Some companies in Sweden are testing a six-hour work day | Hacker News Reader

Some companies in Sweden are testing a six-hour work day

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179 pointsaarghh98 comments

As a swede I think the title is highly misleading. Sweden is not shifting to a 6-hour workday. Sure there are a few experiments but the baseline is that sweden (which has a huge public sector) cannot afford it without raising taxes further.

The current forecasts for the future indicates that taxes has to be raised a lot just to maintain the current standard. I would be very surprised if the 6 hour workday would be prominent here in the future.

You're assuming a 1:1 ratio between time and productivity, which is just not the case for a lot of jobs. In a customer-facing job well yeah, you need people to operate the business as long as the doors are open. But many offices could run from 10am-5pm or 8am-3pm without seriously impacting productivity.

I'm not against the idea. Was just pointing out that Sweden in general is not moving towards this.

Not a single political party is actively driving the 35 hour line which was in the talks a decade ago.

But you said they'd have to raise taxes, which directly implies that you think it would hurt productivity.

He(?) said:

> Sure there are a few experiments but the baseline is that sweden (which has a huge public sector) cannot afford it without raising taxes further.

The general idea is that while you might just kick office workers out the door 2 hours early, and not see a drop in what the actually get done (and there are a lot of office workers in the public sector) - in other areas, notably healthcare (and also Miletary, Police, Search&Rescue, Firefighting, Child protective services ... and to a certain extent education) you need to have a certain number of people on at any given time. Like-for-like that means changing from 38 hours to 46 (although it's not that simple, as schedules tend to overlap, and there's probably at least double the people working during daylight hours).

If you pay them all the same, you have a ~15-20% (guesstimate) pay and pension cost increase (along with a similar increase in income tax, but as no one pays 100% income tax that won't cover the new positions).

Being Norwegian, I don't have that much of an idea about Swedish government finances, but it sounds reasonable that the public sector would probably need more staff if moving to 6 hours.

There'd probably be many benefits, eg: lower percentage of sick leave, early retirement due to health issues etc -- but it's not inconceivable that it would be overall more expensive. I think it would be worth it -- but that's a different discussion.

Why would you pay them the same? Hire 14% more workers, work them 35h instead of 40h, and pay them 14% less each. Costs the same, doesn't it?

How will they afford housing? Pay their student loans? Buy food?

Besides, if they generate the same value - why would you pay them less?

Every full-time job I've ever had in the US paid very well but there was no time to spend any of it because I was at work all the time. Anyways, if your budget is that tight an extra 6 hours a week would let you live further from work / drive an uber / cook more / whatever to fill in the gaps.

> Besides, if they generate the same value - why would you pay them less?

The parent to my comment was referring to shift work like nurses where you can't generate the same value in less time -- somebody has to be there.

Many people will not be happy to get a 14% wage cut, and would prefer working longer. Also, firms have a tendency to just require people to work harder/overtime rather than hiring more.

Finally, retirement benefits decrease if they are awarded based on how much income taxes you payed, which not everyone is comfortable with.

That is why projects to have a legal 35 hours week usually have extra stuff attached to them, such as integration from special government funds.

[W]hen the normal is that both adults in a household works, that's a [ed: 28%] pay cut (or a 72% increase, if one goes down to 6 hour workday, and the other one gets a job as a result of the introduction of a six hour work day).

In the context of the public sector, one is mostly shuffling money around (welfare vs pay/pension) -- but with tangible health effects: for better or worse, very simply, people are generally better off if they have a job, if the job isn't too hard for them (social aspects of having co-workers, sense of worth etc).

I'm not sure about Sweden, but Norway in practice (through union regulation) have a 37.5 hour work week. And a six-hour day then means 30 hour week. Some sectors do have a 40 hour work week (8 * 5), but also here six hour day, would generally mean 30 hour week.

In Norway hourly compensation is still not the norm (except for overtime) - nominal hourly wage is based on a yearly pay divided by 1950 hours (37.5 * 52 - including holyday pay). I think the idea of paying people per hour worked is flawed in general, even if it seems good on the surface. You pay people to be an employee, to use their skills to help a business or organization succeed. I don't think you can often gauge a persons value by hours worked, and it makes for odd incentives (eg: you get paid more, the slower you work).

