A hundred UK companies sign up for four-day week with no loss of pay | Hacker News Reader

A hundred UK companies sign up for four-day week with no loss of pay

theguardian.com

398 pointsnigerian1981272 comments

At a place I used to work for, the four day week question was put to the CEO at an all-hands company town hall.

Not a fan of the idea, he scoffed and said something like, ‘I pay you to be at your desk from 9am-5.30pm Monday-Friday. Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’

I don’t think he realised it at the time, but that answer was devastating to company productivity and morale. He’d just demonstrated to everyone that he didn’t value results and all that was important was bums on seats.

People stopped putting in extra effort, waited out their hours as that was all that was required and started brushing up their CVs. I left not long after and so did many others.

The director for the org I work in says something along those lines after every release cycle. He thanks everyone for working long hours and on burning the midnight oil on weekends, and that’s it. I personally never work long hours or work on weekends and those speeches feel alienating. I think hard during the day, strive to be creative and then go back to my life outside work without donating my free hours to a company that would be just fine without them.

I’ve heard that what we appreciate in people also tells a lot about us and when I hear my director only acknowledge the long hours, I realize that only the long hours are appreciated.

Luckily my immediate management chain knows better and understand the importance of creativity, meaningful output and WLB that I stick around.

>I left not long after and so did many others.

The question from me is, did you manage to move to a company where you got paid the same or more, but for "a day less hours"?

Employers can make that claim if the job market is in their favor, i.e. if most other companies agree with them and decide that they need staff available Mo-Fr 9-5 or for less hours but also for proportionally less salary, which to my experience is most employers.

To normalize this, we need the majority of employers (>51% of them) to switch to paying market rate for less hours, putting pressure on the rest that this is the new norm, but I haven't seen that yet in my EU country, except for a notable couple of companies that made headlines, out of which one recently filed for bankruptcy. So as long as only a tiny minority of companies are doing this, the norm will not change. All businesses here think like your ex-boss: 'Why should I pay you the same for a day less?’ and the market favors their approach as they have seen no mass resignations since they all can afford to act like this.

Therefore, the only solution would be the same as the one that lead to the 8 hour workweek being normalized almost 100 years ago: mass strikes and labor movements followed by government regulations that makes the 4 day workweek the new norm for everyone.

I don’t think you need 51% to affect things at the margins. At one company, we were early to the “remote is OK” and “remote is good” camps. It helped a lot with recruiting and retention, and let us hire a better talent pool. Post-COVID with everyone offering remote the benefit has dwindled for companies early to accept remote work. I think someone offering 4 day work weeks would be able to hire talent they wouldn’t normally be able to. If the promise of “same productivity, less hours, same pay” is true, then they’ll outperform and out recruit.

Mass strikes are certainly quicker though.

this is a real good point, pre covid being remote was a good perk. something i didn't even know i wanted. now its a basic requirement for me to consider a job. now if someone offered me same pay, but a 4day work week, my interest would be peeked.

not only that people who've had time off to destress/etc do better work. 2 days for a weekend doesn't really do that. 3 days is almost like a mini vacation and everyone is in high spirits after a 3 day weekend

I would take Wednesdays off.

No more than 1 day away from a day off. Need to schedule an appointment for anything: Wednesday.

Conflicts are often about signals and what is being said between the lines, rather than factually outcomes. My interpretation of the above comment is that the employer could have had made the same decision, but phrased in such a way that employees still felt valued for their work beyond that just sitting at the desk from 9am-5.30pm.

A few years ago in Sweden one of the top businesses leaders scoffed at tax evasion and basically said that why should he pay taxes if he can afford to avoid it. The statement annoyed people, and did so much more than just the fact of tax evasion. It actually resulted in him being forced to step down from several of his position.

Employers are rarely rewarded for scoffing and treating employees like they are not worth anything.

He stopped paying people who wanted to be paid 5 days for 4 days of work? How is this different from 99.9% of companies?

It's how most companies think they work, but really very few companies actually track output. They track time. They're not measuring how much work you do, but instead how much time you're available for. The idea of a 4 day week is that people stop procrastinating, wasting time, daydreaming, sitting in meetings doing nothing, etc, and that saves a day a week. The employer gets the same amount of work for the money, and the employee doesn't have to pretend to work any more. Everyone wins.

