Further, tons of "work" is done with zero physical strain, lots of those "work" hours are the in-between stuff -- travel, meetings, calls, lunches -- meaning that actual hours laboring are even less.
I can't wait until it is implemented across the whole world. England, Portugal, and other countries are at the forefront already.
Perhaps more importantly, the 4DWW isn't a pie-in-the-sky proposal, there are numerous companies that have switched over and have found the productivity gains offset the lesser hours.
As for "how long until people will demand 3?" - we'll see. When AI starts pumping out the same quality of work as humans do, should all humans starve? Or should all humans work fewer hours and capture the benefits?
Although many first-world countries' median wage hasn't increased much (despite wage growth all around in warehousing, fast-food, etc), the number of high-paying jobs in tech, finance, law, healthcare, media and more has certainly increased. How many software engineers were making $150-250k annually in 1997?
Sure, if you look at the last 150 years, but the data you linked is basically flat since 1980: over the last 30 years in the United States, working hours are down 2%.
Meanwhile software engineers in the U.S. make more than twice their German counterparts' salary: https://www.google.com/amp/s/codesubmit.io/blog/software-eng...
Of course, not everyone is a software engineer. But it doesn't seem surprising there would be a correlation between fewer hours worked and lower salaries, likely because employers who are able to pick countries to hire from will avoid those where individual workers do the least amount of work.
$400/month of my take home pay for over a decade was just in student loan payments, and I got off easy compared to a lot of Americans there. My wife, for example, is still paying about $1000/month, and that's after knocking it down by about $30k recently thanks to a couple windfalls. And she's been paying hers for almost 10 years at this point as well.
They also pay about 80% of your prior salary in unemployment, whereas here it's a hard cap at a really small amount (I think last time I was on it I was getting about a third of my previous salary, and my salary was a lot lower then).
Personally Canada appeals to me more and I might move there at some point (or at least closer to the Canadian border), but I can still acknowledge there being good things about Germany while having reasons not to move there myself. I do think I should probably move somewhere with universal healthcare before I get too old as I will probably have enough health problems that would either bankrupt me or wipe out my retirement if I stayed in the US, like has happened to several of my family and friends.
Your company is trying to get you to work as many hours as possible for as little money as possible, as a working person you should strive for the opposite. As a worker you are selling your labor (of which you possess a limited amount) and any rational actor in a capitalist society should attempt to maximize the gains on what they have to sell by charging the buyer as much as they can for as little as they can. I don't expect a large corporation to strive for less profit because they're "already making more than they did before".
To be clear I don't _like_ this state of affairs but so long as these are the rules ignoring them only deprives yourself and helps your company.
I'm all for maximizing the earnings I make while working, and to be honest, sure, I'd like to build platforms and methods to earn passive income while I am not working. But I don't think it is necessary or required to somehow normalize a 20 or 30 hour work week. Further, I recognize that if my workday allows me to sit in a chair all day, as opposed to hard physical labor in harsh weather, then the moment my work ends, I'm physically capable of whatever leisure activity I want to enjoy. You might technically "work" by sitting in meetings for the same number of hours as people whose bodies are broken down by 40 due to backbreaking labor, but obviously you haven't "sold" your labor to the same extent.