Again from the perspective of the public sector, I think, in general, that one wants people to have a "full time" job, and pay taxes accordingly -- which implies they should be paid accordingly. That is part of the premise of a six hour work day -- that you can get "a days work" done in six hours, that working more isn't really good for you or your employer in general. Things like sick leave, efficiency when at work, years of a life that can be spent working -- all points towards six hours making more sense than eight.

We probably do need more data -- we have much more experience with eight hour days/40 hour weeks than with six hour days.

I also think it's important to avid the "one size fits all trap" -- not all work is the same. But that also means that just because Ford thought 8 hours was great for factory workers, it might not be the best model for most modern work.

The rhetoric that I have read on the opinions is that the workers should still be paid for 40 hours. It is debatable if the loss of productivity is that pronounced, but in overall this scheme would be more expensive to all parties.

Let's hope it's not the case.

Argh, bitten by formatting - too late to edit. Apart from the spelling errors, that should be:

3 (workers/shifts) * 8 hours to 4 (workers/shifts) * 6 hours.

As an American, I'm interested in knowing why it would require Sweden to raise taxes. Since you mentioned a huge public sector, is it a case of needing extra workers to work shifts so that pubic services are run at the usual hours?

I imagine private companies would be able to get away with it, as long as all their competitors also switch to six-hour workdays.

From just a quick googling around I've seen estimated costs for a 30 hour work-week the public budget between 86 [1] - 236 [2] billion SEK/year. The total budget last year year was 862 billion. Somewhere that money has to come from

Some Swedish links about it: [1]: http://www.etc.se/inrikes/sa-tycker-oppositionen-om-sextimma...

[2]: http://www.expressen.se/nyheter/val2014/sa-mycket-kostar-fis...

Here's some more facts about the public sector. Translated from: http://www.scb.se/Statistik/_Publikationer/OE0903_2014A01_BR...

Different measures of government size, 2012. Percentage of GDP.

Public authorities' share of the total value added: 18%

Public sector consumption and investments: 30%

Employed in the public sector: 28%

Employed in the public sector and public enterprises 33%

General government expenditure 51%

General government revenue 50%

I'm Norwegian, and here we have two parties who advocate a six-hour workday. One of the parties wants a six-hour workday with pay compensation, meaning we still pay them for eight-hour days even if they only work six-hours. I'm not sure this is the case in Sweden. Even if it isn't, a six-hour day means people work less, meaning you probably need to hire more people (increased productivity doesn't help in the healthcare, police or fire sector, you still need people at work) which means higher pensions and other benefits.

Yes, this makes sense. For the public sector it would necessarily incur extra salary costs.

Income taxes on hourly wages would go down.

Normally 6-hour work-day efforts imply equal pay, so taxation might stay the same, or go up, not necessarily down, even for hourly wages.

For hourly wages, that'd mean a ~20% pay high per hour.

Wages would also go down, maybe not proportionally but people do not do the exact same amount of work in 6 hours as in 8 hours. To make up for the lost production, some more people would be hired who are currently out of a job.

Average wage goes down, but more people have jobs.

However, due to progressive tax system, that leads so less tax being earned (two people earning $x each pay less than one person who earns $2x and another who earns nothing).

Since real productive time of programmers is 2 hours daily and probably for managers is 10-20 minutes, we could cut a lot of dead stuff in IT and don't suffer productivity drop. May differ in other situations.

Indeed, this wouldn't work in the low wage sector.

This hasn't been in the news in Sweden a lot, there is nothing "official" going on and I doubt that a fraction of a percent of those with a 40h week today will have anything else in a year or two. The headline (both in the source and here) should read "a couple of companies and public employers in Sweden are testing a 6-hour work day".

Nothing to see here.

Thanks—we'll use your title suggestion. (All: it's super helpful when you suggest better, i.e. more accurate and neutral, titles.)

We also changed the url from http://www.sciencealert.com/sweden-is-shifting-to-a-6-hour-w..., which points to this.

And it might be worth knowing that the two mentioned companies (Filimundus AB, M Brath AB) in the article - each have about 10 employees, according to 2014 official records.

I'd say that it's quite hard to extrapolate that the whole country is going the same way as these two companies.

Parts of some large municipalities and hospitals (City of Gothemburg, for example) are trying it at a much larger scale than these companies, and the results will be much more interesting. It's still not widespread though.