I switched to 3 days weeks almost 2 years ago. (Mostly, I remain in a company chatroom on other days for people to ask me questions, and if there's a massive disaster I'll help if I'm available).

What I've found is that I spend the 4 days I'm not "working" organizing my thoughts and plans as a background task and this means most of my 3 days is spent executing. Whereas at my previous job I would spend several days a week on thinking and organizing and another couple on being blocked or bored.

Do you get 60% salary for 3 days/week? I’m thinking of doing the same thing.

I'm in a unique position there where I currently don't take a salary because I'm an investor in the company. But no, if I were drawing a salary I don't see any reason it would be 60%

As an investor in the company, you would seemingly be in a position to push leadership to allow what you do for other employees.

Have you, and how did it go over, if so?

How does switching to a 4-day week stop procrastination, time wasting, daydreaming, pointless meetings, etc.?

If that's so easy, why not stop doing those things and keep the 5-day week?

If only some companies make the switch, you could bring an argument from 'efficiency wages': ie by offering a perk to your workers that they can't (currently) get elsewhere, you make them work harder and avoid wasting time, because the outside options are worse so they want to impress to keep their cushy job secure.

I don't know whether that's true, but it's a plausible argument for why people would do less of the unproductive things you mentioned.

Try thinking about it with the limit not being the hours per week on average you're at work, but the total number of hours per week on average that most people are capable of being fully productive.

In other words: If people at work 40 hours a week on average, but only have the mental stamina for 32 hours of work a week on average, why stay in the office 40 hours on average? Those 8 extra hours will not account for extra productivity. Switching to 5 day weeks, in this model, won't increase productivity, nor 6 day weeks.

I've said "on average" a lot, and that's very deliberate. Most people I've ever worked with across 20 years in tech are largely unable to keep up a fully-mentally-engaged 40 hour work week every week, and even fewer are able to sustain longer average weeks than that for very long at all.

The problem with folks in America is they’ve lost their entrepreneurial spirit. If people are given a shorter work week—great—they’re nice and relaxed. But I’ve witnessed folks getting more-and-more lazy these days.

There needs to be a better method of incentives put in place that coincides with an extra day off.

I would propose not an extra day off, but perhaps an extra day of personal development instead? Something relaxing but related to work maybe?

People are simply too distracted with all the crack social media and Netflix’s auto-play algorithm. So I’d wager that sometimes people will use that day productively, but maybe 7/10 it’ll be wasted down some rabbit hole.

In fact, you could probably argue that people are so distracted these days that they’re productivity and happiness would both go up if they were no longer wasting time online and you ADDED another work day.

> the problem with the most productive civilization in history is that it’s lazy

To add to that beautiful quote:

https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e...

Alternative thesis: most people are getting tired of working hard only for the lion's share of the reward to go to a small handful of people at the top.

I recently did a qualification in leadership and management, and I think it had the exact opposite effect from the one intended. It made me realise how much of management is about finding ways to squeeze more work from people without extra compensation - motivation theory, time management, mentoring, coaching etc. Very little is for the employee’s benefit.

Yep it's 100% then. I lost my "entrepreneurial spirit" after being burned more than once by management that wanted me to work my ass off for just a salary and the promise of something nice someday.

Granted I got mine in the end of the last job like that, but it came through pure leverage and nobody's happy about it, myself included.

It’s really this all the way down. Even if your a top worker, manager, or sometimes even a founder. The next rung up the ladder is taking so much more of the pie that it just doesn’t feel worth it. I know of a major tech co that will only give out 10% if you work your but off and get promoted. You’ll never see a raise otherwise.

Ironically, with the advent of leaf code as the sole yardstick for measuring incoming engineers we’ve also removed any incentive for “working for the next job”.

Have you a source for that criticism? Any ‘these days’ criticism seems to favour a past that never existed.

Productivity in the US is up as far as I can tell.

https://www.bls.gov/productivity/

Well, to be honest, consider the following:

Windows 11 is designed to suck peoples attention away from productivity by gamifying the operating system with rewards for useless mind-drifting, monitizing people’s attention.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Netflix, etc are designed to distract people and keep them similarly hooked.

If the majority of the population is using those platforms, then the majority of the population is more distracted today than ever. How is that trend not tending toward reduced productivity?

> How is that trend not tending toward reduced productivity?

Because every study of productivity shows this to not be the case.

