The Thirty-Hour Week (1936) | Hacker News Reader

The Thirty-Hour Week (1936)

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I won't speak for other countries, but in The US leisure and general livability are commodities now, not a part of life. The talk about shorter work weeks feel to me like they're rooted in growing fears that these commodities are pricing out many in the "professionals class." This isn't meant with snark, but it's an uncomfortable conversation for everyone. As we stand today there are plenty of people, fully employed, who don't even have a savings let alone time for leisure. I don't think we working professionals will ever see anything meaningful change in working time until we can have the larger conversation about why we work, why we value it, and who should benefit from it.

It’s just another signal about how far the laws and norms have been bent towards business against individuals. Companies are able to pay people with gift cards - that charge fees per transaction and age of balance.

Nothing will simply come. It will come, when you try and get it. Are you in a union?

I’d offer a (friendly) counter point. Trusting in the benevolence of a union is very similar to trusting in the benevolence of your employer to watch your back. Both employers and unions ultimately devolve into parochialism. Both ultimately are interested in preserving their existing power structures and NOT in helping the worker. I’d say that the best way to “try and get it” is to make your skills valuable enough where you have more work offered than you you have time for in the day. At that point, raise prices!

"The floggings will continue until morale improves."

Unions brought us the weekend and labor rights. Rugged individualism and hustle did not.

Religion brought us the weekend, and ordinary politics ("vote for me because...") brought us labor rights. Unions brought us dues and a bunch of people standing around waiting for an electrician to plug in a power cord.

I think collectivism in the context of labor is definitely something people should have access to if they want it. This is why national sovereignty is a wonderful thing. That being said, many regulations and rules around labor can hinder hiring and increase barriers to entry for new businesses. Both approaches have their merits. I personally prefer to have greater economic and business freedom, but that may not the preference of everyone.

I love that this topic has been getting attention lately. I’m a huge proponent of the 30 hour week/4 day week.

I’ve been working on a job board just for this: https://jobs.30hourjobs.com

Please let me know what you think!

I have verified that yes, 30 hours is acceptable where I work. It's been done, along with 32, and possibly shorter. Most of the benefits are pro-rated, but we'd still cover the health insurance fully. You could still work more and get paid for those extra hours, but the benefits would be according to how many hours you signed up to work.

Examples: If you sign up for 30 hours but work 50 hours, you get 75% benefits and 125% pay. If you sign up for 32 hours but work 38 hours, you get 80% benefits and 95% pay.

The job post in the "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2019)" item today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20088647

Hey souprock, thanks for sharing!

Please do post that job on the above linked job board (it's free)! It should get you at least a few good eyeballs and the community of people who care about the thirty hour week will appreciate it as well.

Honestly... my company is wasting a lot of money renting out this building for our offices. We could all EASILY be working from home and while I can't say for certain I am fairly confident all of us could get the same amount of work done in half the time. I get 90% of my work done before lunch and the other 10% done the first hour after getting back from lunch...

Personally, if they allowed me to work from home, I believe I would get a heck of a lot more done. Currently I know I have to work roughly 40 hours then as soon as the day is over I forget about work. However, if I was simply expected to get the same work done regardless of my hours I would work a few hours every weekend. I would stay up late when a problem interests me... concepts like this seem to evade employers. If I wasn't more productive (pretty sure I would be) I would at least be just as productive and a heck of a lot more comfortable in life.

> Personally, if they allowed me to work from home, I would get a heck of a lot more done.

I pretty much felt the way you did, until I had kids. Now the problem if I work at home is a toddler who constantly visits the home office with the goal in mind of sitting on dad's lap and watching Peppa Pig on his computer.

I know also a lot of people also psychologically feel more motivated and disciplined having a separate place for work outside the home. (Just look at how many college kids go to the library to study.)

So, I think even in the fully remote world, you'd still have to have an office like solution for a not insignificant percentage of workers.

I totally agree. I guess I am just speaking for myself. I can't say the same for the rest of my workmates. However, I always took my college hw straight to my room. Perhaps I am just an edge case... perhaps I should just discuss it with my boss... lol maybe next year.

