Could the U.S. Ever Adopt a Six-Hour Workday? | Hacker News Reader

Could the U.S. Ever Adopt a Six-Hour Workday?

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My father relayed a story to me about a factory in Toronto that he used to buy supplies from for over 40 years.

It was a small, tightly knit workforce of about 50 people. Mostly immigrants with woodworking skills. When hard times hit North America in the early 1970s, the owner lowered everybody's hours to equate to 6 hours of work per day instead of laying anybody off.

The owner wasn't being altruistic. He was worried that if he laid off anybody that they would go to his competitors when the economy turned around. Taking with them valuable skills and insider knowledge of how his factory operated.

The workers were happy to be getting 75% of their pay instead of 0%, and the company lasted another 30 years after that with much of the same workforce.

The key is in "tightly knit workforce".

Back during the Big Recession of 2008, my then-bosses announced that they were going to require mandatory unpaid timeoff* from every employee in order to minimize the number of positions being eliminated. That meeting had not even ended, and people was already bitching about how they were not going to be able to keep afloat their over-leveraged lifestyles, and how unfair it was for them to subsidize the non-unemployment of a bunch of losers. Apparently none of the complainers though they would end up on the loser side of things.

*Nothing devastating, lit. one or two days per month.

We seem to be moving the opposite direction: fewer people working longer hours. It is part a consequence of the fact that there are fixed costs per employee which make it more cost effective to have one employee work 80 hours a week than have 2 employees work 40 hours a week each. It is also the case that more jobs require extensive training, skills and experience that are scarce. I don't society should encourage anyone who spent 20 years learning something useful in school (e.g., surgeons) to work only 6 hours a day ...

I had this conversation with a person who is studying medicine.

There is obviously a limit to human mental cognition.

The idea that More years studying = better Doctor, has anyone done any conclusive study on this ?

Most doctors will tell you that it would be madness to try to cut the time doctors spend in training - and that we should be extending it. But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist.

I think doctors and society would be better off if we reduced the learning curve and figured out how to more effectively distribute the workload among more doctors.

Doctors already have high sucide rates and very low job satisfaction. And I bet its because of how long they work and the stress that comes from taking so much debt throughout one's life. Also the fact that doctors marry latter.

We should try to build work around life rather than the other way round.

It seems absurd to me that doctors need to choose between living their lives and their proffesional career.

> But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist.

I am neither a doctor nor a quantum physicist, however, I suspect that having minutes or seconds to make a literal life or death decision does, in fact, require a bit more training than the days or months a physicist could be afforded while designing an experiment or writing a paper.

Except that the vast majority of doctors are not working in an ER. They are running through the flow chart for "how should I treat this child's ear ache". The way medical school works now is like saying that every programmer must understand circuitry in order to write websites.

I don't know if the dire state of your average computer program should be taken as an example for how healthcare could be improved.

Medicine seems to be more of a craft than science. Just like programming. Mastering a complex craft in general is more demanding than recieving M.Sc in physics, IMO.

But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist

Because if a quantum physicist fails, all they've done is waste money. If a doctor fails, then you're looking at patients in pain or even dead. Let's say you have a conversation with your doctor and your string theorist: which would you prefer to not be wrong? In medicine, it's difficult to get a do-over. If your surgery ends up in necrotic tissue in your patient's leg, that's it, no more leg. If your quantum physics experiment is wrong... try again. Even finding for the null hypothesis is technically a win.

Also, as someone who has straddled both physics and biology, I find that these kind of comments that downplay the difficulty and complexity of medicine to be patronising. The human body is ridiculously complex; physics ain't the only game in town that needs smart people.

Another metric that fuels this is revenue per employee. It would take a hit if more employees worked less. I think it should change. To help perception metrics like rev per employee, they could simply change many of these metrics to be based off of revenue per work period, which may be a 40 hour block instead, and may have multiple employees perform it.

The problem is costs per employees are high, until health insurance is separated from work (like all other insurance is) then it will be difficult with costs per employee.