I agree with the idea that Windows 11 is worse than what came before it, but people appear to be more productive when you look at sources like the one I provided. So despite the distractions (or maybe because they aren’t actual distractions), productivity is going up.

This isn’t something you can assess by feeling, intuition or one’s personal observation. It requires truely massive data sets.

Here’s a brief history on how people don’t want to work anymore

1894-2002

https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1549527748950892544

Kind of generalizing an entire workforce I think. How are you measuring lazy? You say that people are nice and relaxed with a shorter work week. But it seems you expect that a team that isn't as relaxed will be more effective?

Who are you to decide if people use their days off "productively?" And most orgs that have a day in the office scheduled for personal development/training, inevitably end up pushing other responsibilities into those hours, eventually making them useless. If someone is in the office, it's just too easy for them to be pestered for "real work."

The idea isn't that to get more work out of people, it's to provide them with a healthy WLB; so they don't get burned out, so they're more productive when they're "nice and relaxed" from their time off.

>So I’d wager that sometimes people will use that day productively, but maybe 7/10 it’ll be wasted down some rabbit hole.

Judge not lest ye...

I love the idea that people’s leisure time should be judged on its productivity. Netflix? Okay but only educational stuff, otherwise it’s back to the mine with you. I mean almost literally with your last paragraph. “We’re making you work more for your own good” is a capitalist/fascist dream.

Arbeit macht frei.

Exactly

Employers used to train employees. They don't anymore. Employers used to offer pensions. They don't anymore. Maybe people have become lazier. I could see such an argument. But maybe people are also tired of getting treated as nothing more than a line item on a balance sheet and exchangeable pawns. At a lot of companies, a lot of managers (people, project, product) are basically unneeded, and people are tired of these managers doing nothing and providing friction for the actual work going on.

If I had stayed at my first company, I guaranteed would be making less than 50% of what I make now. There's plenty more I would have missed out on, especially relating to career growth. And that first company was often in the top 100 places to work.

The young people I work with now are the laziest I've ever seen. I think the job market has been so strong for so long they dont know what the real world is like. If/when we get a proper recession these people will all start working properly or get fired.

Young people should be lazy considering how fucked they are with inflation, the rising costs of housing, the looming climate disaster, stagnating wages, and they get to watch as the wealthiest people and corporations gobble up more of the world around them with every passing year.

20 years of essentially no inflation and zero percent interest rates, with nothing like stagnating wages for this HN crowd and you trot out how bad things are based on the last 6 months?

Based on the last 6 months, the hell are you on about? Literally no part of my earlier comment said the last 6 months. Gotta also love that you mention the last 20 years as if nothing happened in those 20 years that completely fucked over young people.

I've had a series of CEOs who've said unnecessary, polarising things. The kind of thing that 10-50% of the employees would really object to - examples like yours or politics. It seems like an uncharacteristic risk with negligible payoff (he's a real person just like me!) but considerable downsides (he thinks my vote was stupid) that I don't see from middle management.

Maybe it's survivorship bias? The kind of people who manage to become CEOs are the ones who have strong opinions but haven't suffered backlash for them. If they had experienced half their orgchart hating them, they wouldn't have made the cut?

The problem is he didn't put enough corporate wank on it. Should have said "Thanks for the suggestion, we are always looking in to the best way forward for the company and we will keep this in consideration and keep you updated with any changes."

Even if he did only care about results, it's a likely scenario that 4 day weeks reduce results or at the least introduce a risk that isn't worth taking. I think the average worker actually prefers just being required to work a certain amount and as long as you aren't extremely bad at your job, you'll be fine even if you have a slow week/month. Rather than being frequently being audited for results and pressured to work longer hours to keep your output up with everyone else.

Some people might think of it as corporate wank, but realistically it gives a boss or organisation time to poll employees/owners/managers, stay flexible, slowly work towards a change like this, etc. Less wankery than the path he took, from the sounds of things.

You just demonstrated that there's a good reason corporate types speak the way they do, even if it sounds phony.

What mattkevan quoted was brutally honest, but did not go over well.

Frankness without hostility is possible. It is a hallmark of really great leadership.

Sadly, it is also rare.

So true. That combination is rare but indeed very powerful. Combine that with the ability to pave the way forward and you got a recipe for success.

Yes. So the safe and reproducible course of action is to use euphemisms.

