Hack, according to Keynes we are supposed to be working 15-hour weeks by now. Four-day week is well overdue.
Companies have found that it is much more rewarding to keep workers working 40 hours (in Europe) or more (many parts of the world, including the US) or more, and to translate the productivity gains into bonuses for top management, dividends for shareholders and increased share prices (for shareholders and top management) [1].
Without the necessary regulation, this process will not be significantly altered either, in my opinion. I firmly believe that hardly any (large) company will be prepared to significantly improve conditions for employees without external pressure - at the expense of shareholder value.
For example, it is perfectly normal for a company like Accenture to pay a 10% higher dividend for the past fiscal year, while dismissing 5% of its employees worldwide. We don't even have to dream of wage increases for employees in the 10% range here. And ACN is just one example because I happen to know the numbers right now.
What company increases its employees' wages by the same amount as it increases the dividend for shareholders? I hardly know of any company that does that.
[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=development+productivity+wages+us&...
And, what this would mean in comparison with other employers (i.e. comparative salaries, etc), we could think about whether we can speak of an (ideal) free market. To do so, the possibilities to change the company as well as the actual profession would have to be transparent and open.
In addition, most theories on the free market also assume rational actors. Which has been sufficiently refuted as a model of reality.
But even this would not be the problem if the basic assumptions above were fulfilled. But in most cases they are not. I do not know what the colleague next to me earns. I don't know how much ROI my employer gets with my work performance and I certainly don't have the chance to get analogous data to other companies in the market. In addition, as an employee I am also very much tied to the local area due to family situations and therefore cannot act like capital on the free market worldwide.
All in all, in this "game" of the employee is always the weaker market participant - which is why, for example, there are facilities and institutions in consumer markets that protect the consumer, because there is an imbalance in information.
For this reason there is (at least in Germany) state intervention in the employee market just as there are trade unions or works councils. There are analogous instruments in many markets worldwide - to create a counterweight to the imbalance of information and power.
Why are some professions doing a shift? Does your software open at 8am and then close up for the night at 5pm? If so, then yeah you need shift workers. If not, then please, just stop it.
The shifts are good for you, because they limit the times when work can command your presence and force businesses to hire multiple people to staff the day. Remote work is already showing the flaws of the reverse, because now people have issues separating work and real life since there is no clearly modeled time delineation any more.
And probably all that use such a webopac system
It would be especially possible if you lived similarly to how average people did in Keynes' day: e.g. smaller housing, limited car ownership, home cooked meals, simple hobbies. The beauty of it is you still can take advantage of new tech because it has become so cheap.