Today we are exhorted to work our contracted hours. While the overall sentiment of not going nuts and killing yourself through over-work and finding a good work/life balance is good, a lot of people will take the idea too far.
My contract says I should work 5 days a week, 40 hours a week, including an hour each day for lunch AND when circumstances require it, extra hours are expected. This is because I am not an unskilled worker. There is no clocking-in and no overtime pay. So, I rarely take more than 10 minutes for lunch (including going out to buy my sandwich), I arrive at around 09:10 in the morning and rarely go home before 18:00 (sometimes later).
[You may notice that I have frequently complained about the number of hours I am out of the house on a working day but that is mostly down to the commuting time (2.5-3 hours per day), not the hours I work.]
Guys, this is normal (outside of the public sector where it's just pretty much a cushy life). This is how business gets done. This is how the country keeps going. If everyone worked 9-5 with an hour for lunch and refused to work a minute before 9 and a minute beyond 5 it would be a total shambles. You may argue that if companies need people to do more work than their allotted hours, they should employ more people to do the work but it doesn't wash. That would result in lower productivity, lower salaries, higher running costs and pissed off clients.
Of course, the other end of the spectrum is equally bad - overstretched, overworked, stressed employees don't perform as well as ones who are less so - but the day is about "work(ing) your proper hours".
And there's always the people who don't even manage to make up their allotted hours. Hmm.
So yes, nice sentiment but things aren't necessarily that clear cut.