> I think the average worker actually prefers just being required to work a certain amount and as long as you aren't extremely bad at your job, you'll be fine even if you have a slow week/month. Rather than being frequently being audited for results and pressured to work longer hours to keep your output up with everyone else.

I agree. It seems like this is another new trend that's coming up because we still haven't found the solution to high-stress IT work. I don't think this is it.

The funny thing is that executives usually justify their giant salaries with the value and results they bring to the company.

Great point. I wonder if any Board of Directors has ever asked a company CEO "Did you log at least 40 hours last week?"

In the US nuclear navy, the power plants have to be manned 24 hours a day both operating and shutdown. Ships in maintenance periods also generally go through a phase where ship personnel have to support maintenance work around the clock. Additionally, some parts of the training pipeline are run 24 hours a day.

I say all that to say that while I am not a subject matter expert, I have a significantly above average amount of experience working various types of rotating shift work as well as duty rotations (a duty rotation is working 24 hours every 2, 3, 4, or 5 days depending on available manpower. Yes, you read that right - for a month, I was at work 28 to 32 out of every 48 hours).

Forget 4 8 hour days, I would work 4 10 hour days right now in a heartbeat with no discussion or regrets.

1) it is invaluable to have a normal working day where you can do tasks - change your oil, get your haircut, go grocery shopping without a crowd, see a matinee, the list is endless.

2) the scope of weekend trip you can plan across 3 days instead of two is exponentially higher. So much room for activities.

3) time after the working day just isn't that useful. Drive home, eat dinner, now it's 630/7pm. Waste a couple hours, go to sleep. After a 10hour day, the time after work is precious and useful to relax, but then you get a whole other day off.

It surely isn't for everyone, but it surely is for a lot of people. The thing that blows my mind is no one is even willing to try.

I had one job, night shift snowmaking at a ski resort, that was on a 12hr 3-day/4-day schedule. So 36 hours one week, 48 the next. It was wonderful because the 4-day weekend felt like a vacation every other week. Plus, at that amount of time on shift, you get paid to eat two meals.

There are different type of works. I can push boxes or clean a ship as long as I have strength, which is likely to be 10 hours.

I can't make productive decisions for 10 hours in a row. If you increase the amount of hours, you don't get more knowledge work done. You just get more meetings and useless fillers or procrastination.

All in all, I think dictating when employees work is stupid, exactly how it's stupid to pay a contractor per hour. You should always pay based on output, no matter when that output was achieved. On the contrary, you might even want to pay more if the desired output was achieved earlier than expected (and not pay less because he must have worked less hours).

Be ruthless on the output, don't bother about the hours.

"The thing that blows my mind is no one is even willing to try."

Your sleep deprivation is getting to you. Lots of people work 4x10.

I didn’t interpret that as “there is not a person who has discovered 4x10” but rather that there aren’t notable companies making it their official schedule.

Last time Lockheed Martin reached out that was one of their selling points.

When I worked for Northrop, they offered a "9/80” schedule. Every pay period, you would work 80 hours in 9 days. Monday thru Thursday, you would work an additional hour (so 9 total), then have every other Friday off.

I never did this personally, but I worked with civilians that did 9 80s. If management isn't willing to consider "exotic" schedules, 9 80s seem like a really good starting point and a pretty sweet deal

Unless you have children...

I used to be a paramedic in a large USA city and worked either 4 10-hour shifts, or 3 14-hour shifts per week every other month.

For instance:

January (10 hr):

  * Mon: 8AM - 6PM
  * Tue: 8AM - 6PM
  * Wed: 8AM - 6PM
  * Thu: 8AM - 6PM
  * Fri: off
  * Sat: off
  * Sun: off

February (14 hr):

  * Mon: 8AM - 10PM
  * Tue: off
  * Wed: 8AM - 10PM
  * Thu: off
  * Fri: 8AM - 10PM
  * Sat: off
  * Sun: off

I loved that schedule since I never had fewer than 3 days off, and every other month I had 4 days off. But I still had at least 2 consecutive days off every week no matter which month rotation I was on.

It was great.

I'm working for the Israel office (gmt+2) of my company now but from Australia (gmt+8),its a great option for me as I work 2pm-10.30pm Mon-Thur and then flexible hours on Friday.

This leaves 700-1400 for doing all the stuff I need to do, food, shopping, exercise and then an hour or so after I finish work to wind down and head to bed.

