Are we done with the 40-hour week?

Don Kranz sits in his other office — his car, that is — describing his work schedule. As an Oswego, N.Y., manager at consulting firm PROCESSexchange, which helps companies improve their technology methods, he’s always juggling his time — half on the road, half at home. The good part, he says, is the chance to catch his daughter’s cheerleading competitions. But there’s always work waiting. “I haven’t done a 40-hour work week in the last four or five years.”

Kranz's schedule is flexible, but not light. Work often comes home. “You want 40 billable hours a week,” he says. “Then you have management time and marketing time, and that’s all done above the 40 hours you’re billing.”

Such are the tradeoffs of modern working America. There was a time — first during the Great Depression, then in the postwar years — when the 40-hour week was an American staple. But those days bear little resemblance to today.

For one thing, employers nowadays frequently find it easier to add hours to workers’ schedules than to hire, train and provide benefits to a new employee. Employees, meanwhile, rely on comp time, employer flexibility and technology to remold their schedules in ways never envisioned in the past. A globally connected economy has made “9 to 5” little more than the name of a 1980 film. With the economy ever more service-oriented, the line has blurred between the average wage-earning, coveralled Joe and his salaried, tie-wearing boss. Not only is Jane likely off the factory floor, but it’s hard to tell whether her collar is blue or white.

All these changes have targeted two competing visions of the American workplace. In one, you do your 40 and leave. In the other, hours matter less; responsibility lies with the worker; company goals and the bottom line are what count.

“There are some companies that are what I would describe as Neanderthal.” — SUSAN MEISINGER

That split used to be clear and class-based — unions duking it out with management. But a huge and growing middle class, and the changing nature of the economy, have thrown old definitions into disarray.

“The social contract is shifting,” says Susan Meisinger, president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management: “For the jobs that fall into the category of knowledge worker, I think the lines are much blurrier.”

And that blurriness lies at the heart of proposed new rules for overtime advanced by the Bush administration — possibly the biggest change in decades to laws governing the work week. The new rules could provide overtime to more than a million low-wage workers, if Labor Department estimates are correct. But the rules could also curtail overtime pay for many workers whose jobs reside in the modern economy’s gray areas.

The work week through the ages
The 40-hour week is anything but hardwired into American culture. Through World War I, Americans largely worked a six-day week. Unions pushed for decades to shorten that. They finally succeeded during the Great Depression — in part to help corporations preserve jobs by spreading work across more workers.

In 1938, when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, it included a 44-hour cap before overtime kicked in; the 40-hour limit didn’t come until 1940. Then, during World War II, work hours soared as companies sought to maximize production for the war effort.

After the war, the average work week leveled off. The very concept of overtime was largely designed to drive employers toward a standardized work week by making it expensive to keep workers on the job too long. That idea succeeded at first, but the data are less clear about the long-term impact. By one tally, work hours have been dropping since the mid-1960s, from an average of 38.4 hours in 1964 to 33.8 hours earlier this year. But manufacturing jobs are averaging just above 40 hours, almost exactly where they were in 1946. And average overtime is rising. Service-sector workers average fewer hours, but because many are part-timers, conclusions about the hours in the average work week are harder to come by.

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