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Is it the end of the 9 to 5 working day?
Traditional workplace hours of 9am to 5pm are now only the norm for a minority of workers, research suggests. Just 6% of people in the UK now work such hours, a YouGov survey found. Almost half of people worked flexibly with arrangements such as job sharing or compressed hours, allowing them to juggle other commitments, it found.
Anna Whitehouse, a campaigner whose own flexible working request was refused by her employer, said there were still misconceptions about such arrangements. In her case, her employer refused her request for 15 minutes flexibility at the start and end of each day to enable her to drop off and pick up her children from nursery. "They denied it because they said it would open the floodgates for other people to request the same thing." [...] Since then she has started the Flex Appeal, aimed at convincing firms to trial flexible working and also to make people aware of their right to request flexible working.
[...] Polling firm YouGov surveyed over 4,000 adults for the survey, which was commissioned by fast-food chain McDonald's.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 22 2018, @04:31AM
No matter what you agreed to in the beginning a healthy business can't pay its employees collectively more than they provide in value to the business. There are natural constraints to what conditions a business can provide, in pay, schedule, etc.
Thus, there are certain things that make for more rigid working days. For example, my current accounting job has several accounting deadlines during the course of the day that both I (and the downstream people) have to work with. I can't shift my working hours by a couple of hours here and there unpredictably because the company can't work around that - a two hour delay on my part means a two hour delay of several more employees waiting on my work to finish. Work needs to get done at particular times of the day in order for the accountants to get the job done efficiently.
Similarly, my employer is a tourist business. It needs to have people working at particular times because that's when the tourists are there. A waiter can't decide to show up half way through a meal period because that would mean that half the shift isn't covered (including a lot of prep work before the shift even starts).
Just like it's foolish to treat people as if they're interchangeable plugs, it's similarly foolish to treat employers and jobs as if they're fully equivalent. I see the same mistake happen with demands for universal shorter work weeks. Not all jobs are the same. Some have rigid time constraints that don't change just because the worker changes their mind.