It's time to switch to a four-day working week, say two experts
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I have long (semi-jokingly) professed belief in the Church of the SubGenius. They extol the virtues of slack. I think the intended meaning of “slack” is as in “to slack off.” But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system.
While some might use that extra day to slack off, plenty more would use that day to invest labors in their communities, maybe to get some exercise, maybe do some neglected repairs around the house.
I feel like in the name of efficiency, we’ve purged a lot of slack from the system, but that has left us with a lot of institutions that are at risk for catastrophic failure. For people who are stretched to their breaking point, there needs to be more slack.
The reason for this are statistical perturbations in stochastic events. If a task takes a worker rand(1,4) units of time you can expect them to do day/1 to day/4 tasks in the day.
You look at the worker doing day/1 tasks and you say, "Well shit, that person is slacking most of the time. Most of these tasks take 2 units, 4 is very rare". So you ask them to work harder and impose rules so they must perform day/3 number of tasks per day.
You look at your constantly busy workers and you're happy. No more slack in the system.
But your assembly line grinds to a halt. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Everyone is busy all the time. Everyone's always working. But nothing is finishing.
What gives?
Turns out any task that hits N=4 on the random curve, wreaks havoc and you fall behind. Then you have both yesterday's and today's tasks to do. You can't. The next day ... well the problem ends up growing exponentially.
Efficient systems have slack.
Also, it very well could be that reducing to 4 from 5 does nothing but simply reduce the number of hours 'the factory is operating'. Surely there'd be a bonus because people might be more relaxed, but it's hard to weight that against the lost day.
For example, my local coffee shop is open 7 days a week, let's say that their staff works 5 days on, 2 off so there's a steady rate of staffers.
If they just switched to 4 on 3 off ... I'm not sure anything would materially change in terms of productivity etc. - and 'all else being equal' (i.e. demand, cost of goods, wages/hour), the staffers would simply make less money and I doubt they'd chose that.
But maybe '3/4 days' would be better in some industries than others.
I recommend reading The Phoenix Project. It does a great job of dispelling the myth that software engineering is unpredictable and artisanal and whatnot. At the abstraction layer of a department or division manager it becomes indistinguishable and the same stochastic modeling principles apply.
But that’s besides the point. A more important point is the idea of effectiveness.
4 days of effective work are often better than 5 days of being busy but ineffective.
Personally I get more done in a 4 day week because I am more cut-throat about saying No to things that don’t matter.
Again, this could only be (dis)proven in a large-numbers experiment (so no, not in a single cafe :)), but I don't think this is limited to any one particular area of work.
Going to a 4 day work week would bring the weekly productivity to the level of a 5 day week from the early 2000s while also providing a "virtual" wage increase.
I don't really see companies flocking to sign up.
You could also consider 10 hour four day weeks, though I guess at 10 hours many would see fatigue affecting their work.
I don't find that 10 hours fatigues me, it feels the same as an eight hour day anyway.
US working hours are nuts, IMO.
On the other hand it's possible that a 10h work day becomes less productive than an 8h one if applied long term. Of course it depends on the actual job but it wouldn't leave much time for anything personal. For a lot of jobs 10h shifts sounds like looking for trouble.
Even now, programming on salary, I'd rather do 4 tens, 7-5. The overhead of commuting is what kills me, and it'd actually be less traffic if I went in earlier. Besides, those two hours before everybody else gets there could be more productive than the whole rest of the day.
Even a short commute just kills me. This is why WFH is so effective IMO. Up between 5am and 6am. Workout, then work. Those few hours in the morning before anyone else gets in is when I do most of my 'work' for the day. The rest of the day is meetings, answering questions, etc...
Because many companies are already getting 5x10 out of their salaried employees. They don't want to lose that extra work.
8 hour days are probably a good balance between how much work you can productively put in during one day and the auxiliary time. Increasing the number of hours per day would probably decrease productivity via fatigue. Decreasing the hours wouldn't bring much of a benefit for the worker since the auxiliary time stays mostly the same (you still commute).
