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I used to work 35 hour work weeks and it was great. If I hit my 35 hours for the week, I could leave early. Most people didn’t and you were expected to get your work done but if you had a busy trial week and worked a 45 hour week, you could take the following Friday off if it was in the same pay period.

My office has a 35 hour work week. For non-exempt employees, it's 35 hours plus an hour lunch every day (so 40 hours in the office, really). For exempt employees (me), I have to put in 7 hours/day of work (time spent on files) but we're expected to be here at least 8 hours/day. So that 1 hour can be lunch but often is just working straight through to get done. And of course occasional extra work on nights/weekends. I can't leave early because I've already "hit" my hour target, for example.

we were 37.5 (union, NYC, ) and took an hour lunch so only half of the lunch was paid, but we HAD to take the hour lunch.
but the kicker was we were "hourly" in the sense that we had to be paid overtime, yet they never did. They just told us it was expected for us to stay late to get our paperwork done, which I totally understand if you are salaried, but we were full time hourly. it was annoying

I think I get what you're asking - basically, can you negotiate to only work 37.5 hrs/wk for an exempt position that's usually 40 hrs/wk? And if so, can you expect to actually only work 37.5 hrs/wk? I think the answers to those are yes and no respectively - you can try to negotiate it down to 37.5 hrs/wk and they might even agree to it, but there's nothing to confirm that you won't end up actually working 40 hrs/wk (or more), which is the nature of an exempt position.

The exempt positions in my company are all 40 hrs/wk, and the 40 hrs are pretty much seen as a minimum - what matters is finishing projects on time, which requires occasional 50 or 60 hour work weeks. But any time worked over 40 hours doesn't get paid overtime, and they don't get to take another day off when it's slower just because they worked overtime that one week.

So all that being said, I think a lot of what you can expect will depend on the company and culture there - if exempt employees are expected to be on call, work long hours, be always available, etc., then I don't really think negotiating fewer hours will help.

@Becky: It totally depends on the culture of the place. My first job, as a salaried employee you worked until the work was done, but the company kept detailed records of all the hours any employee worked, and if you were salaried and worked more than the scheduled hours you were given comp time that would bank and could be used up to 8 hours at a time (so you couldn't take, for example, a week off with comp time). No one ever used all their comp time, and I had something like 120 hours banked when I left, but it was nice to know we had it.

My second job you worked until the work was done and if you were good at your job you got to do other people's jobs, too, and if you worked more than 40 hours that's just what happened (they had high turnover among the competent people, largely for this reason).

My current job is more flexible. I work when I have work to do both during the day and sometimes at night/on weekends, but if I have a light week or need to flex my schedule for personal reasons I can take the time no questions asked, and if I'm twiddling my thumbs, I'm free to leave. That said, I did one of those time matrix things in what felt like a typical week, and I worked 42 hours that week, even though I left at 3 on the Friday and my work week is stated to be 37.5. But there are definitely other weeks where I've worked 35 or maybe even 32 hours without using any vacation/sick time. There are also people here who have negotiate a schedule where they work 9.5 hours 4 days a week, so in theory scheduled is negotiable at some companies, though that's still about the same in terms of total hours.