For instance, when I worked retail, we were paid for only the hours that we were at work while the store was open. We were also required to open or close, and we were not paid for that time. This was, we were informed, an incentive to not stick around- if they paid us for that time it would encourage us to lollygag and waste the company’s money. While your line cook is not expected to peel potatoes at home, I believe food service employees are also routinely not paid for time the business isn’t open (while being expected to tidy up before and after hours). And of course there’s the issue of the way waitstaff/buspeople/etc are paid, which is not directly related but I think partakes of a related mindset.

Managers, too, are expected to put in many unpaid hours- especially service-industry managers. They are routinely responsible for more work than can be accomplished in the hours for which they are allowed to be paid- which means doing accounting and metrics and so on during unpaid time. White-collar managers usually need to do some of this too (though in a good job they only have to do it sometimes, instead of it being a baseline requirement).

And then there’s the whole theory of “exempt” employees, which all white collar/higher status jobs are, where you get paid a set rate for how ever many hours the company/company culture demands of you. Need I say more?

As far as I can tell, the only employed people who escape routine unpaid work are union members- and the rest of employed population hates and is jealous of them for reasons that seem to have a lot to do with the fact that they are more fairly compensated.

All of that said, I agree with your take on homework. Thanks for writing this.

School days are usually still 6 to 7 hours. I guess there are several questions here. One is whether we do in fact want kids to “work” as much as adults. Is asking a teenager to focus for 8 hours reasonable? Should we just extend the school day and have students do that work where they can obtain help more easily? (That is a tough tough tough question.) I’m more disturbed by us asking students to take work home than students working too many hours. Another is what really is the nature of the “work” that students do in schools. If learning is the “product” do they really need a heavily guided worksheet to learn? What about social/other skills that they can learn in the time between school ends and before the family unit gets together? Should we not consider the time between 3 to 5 time for that?

(1) I teach classes for high- and middle-school teachers in a Masters of Arts for Math Teachers (MAMT) program. At least in that setting, they expect homework, and they only complain if they think I’m giving too much. (But they’re very reasonable in this.) I suspect that they view professional development classes, which are part of their job, very differently, although I don’t really know why. Being in the MAMT program is also part of their “job” since they need a Masters degree in order to complete their professional teaching license. Maybe since PD programs are often done during their normal work hours and their Masters classes are after work they mentally classify them differently. Or maybe they just “feel” different? But in any case it’s not so simple as, “teachers don’t like to do homework.”

(2) Has the length of a typical school day changed since I was in high school? Mine went from 8am to 2pm, so 6 hours of official school (not including any clubs afterschool). If that’s a typical school day then expecting 2 or so hours of homework wouldn’t too out-of-wack from a normal working day.

@Sami: Awesome! That’s why I’ve been getting a surge of traffic!