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Comment by mhurron | Hacker News Reader

They're abandoning it because of an obvious requirement? Did someone not realize that in a 24 hour operation that consists of physical activities, cutting hours would require more people to carry the same workload?

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Then again, the hours that were cut also wouldn't have to be paid to the people not working them. In a perfect situation this would have led to higher employment numbers and happier employees. However, the Bloomberg source[1] also mentions that pay was not cut, which led to the overhead costs. You are right that this consequence could've been seen from miles away.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/swedish-s...

> You are right that this consequence could've been seen from miles away.

Which is why this is very close to just propaganda against a 6h work day.

I'm commenting on rebootthesystem comment which is flagged and dead. I don't understand why - he makes a perfectly valid and coherent point.

The language used in his comment has no place on Hacker News [1].

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

He was trolling. Look at all the hyperbolic nonsense in his comment.

In the US the 8 hour work day was established by FDR with one feature being that it would tighten the labor market (and reduce unemployment) by forcing employers to hire more people.

The lower hours also reduced workplace injuries and provided longer term economic gains [1]. This study is probably too short measure the arguably more important gains that would take a long time to show up.

1: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, by Robert Gordon.

Yeah this sentence was a bit of an anticlimax:

"Preliminary results concluded that it achieved all of these aims, but the city had to employ an extra 17 staff, costing 12m kroner (£1.4m), Bloomberg reported."

Am I missing something because that seems painfully obvious without even having to to undertake the experiment no?

That being said I absolutely love that the Swedish government was willing to entertain such an idea and undertake such an experiment.

My interpretation is that the cost could be calculated beforehand but not the benefit. If the outcome was a dramatically improved care and well-being of patients that saw much shorter hospital stays OR an unanticipated reduction in the need for staff as a knock on effect of shorter workdays, then the benefit might have been considered worth the cost.

I see. That certainly makes much more sense. Thanks.

The experiment was to find any positive benefits. If you look at it from that perspective (as a research project) it makes much more sense. Before we could guess what benefits would result, but now we know.

For those not familiar with the swedish currency: I don't know how they calculated but 12 million SEK is more like 1.07 million GBP.

I think the idea is that costs ballooned more than expected.

That shouldn't be shocking either - each shift change requires people to scrub in, pass on information from the previous shift, and so on - but it's a deeper question than adding new staff to cover the missing hours.

The numbers suggest this is not the case. They needed 17 extra employees for 68 existing staff members. Naively, one would expect that for 68 x 8 = 544 man hours per week, one would need 544/6 = 91 (rounded up) employees. Yet 68+17 = 85, which is six employees less!

Presumably some shifts require managers/bookkeepers/etc not required on other shifts. The overnight shift is less likely to require a receptionist dedicated to walk-in visitors and phone calls for example...

Ouch, I didn't stop to do the math. I had assumed the naive addition turned out to be too small, but this makes it hard to understand what surprised them!

I'd be interested in how long they've had 68 employees for; was it 68 two years prior to the trial, or even 51?

I wonder if there's a balance somewhere here too. Perhaps have employees work 7 hours at a slightly reduced rate.

This trial alone is probably difficult to draw solid conclusions from, other than to say if these employees work less they produce less (albeit not proportionately it seems).

It was kind of a weird scenario to test this in. Regardless of productivity gains number of hours staff would need to be on hand will of cause remain the same, if nothing else do to regulations. Still there might have been a ton of complaining, had they tested on staff in public administration.

I'm a huge fan of the idea of shorter work weeks, it's obvious that some jobs won't be able to introduce them without cost. Also, assuming Sweden and Denmark aren't to different at this point, there might not actually be enough skill people walking around without jobs to fill in the gaps in the sectors where people are required to be present, regardless to productivity boosts.

It cost the city more, but it saved the national government 4.7 million in unemployment payments.

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