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You seem to know a lot about this and it's something I've always been interested in:

When laws were passed to mandate 8 hour work days, what % of companies had 8 hour work days already? 10%? 20%? 80%?

Nowadays we know that total productivity is higher if you have 8 hour work days, even though you work less total hours, because your productivity per hour is much higher. Was something like this known at the time? Or was the push to 8 hour work days only so that people could spend time with their family? What kinds of arguments were used?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

Is a good read on the subject and the referenced links are even better (as usual). The 12 hour workday had to be fought for... that tells you something about what %age of employers had 8 hour workdays already, left to their own devices that percentage would be very close to 0. Each and every reduction in hours had to be fought for somehow.

When I was an employer in Canada and we had the standard NL holiday/compensation package our employees were so happy, and other companies nearby cautioned me not to be too open about it lest it 'would spread' and their employees would demand similar. Employers do not tend to be on the same side as their employees in arguments like these (though they should be: happy employee = loyal employee).

Pretty much nobody had 8 hour work days. One of the earliest known instances of someone demanding, and getting, an 8 hour workday was a English-born settler in New Zealand, who worked as a carpenter. In 1840, he negotiated an 8 hour working day for some building work, and he started arguing for it with other workers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Duncan_Parnell

Here's a PDF that gives some stats from 1890 until the 1930's: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c4124.pdf

Prior to the 1890's, it took decades to even get down to the 12, and then 10 hour workday.

I don't remember specifically when there started being actual research into the productivity effects of shorter work days, but it definitively was not known at the outset - at the outset, it was driven by workers rights movements.

The 8-hour workday predates the modern idea of time and motion studies, so it's a bit hard to get those kinds of statistics in a meaningful context around productivity.

But for the sake of argument, the percentage would be very low, probably pretty much limited to professionals that could work their own hours. Most people were working poor, for whom the workday was 10-16 hours long, six days per week (in the Western world).

To give you an idea of the significant lenghth of prior work hours, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day has a pair of phrases: "Women and children in England were granted the ten-hour day in 1847. French workers won the 12-hour day after the February revolution of 1848."

"Nowadays we know that total productivity is higher if you have 8 hour work days,"

We know? Surely on a planet with 7 billion people, some of them can maintain their work efficiency for more than 8 hours. What about the Steve Jobs and John Carmack's of the world? I don't see them being 9-5 people.

It is implicit that when we are talking about regulation of the work day, we are concerned with averages.

That seems to have a peculiar and unlikely assumption that they would have produced less by working fewer hours, while almost all human experiences show those at the top of their profession rarely if ever got there by merely punching a timeclock more than the next tier down.

I will never be a world class ballet dancer or world class basketball player simply by putting in a little more time than the next guy.

Yes more time won't make you world class, but I bet the world class ballet dancer and basketball players often put in more than 8 hours a day.

Probably but at some point you get diminishing returns. The human body needs rest to recover.

Absolutely. But I bet the world class athlete knows where that point is for themselves far better than a legislator.

It definitely depends on the field.

Plus, in certain fields, even if you are experiencing diminishing returns, you can still squeeze more value out of those additional hours than someone else can.

Imagine one Friday your company calls the law firm you have on retainer. The guy handling your case has already put in 50 hours this week and is only operating at 80% capacity. You are still going to get better work out of him than his coworker, because your guy has everything about your case stored in his head without reading any notes.

On the other hand, if someone was on some type of monitoring duty, where usually nothing happens but if something does happen it's very important that he make the right call (ie guard duty, nuclear power plant operator) I would want to split his work over many people.

Sometimes two 30-hour workers perform better than one 60-hour worker, and sometimes they perform worse.

As a Lyft driver, I am more productive the more hours I work (I top out at 12 hours which I only do on weekends). So the 8 hour rule doesn't apply for everyone.

I think your thesis holds, but I don't think it's clear that your example does (though it certainly still could). Depending on just how much chance of accident goes up over time, and just how great a "productivity" hit we apply for an accident, it is absolutely the case that your productivity falls at some point and it's conceivably the case that it's before 12 (or even 8) hours - though for all I know it's at 15.

I'm sure the fatigue that sets in after (say) 15 hours would be a serious factor in accident risk. I mean truckers are required to stay under a certain work day/week and get enough sleep for safety reasons. Sure if they drove 24 hours straight they would get there faster and in theory be more productive but there are serious safety concerns both with the driver and with the truck (less time for maintenance or inspection)

Yes, also relevant might be the difference between what is safe as a one-off (maybe you really can drive 20 hours safely in a day, if you're well rested beforehand) and what you can do sustainably day after day.

In principle, this is stuff that insurance companies should be on top of...

agreed. My typical pattern on weekend nights is to sleep for 10 hours (yes 10 hours), do what I need to during the day for about two hours, and then get on the road, I'm usually taking anywhere from 1-2 hours of break doing other things that involve momevent (e.g. exercise, social dancing) within that 12 hours, as well, depending on availability.

During the week (when i work more protracted hours) I'm sleeping about 8 hours at least, and I'm also not beholden to an alarm, so I get as much sleep as my body needs. I think I'm probably one of the most well rested people I know, despite pulling twelve hour 'shifts' three days a week.

Obviously I'm more tired after I do the 12 hour shifts than during the week, but I haven't felt so tired that I was at risk of falling asleep on the road (which happened from time to time when I was in grad school).

> What about the Steve Jobs

If Steve Jobs would have worked less, he may not have been removed from the Apple Board. If he had spent more time with his family, maybe the Lisa wouldn't have had the connotations that it had.

These are not conclusive, but they do point us in a direction.

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