“I came in about an hour late, but I’ll make up my time by staying an extra hour tonight”

That is a comment I hear from time to time at the office. It doesn’t matter what their workload is, or what projects are on the go but everyone works roughly 40 hours per week. They’ll stay the extra hour but sometimes they’ll be doing nothing but deleting spam, surfing the web, doing some online banking, watching youtube videos, etc. Why don’t employers set project based requirements instead of time based requirements? For example, why not just say, I need Project A, B and C done within the next two weeks. If the employee works only 20 hours per week and gets everything done, why does it matter if they were only in the office 4 hours per day?

IIRC it was Henry Ford that actually reduced the work shift from 9 hours per day to 8 hours per day and thus the start of the 40 hour work week that still exists today. On the surface, the reduction of the work shift from 9 to 8 hours may seem like he was reducing productivity at the Ford Motor Company but this was done so he could fit three 8 hour shifts into a single day and thus, have his plant run 24 hours / day.

Would it have been better off had Henry Ford simply paid his employees based on the number of cars produced rather than hours worked? This is a tough topic now that we have a huge bureaucratic web of labor laws that actually does more harm than good (ex. minimum wage laws).

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