It is not mentioned in the article but a many places has also opted to implemented a 2 team shift. This mean that instead of having production during 8 hrs each day and seeing significant drop in production during the later hours, they instead got 12 hr of very effective workers. One hospital that did this has reported significant increase in number of surgeries, decrease in mistakes, few'er sick days, lower turnover rate, and easier time to recruit. The doubling in employees are paid not by taxes but instead with higher efficiency, and as such we might not need to build new hospitals in a while if this was implemented as a national policy.

I've found that working 8 or 9 months during the year then taking 3 or 4 months to look for the next contract or FT job helps me to re-sync and avoid burn-out (at least, I don't think I'm burned out - that's a good sign right!).

I like your style.

way to go! I try the same, but when I stop working and chill for a while, I start to feel guilty for not making more money despite I could.

Maybe a personal year-income-threshold would be a good idea. Once that's earned, just relax. Makes more sense in countries with progressive income tax rate.

> Maybe a personal year-income-threshold would be a good idea. Once that's earned, just relax. Makes more sense in countries with progressive income tax rate.

Isn't a progressive income tax usually applied monthly? In that case, not working for some calendar months is hurting your income.

At least where I am, we have progressive income tax, and if I did this I would end up paying more in taxes for the same amount of work, as for 3 months I would not use any of my lower-tier income tax, and the rest of the year I would be paying more to the higher tiers than if I balanced things evenly over the year.

I guess you could make a deal with your employer to split your payments across the inactive months, not sure if there are some legal issues with that.

One of the many ways tax systems can create weird incentives, as this actually sounds like a pretty nice arrangement.

The US withholds taxes based on the amounts in the paycheck, but the actual tax is figured on annual income, so you either get the money back or given a predictable annual income, adjust the withholding (there is some risk of getting penalized for owing too much, so the predictable part matters).

Correct, this is in the US and in fact to the parent, we found we end up not with much less in our account making 80K instead of 120K. I suppose maybe if you go above 150K it might be better, not sure about that though.

  Filimundus switched to a six-hour day last year, and says that
  the change hasn't really made a major difference in how people
  work. The leadership team just asked people to stay off social
  media and personal distractions, and eliminated some standard
  weekly meetings.

Might work for a company with a good culture, but betting on people to be grateful and voluntarily improve their work ethic works only as long as all the others still have the 8h workday.

Can't wait till this happens in North America. I hope we realize shorter work days and basic income in the next couple of decades. Then we will truly have a golden age.

I fully expect the US to be the very last to switch.

I don't think the US will ever switch at the federal (or even state) level. Any changes would be driven from the industry and individual company level.

I'm thinking the lag time will be around the same as the metric system, so anywhere from 55 years to forever.

That's reasonable. We've been the last on so many other progressive social changes.

I'm kind of Ok with letting other countries try this one out first. I'm receptive to the idea of basic income, but the potential unintended consequences seem terrifying.

If anyone is to try this, the states are ideal candidates. People can (and do) vote with their feet when states implement negative policies, which is one reason they are "laboratories of democracy". In addition, it is clear that they have the consitutional authority to do this (while the federal government does not).

There still is quite a few hurdles to switching states, not the least of which is having the money to do so, and the ability to find a job and housing in the new state. Usually those that are the most affected by bad policy are the least able to move.

It feels like something that would fail if only one state did it. A lot of low income people would move to that state for basic income and the high income people seeing massive tax increases would leave. Then the system would collapse.

At a country level it is much more difficult for people to come and go and countries have some control over who does come and go. It would be better tried by some European country.

>If anyone is to try this, the states are ideal candidates.

I'm inclined to disagree. It'll be easier to implement in a place like say Canada or a northern European country where there is already wide acceptance of social support structures.

More terrifying than the status quo, or the consequences of not implementing income supports for the working class under present and coming economic conditions? Really?

Yes.

US businesses will do one better!

0-hour workweeks for everyone, the second robotic slaves are economically advantageous!

No joke. People are already getting cut to 25 or less hours for health insurance reasons. I was told in a staff meeting that we might be going to a 4-day week with the cut in pay that entails since we will have a budget shortfall and our health insurance is going to do a 3x increase this next year.

or never switch, like the metric system

About the same time they move away from the Imperial measurement system.

A golden age of after-work creative and productive output? If you don't have the passion to create something meaningful with X amount of free-time, what will X+1 do for you?

If your current X=1, then you could probably do double with X+1.

I think the US should focus on more paid vacations days for starters.

or time off in general. Just a small sample of the cruelty inflicted on people by many companies:

- Significant other or child dies -- too bad, so sad, go without pay.

