At the very least, the word can be used figuratively to describe the decay and breakdown of social fabric. Personally I find it refreshing to hear an entire society held accountable, not just a few mustache twirling villains at the top.

In the same vein, it's worth noting that government =/= culture...

That’s not just pedantry, that’s unnecessarily narrow-minded. Ever heard of the corrupted heart? According to your definition, that’s an impossibility, unless the heart belongs to someone in authority, or something, I guess.

The point is, there is more than a single interpretation of things, and there is not a singular definition of corruption. Anyone can be corrupted, and giving examples that show that lawlessness permeates every level of society is a great way of showing that corruption is likely endemic in the culture.

In my own personal experience of that shit, it's just plain managerial incompetence at all levels - basically "bums on seats" is an easy thing to measure whilst in Services, outside domains with actual direct easy to measure results like sales, actual productivity is hard to define and hard to measure, especially in areas like Software Development where most projects are unique, so whenever you have management styles which are low on analysis and organisation - typically places with shot-from-the-hip management - you see low and mid-level management quality being judged on such easy to observe and measure things like people working more hours ("he inspires his people to work hard") rather than on things which are much harder to measure in a way which is standard across projects which are highly correlated to productivity.

From what I've seen there's a huge cultural component to this: countries with cultures which value being organised a lot have much more structured ways of work and of measuring the output of work and those are also countries where working long hours is rare, were countries which value improvisational skills above organisational (like my own Portugal, which in addition to one for "improvise" even has a unique verb for solving something on the spot without preparation) tend to not have standardized ways of measuring the output of work (unless that output is something obvious, like manufactured widgets) and working long hours is very common.

I don't think this is at all 5D chess by the Oppressor Class in Capitalism, I think it's a reflection of how much the local culture values organising and preparation as skills.

Now, people working long hours because they have to have multiple jobs to be able to survive, that's a different story and you would probably be right if you were saying that about those situations.

If that is the argument that gets through to their thick management skulls, then so be it.

I’m Dutch too, and I used to work 8h/day 4 days a week. And my productivity became even better than when I worked 5 days a week. I could kill it those 4 days, and be rested enough the next week so I could kill it again. It worked wonders.

I like the rhetoric, because it means that my employer got something out of it too. But I don’t think it implies that was the only reason it should be given. I obviously enjoyed the time off for my own reasons.

Working 8h/day (aka 40h/week) is the normal working length around here: nothing at all to do with time off.

Also productivity does not have a liner relation to hour-of-work-per-day, so you can't really extrapolate from the difference in productivity between 8h/day and 10h/day to working fewer hours per day.

Last but not least, even if time off gave a massive boost to productivity (which cannot be implied from my experience since the relation between hours-worked and productivity is, as I stated, not linear), logically that would still say nothing at all about the existence or not of other equally or even more valid reasons for people to "be given" time off.

What you say does not at all logically follow from what I wrote.

Those are part of the chores.

Good way to limit population growth though, maybe too good.

actually it's usually money that forbids you having kids.

so, yes.

USA is not a civilized country

As a full time working US citizen this made me chuckle. It’s like a fairytale hearing about the kinds of protections and guarantees people in other countries get.

I'm amazed when people ask if you get paid overtime... Yes, otherwise i would be home.

Ya but Greece is wanting 13 hours, 5 days a week, forever. Not the same thing. Even more so when Greece wealth inequality is just as bad as anywhere else.

Many moons ago I was in charge of scheduling for all the guards at a security post for several months. Got everyone together and talked to them, and we all agreed to try out 3x12 instead of 5x8. It'd cut a couple people's hours, but a few others would get some more. Iirc, a few people only had 2x12, but it was a long time ago.

We all fucking loved it. 4 hours shy of 40 didn't make a huge difference in pay, but working fewer days than you were off (on for 3, off for 4, every week) more than made up for it. We stopped getting call ours, people showed up on time. It was awesome.

As soon as I stopped making the schedule they changed us back, and we went right back to all the old problems

4x10 is so stupid though. A huge portion of roles could get everything they need to do done in 3x8 or 4x8.

Contract work doesn't care when you put in your hours, as long as you put them in.

so wait. you were doing the 12 hour thing and you weren't hourly??? its supposed to be every other week you get 8 hours overtime so 12 hours pay. So basically its supposed to be a bonus days pay every two weeks.

It beats spending Saturdays recovering from the week and having only one day free.

Technically it would, as the law change is to allow 13 hour days, not to force them. Same as the previous one that allowed six-day work weeks.

I'm assuming it's similar to how it's here in Finland, where the law generally limits work days to 8 hours and a maximum of 40 hours a week. Changing those legal limits wouldn't directly cause anyone to have to do more work, but it would now be legal - Finland has a few exceptions to it as well, some jobs have the limit be 80 hours per two weeks for example to allow longer/more days crunched together.

If it's combined with a limit, like "The law now allows up to 13 hour days or six hour work weeks as long as it's under 40 hours a week", then in theory it's a good thing - being able to choose anything between 13h x 3d and 7h x 6d depending on what works best for the job would be useful. The problem obviously is "Hey, you are fine with 13 hour days six days a week right? Oh you aren't? Well there's the door we'll find someone desperate and stupid enough to replace you."