Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours.
Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified.
Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact.
But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
> Many types of manufacturing. If you're making e.g. textiles, and being tired means you occasionally produce something that gets tossed out by quality control, this is not obviously a danger to anyone so it's just a cost trade off in wasted material vs. benefits of operating the factory for longer hours.
Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
> Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens.
That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.
> But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.
> Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
Sewing machines? Not that expensive, not that easy to destroy and the typical injury would be that you get stuck with a sewing needle.
It seems like you want to assume that every job involves some kind of delicate yet fatality-inducing industrial equipment. It doesn't.
> That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.
It's a person working for 12 contiguous hours, because the benefits outweigh the costs.
> I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.
And if they're willing to work and the output is making you money?
The proposal is to ban people from working for more than 8 hours. You don't need a law for any of the cases where it isn't in the employer's interests to do it anyway. They just won't choose to do it in those cases then.
So far your thought experiment involves someone with an athlete’s endurance who’s willing to spend half of their day on a menial task for three days out of five? A little unclear on the last part since you don’t seem to understand how overtime is calculated.
> So far your thought experiment involves someone with an athlete’s endurance who’s willing to spend half of their day on a menial task for three days out of five?
It could just be a job that isn't that tiring.
And why does it have to be three days out of five? Paying time and a half for four out of twelve hours could be worth it over paying benefits and overhead for another employee.
> A little unclear on the last part since you don’t seem to understand how overtime is calculated.
How are overtime calculations even relevant? If it isn't worth it for the employer to pay overtime in some context it would be required then banning 12 hour shifts would be irrelevant there because they wouldn't be happening to begin with.
> Your concerns are a corner case.
12 hour shifts are a corner case. Stop trying to ban everything atypical.
Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified.
Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact.
But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.