You're absolutely right about needing an office like solution for a lot of people, but that doesn't necessarily mean your organisation's office. Co-working spaces allow you to have an office closer to you, often allow fairly flexible pricing based on your specific needs, and you have choice on which office environment you want. I only hope that it becomes more normal for companies to shrink their central offices and subsidise remote employees using those spaces instead.

Where I work I get 6 weeks of vacation and 10 floating holidays. It's actually pretty difficult to use up that much vacation if you try to take it in big chunks, and I am sort of averse to travel (because a former job I had required so much that now I am sick of it even for personal "fun"). So now I take almost every Friday off or Monday. If you work it out with holidays you basically work 4 days a week. Since I have been doing this for several years now I have found that I am actually a lot more productive than when I work 5 days a week and take several weeks in a row off. For me, the 4 day work week makes me happier and I get more done.

Why did you go with Mon/Fri instead of Wednesday?

Everyone goes on about Wednesdays but I honestly find Monday the absolute best day to take off. If you are working on personal projects, it gives you three full days to spin up to top speed.

Fridays just feel like the weekend started a bit early (due to the rhythm of office life I think), and Wednesdays doesn't give you the same runway for personal projects.

Can you give idea hwere this is? And salary range?

Let me guess, you travelled for a management consulting job? Or something similar... I work for a big 4 MC corp and now prefer to stay home. Plane travel makes me ill at ease.

A lifetime ago (1978) when I got into the Plumbers Union, (as I was teaching myself to be a racer, and future world champion; before I realized I could not learn a new racetrack, and get into a rhythm in 8 laps like say a Senna could--which really was why I walked away from that), we worked 35 Hour weeks. 8am-3:30pm: Plus we had two breaks; morning coffee and a soda at 2pm, and we also usually took 45 minutes for lunch, instead of the unpaid 30 minutes the contract stipulated.

Oh and the Electricians--shit they really lived large: they would barbeque every Friday... and Inside the building in the winter. They could give a fuck less if the job super didn't want then too.

The work got done, and I have to tell you there was no substitute for Union Trades; the apprenticeship programs were second to none and guys gave a shit about the product they produced.

I don't think anybody can drive like Senna could. Do you still race from time to time?

We just need to get back down to the 40 hour week. With time and a half for overtime.

My angle is that software developers do not meet the requirements for exempt workers in spirit; namely, creative and self-directed solutions (perhaps distinct from software engineers). Work for a new/rebooted development org could be structured this way. It’d probably look like a deplorable plan on paper to money people.

I'm confused. I simply don't work over 40 hours a week (average), don't want to lower my per-hour salary. Increased compensation for overtime would be the only thing to make me work over 40 hours, I think that's fair. Genuine question: why can't you go home early?

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer; everything in this comment is my opinion and/or based on things that I have found on the internet or vaguely remembered from legal notices posted around my workplace. EDIT: Also this is only about things in the USA--I do not know how it works elsewhere.

Short answer: You can't go home early because if you don't put in the time your employer requires of you they can fire you!

Longer answer: The 40 hour work week is set forth in the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). All that the FLSA says is that depending on what kind of work you do, your employer may or may not be required to compensate you for overtime. Your employer is allowed to set your work hour requirements, but if you are considered "non-exempt" from the FLSA, then if you work more than 40 hours your employer is required to provide time-and-a-half compensation for the extra hours worked. Many positions in tech are, I think, generally "exempt" from the FLSA's overtime rule (software dev types, at least--I'm less sure about ops/IT services folks) and therefore employers are not required by law to compensate software developers for overtime.

The FLSA does not address whether or not an employer can require you to work more or less or exactly 40 hours per week; it's all about what obligations they take on if you are non-exempt and they do require you to work more than 40 hours per week.

Not only do they not meet the requirements in spirit, an argument can made that developers don't meet the requirements in the letter of the law in places like California. But they've been conditioned to take their stock options and shut up about it so it hasn't been litigated much.

At a job in Minnesota, we were paid a "production bonus" for working over 40 hours / week. Bosses were extremely clear about never calling it overtime, because they legally couldn't.