- Having a kid? Hope you enjoy not being paid while you have that extra medical expenses, or being marginalized. Worst case? You get fired.

- Sick? Sucks to be you.

(More of an aside, but I never personally understood the reason why the economy doesn't better support having children. An every-increasing supply of future consumers is what drives a lot of economic expansion in this country.)

>"the economy doesn't better support having children"

What do you mean by "the economy"? It is not clear (to me) why employers should pay fertile people more than sterile ones, or those who dislike contraception more than those who use it. Incentivizing child-bearing as a means of increasing future sales is not a good investment, even if we assume that said company will be a going concern by the time the child becomes financially independent.

The solution to most of your issues seems to be increasing the number of opportunities available to people; this would provide them options, and additonal competition between employers would improve treatment of employees. We already see that in-demand employees are treated very well; the key is to make everyone more productive, and increase demand for labor services. How this can be achieved is, of course, a topic of great debate.

If I don't want children of my own because they're ridiculously expensive, why should I subsidize yours? There's no reason a private employer should pay you more because you want a kid.

Children are not personal property, they are a cultural resource, and it is perfectly acceptable to make people invest in the important parts of their culture. If you don't like it, give back all your state-printed social-agreement-enforcing cash and make your own monopoly money to hoard. You, as a participant in an economy, have social responsibilities. Caring for the next generation is a big one.

> Children are not personal property, they are a cultural resource

You're entitled to that opinion, as am I to the opposite one. Thankfully it would appear the United States as a whole is on my side.

Yes, thankfully we have to pay for our own children's education, transportation, food, and healthcare because nobody pays taxes. Truly, this makes the US a wonderful place.

Having a federal minimum of say 4 weeks would be a start. And any state that dint follow suit would have its pork (federal aid) cut

Where will we get the money for that? We're already trillions of dollars short on future obligations.

Our mounting debt is a real problem, no joke. But the ideas behind basic income and shorter work days do not inherently require our government to spend more than the already astronomical sums it's currently leaking.

"Trillions of dollars" doesn't really give any insight into the scope of the problem, it just suggests the number is really large.

The scope of the problem is that we have about 1.5 years worth of GDP in debt. So, with yearly payments of 10% of GDP, we could pay down the debt in 15 years. Suppose through automation we increase productivity by 50%. We could shorten the work week by 25%, add a tax to pay down 10% of the debt each year, and still maintain exactly the same standard of living while paying down the national debt in 10 years.

Point being, the United States has no shortage of money to pay down our obligations.

The obligations extend well beyond the debt. Social security, medicare, and medicaid will be much more costly than the debt for at least 20 years (at current levels). Public sector pensions are another huge non-debt liability.

Another interesting wrinkle that lukeschlather brings up is that if the productivity increases are the result of more and more automation, does that not also mean that there are fewer and fewer people paying into social security? Or am I misunderstanding the statement?

Whoever owns the machines is going to be paying a lot of taxes on their outrageous income, though.

That's only assuming that costs go up or stay the same. They might, but if the tax burden becomes higher than the net increase in production, they could very well lower prices to better compete.

Long story short, you MIGHT be right, but if the economy is depressed by all the newly jobless, it seems a stretch that prices would skyrocket, or even stay flat so long as automation provides more wiggle room at the margins.

Netflix will pioneer it by launching the 0 hour work day.

And then firing the bottom 20% consistently of the people who work the least.

Except these are companies choosing to shorten their work days. This isn't a top-down imposition by government. I suspect you are envisioning a 6-hour day, with government requiring overtime compensation beyond that. As for basic income, that's another discussion entirely.

In all honesty, many knowledge worker jobs in the US are already un-clocked. Essentially, the company has an expectation that a job gets done and the employee has an expectation that they'll generally speaking be present at the office roughly during core hours. The unspoken agreement is that this ends up being roughly 40 hours per week, with concessions made on the employee's part when things get tough and on the employer's part to offset the aforementioned extra time.

Ultimately, this serves the employer's purposes more than the employees', but it's better than the bad old days of clock-in, clock-out. Imho, most managers [at least in tech companies, but not just the big name tech companies] operate this "just get your job done" way.

This is especially common in the Bay Area where a fair number of folks have 1.5-2hr each way commutes.

