Templar said:
First of all, I do not work, or intend to work, for KPMG in any capacity. Check my posts and you'll find I'm a pure maths.
er...given you said (and I quote) "I'm particularly interested in the context for KPMG, so any employees please contribute to this." I have no idea why you need to make such a big point. My assumption was not an unreasonable one.
Secondly, I'm not against the existence of overtime (as a person who wants to enter med, I acknowledge the 60 hour week is a widespread practice and look forward to using overtime and penalties to boost my wage). I am against the concept of overtime with no penalties or pay.
Welcome to the professional world. Doctors are usually paid by the government, where luxuries like overtime are given. Whilst overtime pay is prevalent in the health sector unfortunately in the high end of the commercial sector it is not. I generalise, but I feel its reasonably correct. Do you ever see a CEO get overtime for instance?
It seems highly unreasonable to demand such without sufficient penalties (and taking 1:1 excessive hour leave isn't penalty to me). I would like to think that the big 4 firms has the organisation skills to deal with clients in a timely matter with sufficient overhead to ensure this is not the case. It seems just like another case of the bottom line than their claims that they are family friendly.
The Big Four working experience is like a holiday compared to that of a law firm or the Investment Banking department of a financial institution. If you want to bag poor staff policies, target them first. The Big 4 make huge concessions, especially considering the prevalence of women in accounting nowadays. There are numerous instances of people being allowed part time work, e.g. 1-3 days a week to pursue family or sports or education. There are people I have known personally who have worked 2 days a week raising a family, or 1 day a week whilst playing professional sport (I mean right at the top level, AFL/Cricket etc.)
It is not unreasonable to demand a few extra hours to improve the quality and completeness of your work. Do you not do it for homework? Why not for your career? This culture is ingrained in not just accounting but engineering, law, consulting, financial services etc, virtually every professional field.
I am particularly concerned about this practice with cadets, seeing that they are continuing with their tertiary education and should be given sufficient time for their studies. I am not saying any less emphasis should be put on the CA or CPA, but it is an area I'm more familiar with.
Cadets are extremely well looked after. They are given extensive study and lessons leave. Whilst the workload is tough, it is good training for whats to come. Full time University education is a vacation compared to trying to juggle CA with work etc, and also the stresses that come later in your career.
While I agree that if you work hard you get something in return, work hard does not equate to work long. Efficiency is what people should try and achieve, instead of putting in long hours. I am also concerned about this threat, however they want to disguise it, of poor reviews for people who choose not to work such long hours.
Work long=getting more stuff done. No matter how efficient you are, the longer you work, the more you will get done.
Surely there has to be some legal requirement as to how many consecutive hours a person can work? It has been medically proven that such long hours is not only detrimental to the person's health, but it also hinders their working ability.
People have a remedy. Get a new job.
I admire the 48 hour system in Europe. I believe that we have become too obsessed about our careers that we have let our social aspects slip. If this could be done in Europe, why not here?
Again, no way will many professionals adhere to this. An IBanker in Europe would be lucky to get away with 84 hours.
After all, at least in med, if you are sufficiently tired, you can always refuse to work additional hours on safety grounds. And I'm sure a lot of people will be on your side.
Are you kidding? If you work below 80 hours for Surgery, you are treated as an outcast. The senior surgeons will most likely tell you to quit surgery. I believe this is disgraceful, but you can go blame the Surgeons college for limiting their training of surgeons.
I dunno about non surgery roles, but if you've seen the shocking state of hospitals at the moment, and doctor with some level of compassion will go beyond a standard working week to help out with the huge backlog of patients.
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With regards to what you have said, I admire your principles but your views are too simplistic without regard for much of the complications and issues that exist. Professionals have put up with being treated like slaves in the past and continue to do so. They do so because their work has become integrated with their personal lives. Is this good? I don't know, but given that you never see accountants or lawyers or engineers marching down the city crying out for minimum wages or 2 days extra sick leave suggests that they are happy to work a little bit extra for a lot more remuneration. I mean they have to do something to justify their relatively large salaries.
I think that the world would be better if everyone stuck to the 9-5 routine and that was it, with overtime rates if this was exceeded. But then how do you justify a surgeon earning 3 times a nurses salary? You can't. So they just work 3X the nurses hours.