The reason? We salaried, not hourly employees, and overtime is a legally regulated thing for hourly employees. Of course, we were paid the equivalent of our hourly rate, not hourly + half, which might have had something to do with it, but working over 40 was always optional, so noone complained.

I'm not a lawyer, but that's what we were told at least.

In California you can't voluntarily waive overtime if you're entitled to it. And whether you're entitled to it is a question of fact that can't be changed by calling it something different. California law is very clear that you can't contract your way around public policy.

In the context of sharing jobs in the great depression.

There was a shanty town in central park.

Bit like now, in SF?

To be fair, even though HN would have you believe SF is the center of the universe, it's an edge case, in many ways. The Great Depression had a far greater impact than just NYC.

My theory is that 90% of people don't do more than 20 hours worth of work per week anyways. We just all got used to be very inefficient at what we do.

I have recently gone down to work 60%.

Yet my output isn't very different from what I used to produce, so your theory seems to match my experience.

How did you manage this? I currently work 80%, but I don't see a super-viable pathway to go down to 60%. You work three days a week or what? (Mostly four days a week in my case, with some additional days taken as holiday).

I work 5 hours per day, with 4 hours on Fridays. We did it so I can work on a side-project (writing a book) and so our boy don't have too long days at kindergarten.

We do live in a small village where our cost of living is quite low. I also work remotely and keep a fairly good salary comparatively, so it all works out well.

I wish we could concentrate our effort at work and be allowed to work less hours for the same pay and output but companies pay for your availability not for your output so never gonna happen.

you are exactly right. Fortunately in Tech that seems to change somewhat with homeworking and other "remote" style of working.

If so, we are just collectively wasting everybody's time.

Well, yeah. Most white-collar jobs are adult daycares (including my own + many others in software).

Yes I believe we are all partially wasting our time. Unfortunately it is one of the pillars of our societies and it would be extremely or almost impossible to change. People expect to be busy at work 5 days a week for 8 hours.

Pretty easy to change, I think.

For everyone on salary, just say: "our new office culture is a 2.5 day week."

For everyone on hourly wages, just double their wages and they'll adjust their own schedules.

The trick is to do so simultaneously across the world to discourage scabs.

> For everyone on salary, just say: "our new office culture is a 2.5 day week."

That'd work for many, but many others would seek another job the same.

> For everyone on hourly wages, just double their wages and they'll adjust their own schedules.

That definitely doesn't work. Where has introducing or raising minimum wage caused workers to seek fewer hours, for real but less extreme example?

> Where has introducing or raising minimum wage caused workers to seek fewer hours

I guess we haven't yet saturated the demand for wages.

This has been a longstanding theory of mine. The brain is lazy and doesn't like to think - people sometimes miss manual labor because you don't have to spend too much time thinking since at some point it becomes rote.

Every once in a while I pine for jobs I had before I was an engineer because the stakes were low and I never had to give work a single thought while I was off the clock. Ultimately I think I'm happier as an engineer (at least at my current job) but I still miss it sometimes.

I have had both Engineering jobs that would force me to be always on and other engineering jobs in which I would completely disconnect as soon as I leave at 5PM.

The ones in which you fully disconnect are so good for your private life. You leave the office and don't even think about opening the work laptop anymore, that's something special.

Unless you're carrying a pager, as an engineer you don't really need to think about work when you're off the clock. Culturally this tends to happen a lot, but it's not mandatory.

When you've been pouring your mind deep into a difficult technical problem, it can be extremely difficult to just "turn it off" when the clock hits 5.

And whenever I get shanghaied into working into the evening, I'm unable to sleep till the early morning.

Which also makes 'keeping up with evolving tech in your off hours' so frustrating, it's no longer fun.

I don't mean that I _have_ to think about it, it's more that any problems that existed at the end of the day will exist the next day. There's no reset because there's no second shift coming in after me. That causes me to think about the problem, at least subconsciously, until I can fix it.

When I worked in food service, any problem that came up that wasn't solved when my shift ended, would likely still be fixed by the time I worked next.

