Larry Summers, and the Myth of the 80-hour/week White Collar Worker

This tedious saga just keeps going on, and on. I can't keep up. But here's Bitch, Phd with what should be an obvious statement about the ridiculousness of the 80-hour work week.

My mother-in-law once asked me how people who worked got anything, you know, done in their lives. "They do it on company time." I said. 80 hours is the magic number that we, white-collar America, have settled on as the top end of the "career-oriented professional" reasonable hours of work per week. It's ridiculous, both because it is so insane, and so obviously inflated. Professionals have discretion over how they use their time at work.TThey are paying their bills online, they are squeezing minutes off their lunch breaks, they are ordering stuff from Amazon, they are reading blogs, they are writing blogs, and they are IM'ing their spouses about what to have for dinner.

There are people in America working 80-hour weeks, for real, who can't even take bathroom breaks on the clock. They're not doing it to get ahead. They're doing it to stay afloat. You'll find them at Wal-Mart. Or emptying your trashcan when you've stayed late at work to finish some project you procrastinated on by looking stuff up on Wikipedia.