Others are trimming business hours, or staying shut on entire workdays, to save on labour.
Executives are lumbered with two overlapping workdays: a formal one full of meetings and an informal one spent trying to keep up with the torrent of e-mails and messages.None of this is good for businesspeople's marriages or mental health.
On workdays, he dressed like the owner of a country hardware store; on ceremonial occasions, like a plumber got up for church.But even in the years of his sad decline, Mencken was hardly ever pompous.
Ms Bourne approached the question as an ethnographer would: she chose ten female entrepreneurs, interviewed them at length, and spent time observing their workdays, which were sometimes 12 or 14 hours at a stretch.
What makes the study's conclusions more plausible is that the authors used very conservative assumptions, only counting the direct costs to the health system and lost workdays of a pandemic.
These figures include health-care costs, lost workdays and the lost earning potential of the dead.No wonder businesses are fretting about disruptions to travel and trade.
The journal (from jour, French for "day"), used in medieval France, was equivalent to the area a man could plough in a day with a single ox, as was the acre in Britain or the morgen in north Germany and Holland.But no two feet, barrels or workdays are quite the same.
Salarymen, outsiders assume, squeeze uncomplainingly into packed commuter trains, stagger home after 12-hour workdays, rise predictably through the corporate hierarchy and never, ever, take risks.
Last weekend was the first this month in which no large anti-Japanese protests were reported (demonstrators have avoided workdays).
Although these areas are crowded during workdays, most are nearly deserted in the evenings.
When a delegation of workers tried to present their grievances about low wages, poor living conditions, and 16-hour workdays directly to the company's president, George M. Pullman, he refused to meet with them and ordered them fired.
