With most of "us" being some kind of a software engineer, I'm sincerely curious: was 80-hours workweek ever a mandatory thing for an engineer (teacher, doctor)?

Here are some things I've learned from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States and linked pages :

- In 1791, carpenters in Philadelphia went on strike against "the prevailing sun-to-sun system, and the 75 hour work week" and fought for a 10-hour day. http://www.red-coral.net/WorkCoops.html

- The International Typographical Union, which had relatively well-off members, went on strike around 1900-ish initially for a 48-hour work week and then for a 40-hour work week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Typographical_Un...

- In 1907, the US passed the "Hours of Service Act," which limited railroad telegraphers to a 9-hour day. In committee the act was almost going to be a limit to a 12-hour day (i.e., the normal day was longer than that!), until the telegraphers spammed their congresspeople using their telegraphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Railroad_Telegraphers...

I would say that software engineers, SREs, etc. working IC jobs maintaining large codebases/services at the direction of their bosses in large companies are far closer to the professions that historically have made up the labor movement—carpenters and typesetters and electricians and actors and journalists and composers and telegraph operators and so forth—than they are to the doctor running their own private clinic as their own business.

Its not great for the doctors, but if you're a patient with an acute problem its much better to have the same few doctors working keeping watch over you than a brand new doctor every 8 hours coming on board that doesn't know anything about why you're there.

However, doctoring, as profession, is a conservative one, and is highly resistant to process improvements. It took decades of effort, and decades of trivial mistakes (wrong organs removed, surgical instruments left inside patients when they are sewn up) to get the profession to even consider that maybe, maybe, checklists are a good idea during surgeries.

If someone came up with a process improvement that made patient handoff better, many doctors would resist it out of principle, vanity, or plain-old "I was hazed with 90 hr/week residency, so should every new doctor."

But I, as a consumer of medicine, would like the profession to spend more time in reviewing its processes, their outcomes, and to not assume that doctors are infallible geniuses, who don't need any of that checklist nonsense. (Oh, hey, the patient just woke up, and told us that we removed the wrong lung...)

I would imagine that it would involve overlapping shifts so the handoff process can be extended over time.

The extreme case actually seems good; pair doctoring where shifts start four hours apart, so you spend the first half of your shift with one doctor, and the second half with another.

Maybe instead do 2 x three hours, and give doctors really reasonable work hours or time to keep up on current research.

I fear the conclusion to that would be managers saying "what are all these doctors doing, we need to lay 3/4ths of them off and make the rest work twice as much for 50% more pay!"

Which country is going to vote a LAW that writes: nobody works more than 45 hours/week?

The next day healthcare will collapse. Big corporations will lobby VERY hard against that.

The limit is 48 hours, and it's calculated with some averaging over multiple days, but I hope that's close enough.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_Time_Directive_2003

You get license to use the software if you abide by the terms of the license agreement. A company that asks its employees to work 60 hour weeks breaks the license agreement, and therefore cannot use the software.

The only LAW that could be written about this would be "Contracts cannot include limits on the number of hours employers ask people to work".

So maybe, yes, the megacorps get that law passed. Until then this license is binding...

Now whether the any particular legal system cares to enforce the license terms is another matter

By using the software, you agree to the terms of the license, and can in principle suffer a civil (non-criminal) lawsuit against you for breaching them.

You have no proof of this. The (x times y) work week for manual labourers was earned by a long history of labour activism.

Good working conditions for highly-skilled in-demand work arise naturally through supply and demand.

We can all pretend that we have more economic power than our highly paid blue collar peers that worked in highly unionized work forces in the past, but the programmers that make the kind of money for that to be true are very rare. Nearly 30 years ago my father made 70k as a union welder. It is highly unlikely that I will be able to match that salary street inflation, and the world is more expensive: education and health care could eat us alive at any moment.

I don't know how much of our effort the capital owning class needs to strip from us before we take advantage of the massive productive capacities we have before we make it fair again, but I assure you, it will be organized, not natural.

But they don't necessarily arise if the demand from workers wanting to do that work is sufficient. For instance, game developers have relatively terrible work conditions by the standards of the software industry, because so many people want to work on games. You could reasonably argue that they get enough satisfaction from being able to work on games that they're willing to put up with worse conditions, but that doesn't change that their work conditions are relatively bad. The nice thing about somehow bringing about a reduction in developer working hours is that it wouldn't necessarily result in any loss in economic output or employer profit, as there's a wealth of research showing that working beyond a certain amount of hours daily is counterproductive, so it's a win-win, and could even increase productivity.

So collective bargaining is unnatural? Except when a corporation does it on behalf of its shareholders, of course.

Comment section is not "toxic" just because it expresses the notion that this license is useless, nonsensical, stupid or any other thing you disagree with. Even if commenters might have missed the point.