And Friday I can work normal Australian hours 8-4.30 and have the evening and weekend for going out with friends/family etc.

Wouldn't say no to the Friday off completely though.

I've done 4 on 4 off for the last 8 years and I can't go back. Great for holidays as you get 6 full weeks off(24 12 hour days) , take 4 off and you get 12 days in a row away from work.

technically 3.5 days worked per calendar week saves on petrol too.

The key to this in my view is having it be an officially "approved" option. Working at a FAANG company in the UK, I could already afford to take a 20% pay cut and work a 4 day week. I would love to do so in fact - but since that working pattern is relatively uncommon, I don't have the confidence that colleagues would respect or acknowledge it - basically I see myself spending an excessive amount of time telling people that I am not available on Friday for that meeting, and no I won't make an exception just for this week. Or, I would make an exception and get sucked into work - and now the company is getting 20% of my time for free.

If a 4-day week was more widespread, I would have more confidence in maintaining it - and on the odd occasion I have to work the extra day, I wouldn't feel so bad given the 100% pay model described here.

Do people ask you to make an exception and attend meetings when you have a Friday booked off from your holiday allowance? What would be different if you have it booked off for working pattern?

Not unheard of, but also I do think it would be different - everyone knows holiday time is limited, which feels different to having an unusually long weekend every week. It shouldn't, and maybe I am overly concerned by the impact this would have - but I would still be much more comfortable with the idea if it is at least available org-wide rather than by exception only.

> I do think it would be different

Q: If a cow-orker isn't at work on a given day, for whatever reason (sickness, holiday, part-timer), why would one expect to be able to contact them?

This sends us off on a tangent about communication techniques, and specifically the down-sides of Slack. I personally try to use it like a richer email system (i.e. asynchronously as much as possible) but you always get the odd person who insists on "hello are you there" as their opening message.

A few people at my IT company don’t work Fridays, but at least from the cases I know it seems to be Product people.

sounds like you just need more confidence in yourself. This doesn't need to be "norm" worldwide or even company wide for you to start doing it. All it takes is for you to have the will to decide that this is something you want and are going to do.

> This doesn't need to be "norm" worldwide or even company wide for you to start doing it. All it takes is for you to have the will to decide that this is something you want and are going to do.

If the (overwhelming?) majority of staff in the company are at work on Friday, every Friday, and they can't ever reach you on a Friday, isn't that pretty much guaranteed to be a [potential] source of friction?

> If the (overwhelming?) majority of staff in the company are

you could replace the end of that sentence, with any number of other options:

If the (overwhelming?) majority of staff in the company are [race]

If the (overwhelming?) majority of staff in the company are [gender]

If the (overwhelming?) majority of staff in the company are [age]

If the (overwhelming?) majority of staff in the company are [non-disabled]

Its only a source of friction, if the majority makes it one. And just like the other options, it could be seen as a form of discrimination. Someone can work four days, and still be a valuable member of the team, maybe even more than "five day" workers.

I had collegues working 4 days a week, including a team leader of adjacent team.

People get used to it and it becomes nothingburger.

In the past, I worked at a small company that allowed people to work 4-day weeks with a 20% drop in their salary. Because it was part of the company culture, people respected the additional constraints of working with their 4-day-week colleagues.

Anecdata: I worked at a large non-FAANG tech company, and went down to 60%. There were many fewer issues like that than I expected.

There were downsides (A project failed because I didn’t have time to fill in the shortcomings of a teammate, which I’d been quietly doing), but on the balance it was very positive.

Interesting, thanks. With hindsight, would you have chosen 60% again, or gone with 80% instead?

My tentative plan is to get promoted first, then step down to 80% - that way the pay cut is even smaller relative to now and with a bigger tax saving.

Aside from the other concerns mentioned, I'm currently working on "what would I do with an extra day per week" - which is a deeper lifestyle question and not at all related to work, but still very important for getting the most out of this change.

I suspect it depends strongly on what you will do with the extra time. I started consulting, which would have been impossible at just one day per week, but it is totally legitimate to use it for non-revenue pursuits and going “one step at a time“ (going 80 -> 60 would likely be much easier) could make sense in that case.

Another consideration is whether you would lose benefits under a certain threshold. I almost guarantee that HR will not know off the top of their heads, so before spinning your wheels, on fuzzy lifestyle questions you should start the process of getting official documentation on how things like healthcare and vacation days will be handled, it might make the decision a no-brainer.