I'd love to see a push to change the metric from profit per employee to profit per hour worked. That would be a more fair comparison.

Our department was mandating 20% OT for the last 6 months. I switched to a new program and the management really would like about 10% OT (8%-12% band).

Oh we used to get some pay for OT, but they took that away.

6 hour workday - how do I get to 8 hours?

This is a Fortune 100 company.

It will be very difficult to do this in the U.S mainly because of cultural reasons. I've a colleague who works 10-12 hour days routinely, for absolutely no reason. He could achieve his goals by simply planning better and working less. Working long hours is part of the culture here.

When I first started working in the U.S I heard this (rather poor) joke many times when someone was going home at 5.30 pm - "half day today?".

If the U.S wants to do it, it can be done fairly easily - same thing goes for remote working. The amount of resistance to remote working from middle/upper management boggles my mind.

The whole idea of a standard work time is ridiculous. We only have it because for many jobs it is hard to measure actual productivity. This also leads to the destructive phenomenon of secrecy in compensation where some are heavily over compensated and many under compensated.

Not so ridiculous when you consider retail or call center jobs that require someone to be present during business hours.

There are certainly more important metrics than mere presence though, aren't there?

No, because the workplace in the US is too focused on competition. Workers try to put in more face time than the other guy, to climb the ladder and out-do their neighbours and co-workers. If everyone is forced to work the same amount of hours, how are they going to out-do others? BTW, the average workday in the US is currently over 9 hours.

As someone who works in the Australian office of a US company with offices in SA, Europe and Asia Pacific, I am always amazed when US-based colleagues reply to emails or Skype chat after midnight.

This just does not happen in any other of our regional offices.

I worked in a US based office for a global company. The benefits were pretty awesome- down to them paying for my home internet, but our US based benefits were still quite weak when compared to our counterparts around the globe. The US working hours were longer and when I went on overseas assignments I found that their quality of life was higher than ours overall. It's quite depressing.

When I started looking for a job last March I realized that the monetary compensation from the offers I had were within a few thousand of each other but on only one of the interviews did multiple employees bring up that they were a true 9-5 and people actually get mad if you reply to emails after hours or do work during your off time. Their offer was $4000 less than the others and they didn't seem like they wanted to negotiate. I took it anyway and I now work 40 hours or less per week, I leave my computer at the office and I don't feel guilty for not having access to work when I am not at work. So even though I make a little less yearly, I am making quite a bit more per hour.

I wish more people in positions of choice would prioritize a true work life balance. Not only has it been great for my physical and mental health, non-developer employees get the same treatment as it sets a company standard.

I can't believe how long I bought into the culture of giving up a personal life to get a head at work. I used to put in 60-80 hour weeks and still feel like I wasn't contributing as much as I should. Now I have hobbies(!) and I think I solve more programming problems working in my garden than I ever did sitting in front of a computer.

Their offer was $4000 less than the others and they didn't seem like they wanted to negotiate. I took it anyway and I now work 40 hours or less per week

You made the right decision. Until time can be purchased, let alone at a decent price, time is the most valuable thing you have. You only have so much of it and we're giving it away to poorly managed companies like it grows on trees.

"Until time can be purchased, let alone at a decent price, time is the most valuable thing you have. "

This is so critical. It is sad people realize how much precious time they have only when it is running out. Yes, one needs to work but unless the work is also a healthy passion one should have time for other things in life.

Could the U.S. adopt an eight-hour workday? In my experience no.

Seriously.

But I'd rather formalize the 10 hr workday and switch to 4x10s. I think it's superior to 5x8s because you can get longer continuous periods of work and an extra day to actually rest/recover.

I don't really see 6 hr days working in office jobs. With emails, meetings and lunch, I feel like I don't really get going until 3pm.

To each his own. I prefer working a little each day and not stress myself too much.

I think what needs to happen is an increased in flexibility. To me it seems that society has done a piss poor job in figuring out how to accommodate to women and new types of knowledge work - which requires a lot of flexibility.

