Work Your Proper Hours

Late last month I was in London, just in time to celebrate a new holiday: Work Your Proper Hours Day. Leave it to the Brits to have the perfect knack for expressing alarm at the insidious trend of creeping (unpaid) overtime.

As the organizers point out on their Web site, over 5 million people in the UK regularly labor more than their paid hours, giving their employers a fat 23 billion pounds of free work every year. To get a sense of the magnitude of the problem, figure that with the current (appalling) exchange rate, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of $46 billion bucks.

What struck me most about this idea, however, was a story in the NY Times upon my return about the uprising over unpaid overtime at a place closer to home -- the video game manufacturer Electronic Arts.

Game developers at the San Francisco company are in a fever about this issue, stoked by an online essay late last year by a gamer's wife, who complained that EA was forcing its employees to work Dickensian hours, particularly during the crunch time before a game's release. Without the bait of the dotcom era's lucrative options packages, critics say the company's perks -- fancy gyms, classy cafeterias -- seem inadequate compensation for protracted periods of 80-hour weeks.

Rusty Rueff, the company's HR director, responds that paying overtime violates Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial ethos, and risks turning gamers into a bunch of bureaucratic clock-watchers. The company's vice president, Jeff Brown, also made threatening noises about moving the work out of the Valley to a cheaper location -- Vancouver, Montreal....or (insert ominous sound-effects) China.

What do you think? Should these folks "work their proper hours" -- then start the overtime clock? Or be grateful they have cool -- if exhausting -- jobs and suck it up?