The concept of professionalism sounds abstract and insubstantial, but we all depend on it in our daily lives: We depend on the police to take their jobs seriously and not abuse their authority; we depend on doctors and pharmacists to pay attention with every decision they make; and we depend on the guy fixing our gas main not to be phoning it in that day, among countless other examples of human inter-dependence. We depend, in other words, on the ability of each and every person whose job is of any significance to separate the imperatives of their work from their own personal interests and moods.
The less time they have to take care of themselves, the more their own desires, prejudices, and distractions will intrude into their workday. You can't completely subsume a human being into a function - the human will win, eroding the function. This sows the seeds of corruption and inefficiency, and contrarily shows that shorter working hours at higher pay provide a qualitative benefit to society well beyond the economic arguments.
It seems like a trite observation, right? Overworked people lose focus. But it's actually more pernicious than that: They lose the ability to separate themselves from the job, and the result is not a person more committed to their work - it's someone who uses their work in increasingly self-serving ways, even if they consider themselves ethical. A person must exist, so if you force them by economic necessity to exist through their job, that job will become corrupted into the direct instrument of their personal needs rather than just a source of income to meet those needs.
The cop forced to live in his job does not enforce the law in return for his income and pride - instead, he may steal money and property, take bribes, sexually harass women without being aware of it because he has no time to get laid, and is lazy when his professional services are needed. Even without meaning to be, he is an embezzler because a lot of his time on the job ends up devoted to himself, and the authorities of an officer end up being abused for his own convenience. When citizens "intrude" on this "personal time" by actually needing him to act as a cop, he resents it. This is the normal state of affairs in third world countries, and a first world nation is partly defined by its avoidance of this phenomenon.
A cop who is allowed to live outside his job by being paid well enough and having reasonable hours can separate himself from the job: He can draw a hard line between what he wants and what the job entails, take pride in the work rather than the possession of power or status, and handle his life off-duty. The same goes for every kind of job with any importance whatsoever to society, and really any job at all when you get down to it. Even a cashier: We depend on them not to overcharge or shortchange us, to get our order right, etc.
Now, there is another dimension in the form of pay: If you pay someone a lot more for longer working hours, then it will be competitive enough that only people who can focus and maintain a professional outlook will be able to get and keep the job. This is why doctors and lawyers remain the gold standard of professionalism despite working themselves ragged - a person who is routinely unprofessional in these fields will develop a reputation and possibly face disciplinary action or even lose their license. It's not a perfect system, because no such thing exists. But high pay is at least one compensatory mechanism to deal with very long hours.
Since we can't pay everyone like doctors and lawyers, the best we can do for the rest of society is ensure living wages coupled with reasonable, preferably flexible hours. When people go to work, it needs to be something they have the surplus energy to approach as a task worth doing properly, not an endless and unrequited drudge consuming their ability to live life in return for the privilege of breathing. In other words, wages and hours need to be set symbiotically, not parasitically - the best work comes from employees who are cultivated as human beings rather than trying to force them to become their functions, and that's true all the way down the line.
Corporatism doesn't like this idea: It doesn't even like humanity. We are an inconvenient but necessary tool for them, and they would rather try to bully and starve people into behaving like machines, even if the result is less profit. There's an ideology involved, and the notion of workers as humans offends that ideology despite being both (a)true and (b)the key to productivity. It's because the Holy "Free" Market is supposed to be the absolute and unquestionable determinant of what pay and hours a job entails, so saying that it just doesn't work like that is blasphemy.
But we as a society are not bound by that ideology: We can recognize that higher pay and shorter working hours lead to better results and pursue that. The difference between what the market wants to pay people for a job and what they need to be paid to do the job well can be called the "Humanity Tax," and it's a tax paid in both money, benefits, and time by employers to their workers above what the market demands in return for professionalism. They need the time to be themselves and the money to be themselves without fear or avoidable difficulty, so they can come to work fresh and focused.
I'm not saying anything that professional HR people don't know, but it is certainly something that today is not reflected in either public or corporate policy. And one of the reasons for that is ironic: The over-professionalization of fields where a person's humanity should be involved - the transformation of business from a productive endeavor into a purely abstract, black-box attempt to squeeze money out of others by any means necessary. Because these MBA assholes will not see what they're doing to other people, and instead professionalize theft, they're creating an economy where other fields are de-professionalizing and becoming corrupt and inefficient. The least productive and most immoral activities are highly focused and efficient while the most productive and moral become more difficult and chaotic.
Solutions, I think, always begin at home. Step 1 is simply to implement this understanding in your own life: To see how you are corrupted by the demands and necessities of your environment and find ways to make yourself a better person, and help other people do the same rather than treating them as tools to be price-minimized. Don't do business with companies that treat people like shit, if you can avoid it. If you can afford a higher tip for competent and efficient service, fork it over. Just common sense stuff. And then at the second level, you can support living wage efforts in your community, and other progressive labor laws. Everything higher than that grows from those roots: Make yourself progressive, and the rest will follow.