A good chunk of the lost productivity would probably be offset by higher worker satisfaction.
https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...
Most important and revealing graph in the entire book
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/wh...
As well as that you have growing land use regulation making certain types of housing illegal, e.g. apartments or houses below a certain area, or flophouses/SROs. Zoning more generally does this everywhere. Most of the residential buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today. So land holders capture much of the gains in productivity and that doesn’t show up in the labour share of productivity growth. But land ownership is extremely widespread; this is the lower middle class and up, not just the rich capturing increases in productivity.
Less important but still significant is that due to the US tax code’s treatment of benefits compensation has gone up more than wages have. The cost of health insurance has gone up enormously since the 70’s, A’s has what you get for your money.
I now take 2-4 hours a day off during the day instead.
Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.
2. Successful businesses are making their owners and shareholders lots of money. As an absolute worst-case scenario, every company takes a 1/5 hit to the profit they produce for their owners.
3. Point #2 means that a four-day work week would do a lot to rebalance the value of capital vs the value of labour. The balance has been tipped towards capital for far too long.
Edit: increased productivity needs to be a huge part of the argument here
What's magic or received about five days?
If your business dies at a 2% loss of profits, i’m ok with that.
But frankly i doubt you’d lose 1/5 of your worker productivity by cutting hours by 1/5 (assuming pay rates stay the same) - so that’s a worst-case scenario where productivity is directly tied to time-spent-working.
But the point was that the loss of pay due to working only 4 days, vs 5 days, is not going to make any workers happy. Business paying 5 days of wages for 4 days of work is not going to make anyone happy, especially shareholders.
You might make up some of the loss by cutting vacation time, but there's no extra room to make up 42 days of lost productivity.
Prices will have to increase to make up for lost profits, but with less money for people to spend, this sounds like a recipe for economic disaster.
If labour is 100% of your company’s costs, then yes you are facing a 20% increase in costs. 100% labour businesses are VERY rare.
It is also very unlikely that cutting hours by 1/5 (while keeping wages stable) would result in a 1/5 loss in productivity. There is so much time wasted in the typical 9-5 workday because nobody can be productive for 8 hours straight.
So if you have a business that’s near 100% labour costs, and the work is such that productivity is very nearly equal ti hours spent working, and your margins can’t take a 20% hit, then yes you are going out of business.
There are whole classes of business that would work if 50 or 60 hour work weeks are legal to mandate - but we don’t care... why do we care about that thin slice of businesses that require a 40 hour work week? 32 hours or bust.
I don’t think that forcing people to do things is ideal, personally.
This is essentially how Tom DeMarco defines it in his book Slack.
If for no other reason, we build a lot of infrastructure for "peak" usage, like rush hour traffic. If we all have the same 3 day weekend that means we have lower "weekend" traffic one more day but the peaks stay the same, but if we better distributed our weekends, overall peak would go down a bit.
It's a whole new set of coordination problems, of course, but we don't all go to church on Sundays anymore, we don't all need to be off the same day.
Church has nothing to do with it.
> we don't all need to be off the same day.
True enough except that you won't stop making a racket. I, and most other people I know, want a day when it is quiet, no rush and bustle, no noisy traffic, no noisy diy. Where I live it is normal to not mow the lawn or do any construction work outside the house on a Sunday and not do do any noisy work inside either if the neighbours could hear it.
Why on earth should an insurance office be open at the weekend? Come to think of it: why does such a thing even exist. I have not visited a bricks and mortar office to arrange insurance in the last forty years, I don't think they do exist here any more (Norway). Same for banks. And if I have a dental emergency then I go to the emergency dentist, otherwise I ask my usual dentist for an appointment during the week.
What do I do instead? Binge read documentation to learn about new functions and parameters that may make my work easier. Tweak vim configuration. Experiment with new shell commands. Clean up my email inbox and various notifications.
