Work-Life Archives - Page 8 of 10

The Saturday Rule

In February 2021, thirteen first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs gave management a survey of their working lives. They reported more than 95 hours a week and five hours of sleep a night. One wrote, “This is inhumane.” Chief executive David Solomon told staff, “We’re strengthening enforcement of the Saturday rule.” Under the rule, junior bankers should not be expected in the office from 9 p.m. Friday to 9 a.m. Sunday.

In May 2024 Leo Lukenas III, a 35-year-old associate at Bank of America, died after reportedly working several weeks of more than 100 hours. JPMorgan then told junior bankers that they should typically work no more than 80 hours a week, with exceptions for live deals.

Both rules were set by the banks themselves, after complaints or a death became public.

One Worker in Nine

In 2025, 11.2 percent of American wage and salary workers were represented by a union. Union members were 10.0 percent of workers. In the private sector the membership rate was 5.9 percent.

In 1983, the first year with comparable data, the membership rate was 20.1 percent.

Grown and Intelligent Men

In 1905 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a New York law that limited work in bakeries to ten hours a day and sixty hours a week. The case is Lochner v. New York, and the vote was five to four.

Justice Rufus Peckham wrote for the majority. Laws “limiting the hours in which grown and intelligent men may labor to earn their living, are mere meddlesome interferences with the rights of the individual.” Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes dissented: “The 14th Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”

The Court’s 1937 decision in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish signaled the end of this view. Federal law today still sets no limit on hours for adults.

No Limit on Hours

“There is no limit in the Act on the number of hours employees aged 16 and older may work in any workweek.” This is how the U.S. Department of Labor describes the Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law on wages and hours.

The law requires covered workers who are not exempt to receive overtime pay after 40 hours in a week. It does not set a maximum. “The Act does not require overtime pay for work on Saturdays, Sundays, holidays, or regular days of rest, as such.”

Under federal law an employer may require overtime and may dismiss an employee who refuses. Some states give workers more rights.

Radio silence

Borrowed from military communications and used in American offices about a colleague who has stopped responding. It is a complaint, and it names the absence itself as the problem. Nothing is alleged about why they went quiet.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

Dale Carnegie published it in 1936. It has sold tens of millions of copies and has never been out of print. Its argument is that business outcomes follow from how people feel about you, and its instructions are about attention, names, listening and genuine interest. An American business classic is a book about liking.

Burnout

The World Health Organization classified burnout as an occupational phenomenon in 2019, and American surveys report it at high rates across professions. It is discussed in the United States as a condition of the individual, with individual remedies — resilience, boundaries, self-care.