I sent a proud Tea Party member into shock recently, and he still hasn't recovered.

[SheilaT]

50. Oh, that's good. He's actually looking this up on the internet.

Keep on asking him for frequent updates.

With any luck at all, as he over and over again only finds that it was under FDR (and over the vociferous protestations of Republicans and all big business) that we got the 40 hour week and time and a half overtime, maybe he'll start to realize how wrong Fox News really is.

A couple of other things. In the 1970's I had a job that, while I was not in a union, benefitted from a strong union presence in that industry. As a consequence, any time I worked more than 8 hours in a day, I got overtime. Even if for some reason I didn't work 40 hours in the week. It was quite nice.

The other thing is that some months ago I read an interesting article about overtime, the 40 hour week, and what's wrong with all the work-obsessed people who run Silicon Valley and such places. It pointed out that back when we went from a standard 12 hour day/60 hour work week to a standard 8 hour day/40 hour week, business owners were flabbergasted to discover that the workers were MORE productive in those 40 hours than they had been in 60. Businesses got more than their money's worth. There was also an interesting analysis of the idiocy of 80-100 hour workweeks in the computer field, and how that sort of work schedule reduces productivity. By a lot. According to the article someone had looked at how Apple employees had worked such insane hours when working on the first IPhone and concluded that the phone would have come to market two years earlier had the employees worked a normal schedule. But the problem is that companies like Apple are run by people who have essentially no life whatsoever outside of the job, and they don't respect people who aren't like that. Me? I work to live. I do not live to work.

I long ago figured out that diminishing productivity thing. I observed people in jobs where they were working 80 hour weeks during budget time, and could tell by listening to them describing what was happening, that basically NO work was being done during the extra time, and probably the quality of the work in the otherwise regular time, wasn't so hot.

Just my personal observations there.