These activities still push the work forward, but don't require as much creative juice and there's no consequence for mistake.
I would still prefer a 4 day week, but it's the next best thing.
Same principle applies in the gym - you start out the workout with the super strenuous squats and deadlifts, then move to the difficult bench press and dips, then finish with relatively easy bicep curls, tricep pushdown, and cardio.
Some things just can't be done effectively unless you're above a certain level of rest; other things can be done even if you're tired. It just makes sense to sort things into the period of time where you can actually do them.
In coding this extends all the way to watching lightweight YouTube videos about coding late at night when you're tired.
More broadly this is one of many good reasons for programmers to unionize; even if salaries are high, working hours are still far too long.
For every hour spent at work, I am not spending it on something of my own choice. Hours of my own choice are worth much more than hours of work to me, because they usually fulfill me more.
So, if I am to work couple hours a day, that's going to cost you little. The more you take from my "own" hours, the costlier they get. So, if I consider a normal work week to be 24h, anything above that costs non-proportionally more. I.e. 40h is not 40/24 more, but it's actually 24 x base_hourly_cost + 16 x own_factor x base_hourly_work, where own_factor is usually around 2, depending on how much I might like the base work.
So, in a sense, I am not taking a pay cut, I am just taking a reasonable salary for doing the work, but if someone insists on taking more of my time for little benefit to them and a lot of burden to me, it's going to cost significantly more.
From this perspective, taking a flat per-hour pay cut is an easy choice.
I also take a different view: a person is not owned, but it's normal for labour to be paid. A labourer can design their own pricing scale to encourage labour deals they prefer. Just like companies design their pricing schemes to eg. support only large customers (up to 20 users free with no support, paid-for afterwards).
I was working 25 hours a week, 5 5-hour days, which was good fun too. But I kept bumping heads with people at work. I'd work 10-3, with no lunch, and people would schedule meetings for 3, or 4, forgetting I wouldn't be there. Jira also didn't make things easy for the accounting people, so I am told...
If I could afford to go down to 3 days a week, I would. I'm not quite there yet with my annual salary. I think 3 days a week is the sweet spot. Though I feel my firm would be a tad peeved at 3 days a week. I'm not sure if they'd go for it. But it's a conversation I'm keen to have.
Some things aren't geared for pro-rata either. Things like the NHS top up, share schemes, cycle to work, you might lose them when you drop below 25 hours, rather then them scaling down like salary and holiday allowances.
2. Some people are less willing or able to negotiate for various reasons.
Thus, while individuals can and should negotiate for themselves, negotiating for everyone is even better.
Of course, you have no experience and have not proven yourself. Essentially you're a huge pile of risk asking to take a chance on you. How would you expect to be easy to negotiate in this position? Why would you expect the employer to remain in a position where they get all the risk and no power for any significant amount of time?
> 2. Some people are less willing or able to negotiate for various reasons.
If somebody is content with what they are getting and is not willing to negotiate, then where's the problem?
> Thus, while individuals can and should negotiate for themselves, negotiating for everyone is even better.
That's a non-sequitur. Are you claiming since some people don't have good negotiating position and some just don't want to do it, their negotiating power should equal to those who both have good offer to negotiate and are willing to do it? How it's better? Of course it could be better for some people - namely, somebody who has no negotiating skills and very weak negotiating position - but that can come only at the expense of other people who are willing to negotiate and have a good position, since employer's resources are not infinite, and one-size-fits-all negotiation would surely have to take into account that part of the pool is very risky, and compensate for that risk somehow.
Segments of workers are less likely to negotiate, and often it might not be because they are content with what they're making, but are either intimidated by the prospect of negotiating, or ignorant that they could or should negotiate.
https://www.payscale.com/career-news/2015/05/millennials-and...
And this is a situation that often occurs in software development:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
https://www.twilio.com/blog/2016/02/patrick-mckenzie-on-sala...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=negotiation&sort=byPopularity&...
