Elon Musk claims to work up to 120 hours a week and expects such devotion from his staff, too — once calling remote work “morally wrong”. Fans take such Stakhanovitism as proof that grit and determination yield results, including billions of dollars. Detractors see it as counterproductive machismo.
Brigid Schulte, a director at New America, a progressive think-tank, is in this latter camp. In Over Work, the former Washington Post reporter explores how long hours have taken over the US so that overwork has “become a fact of life”.
We are at an inflection point. Employees have increased flexibility, including location and asynchronous work, after lockdowns. Campaigns for a four-day week are gathering momentum as experiments with shorter hours are run in companies worldwide, albeit typically in ones with small workforces. Yet there has also been a desire to restore the pre-pandemic order, notably in mandates to return to the office, including by Goldman Sachs and Boots. Recently, Amazon’s chief executive Andy Jassy demanded staff come back five days a week: “Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward.”