Why Overtime Pay Doesn’t Change How Much We Work

New rules from the Obama administration may not have their intended effect.

by

Walter Frick

by

Walter Frick

July 01, 2015

Kenneth Andersson for HBR

America works too much. Half of salaried workers report putting in at least 50 hours a week, and surveys of white collar professionals report even higher figures. Long hours deplete our ability to make good choices and make it harder to fit in a full night of sleep. As a result, workers are less productive, less healthy, even less ethical. Long hours also make it harder for women to advance into leadership roles.

Walter Frick is a contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, where he was formerly a senior editor and deputy editor of HBR.org. He is the founder of Nonrival, a newsletter where readers make crowdsourced predictions about economics and business. He has been an executive editor at Quartz as well as a Knight Visiting Fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism and an Assembly Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. He has also written for The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, The Boston Globe, and the BBC, among other publications.

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