One of the things that mark people who earn a salary for the year and not an hourly wage is that they are considered exempt employees—meaning that those paid a yearly salary are not eligible for overtime pay. Work to the exempt employee is a function of the work that needs completing irrespective of the time taken to complete that work. If that work takes forty hours or eighty hours to complete in a week, the pay of an exempt employee remains the same.
I see this weekly in my wife’s work. Her team has a task to do and the concept of the work week is based solely on the completion of the parts of the task. Since she has to keep track of her hours for record keeping purposes for her company, I am fully aware of the challenge of the exempt employee. One week her work week consumed seventy-one hours, another week sixty-two, and rarely does it go under forty-five. My own work has the elements of task completion over hours spent working, as it is for the majority of employees of Golden Apple. We have a mission to pursue, and the completion of the parts of the mission supersedes the hours spent addressing the parts of the mission. It is what is in the world of the exempt employee where completion of the task is the primary goal.
Reaction to the desire on the part of CPS to increase the Chicago public school work day and school year has been interesting. One CTU official said such an increase in time without commensurate pay means that a CPS teacher will endure a 23% pay cut. But CPS teachers are not non-exempt employees who work by the hour and get overtime. There is a job to do—to prepare children academically as best as can be done. And every teacher knows about the 5/6 of the job that occurs off hours in preparation and reading and planning and fretting over our students. In the context of the non-exempt world, it is what is, and what proper address of the job entails.
More class time, proponents argue, would be beneficial to every teacher of all levels and subjects. I would be interested to know how do critics of the idea structure their argument outside of the perception that teachers should be paid more for more time on task when the concept of their exempt role doesn’t include time as the function of the job relationship but the completion of the task at hand?
Golden Apple 
How about we stop criticizing workers for not wanting to be overworked? Because teachers are in a service profession, “proper address of the job” entails being willing to ALWAYS give up more personal time, without more pay, without protest? As if teachers don’t do enough already. Teachers are not addressing the job properly if they want to go home? How dare someone want to leave work at some point! And if students aren’t mastering the material in six hours, how is keeping them in an ineffective environment for another ninety minutes going to help anyway? After a point, the brain is done acquiring new information and needs a break to process. Why don’t we try to fix what’s going on during those six hours instead of simply making it longer?
This is why we have unions, to protect workers. We have unions so employees aren’t forced to do more work without fair wages. We have unions so bosses can’t abuse their power. But this post is painting unions as bad guys, whose lack of support for an extended day without extended pay will prevent teachers from “doing the job at hand,” from teaching more effectively. This post could be easily used by those who do not support unions as proof that unions are stumbling blocks to our kids’ success and education.
I appreciate your perspective, Ms. Harrell, and thank you for it, as well as for reading my opinion in the first place. No disrespect was intended, but the exempt employee life from those in my life is exactly as you depicted, it “entails being willing to ALWAYS give up more personal time, without more pay, wthout protest.” No one, least of all me, would dilute the effort you exert and the toll it takes on you or your family. I’m just searching for a different avenue of discussion about the demerits of the increased day/year then on the basis established for the hourly worker.
One thing that I have heard said is that CTU seeks to have a “smarter” rather than a longer school day. Could you explain what that means? Is time taken away from classroom instruction within the existing school day that in its absence would equate to the 90 minutes extra? What needs to be fixed in the six hour day?