I haven’t seen a single large company that doesn’t offer some sort of a flexible working arrangement including a 4 day work week.

And you know it’s quite easy to block your calendar don’t let FOMO hold you back.

Offering it on paper versus accepting it culturally is the gap we need to close.

This is reminiscent of my suspicions about hybrid on-site/remote working environments: unless a critical mass is remote, those employees are generally at a serious disadvantage. Left out of impromptu face to face conversations, etc.

One of the few benefits of giant faceless corporations is most of my direct coworkers were 1000 miles apart anyway under normal conditions, so an extra 20 miles away sitting in his house never mattered vs sitting in an office.

I worked a 4 day week (although technically 33h in 4 days for a 4/37 reduction in base salary) for ~10 years. All for work/life balance due to having a young kid. Two days in the office, two days from home.

Generally it worked ok but not being around one day a week did cause some annoying situations - but that's partly because I moved into a different role that had more responsibility (and that was their doing). I think I made an exception for a meeting on my day off once or twice in all that time, and that was just to make my life easier, everything else was batted back with a flat "no" which was understood after an initial period of grumbling.

Now that child is older I don't need as much flexibility and so I moved company to go full time again. Work life balance is still good thanks to it being a fully remote role.

Just create recurring OOO meeting on Friday for the whole day and you're done, no?

No...there's always a pushy person asking you to make an exception, or a deadline, or "this time works for the CEO and we need you there." Never that simple without widespread buy-in.

> there's always a pushy person asking you to make an exception, or a deadline, or "this time works for the CEO and we need you there." Never that simple without widespread buy-in

My OH has been on official sick leave and has been contacted by team members demanding input because "something was urgent" :(

Unless you actually go completely offline, it's rarely simple.

I think people just need to learn how to pushback. “Sorry I have plans” has always worked for me with an handful of exceptions over 17 years of working.

I've been trying this on and off for a couple of years, blocking out time in my day to do "actual work" and avoiding meetings. All that happens is the sales people (inevitably it is sales people) book a meeting with a customer without checking my calendar first.

Why don't you decline?

Or set up a rotation with a few other coworkers so that _someone_ can always take a sales call and pass it off to them if it’s during your off/focus day and vice versa for theirs.

> and on the odd occasion I have to work the extra day, I wouldn't feel so bad given the 100% pay model described here.

Something tells me you don't feel that way if you have to work the occasional Saturday today, so I doubt this would be the case after this change after a very short amount of time.

The difference is whether the overtime is driven by my own conscientiousness, or external expectations. The former is OK in small doses, the latter rapidly causes resentment. The problem with being an "early adopter" of a shortened week is that other people don't necessarily adjust their expectations accordingly.

I’ve worked a 4-day work week at three companies now, ranging from tens to thousands of employees. You just block the time on your calendar and remind people when they try to schedule something there anyway.

I would recommend you try it. It’s always going to be easy to go back to full time if it isn’t working out for you.

I work 90% - every other Friday not working, taking the pay cut. The majority work 100%, about 2% work 60%. The confidence to maintain it is not that hard. I think my productivity is as good as I can be more focuses on the shorter week. Some colleagues need reminding I will not be in on the Friday - I take this as validation that it works.

Have the confidence.

I guess the key question is whether or not you can produce 80% of as much in 80% of the time. For me the answer is maybe.

I do more than twice as much in 40 hours as I could in 20. I do far more than 40x in 40 hours as I could in 1 hour since there’s some overhead in task shifting. But four days a week is probably okay.

Why do you need to make the effort to tell people individually or repeatedly?

Setup your calendar to auto-reject meeting invitations with a polite message that you no longer work Friday and if your attendance is required for the meeting then please schedule for Mon-Thurs during your working hours.

I do this with my non working hours, I book a block of 'out of office' time which auto rejects meetings and notes my normal working hours for the inviters future reference.

I expect to be downvoted for saying this, as some people are really precious about the idea of 4-day work week, but I really struggle to understand how working fewer hours will not result in loss of productivity. If for some reason it is true that working 4 days a week results in the same amount of productivity, then why are 3 days a week not even more productive? Or 2? This is obviously reductio ad absurdum but that would mean that people who work 0 hours are the most productive ones.

