The thing is, a lot of businesses are moving away from the 8 hour work day, but unless it is done properly, it can make things a whole lot worse. France, for example, used to be the envy of most of Europe with their 35-hour week and 5 compulsory weeks of vacation. Of late, however, a lot of companies have stopped imposing fixed working hours on their employees. You come in when you have something to do, and leave when you don't. Good news, right?

Except now, there's no way to limit the amount of work the company makes you do. Unless you're in a job based on shifts (waiting on tables, hairdressing, cashiering), you actually end up working well over 40 hours a week, simply because you have insanely short deadlines and more and more projects piled on you all the time. If you take your foot off the gas for just a bit, and miss a couple of deadlines, it can be grounds for being laid off, or for not getting a pay rise. In some places, you just have to put in long hours, except now you don't even get overtime. It's an absolute mess.

The problem is that a time-based work week is more or less obsolete in most professions now. It was made for the industrial age, when workers were expected to just turn up at a factory, do their thing and then go home and have nothing to do with work for the rest of the 16 hours. Nowadays, if you work in the service industry, you're taking work home, constantly scrambling to get in your projects on time. Things aren't necessarily better.