'd be doing is low-demand, low-priority product support/customization where you'll get your 40 and done. Same thing is true in just about every industry I can think of... you'll have your segments of 40 and done, your segments of rare, bursty overtime and your segments of nearly-continuous workoholism.

As to Jared's point that employee abuse is an insidious thing that tends to grow if not checked, I would agree and point to the Industrial Revolution. However, my counterpoint is that while there may be occasional outbursts of asymmetrical employee abuse, this sort of thing tends to be relegated to artificial subpopulations of people whose choices are limited to "stand around and take it so I can keep getting a paycheck."

Especially in America, where the costs of entrepreneurialism are the lowest of just about anywhere in the world and the economy is far more supportive of small business than any other developed nation, I would challenge anyone to find me a large industry that isn't manufacturing where $3 million in capital and 10 people couldn't make a serious go at running a company to compete with their current employer.

And that's the thing that keeps most companies from abusing the hell out of their employees. Sure, there will be occasional bouts where a company asks more of its employees, but if it continually demands more than the economy will bear, those employees will either go work for the competition or found another company of their own. And honestly, the best performers in most industries are the lean start-ups whose founders experienced the abuses of a larger company and decided that they could compete with a company run that poorly. And then they did, and did it well.

As to unionization, I see two segments of the population well-served by unionization:
1) Jobs whose requisite skillsets are not so advanced that employees couldn't be replaced with a readily-available, untrained person who would be fully-functional in a month.
2) Jobs whose domain is so specialized that there is a readily-available pool of replacements because there's nowhere else for trained employees to go with their skills.

Domain 1 is easy, because that's McDonalds' employees... and you do see unionization in this segment, largely in the form of the United Food and Commercial Workers. Some might argue that it also covers individuals who do hard manual labor (like the Teamsters and Dock-Workers), and to some extent that's true, especially in a down economy. Of course, in an up economy, good construction workers are very hard to find... so perhaps those Unions serve more of a protectionist cause.

Domain 2 is tricky, mostly because it's protectionist all of the time. Taking an example of a Ph.D. Philosophy Professor, there incredibly few jobs teaching philosophy at the college level compared to the candidate pool. Obviously, the philosophy professor could do other things, but without leaving his field and turning to professional writing or practicing law or something tangentially related, his options are very limited, and thus he can be taken advantage of and needs a union to allow him to bargain collectively with other professors.

Your big flaw is here: "I would challenge anyone to find me a large industry that isn't manufacturing where $3 million in capital and 10 people couldn't make a serious go at running a company."

Sure, that's true.

Now where's my $3 million?

During this particular economic phase, getting finance loans could be tricky, but if you want to get capital financing to start a company during an up economy, it's surprisingly easy to do. Obviously, it's preferable not to accrue a bunch of debt to go into business, but if you're willing to do it, even inexperienced 20-somethings with strong business plans have been known to get serious capitalization.