The four-day work week

20. August 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

The article in Inside Higher Ed about some colleges shifting to a four-day work week to save on energy costs isn’t the first I’ve heard of this. NPR did a story on government offices doing the same thing. The comments at IHE indicate that some people think this is a bad idea, a poor use of resources, etc. I think it’s a great idea but poorly implemented, mostly from a human resources perspective. In both the IHE article and the NPR story, the workers had to fit 40 hours into 4 days, meaning they had to work 10 hours a day. In my book, that would suck. If I had to work a 10 hour day, I’d have to leave my house at 7 and wouldn’t get home until after 6. So I’d be gone most of the day and I’d be exhausted when I got back and would probably snap at the kids, etc. And I still have to make dinner, tend to homework, do laundry, etc. in a much more compressed schedule. And I know, I’d get a 3-day weekend, big whoop. What I’d like to see is someone propose a true shortening of the work week. Why not shorten it to 30 hours? That would mean a 7.5 hour work day plus a 3 day weekend. Why do workers have to suffer so that a company can save money? In some cases, the theory goes that you’re saving the workers gas money. That probably amounts to about 10 bucks a week. Is that worth a 10 hour day? For parents, the 10 hour day has been problematic because most daycare centers aren’t open that long. Some have been accommodating and some haven’t. Another solution that hasn’t been discussed is telecommuting. Why not have one day where everyone works from home? For those who do mostly office work, this would work out just fine.

I’d like to point out that in academic institutions, the people that 4-day work weeks affect most are the staff, not the faculty. Many faculty I know already only come to campus a few days a week, so institutionalizing a Friday off is not likely to affect their schedule. They wouldn’t need to put in 10 hour days on campus (most work this much anyway, just at various locations). It might also affect the students, who, as the IHE article points out, still need access to libraries and student services.

I have to say I continue to be amazed at what American workers will do to keep a job.

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Generation Alphabet

30. May 2008 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

I’m getting all my good ideas from Dean Dad lately. Yesterday he writes about golf serving as a generational boundary. The comments are especially good and I’d recommend reading this one from Eyebrows McGee. He gets at some of the complexities behind Dean Dad’s discomfort with “Of course, there’ll be golf.” It’s about jobs, economics, and generations.

I’m a Gen X’er myself, though I’ve been called on to speak about the Millennials time and again and many of my behaviors fit more with that generation than my own. In theory, this makes sense since some people put the Gen X birth dates slightly before my own. Maybe I’m a Gen Y. I don’t know. I feel less and less young every year. I sense that there are many academic bloggers about my age, many of whom have written about their pain and sometimes final triumph in the academic world. We were all told in the 80s that a whole bunch of faculty will retire, enrollments will soar, and faculty jobs will be plentiful. We all know how that turned out. So I think there’s a certain amount of general frustration with how the academic job market turned out. It affects administrators as well, as Dean Dad and his commenters point out. In some places, there just isn’t a group of faculty that can be groomed for those upper level positions. When over half a department is made up of contingent faculty, there just isn’t as much to choose from.

I’m experiencing much the same thing on the staff side. There’s not as much of a generation gap in that we have a few managers actually younger than me (okay, 2), but many are 10-15 or more years older–not old enough to retire. I suspect this pattern persists across other institutions as well. Someone who gets stuck or “blocked,” as one commenter at DD’s put it, has to look for employment elsewhere. In the corporate world, this may simply mean going to the company across town. In academe, not so much. There may not be another college nearby, or if there is, there may not be a job that fits your skills. It’s not that this doesn’t happen to some corporate types, but it’s less common and, there are often better incentives to move when you’re a corporate manager–not just moving costs, but sometimes bonuses and housing allowances. Academe doesn’t make it easy to pull up stakes.

I’ll also say that I possess the “typical” restlessness of Gen X. We like change. We’re frustrated when people are slow to change, especially the baby boomers, who claimed they were going to change the world and then just settled in to play golf. We are the first generation to be less well-off than our parents (that’s true for me though not true for Mr. Geeky). People made us promises that dissipated into the thin air. That’s not to say that things are just horrible, but that perhaps the previous generation was a little too optimistic and too self-satisfied. I think, actually, that my generation and even the generations younger than me are a little more realistic and grounded. How’s that for broad, sweeping generalizations?

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Filtering

10. February 2007 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,
One of the more interesting conversations I had last week was about filtering. What we were discussing was the difference between what we do and say at work and what we do and say “off the clock.” We were describing how we filter our thoughts and words at work and that sometimes that varies depending on who we’re talking to. And that it is also sometimes hard to do. And sometimes we let the filter slip accidentally. We all had a couple of stories when we’ve said things that might be deemed inappropriate or career damaging.

I struggle with this all the time (witness the blog). I’m a pretty open person and there’s not a huge divide between my professional and personal life. I’m wondering, though, if I should up the filter. Should I keep things a little more close to the chest or is it okay to express my opinions openly? On the one hand, I’m a principled person, and I know there are certain values that I hold dear, and if I see those values being violated, then I’m going to speak up. On the other hand, I work in an environment where not everyone shares my values and I might need to learn to let some of the smaller stuff go. One of the reasons I like the higher ed environment, though, is that there’s room for passionate people. I just worry sometimes that I get carried away. Perhaps I just need to step back sometimes and see where I can let the passion fly and where I need to reign it in.

Another thing that makes it difficult to maintain the filter is that sometimes there are personalities that make me want to drop it. There are people who provoke me in one way or another. Others had stories along these same lines–a belligerent professor, an offbeat coworker. It’s not that these personalities don’t exist outside academe, but they tend to thrive there. There’s a reason why there’s a fair amount of fiction dedicated to the higher ed environment.

Please consider donating to my efforts in the Susan G. Komen 3-Day Walk for the Cure