Agreed. Wouldn't having some people on five-day workweeks of 5x6, and others four-day workweeks of 4x10, and still others doing whatever lead to companies having to hire more people to fill in the blanks? Wouldn't that help lower unemployment?

I've come to the conclusion that more flexibility often leads to a race to the bottom. Like the "unlimited vacation" that's so popular now. Same with flexible hours, I'd guess. Anyone know how to combat that aspect of it?

" With emails, meetings and lunch, I feel like I don't really get going until 3pm."

That sounds like a really wasteful work environment. You spend tremendeous amount of time just synchronizing with people. That's just bad management and lack of vision from your employers part, not a law of nature.

How about, "Could the U.S. Ever Adopt an Eight-Hour Workday?"

I'm not talking about including off-hour emailing and such. I'm talking about a plain old 9-5. I'm probably biased by living in SF, but I don't know anyone who works such short hours. Did salaried people ever get to do eight hour days like wage workers did?

Gallup put out a poll a year ago, indicating around 37% of full-time salary workers put in exactly 40 hours. For full-time hourly workers, it's 56% by comparison. And 25% of full-time salary workers are at 60 hours or more.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-lon...

Norwegian here. 7.5 hour work day, lunch included. We don't get paid as much as US software engineers, though. We are "salaried" in the sense that we have a fixed salary, but we also have strong protections in law that require companies to pay if they require more than 8 hours per day from an individual employee.

I think your question is pretty obvious; as long as salaried means "fixed price to squeeze out as much effort as possible" then obviously a large portion of profit-focused companies will do just (misguided or not; organizations are rarely super insightful in aggregate) that in the absence of legislation that discourages it.

Would you personally adopt a six-hour workday? Assuming you got paid 25% less? (Also assuming you currently only work eight hours, which may be a stretch.)

I wouldn't, not at this stage in my life anyway. I'm all for flexibility, but that goes both ways.

The purpose of a six hour workday is that you wouldn't get paid 25% less.

And why would I pay someone the same for working less?

In school, was your grade determined by how long you worked at a problem, or by the quality of the work itself?

At school I tried to do the bare minimum amount of work that I thought I could get away with, so... probably the former?

I am sorry that you felt that way in school, but "real life" shouldn't, and doesn't have to, be like that. Whether your anecdote is true or merely a creative reimagination from a prototypical brilliant slacker, the point still stands: work and pay should not (typically) be measured by the time spent doing that work, but by the output and effectiveness of the individual.

Sure, certain civil service jobs inherently require a time component, e.g. firemen, police officers, etc., but many professions would benefit from a departure from the 8 hour work day.

Do you think that just because someone is in the office, he's being productive? Most of the time, people are in the office to give the illusion of productivity.

Of course, but what I'm not convinced by is the idea that if you lop off two of those hours it all comes out of the goofing off pile instead of the hard work pile. My own experience when I work a short day does not match that.

I set my own hours, so if I thought I could be just as productive with fewer office hours I'd be all over that.

The proposal is for a six hour day with no change in pay. Quoting one of the articles referred to on the article: "The 1990s saw several experiments with the six-hour day for a full wage in Sweden."[1]

The theory is that people should be based on work output, rather than hours input, and the six hour day typically sees an increase in productivity, so the output is maintained and the pay is maintained.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-t...

I'd love to see tho applied to low level (maybe even high level -though don't interact with them to know) government workers. They are totally about hours put in and very little about work achieved, few, few exceptions of course.

but the example in this article required more workers hired, so output per worker clearly wasn't maintained.

Can you have a team of people, working less than 40 hours a week, and still pumping out something profitable? I don't that thats too crazy an idea, especially in this industry. But I think if the company answers to stockholders, the underlying purpose of the company leans naturally towards making someone else money, so you'd be less likely to see that kind of thing.

TL;DR: Yes, but not as long as profits and money are in charge.

You might want to start gently with a 48 week working year, that seems to work OK in Europe too.

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