A reader writes:
Robin Hanson's question answers itself, though he seems not to notice. He asks why we tend not to limit the hours of self-employed, high status, professions. We don't limit the hours of such people because they are 1) highly paid, 2) have a great deal of control over their work schedules, and 3) don't do much in the way of manual labor. Statutory limits help poorly paid people, who have little control over their schedules or conditions of employment, and often engage in physically difficult labor. There are also, of course, safety considerations in some lines of work (pilots, truckers). So it seems like a quite rational system, at least in broad outline.
Another reader adds:
We limit these hours because, historically, owners or bosses would compel workers to do physically demanding and dangerous jobs beyond the point of sanity, where exhaustion and fatigue would endanger workers’ health and lives. Their compulsion was based on the fact that there was a line of guys outside that factory door looking for work, and if you weren’t willing to put in 12 hours a day, the next guy might.
We also limited hours to spread jobs around during the Depression. Overtime pay was designed to get owners to hire more workers instead of just over-working the ones they had, to spread the work (and hence, the wealth) more widely. But many workers took to overtime as a form of de-facto pay raise.
Finally, some of the workers who we don’t limit, we probably should. Doctors especially should have work limits, given the fact that study after study shows that fatigue leads to bad decision-making which leads to bad outcomes (ie, death) for patients. But doctors who are in a position to change things came into that position of power under the current regime of crazy training hours, and so see no need to change it. People working for themselves – the financiers and artists and academics – fine, work yourself to death, 16 hour days, 7 days a week, whatever. But people working for other people need some protection, and people who work ON other people should also be limited even if they are not.
The Dish 