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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

You can contract for 4 days per week at plenty of employers. It's called a part-time job.

I'm gonna borrow OP's mindset for a second:

Fuck this.

In the United States the benefits of full time employment are mandatory if you want to live a much less stressful life. Tying benefits to employment has given employers far too much control over their employees lives, without a huge savings or secondary income source anyone without insurance is one bad day away from bankruptcy (and too many people /with/ benefits are as well).

If a 4 day work week lowers stress and increases productivity that much, I don't see why many industries shouldn't adopt it. And don't tell people that "You have a choice, just get a part time job instead". Thats not a choice, thats a financial death sentence.

The US economic system is broken in many ways and workers rights there are next to non-existent. It is also not the only country in the world and there are plenty of examples of how it can be done better.

If you want to change that start with changing how you vote, the two party system is broken beyond repair, the US would fare much better under a coalition government.

I agree with your sentiment regarding benefits in the U.S. Couldn't companies provide the important benefits (healthcare, 401k matching) to employees who worked a 4-day week as well?

One potential issue is that I think there are fewer legal requirements, but competitive employers already provide benefits that exceed the legal minima.

Employers should not be involved in the health care game at all. It should be a universal right provided by the government as it is in many other countries. This would lead to a healthier population as a whole. It would also lead to a reduction in costs associated with poor people who put off going to the doctor due to inability to cover even co-pay ending up in the emergency room and defaulting on a ~50k bill. In addition government could negotiate for vastly cheaper medications as they would essentially be the only game in town.

This would also allow industry to focus on what industry does which is make money. They no longer would have to spend on expensive Cadillac health care plans in order to compete for employees. Governments job is to keep its populace safe and healthy, that is not the job of private industry.

The only reason we don't have this is due to lobbyists.

My only question is why do employers have to be responsible for healthcare?

Retirement makes sense as this is your source of income. I feel that company resources would be better spent elsewhere than on healthcare.

This would, of course, require universal healthcare or direct market healthcare. This would help new businesses thrive, especially the "mom and pop" types.

I guess I am jaded on this as my parents lost their business when I was growing up due mainly to the cost of healthcare. Not all companies have monolithic budgets.

Well, Henry’s Ford and Kaiser were there before the govt was, and Sen. Edward Kennedy didn’t want to help Nixon with health care reform so Edgar Kaiser’s HMOs won out.

I doubt most Fortune 500 employees would support turning their company plans into some medicare-for-all. Next step would be turning Social Security over to Goldman Sachs.

Well, they could, but. Benefits, particularly health care, are very expensive for employers as well as employees, so employers, especially for lower wage work, look for ways to cut that. Not-quite-full-time is one way that's done.

Getting health insurance, whether public or private, out of the hands of employers is probably the single best thing that could be done for working conditions in America.

amen

My understanding of the current law is benefits are mandatory for employees working more than 32 hours a week. I don't know what the rules are for exempt employees.

Which is the problem. We're trying to say we've generally exhausted our productive capabilities after 4 days of work per week, which is what this article was saying as well.

If I've contributed my maximum amount in 4 days rather than 5, it should not be called part time. Part time should be reserved for instances where you are indeed contributing less than a full amount per week, such that you could hold two part time jobs.

Well, if enough people do it then it will be full time. It's more about what is considered to be the norm than anything else, and of course you will get paid for four days, not five. But over time pay will go up again and then we can repeat the cycle with three days. The interesting question is not 6, 5 or 4 but what the lower limit is. I suspect still quite a bit lower than 4.

For the purposes of health care in the US, 30 hours is the threshold for full time. At my last gig I was 32 hours a week and considered a full time employee.

So the question is really why some employers insist on the full 40 rather than being open to a range from 30 to 40.

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