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During my formative years I was instilled with the notion that "If you don't work, you don't eat." It didn't take long for me to realize that the more I worked, the better I ate.
I'm a boomer, and I, too, learned early on the connection between working and eating. It is a powerful connection. It seems lost on some people.
The one thing most of us have in common is that we managed the transition from a university environment where our time, broadly speaking, was our own to a work environment where our time was not our own. Certain aspects of it were highly inconvenient, because certain things way back then only could be done in person during normal business hours. I don't recall specifics, and of course my memory is fallible, but I'm thinking of life maintenance things such as getting utilities turned on, establishing bank accounts and the like. But those are one-time things, for the most part - but there are others like trying to get the car fixed, etc. The errands of life.
Most of us on the retirement board are boomers who have worked hard most of our lives. With that as a backdrop, I find the first-person account by this Gen Z person to be illuminating. She graduated from college this past spring and just recently entered the permanent workforce. Thus, she is young enough not to have experienced 9/11 and is unlikely to remember The Great Recession.
From my perspective, she is exhibit A of why it is hard to find employees who want to work.
As retirees or near-retirees, what do you think??
Reality check: My twenty-year old kids work long hours. My daughter, the teacher, spends her evening going over lesson plans and weekends grading papers. She needs to work summers for the extra paycheck so a 9 to 5 job would be considerably easier for her.
IMHO, if high school/college students don't take minimum wage summer jobs, that they are in for a shock after graduation. I'm guessing her parents probably sheltered her from reality by failing to require summer jobs. Still, it's really hard to believe she never saw her parents work long hours. Right? Her parents provided her with a home, cars, food - how did she manage not to see them work? Is she stupid or oblivious?
I'm giving you a rep point just for remembering Sliders.
Thank you.
Sliders was interesting, for a show of 25-30 years ago, for there were stories here and there that one could come across areas not as advanced as what one was use to. Such as with, I believe, "Just Say Yes" where it is observed the Sliders don't have autoinjectors, the Doctor says there are some primitive areas without, and a Mallory, Quinn I think, supplies the cover story that they are from Canada, not as advanced up north.
HENCE, in relation to our subject here, it is good to remember that not everywhere in the world is as advanced as what one might be use to. Everywhere might not have, say, ARCGIS but rather, one has to use ALOHA, it's EPA software, for chemical spills. Free vs $$$, doncha know.
Who are these people who work 9:00 to 5:00, and can I get one of their jobs?.
There are tons of 9:00am-5:00pm jobs out there that you can apply for. Indeed and LinkedIn are good places to set up searches.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rabbit33
Since I started my first professional job in 1984, the work day has started at 8:00, except you need to be on hand a little before that because your first meeting would be at 8:00 and you want to get a cup of coffee and get to your desk before that; lunch is taken when there's a break in the work, whether at 12:00 or 1:00 or maybe never; quitting time is when the work's at a reasonable pausing point, which might be 5:00 or 7:00 or 9:00. When I was working in manufacturing, many were the days when I'd have to be on hand half an hour before the line started at 7:00, and then I'd be working on things after they stop the line at 3:00 and on into the evening. Or I'd go on third shift schedule for a two shift operation so I could work on installations or prove-outs of new equipment when the line was stopped - 11:00 pm to 7:00 am. Or any number of other possibilities.
Now, I've not been hourly since then, but the hourly guys typically work 8 hours with a 30 minute lunch, which sounds like 7.5 hours a day - not too bad, you might say - except we would have months on end where the line workers were working mandatory Saturdays and two or three Sundays a month, because when you've got a three shift operation and you have three and a half shifts' worth of orders, you can't realistically afford to add enough people to staff it - and there has to be some planned downtime for equipment and facilities maintenance. So their gig isn't this mythical 40 hour week, either. I remember people telling me they'd worked 30 and 40 days in a row without a day off. Sure, they were booking time and an half and double time, but the pace was still grueling.
So you don't think those working conditions should be improved upon? With innovation and modern advancements, it may be possible but then the corporation you and they are slogging away may have to take a small reduction in profit or the executives making top dollar may not get their bonus.
I call BS on being able to pay employees overtime for working 30-40 days in a row, having three and half shifts of orders but can't afford to hire staff to alleviate the demand on its employees.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rabbit33
When I was doing field service, I remember several times when guys booked 168 hours a week of work, between 14-18 hour shifts and travel times.
That's awful and it sounds like it would be illegal. There are 168 hours in a 7 day week. I would be very concerned about the quality of the work they were performing. How does someone go 7 days with no sleep/rest and still perform at a high level?
And again, you think it's acceptable for an employer to require that of their employees?
Quote:
Originally Posted by rabbit33
Ask a first year attorney, or an emergency room nurse in a big city hospital, or the owner of a small bodega in the city, what they think about someone who's posting how AWFUL it is to work from 9:00 to 5:00 five days a week.
There are a lot of careers that don't have traditional work hours. The people who choose these careers have a passion for helping and serving others. And I am thankful for people like them everyday.