I know that there is the argument about "if I have fewer hours they will be more focused", but that to me sounds like it's entirely wishful thinking and in a few years will be having the same amount of wasted hours in those days too, as people start thinking of Thursday as the new Friday.

I assume there is some sort of middle ground between working too much and working too little. Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5?

I would find the whole idea much more palatable if it wasn't sold by claiming something likely isn't true (people working fewer hours do more work), and instead someone was honest and admitted that this is a political project.

What I find much more interesting is switching from a 7 day week to something else entirely, for example working on: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is free, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is free. I can see how that might result in people being more productive, as they still work the same amount of hours, but they don't get as exhausted as before.

We need to do experiments and gather data to test hypothesis.

This is one of those experiments.

The no loss of productivity can be a combination of multiple things:

a) There is loss in productivity but it isn't (or can't be) properly measured or does not make an impact on the business, e.g. a help desk responds to customers with 1 business day rather than 4 business hours.

b) People are more motivated (including it being a novelty) so employees are eager to work harder in their reduced hours to ensure they can continue a 4-day working week. If this becomes the norm after a while you may see this slack off.

c) Lots of people are doing busy-work or "bullshit tasks" which do not actually affect business productivity or are simply just looking busy and procrastinating, e.g. office workers browsing Twitter, Reddit or HN for a short time every couple of hours which is eliminated.

It highlights saying "don't confuse activity with achievement/productivity".

Most systems don't have a nice, clean, linear relationship.

You did a reductio ad absurdum in one direction, let's do it in the other: if hours worked directly translates to productivity, then we should be able to add more hours and continually get more productivity. Why not add Saturdays and Sundays back in? Then we can go to 10 hour workdays. Maybe 12 hours?

Even aside from the humanitarian arguments against this, it should be obvious that there reaches a point where the marginal return for additional hours is negative—where adding extra hours reduces total productivity.

Experiments like this are designed to find out where that inflection point is, and the evidence that's coming in so far suggests that the inflection point is somewhere below 40 hours. More research is needed, but that's exactly what is happening.

40 hours work vs 40 hours office is not the same thing though. Maybe diminishing return starts at 30 hours of work, but still you can benefit from some relaxed schedule at the office.

30 hours work at 40 hours office time vs 30 hours work at 30 hours office time would have different outputs for sure.

If those 10 relaxed hours actually mattered there’d be a measurable productivity drop. If it’s not measurable or significant, then those 10 hours don’t matter and we should get them back for stuff that does.

No company is measuring hourly productivity, especially in anything beyond the lowest levels.

It doesn't matter—if a company joins in one of these experiments and drops everyone to 32 hours, we should see a decrease in company-wide productivity if OP is correct that the downtime is useful. If it's not useful, then we should see stable or increased productivity (which is what most companies are reporting).

I don't disagree but 100:80:100 has also stuff like this:

> Certain teams/divisions were unable to fully (or partially) participate in the trial as a result. Others found themselves working compressed working hours (10 hours in 4 days) as opposed to reduced working hours. Managers, across all levels, seem to find it particularly difficult to reduce their working hours, as one respondent says, ‘the work just doesn’t stop’.

> At times, this concern was connected with a reported perception of ‘variable behavioural change’ whereby some employees improved their workplace behaviours while others ‘took it as a gift and didn’t change’.

Even if some workers stay the same and some improve their behavior, that would overall be an increase in productivity which seems to line up with what most companies report after running these types of trials. Organizationally, you care more about total output than any one individual. If you have good managers you can trust them to address the individual variances if and when they see fit.

32 hours a week would be great but I'd even be thrilled to have the opportunity for 4x10 instead of 5x8.

> Experiments like this are designed to find out where that inflection point is, and the evidence that's coming in so far suggests that the inflection point is somewhere below 40 hours. More research is needed, but that's exactly what is happening

If someone's job is in customer service and the key part of their role is to answer the phone when it rings/respond to the email when it arrives ... you don't need research to determine that if they are not there, the phone/email doesn't get answered.

If you let them stay at home on Fridays, either you pay someone else to come in on those Fridays, or you accept that phone calls/emails won't be answered on Fridays. Ever.

This appears to be really easy to propose/promote when it's not your company :(

If the customer service rep works more hours, at a decreased productivity (tired workers make mistakes, over-stressed workers may be more impatient) such that the marginal return becomes negative, then YES! it becomes more cost effective to pay someone else to come in on those Fridays.

