Longer hours the new 'regular' workday
HACKENSACK, N.J. -- Matt Ehrie wouldn't dream of heading home after just eight hours at work.
As the manager of Garden State Plaza in Paramus, he often works at least 10 hours each weekday and puts in two Saturdays a month. And from Thanksgiving through New Year's, he works six days a week.
''It makes me sleep better at night if I'm kind of overseeing everything," said Ehrie. ''My company isn't requiring that I'm here this much; it's what I feel I need to do."
These days, so many workers are putting in hours on Saturday or stretching the workday past dinner a few times a week that it's hard to define ''regular" anymore. Baxter Strategies Inc. recently found that 13 percent of all full timers in the United States regularly work more than five days a week. Almost 4 percent of full-time workers put in seven-day weeks, the marketing research firm found in its survey this year of more than 2,500 full-time employees.
''The 37.5-hour week is more of a minimum baseline these days," said John Sweeney, an information specialist with the Society for Human Resource Management. ''There is an expectation by many employers that you will give 5 to 10 percent above that to get the job done and to get ahead."
Working more and varied hours is driven in part by technological breakthroughs, Sweeney said. Another factor is flexible work arrangements that allow people to attend their child's afternoon softball game or scoot out early to make a dentist's appointment and wrap up their work some other time.
''For a lot of people, the workweek doesn't close until they've caught up on unanswered e-mails on Saturday," Sweeney said.
His organization sees the trend of evening and weekend hours playing out primarily with managers and other salaried workers who aren't eligible for overtime pay, although a growing number of hourly workers also have nontraditional work schedules.
''There's more emphasis on what the person has achieved than there is on observing what time they're in in the morning or leaving at night," Sweeney said.
In 2004, the Department of Labor rewrote some overtime rules, in part to reflect newer industries. Under the rules, almost all workers who make less than $455 a week are eligible for time-and-a-half pay after 40 hours, while ''executive" or ''administrative" workers are not.
But the rules leave some questions unanswered for workers in the middle of the scale, according to observers.
And long hours can be a thorny issue when it comes to pay. Employees for companies as varied as
Andy Gatto, the chief executive of Oakland, N.J., gift company Russ Berrie, said that at his company it's mostly executives and top managers who regularly put in longer workweeks, especially during busy holiday seasons. He has worked late nights and from home for the past decade. But he notices that more white-collar workers are occasionally staying late, taking work home, or heading to the office on a Saturday.
''In general, most businesses today are challenged to produce more efficiently with reduced overhead, and that involves putting in extra hours," Gatto said. ''The competitive workforce is here to stay. To differentiate yourself from others, you have to put in extra effort, especially to wind up with a better level of service to your customers."
Donald Maguire, the chief executive of Hoyt Corp. in Englewood, N.J., instituted a swing shift at his firm about five years ago to stagger the workload and save on overtime. The company manufactures electrical components for power equipment.
''A lot of people are working a lot of different shifts these days to get the work done," said Maguire, adding that his office staff tends to keep more traditional hours. ''We have different machines we can keep on running if we stagger shifts."
As of 2002, about two-fifths of employed Americans worked during the evening, weekend, overnight, or on a rotating shift, according to federal statistics.
''More and more today, we're in a situation where work arrangements are very fluid," said Sweeney.
