For many in the American workforce, the answer to the question posed in the headline is "no; everyone's at work." Although long workdays are drawing more attention as more companies move toward 24/7 operations, this kind of operation is nothing new for some. Firefighters have long worked 3 days on and 2 off, or some variation on that theme, living in the firehouse for their entire shift. And physicians in some specialties periodically spend 24 or more hours on call, grabbing sleep whenever they can.

Steel and chemical plants have always run continuously because it is costly and hazardous to stop and restart them, says Bill Sirois, vice president of Circadian Technologies Inc. But, "in the last decade or so, you've seen a massive conversion to running 24/7," he says in a recent report by Timothy Aeppel in The Wall Street Journal. In the same report, Joseph Martha, consultant with Mercer Management Consulting, says he sees more companies shutting plants as part of restructuring, but managing to maintain overall capacity by running their remaining factories continuously.

To run factories continuously after job cuts, companies typically "ask" the remaining workforce to put in more time. In ASSEMBLY's 2001 State of the Profession Survey, you said that more of you are being "asked" to do more work, and there's no a priori reason to suspect that the hourly employees in your plants are completely immune to these "requests," union work rules notwithstanding. More than one-third of you said that the time you spend at work has increased during the past 12 months, with 91 percent working more than 40 hours a week, and 22 percent putting in more than 50 hours. And, 29 percent of you expect your hours to increase over the next 12 months.