Is this the main reason for a software workers' union? Not necessarily. It seems like there's at least one service that exists for such a case. Or perhaps the IEEE, or some other industry guild could provide free training and education about how to better negotiate their salaries, to reduce the obfuscation that often accumulates in the hiring processes of the industry.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17276423
> since employer's resources are not infinite
Certainly not, but employers are often choosing to spend revenue elsewhere instead of raising wages:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshbersin/2018/10/31/why-arent...
And this is not consummerate to, especially in tech, how much revenue each employee brings in:
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/02/why-the...
They would frequently say how they are not interested in "part time" work. I'd counter that this is full time work, with efficiency higher than the full time work, because people can focus on intellectually hard problems only for a short while sustainably. Sure, I can put in a couple of weeks of 12h days, but after that, I'd struggle to put in 4h days of quality, focused work (well known as burnout). Similarly, 8h days are not sustainable either, though it takes longer to burn out.
As people have noted, the extra time I get would not be spent in pyjamas watching netflix: it would be quality time with my family, working on projects and research, etc (if it wasn't for miserable pay and state of academia, I'd probably be doing research exclusively). Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter. And as stated numerous times, even employeers would benefit.
But alas, when there's the next guy willing to submit to the "norm", it's hard to get the ball rolling.
Is it really true? Can you prove it? I mean you can argue that, but if you're absent 20% of the time compared to other workers, is it true that your value is still the same because you're so much more productive? Maybe yes, but can you prove it to an employer? You're asking them to take a risk on supporting unfamiliar approach - which their familiar approach probably worked for them for years and they are fine with it. What do you offer them to justify taking this risk? I mean, maybe you are so spectacular that employing you is worth any risk. But naturally most people aren't that exceptional, by definition. Their experience shows 5-day weeks works great for them, how much better would be 4-day week to justify the risks?
> Civilization as a whole would benefit as a result if there were more people putting their brains to problems they think matter.
Is there any proof that there's significant marginal increase compared to thousands of existing research institutions that have tens of thousands of very smart people already spending years attacking practically every important problem? Would amateurs spending one day a week on side projects significantly change the picture here - and offset the above-mentioned professionals not spending one day a week on their area of expertise (instead doing their hobbies in turn)? I am not sure this is that obvious.
I believe you were happier. But how did you measure the productivity? Are you sure it was objectively the same? I don't mean it as criticism for you, but people are notoriously unreliable at evaluating their own productivity (something 85% people thinking they are above average, and so on :) and productivity in general is not the easiest thing to measure. So, how did you ensure that and how you ensured your case is not "my productivity was less but turns out that was enough too"? I would be glad to have definite proof of this, but self-reporting is not a very reliable productivity indicator, unfortunately...
With salaried work the only effective limit is your retirement. Working more simply means more income, but if that extra income isn't needed, or doesn't net you enough extra benefits compared to simply having time off, the cost of being mentally engaged for such a large part of the week just doesn't weigh up to the gains.
Sure, if your work is so engaging and rewarding that work itself is a pleasure, than it might pay off. But for most of us it just doesn't work that way. Work often means doing things were mostly others set the agenda, and while you may be good at what you do and find motivation in doing it, I've found that it rarely means that you can do it with the same sustained level of energy and quality for more than four eight hour days — and even that isn't a given.
Let me flip this around: Employers are terrible at measuring productivity of certain kinds of knowledge workers, so they just try to squeeze as many hours out of us as possible to compensate.
It's generally accepted that longer work hours decrease cognitive performance (see eg. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727184/), but the base is usually 40h a week.
It's hard for me to prove the first point in relation to me personally: basically, I've done an experiment where I've worked mostly 6h days (still 5 days a week) and have been consistently rated higher than my coworkers at a software company with pretty good developers overall. OTOH, when I worked usual 8h days, I mostly compared as average. But that's me comparing myself to others and in distinct time periods with different projects and opportunities, and different life circumstances. For an actual proof, I'd need to compare myself with shorter work week to myself with a longer work week, working on the same projects at roughly the same time and similar external circumstances.