I miss my old restaurant jobs- not because the stakes were low, but because the requirements were all well-defined. I knew when I was doing a good job because everything was running smoothly, and then I got to go home and screw around. Being tired didn't make work that much worse because it was easy to get into a flow state.

Compare that to current job- must maintain several projects, all of which are constantly changing scope, while leveraging soft skills and playing office politics, while worrying about career development...

That was one of the central theses of David Graeber's famous "bullshit jobs" essay, which is now a book (haven't read yet.) Keynes et al. predicted declining work hours. Graeber says not only do most people barely work during their 40 hours, many entire jobs or entire departments are basically... well, bullshit.

Sounds like just the sort of thing that 'lean startups' push back against.

How?

I'm afraid I don't know specifics, but the lean startups 'movement' emphasises efficiency.

I though Startups where all about working people to death

I think they demand the focused work at similar hours, which is very mentally drowning for very many people.

I always assumed startups were about sticking

    CREATE TABLE widgets (
      id SERIAL,
      name VARCHAR NOT NULL
    );
    CREATE INDEX widgets_idx_id ON widgets (id);

into migrations/42-add_widgets.sql, tapping Melissa[0] on the shoulder and asking her to review it, then SSHing into staging and executing it, all in the space of about twenty minutes with zero paperwork other than a PR.

[0] Melissa is not real

Melissa is real to me dammit

You're right, but capitalism will simply use this to pay people 50% and starve them.

I guess you never heard of the time Boris Yelsin though a grocery store was myth because he had never seen so much food in one place.

But everyone that I talk to is "slammed". It's interesting how the perception of working more hours is so powerful.

Regardless of how much you get done, you're still at work for those hours. It's not like people who work inefficiently have more free time.

Right. But the tough part is most of the workers have internalized that low level of cadence and focus. For that archetypical person, if you cut their work week from 40 hours to 20 hours, their actual output would probably fall to the equivalent of 10 hours.

I you're right that it would fall. But I think that would be temporary until they got used to the 20 hr week.

30 hrs a week was a way to deal with mass unemployment, which the US is not currently facing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20130327020843/http://eh.net/enc...

Only if you get less done. I feel that for a lot of jobs we could work 30 hours and get no less done.

I'd argue that:

o it is

o it's going to get a lot worse faster than many expect (and most are prepared for)

o we need to consider / encourage social rearchitecting globally, not just within each country's borders

I think this, with ability to not commute to work would be ideal work time for knowledge workers.

What % of the US work force owned personal transportation in 1936?

I'm a bit confused - are you saying the debt load has increased because of that transportation? Because I'll be honest with you, next to my mortgage I don't even think about my 10 year old, completely paid off, car.

Not addressing debt. Addressing the fact that the work day is far longer when it takes longer to get to work, so a six hour workday comparison from 1936 isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

Are you talking rural or urban environments? By that point in time the streetcar was popular, and public transportation was plentiful. You used to live near to where you worked - cars enabled us to not live close. I can't find any actual statistics, but given the awareness of our commuting times, I think commutes have gotten worse.

Back before cars, when, if you didn't live in a very dense metropolis, your commute to work was almost certainly done using an open-air conveyance such as horses or feet or donkey carts?

Yeah, I can't imagine many people would choose a 45 minute each way commute. Not unless they lived in some magical place where temperatures never drop below 15 degrees and rain only falls on weekends.

> Back before cars, when, if you didn't live in a very dense metropolis, your commute to work was almost certainly done using an open-air conveyance such as horses or feet or donkey carts?

> Yeah, I can't imagine many people would choose a 45 minute each way commute. Not unless they lived in some magical place where temperatures never drop below 15 degrees and rain only falls on weekends.

How many people actively choose their commutes today? I know many people who had moved somewhere for a job, bought a house with their spouse, and subsequently changed jobs. Once you start adding things that can tie you to a place (high-school age children, elderly parents to care for, mortgage, etc) it becomes harder to uproot yourself for the sake of one's commute.

It's easy to forget how much of an echo chamber HN can be. It seems like everyone here is a single, young, successful city dweller. It's easy to let that totally skew your world view if you don't pay attention to it.

"Some ass takes me to work every day."

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