Maybe if an ER Nurse's shift was 8 hours instead of 16 or even 24, there wouldn't be a shortage of healthcare providers. It would be a win-win. The providers quality of life would greatly improve, the quality of care would improve, and maybe there wouldn't be a shortage of folks entering that career.
I'm a boomer, and I, too, learned early on the connection between working and eating. It is a powerful connection. It seems lost on some people.
I think that we all know the connection. We must work to be able to live.
What some of us would like to have happen (and it's not just Gen-Z), is that we would like to be able to work less and still be able to live.
I'm a Gen-X'er with a standard 40 hour job - 45 if you count my commute. And there still isn't enough time for me to be able to do all the things I need and want to do in my home life.
I have to be in the office 40 hours of week but more often than not, I really have about 20 hours of actual work. The other 20 hours - I'm just here. There are exceptions, of course. I have much busier weeks when I can easily work 50 hours but those are spaced out a couple months apart. It's annoying because those 20 hours are just a waste when I could be doing other things. Sure, I could change jobs but I still need to work full-time for the full-time benefits and like I said earlier, I need the money to be able to live.
So pay me my salary, allow me to have a flexible schedule, and they'll have a much happier employee.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
44,550 posts, read 81,103,317 times
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Interesting how different it is today. When I got my first real job after graduate school in 1975, It was a relief to only be working 40 hours, and with no long hours studying. I was working throughout college, as mush as 50 hours a week, taking on whatever additional hours I could get, plus other side jobs to pay for my own college tuition, books, and apartment. Anyone shocked by a 9-5 schedule was most likely spoiled by parents that gave them whatever they wanted, and didn't prepare them for the real world.
I chopped up the interview a bit for certain selected portions of it.
Quote:
"I work in a YMCA office and I find my job really rewarding, but it's difficult to not feel like it takes up most of my life"
Work will and does take up quite a bit of your life so does sleeping 8 hours a day. You can cut back on your sleep but if you cut back on your work you will suffer financially.
Quote:
"How can I make sure I'm eating well and seeing my friends and taking time for my hobbies? How am I supposed to fit my whole life into a 9-to-5 work schedule?"
Oh this is an interesting part. In my position what I would do is I would make my meals two and three weeks ahead of schedule, freeze them taking them out with me to lunch, while they thaw and then microwave.
My hobbies were either one night a week bowling or bowling on the weekends and during the parts of Summer at times taken off Sundays or Saturdays for fishing. I'll also walk my dogs in the morning in the evening (sounds like she does that too)
But I think she feels that she has to jam-pack everything into each day whereas when I was working it was more of if I don't feel like doing anything I won't do it if I want to do something I'll plan for it. (Or wait for the weekend)
So I suspect she has time management issues.
Quote:
"It's not even that I don't like my job because I do. But it feels like it takes up most of my life. The other day, there was an issue at work and a coworker turned to me and said "are you ready for the next 45 years of your life?" and my stomach sank. I'm not ready.
Sounds like she expects to be stuck in that position for the next 45 years. That the defeatist attitude that keeps a lot of people out of management. Plus she doesn't know if she's got any strengths, and that she's new, she probably hasn't exercised her abilities yet to manage people and obviously manage time.
Quote:
"I don't know if a full-time, in-person job will be my future for the rest of my career. I want to be able to have a more flexible life, where I can maybe go into the office for a morning meeting, then have lunch at home, and some time to run errands in the afternoon. I want to be able to work remotely more.
Well she could move away to a nice small town hook up with a nice guy and be a SAHM I will repeat myself that she obviously has a weekend I don't know what she's doing there but obviously her time management skills suck so badly that she somehow thinks everything's got to be packed into Monday-Friday.
I call BS on being able to pay employees overtime for working 30-40 days in a row, having three and half shifts of orders but can't afford to hire staff to alleviate the demand on its employees.
Never worked in a manufacturing business, have you? You fill the orders when you've got them. If you hire a bunch of extra people for a spike in orders, then you'll just have to lay them off when orders drop, and you'll be out all the RIF costs plus their training.
If you've got more orders than you can fill with a standard 3 shift operation five days a week (and remember there has to be SOME downtime for maintenance), plus OT, then you're going to have to add capital equipment. In a well-laid-out factory, you don't have big bottlenecks that you can eliminate by just adding one or two pieces of equipment; you're going to be adding entire assembly lines.
Then you'll have the depreciation cost on that equipment for the next 3-7 years, or 15 years if you have to expand the facility. OT on the other hand is instantly flexible. Orders go down? Cut OT. Response time on financials? One week.
Of COURSE when I was 23 years old I would have liked to be able to make my salary working 30 hours a week with flexible hours. Well, factories (you know, the places where wealth is actually CREATED, not just moved around) don't work that way.
Have you ever reviewed a P&L statement of a profitable business? The amount of "excess money" to pay to employees for working less, is almost always a WHOLE LOT less than you think.
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