So, it is certainly anecdotal, and I am aware of that.
However, in a similar vein, they don't have proof that 5-day weeks work well for them. They just "work" for them because that's the law in most places and they never tried anything else. Actual proof would require a number of long-running experiments, so it's pretty much out of the question for any one company.
As for the second point, my experience and opinion of research institutions is not as high as yours. What you get in academia are ~5% of very smart people very much interested in the subject, another ~15% of very smart people not very much interested in the subject matter, and the rest who simply went with the flow. I've tried to find data for "best in class postdoc student retention", but nothing turned up, so I can't back up my out-of-my-behind numbers with anything. Other than adding that if you look at most research papers, a lot of it is simply bull (i.e. not research at all or just one thing repeated ad-nauseam with slight modifications, for the purpose of getting appropriate academic points to keep grants and funding going).
You might also note that I've argued for a shorter work day as well, thus allowing for significantly more non-work work to be done by amateurs than just 1 day per week.
If the premise of increased productivity for shorter work weeks applies to research work as well (can't find any study on this in particular), then we'd see no drop in their productivity, and only an increase on whatever we get from amateur work.
But, for now, these are mostly "thought experiments", and surely not "science". It's mostly a simplistic, idealized view of where the civilization should go, and it's hard to prove benefits either way.
Of course, it is more or less obvious that there's a point where working more is not going to produce marginal improvement anymore. Physiology is a harsh mistress. But claiming 4 days per week is that point is pretty bold.
> You might also note that I've argued for a shorter work day as well, thus allowing for significantly more non-work work to be done by amateurs than just 1 day per week.
To me it looks like replacing workhours done by professionals at designated workplaces by workhours done by enthusiastic amateurs using their own resources. It may be that the latter model is more efficient, but that is a rather bold claim that needs some proof, and not at all intuitive. What amateurs win with anthusiasm, they can easily lose with poor resource base, organization and cooperation issues. Some things, to be sure, lend itself to crowdsourcing easily, but some - and a lot of fundamental science seems to be in that area - require very specific large organizational effort and significant resources. If, say, an average pharma worker works 1 day less to pursue their hobby of writing gcc patches, and an average software engineer works 1 day less to pursue their hobby as a amateur chemist, I am not sure we'd get cure for common cold or order of magnitude better compiler. Maybe it will happen, but it's not obvious to me that it should.
> If the premise of increased productivity for shorter work weeks applies to research work as well
That, again, is a big if. Especially the point where the return starts to be negative.
So: just saying this is more complex than looking at increased per-hour productivity of a single person
Why? Remote work is a thing. If your processes demand having people on premises all the time, your processes may need improving. If a programmer want to work one day from home to cut down on their commute and be able to focus on a task, why would you want them in the office unless they aren't trustworthy? For colleagues to break his concentration when they need him?
Meetings can be scheduled, work coordination can be done electronically, and you surely have something like Mattermost or Slack set up?
I have some push back about the arrangement from people two or three links away from me and my team output and I have not got metrics to prove that this is effective.
Do you have any push back about your devs - 4 days 8 hours and 30% ? Do you have any other evidence/metrics for the benefits ?
I've actually worked in primarily remote company, and the challenges there are even greater: no offices, hand-offs and hand-overs have to be well documented or you are wasting time, timezone differences, discussing architectural documents over video and voice calls...
Basically, I wasn't asking for full flexibility in choosing one's hours: I think that's harder (for all the reasons you bring up) than just shortening the hours.
I recently read Sebastian Junger's Tribe, which had many memorable takeaways for me.
One, in particular, was the assertion that, historically, subsistence farmers and the like generally only needed to work, on average, 12 hours per week.
While I know modern farming practices require copious amounts of work, it is nonetheless an interesting idea.