So ultimately what hours do most tech/knowledge companies work in the US? 9-5? 9-6? I've also heard stories of 9-9 or worse but wonder how much is startup myth.

9-6(8 at office, lunch hour uncounted) is typical for an established company that is not experiencing a managerial crisis.

No need to wait for it to happen nation wide. You can already start applying it for yourself. Try to negotiate a 4days week next time. If you can't find any employer who would agree to that, accept standard 5days contract, but then take a day off every other week or something. I'm sure there is a lot people can do to reduce their work time (stress) without waiting for it to "happen" country wide.

This is a great idea - people waste so much time at work that if they only worked 6 hours they might get more done, and have a better quality of life, leading them to be more productive when they are there.

As an expat.living in Sweden with kids, there's a lot of social pressure to not leave your kids in childcare longer than 8 hrs. If both caregivers don't have flexitime, 6 hrs would be very attractive to IT workers here. Both male and female.

Standardizing work always leads to problems.

Some individuals need 3 hours, others 12 hours. The only question is whether the job is done.

What's more accurate as a salaried thought worker (i.e. software developer) would be a cumulative average of the sporadic fits of inspiration I work each week sometimes at midnight, etc.

Fully agree! Different people at different moments in their lives have different time requirements. There is no way to make everyone happy with one single standard -- freedom of choice is the best choice here.

And sometimes I need 6 hours in the office to finish the day in a 2 hour blaze of glory

It might be worth noting that the two companies (Filimundus AB, M Brath AB) mentioned in the article both have about 10 employees each, according to official records from 2014. Both companies have been running since approximately 2011.

I think it's pretty safe to say that "Sweden" is not moving to a 6 hour work day yet. This is two, incredibly small companies that are doing so.

If it was Ericsson AB or any of the industrial companies (Sandvik, SCA, Volvo, SSAB ie Swedish Steel) however...

One of the reasons why Swedes find it most necessary to push for this (they don't to any large extent, but when countries do, Swedes will be among the first) is that we don't do 9-5, we do 8-5 (white collar) or 7-4 (blue collar) because we have 45-60 minutes of unpaid lunch break. As a swede, the term "9-5" sounds like a holiday really!

While I agree that an arbitrary eight-hour work day may not suit every task the best, I don't see why switching it to six hours is any less arbitrary.

As a self-employed person my pay _directly_ correlates to the amount of hours I grind away. I actively try to make my working time more efficient, but cutting down on hours wouldn't get me anywhere.

Why not advocate that shifts be of a length required by the task alone and not a preset amount of time each day?

Because it's mentally taxing to work for eight hours straight for many if not most people. Knowledge work (http://calnewport.com/blog/2012/11/21/knowledge-workers-are-...) does not scale linearly with time, even over the course of a workday.

I find I work best in two sprints less than 6 hours, I totally get that long sprints reach a point of diminishing returns. My question is Why is six hours so much better than abandoning shift-based timing for something like task-based timing instead and cutting out all that extra time, not just reduce it.

I would like to try out a 10h workday with 4days/week and a 3 day weekend. Some studies say a 3 day weekend makes you happier and more productive.

why 10h? go ahead with 4 days but keep 8h.

1. Employers want to get 40h work out of every employee

2. Employees don't want to take a 20% cut to their salary

It's all a matter of negotiation, isn't it. You never get what you never ask for.

No success yet, but if you find a company that pays a CTO with 4x8h give me a call.

I've tried every other Wednesday off. People ask me why I wouldn't just do a longer weekend, but I found the mid-week break to be great. What used to feel like a long five-day slog is much more manageable in two-day chunks.

I probably work about 10 hours per week, offsetting that by basically being available 24-7 if needed. Luckily, that's very rare. I guarantee my workload and quality of work excels my coworkers who are in the office 40+ hours a week. The 40 hour work week is totally ineffective for most industries but, alas, America would never move away from it.

I personally always negotiate for 4days a week. Works wonderfully for me.

..and they established they were 25% less productive.

The majority of people have children. Sucks for you, but I'd rather it suck for you and the rest of the few asshole asocial hermits, than suck for all of us. Though if you like money so much, maybe we could pass in a law that you can trade in your fertility for a tax cut.

I second the other comment. Fuck you, just, fuck you.

Please follow the HN guidelines and remain civil, even when the other person has not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

> you and the rest of the few asshole asocial hermits

Personal attacks are not welcome on Hacker News. Please don't do this again.

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