If you love what you do, you'll never work an hour in your life. So maybe academics shouldn't work at all, since the compensation isn't worth doing something you don't love ;-)
That's absurd. No matter how much I love what I do, spending more than a certain amount of time at it makes me tired. Tired me makes mistakes that fresh me has to fix. Tired me produces less overall output for the same amount of effort put in. If what I want is to maximise output, stopping to rest is the only rational choice.
Also, the implicit assumption is that, if you love what you do, you don't love doing anything else. I want time to devote to activities other than the work I so love. Much of that time can and does end up producing useful cross-pollination with my day job, but that's just gravy.
Not quite true. I love what I do, but what I do is really hard work. It is such excruciatingly hard work thay it slowly rips out my sanity.
I can imagine this is the same for academics.
Plus a lot of the job are things that they hate doing - politics, fundraising, dealing with hopeless students, writing modules that never get used. Many of them spend all their time doing these things, and the "overtime" is necessary to get the real work done after all that.
Also, the implicit assumption is that, if you love what you do, you don't love doing anything else. I want time to devote to activities other than the work I so love. Much of that time can and does end up producing useful cross-pollination with my day job, but that's just gravy.