Imagine all the remaining time to just sit in sun or socialize.
Progress, what is that?
I’ve seen this claim before, and it typically revolves around careful definition of the word “work” rather than any fundamental difference in how we structure activities and priorities. iirc altering the definition to “any work that provides utility” puts the time at 30-40 hours a week. Still very much for a 30 hour/ 4 day work week, but I’ve found that particular argument to be very weak.
Granted, the west never seems to count reproductive labor when talking about work, which is itself a problem. Most Americans spend the vast majority of their waking hours in some form of labor.
why would it matter where the extra time goes. you're saying that caring for your kids is more important than a single guy working at the gym or watching netflix. everyone has his priorities and none are more important than others.
Due to the progressive tax in The Netherlands, working 5 days instead of 4 doesn't earn /that/ much more money and if you have toddlers, you will spend a day less for daycare, a day extra with your kids and probably have more time for the fun things in life as well.
As a salaried employee I often chose a 4-day workweek as well when living in The Netherlands. But once I started freelancing, the 5-day workweek seemed the better choice for me. As freelancer you are taxed a bit less compared to a salaried employee, so there's more incentive to make as much money as possible during the workweek.
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[0]: https://www.equaltimes.org/a-four-day-work-week-is-only-a#.X...
That means two days of daycare (partly subsidized by the government), one day, each, at home with the child, and one day where she works from home for four hours.
This is fairly typical for white collar workers in the Netherlands. Four days is more than enough for me.
From The American Challenge by Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber published in 1967. Too bad this will never happen since most managers are workaholics.
This inspired the book How Much Is Enough? by Keynes biographer Lord Skidelsky and his brother [2].
Keynes' essay had some non-PC parts: he feared
> a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations — who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing.
It also had some utopian dreams:
> The love of money as a possession – as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life – will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. )
[1] http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Is_Enough%3F_(book)
But I live to work, and often work 7 days.
I can't imagine doing a project with delivery time pressure (like a startup trying to execute in a timely manner), working only 4 days, with a 3-day gap.
I'd rather have flexible hours, and an emphasis on working sharp in the hours we do put in -- not have frequent 3-day interruptions of project mental space, and putting off gratification in seeing the project come together.
I can't imagine not working 6-7 days a week.
But I'd rather have expectations of flexibility (e.g., take day off or a short day because didn't sleep well, or family activity, or enjoy the nice weather, or just finished a work crunch), than (I imagine) expectations that, on those 4 days, one had better be there the full day and at least pretending to work.
For some jobs, flexibility could mean that someone can arrange with their manager&team to personally have a predictable 4-day schedule.
Here in Sweden the movement has mostly been push by the left, and for workers with lower wage/burnout/high amounts of sick leave etc. I think it's mostly been tested in the health care sector. I think it lowered the amount of sick leave, but was too expensive to keep since those type of jobs are very hard to make more productive. I.e, we always need nurses on staff at the ER, or to look after the elderly.
Most office-type work seems that it could potentially benefit from this though.
https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-only-work-4-days-a-week-du...
Americans already take pity time off.
I have lots of time for learning new stuff and also teach a course twice a year at a local college for some extra cash.
Started when my daughter was born and never stopped ;). Couldn't be happier and I really hope I can somehow keep it that way.
Employees loved it, management loved it, the only ones that complained were some of their very large customers, and even they got used to it after a year of not being able to reach anyone on Friday.
Instead, not only just tech industry in China, many are now moving more towards 996.
Jack Ma, defending 996:
“To be able to work 996 is a huge bliss,” China’s richest man said. “If you want to join Alibaba, you need to be prepared to work 12 hours a day, otherwise why even bother joining.”
"Independent thinking, teamwork, care for others, these are the soft parts. Knowledge may not teach you that. That's why I think we should teach our kids sports, music, painting, art -- making sure humans are different from machines."
