Those of us working for the low cost competition have been doing 4 sector early duties with reports before 0600 and a duty time limit of 12 hours. Many of these days are well in excess of 8 hours block flying and in the summer one could be doing 5 of these in a row. I agree they are very much hard graft, especially in a noisy and uncomfortable flight deck like the 737.
I appreciate this is a fairly unpleasant shock to the system but if BASH is to keep up with the competition it will be harder and harder to do so without trying to work the aircraft (and necessarily the crew) harder.