TimothyH, I should emphasize our points of agreement. I do think that a lot of management reacts to their boss's mandates by decreeing work schedules without regard to what is feasible in 40 hour (or 50 or even 60) hour week. I don't think that's ethical, moral, or fair. Didn't want my agreement to sound like I was taking issue with your main premise: we agree!
Once worked seven 12s for several weeks, on a construction site in Germany. Interesting and tolerable when your 22. Would not be now. We were working to hand over a 300 million dollar portion of a vinyl chloride monomer plant to the client, and every day we didn't do it, we paid interest. And this was during the Jimmy Carter stagflation, 20% interest period. So, after working these insane hours we were successful and the pressure was off for a few days. Everybody let loose. I'm kind of personally conservative from a moral and ethical viewpoint. So I had a few extra glasses of wine. Some of the instrument techs ended up blowing nearly a thousand bucks over the weekend. I'm sitting in the bar, and they each walk in with one or two gals of negotiable virtue under their arm(s) and a bottle of champagne in each hand. Ah, memories.
Interesting that this came up. A person I'm very familiar with just told me that their management set a standard for how many new projects they had to initiate each week. I told them that it wasn't possible - the number of hours of work would subsume the hours in the week. So I'm doing an approximation of Monte Carlo simulation to help them show their management that the requirements they are insisting on are impossible.