Comment by otoburb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by otoburb | Hacker News Reader

To be really clear, Aidan Harper is campaigning for the following:

"We make the case for a general reduction in working hours __without__ a reduction in pay. We also make the case for a steady managed transition to shorter hours with a bolstered welfare state in such a way that the most vulnerable and underpaid in society are protected."

It's hard enough to ask companies to shift to a 4-day workweek for the various reasons outlined in the article and sibling comments, but usually this is accompanied by a corresponding cut in compensation. Adding the "without a reduction in pay" condition makes the proposition much more difficult for small-to-medium sized businesses.

In fairness to the article, there is the possibility of asking employees to work 10hr workdays for 4 days to accommodate the 40-hr work week model (or 8.75hrs/day in France to accommodate their 35-hr work week). Since (most of us?) are already overworked, maybe this then just boils down to a scheduling and staff coverage problem.

Anyone who does knowledge work in a large company knows a huge amount of the "work" is just a weird game we all agreed to play. Sure everyone is busy, but surprisingly little is really getting done. We agree to work 40 hours because that model worked for people making widgets in factories. People work extra hours to demonstrate socially that they're hard workers, but again, nothing is really getting done.

There is no reason at all you could not reduce all of this to 30 hours a week and get the same amount of productivity accomplished. Why shouldn't people be compensated the same if the end result is the same? For labor intensive job where a human is working as a type of robot then hours of labour is directly correlated with hours of product (with some point of diminishing returns as you overwork people).

I think you're over-generalizing. Yes, some people work more than 40 hours for social recognition without getting any more real work done. On the other hand, I know people who truly do work over 40 hours out of a feeling of passion or obligation, completing extra work while not advertising the extra hours they're putting in.

over-generalizing cuts both ways when dealing with anecdotes: all those people you know might just be a tiny fraction of the full work force that _does_ twiddle their thumbs behind their desks for a collective 10 hours per week and would see barely any impact on productive output by lowering the number of hours spent behind that desk while keeping the pay the same, because the output stays the same.

To be clear, I'm not talking about people "goofing off at work" (such as myself on HN right now). Socialization is something deeply internalized so it doesn't matter if you know people are watching. I've been those people working on things late a night without anyone knowing, then I realized so much of it was sweat and stress for literally nothing.

The thing is, when you look at the fruits of the labor put in, the result is nearly null. There are people who are working very hard on things that have no real long term (or short term) purpose or function for their employers, it's work that exists because "work" has to be done. When I look at the projects being busily worked on around me, nearly none of them have any value or will make a dent in the overall productivity of the larger company. These people aren't goofing off. This is the ritual of work.

People pray in the privacy of their own home but that doesn't mean there's a god listening. The same goes for the culture of "work" in most large organizations.

What industry to you work in, and how large of a company is it?

Sounds like a great opportunity for a more efficient competitor to undercut this company :D

Once you get past a certain size, efficiency is a pipe dream.

I agree in general, but I think I might prefer to keep the 40 hr/wk schedule and give everyone 10 weeks vacation as a baseline. I suppose that creates a headache if everyone takes the whole summer off at once or something, but what it does do is give each person the flexibility to decide if they want a whole year of long weekends, or some other configuration they prefer.

I wouldn't complain about 10 weeks of paid vacation! But for a lot of businesses, it's easier to lose people 1 day every week as opposed to 2-3 weeks at a time several times a year. Just in terms of coverage and workflow. Though that's going to vary for each role/company.

At our company which handles General Contracting for construction we NEVER use 4, 10's if possible.

Jobs running 5, 8 hour days always run on schedule better in the long term it seems (talking 2-3 year building projects) based on past anecdata.

You would think giving the guys an extra day off to rest would help but actually being present on the 5th day tends to be very important when there are major milestones to be hit.

I've seen 4, 10 hour shifts.

I've seen 3, 12 hour shifts + 1, 4 hour shift.

I've seen 5, 8 hour shifts

The schedules created to run 5 days a week always work better.

Now there is a case to be said for having shorter shifts so we can get out of our 40 hour funk zone here in America. I think if you ran a job where only the foreman/superintendents had to be present for 8 hours while the workers worked say 5, 6 hour shifts or even 5, 7 hour shifts would still be better and on time more frequently than pushing someone for 40 hours over fewer days.

Perhaps the 4 day week works best with knowledge work, which is significantly different than manual labour.

I would have to agree there.

This begs the question, better for whom?

It’s entirely plausible that employees at small companies aren’t generating value for all the extra time they’re at work. You could make the argument that with a four day work week they’d accomplish the same amount of value generation, and that in the current situation there’s a lot of waste.

People balked when the 40hr workweek was introduced but it ended up lowering injuries and illness and had a net increase effect in productivity.

There is a business case for a shorter workweek. There are benefits like higher employee morale, less sick leave, more productive employees, etc.

But what about the case for simply hiring more workers to cover the dip in overall productivity?

The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio has increased almost 1000% since the 70s [1]. Surely this is due to the benefits in technology and automation. Don't the workers deserve to see some of those benefits in the form of shorter weeks?

[1] https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/ceo-pay

I always revert to this small, UK-based PR agency who did it (with a few caveats due to PR being a 24/7 industry anyway...): https://www.radioactivepr.com/agency-impact-1-year-4-day-pay...

It is possible for small businesses to adopt it, but perhaps only really in the knowledge worker/high customer contact space. If you're a small ecommerce shop selling lots of actual stuff, then you'll definitely need to have greater role coverage than you otherwise might.

At my work, we do 35 hour weeks in the summer, and it’s extremely nice. What ends up happening is I schedule all my appointments (doctor, car repair, etc) on the “summer Friday” afternoon, and keep my personal life moving along guilt free.

During the rest of the year I just miss work for those appointments, which isn’t the end of the world, but I miss the guilt-free aspect of it.

My gut feeling is that the dev team puts out the same volume of work per month in the summer as we do the rest of the year, but I don’t have any data to substantiate that.

I like the idea, especially for highly-skilled knowledge workers (i.e. the people browsing HN) but I fail to see the broader applicability for other jobs.

Imagine one has a machine that produces 5X widgets in 5 days. We now want it to be on for only 4 days and as such it produces 4X widgets but at the price of a 5X widget machine ... that just makes it more expensive ...

My wife's business operates 8-6 M-Th. Her employees LOVE it.

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