COMPRESSED WORKWEEK GAINING GROUND IN U.S.

Byline: Peter T. Kilborn The New York Times

Tony Moreno is an outgoing, churchgoing man and the father of three.

But for most of the past five years, Moreno put in 12-hour workdays, including all of his Sundays, as a machine operator at Lucent Technologies here.

Some of his colleagues at the immense, windowless microelectronics factory relish the schedule, in which they alternate three- and four-day weeks, because it gives them so much time off.

``But that didn't mean much to me,'' said Moreno, 45. ``I missed going to church. Being a family man, weekends mean a great deal to me. All my friends are off on weekends.''

Many of Moreno's co-workers like the nontraditional set-up because, in addition to long stretches of time off, they also receive premium pay. Like it or hate it, however, more and more American factory workers are being assigned the short-week, extended-hour schedules.

Management experts call them compressed workweeks. At factories like Lucent's, the eight-hour-a-day, five-day workweek has all but vanished and given way to schedules that management deems efficient, even if they ignore the calendar's seven-day cycles and community patterns of work, sleep and play.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that from 1985 to 1991, the proportion of full-time production and service workers with conventional eight-hour-a-day schedules had declined to 81.8 percent from 84.1 percent. The bureau has no data for the years since 1991, but a private survey this year suggests that the trend is growing.

In a survey to be released this month of 800 companies that employ 1,000 or more workers in all types of businesses, the William M. Mercer management consulting firm in New York found that 34 percent used compressed weeks for some of their work force and that 14 percent were considering those schedules.

Abbreviated workweeks have been in effect for decades for some workers, particularly in police and fire departments, hospitals and utilities that run around the clock.

But they have been a growing trend in manufacturing. Nearly all automobile tire companies and most big semiconductor companies have shifted to the new schedules. The big General Motors plant in Tennessee that turns out Saturn automobiles has adopted one, too.

``I think employers are concerned about getting the most out of their employees,'' said Marc Vallario, the Mercer firm's health and welfare expert. ``They also recognize there are other demands on employees' lives. So many are structuring the workweek to accommodate their productivity needs and their employees' life needs.''

Efforts are being made in Congress to speed the shift to abbreviated workweeks. Many companies want Congress to change overtime provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that require employers to pay time and a half for any work beyond 40 hours a week, with one proposal seeking a monthly ceiling instead.

``The week is getting redistributed toward work,'' said Jerome M. Rosow, president of the Work in America Institute, a research organization in White Plains financed by unions and corporations. Part of the price, he said, is the traditional weekend: ``Leisure is getting squeezed out.''

The impetus, experts say, is a redoubled emphasis on efficient production, the same pressure that has been driving the tides of corporate downsizing. It is another tactic to wrest additional profits and lower-cost production from factories.

The Lucent factory belongs to AT&T, which said this year that it would shed 40,000 workers and recast itself into three smaller companies that will soon become completely independent. One of the three, Lucent, combines AT&T's research laboratories and 14 manufacturing plants, including the factory here.

In Orlando, management is building a big addition and expanding the work force to 1,500, from 1,000. About 80 percent of the employees are refugees from AT&T shrinkage elsewhere.

Inside, the factory workers, in white suits that conceal everything but their eyes, bake tiny deposits of metal onto paper-thin six-inch-diameter wafers of silicon. Factories in Singapore and Bangkok slice the wafers into the integrated-circuit chips that form the brains of computer modems and cellular telephones.

Five years ago management decided that to hold its own in competition with wafer processors worldwide, it could not let its machinery sleep when people do. ``The equipment has to keep running,'' said the plant manager, Robert B. Koch.

Before, the company had been running on a less-compressed week with four 10-hour days. But that meant that for several hours a day the machinery stood idle.

``The company eyeballed that quiet time,'' said Thomas S. Christian, president of Local 2000 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, who helped negotiate the schedule with 12-hour shifts.

As Koch put it, ``There were inefficiencies.''

Now all but some office personnel work the long shifts, three consecutive days that total 34-1/2 hours one week and four days that total 46 hours the next. Time and a half overtime pay is incorporated into wages that start at $6.91 an hour and rise to nearly $18.19, very high for factory work south of the Rust Belt.

Everyone has one weekend day a week, Saturday or Sunday. To make the schedule work, employees also gave up two holidays, Memorial Day and Labor Day. Still, all the free days amount to half the year off.

Workers say they appreciate having jobs, enjoy the time off and relish the pay. They also talk of being extremely tired.