Yeah, the FIRST thing you need to do to do that is to end this 996 horror. 996 IS treating humans like machines. People already have kids and parents to care for; if you want them to engage in sports, music, painting, art, they need normal work hours.
Employees who join Alibaba aren't given a lick of equity these days.
So as someone who works neither 12 hours a day, nor 6 days a week (on paid labour at least), I agree with Jack Ma. I don't see the point in joining a company that is clear it expects this. I think that would be self defeating if you were a person like me.
I work at a silicon valley BigCo, and I work half-time (20 hrs per week). I got this by just asking for it, though it did require high up approval. I didn't even hide the fact that it was for the purpose of personal projects. I get half my salary, and half my stock and bonus. It is still more than plenty to afford living here for me. I have 1 kid.
I've done this for 5 years now, during which time I've spoken to many BigCo colleagues about this, and I'd estimate about 100 of them know my "deal", and so far no-one has followed my path. Note that 80% and 60% are also options.
When asked they uniformly say that they couldn't take the reduction in pay. Median total comp for these people is easily 300k. Some don't even have kids.
So no, if you want to improve society you'd have to force a 4-day work week by law, otherwise no-one will follow-thru.
With more money, the price of limited resources increases to fill the void.
If a 3 or 4 day week is mandated, there’s less for housing, it’s the same demand, the same supply, so prices have to come down.
Given that this is a country which is in the EU I'm very much worried about this being adopted by more countries and becoming the norm, all in the spirit of maintaining our "competitiveness"
It's like someone was asking back in the day: "Abolishing child labor? What about all those 10 and 12 year olds that depend on their job to eat?"
So, there wouldn't even be an actual loss in productivity. Still I predict this recommendation will fall on deaf ears. The problem is not economic or rational, it's cultural and religious. “Society” still adheres to the notion that a person's worth is largely determined by the extent of their economic activities (independent of productivity, obviously). Working less is perceived as a dangerous moral failure (“Idle hands are the devil's workshop”, in christian cultures).
The ratios:
5|2. Just right and too little
4|3. Too little and just right
Weeks should be 8 days
5|3. Just right and just right.
7 has nothing to do with human health and happiness. Why stick with that week length dogma?
8 days a week, thr Beatles had it right.
edit - I should add that I started the job at 40 hours/week, and after 1 year of being there I asked for 32 hours/week.
I want 6 hour work days 5 times a week. Not 4 work days. And banks being closed an extra day would just be annoying. (not that I go to a physical bank, but just transfers and such).
Four day work week would be fine, but I suspect people would just cram more meetings in and it may become less productive.
"the caravan" == employers.
Some people derive satisfaction from their work !
Others don't.
Also will the pay be the same ? Call me a cynic but knowing business owners they will never accept lower hours for same pay. They will spend all their time figuring out how to game it.
All these solutions, studies seem like busy work for though leaders who have nothing better to do.
The best solution is quite simple - Universal Basic Income.
It can't be gamed as easily and by definition it costs less and gives everybody more freedom at the same time.
Normally I feel like rules that restrict freedom ( like you can ONLY work 40 hours ), you have to be skeptical.
Its just more economically efficient to have UBI.
If I have a better yield for a given task, then I will provide exactly what my employer asked me for the price we agreed. Eg. That means that if we agreed for 8h * 5d for a given task, and manage to do it in 8h * 3d, I obviously won’t work more.
At least not before discussing the share of my productivity gains added value.
Being zealous is the best way to get fooled.
Another thing, these 40h or even 35h in France won’t limit your freedom, you can obviously work more: it’s a disguised pay raise.
I think also that’s not ideal if applied uniformly. The price of some goods and services will mechanically rise, and you might end up “richer” but everything got expensive at the same time.
It should be bound to the marginal cost of production or the derivative of the price wrt quantity.
If you’re sublinear then you’re good to go. Otherwise it’s simply a no no.
Sorry if there’s some mistakes, I’m typing on my phone.
Historically, no, in the 70s a 3 day week came with a 3 day pay.