Just like we don't expect those reps to also work evenings and weekends, even if the company has 24/7 support.

The article points out some indirect benefits, like improved employee retention, which would decrease training costs and result in more experienced reps working the phone/email, which may improve customer service and relations.

This is really hard to promote, which is why there have been experiments along these lines for the last 5-10 years.

Here's what I think you're missing: Most people who answer telephones for a living are not paid to answer telephones. They're paid to answer customers.

If I'm speaking to someone who's worked too much for their capacity (whatever that is) and I get a curt, wrong, or bad-mannered answer I'm very likely to take my business elsewhere. In fact I've done so, to the tune of a few good thousands, a few times. Off of a repeat bad experience with customer service.

Would it be better for the business for that same position to be filled with someone whose energy were better at the time I rung?

(To give you credit, some positions do need to fill shifts and it is what it is, but you can always split them between more people)

> Most people who answer telephones for a living are not paid to answer telephones. They're paid to answer customers. If I'm speaking to someone who's worked too much for their capacity (whatever that is) and I get a curt, wrong, or bad-mannered answer I'm very likely to take my business elsewhere

(Warning: anecdote) I've just phoned my son's school to tell them he's poorly and won't be there today. The receptionist who answered the phone is "the grumpy one" (there are two at this school, the other one is lovely).

Of course it's possible that the grumpy one could well morph into being lovely if only they were given more time off, but I doubt it. I've spoken with both of them dozens of times, and it's utterly predictable, one is always lovely, one always isn't. Some people are great with customers, others just aren't.

> some positions do need to fill shifts and it is what it is, but you can always split them between more people

There are small businesses where teams are, unsurprisingly, small. Having worked both with and in such places, I'm not sure how feasible the "split between more people" actually is.

Fair enough. Incompetent people should either be trained or fired, no argument there. The point is that in many (most?) jobs it's mutually beneficial to employer and employee if work is done at peak performance. But some people should just...go do something else for all our sakes.

I've been a one-person customer support team for thousands of clients myself. Working till 6am to answer all emails in under 24 hours got old very quickly. There's always another way to do things.

A business that can't expand or improve while treating employees well is probably not a business that should exist.

>If someone's job is in customer service and the key part of their role is to answer the phone when it rings/respond to the email when it arrives ... you don't need research to determine that if they are not there, the phone/email doesn't get answered.

You're correct that the phone doesn't get answered. But that's not "productivity". Productivity is the function of the hours worked and the results gained. Their job isn't just to answer the phone, it's to resolve problems and leave a customer satisfied. Too little sleep and a foggy brain? Might take them more time to resolve an issue. Might leave them unhappy and the customer can detect that.

The results might surprise you, they could be more productive and more phone calls are answered in less time because issues are resolved quickly. To get around the problem of no phones being answered on a Friday you could propose a rota so staff is properly covering every day of the week. If everyone is 20% more productive, then every day can afford to have 20% less staff. Problem solved. 24/7 businesses already rota customer service staff.

Maybe the rest of the staff are more productive and there's less problems. The knock on effect being that there's 20% less phone calls. The problem sorts itself there, they don't even need to be more productive.

Lets say that there is no productivity increase at all. Well, hire 20% more staff then. Large companies can afford it. The wealth gap is widening, capitalists with hundreds of millions or billions of pounds have convinced workers there's not enough money to go around, but we know that's bullshit.

> If someone's job is in customer service... you don't need research to determine that if they are not there, the phone/email doesn't get answered.

Except perhaps in the case of very small companies with a single CS person - someone else can answer the phone?

Can they never have a holiday too?

Several weeks back, in the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33561648 , I hit Google Scholar to find seemingly relevant papers. Here are two showing negative productivity.

The first is munitions production in England during WWI. There was linear production in hours worked, up to about 48 hours per week, then the marginal product went down; going negative after about 63 hours. See Figure 5 of "The Productivity of Working Hours", John Pencavel, 2014 at https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf for a graph.

On a more national level, "The effects of working time on productivity and firm performance: a research synthesis paper", Lonnie Golden (2011) at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---ed_protect/---pro... points out:

] A recent analysis of 18, mostly European, Member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development explores the degree to which longer annual hours have been associated with per-hour productivity at the national level, since 1950. It finds that the responsiveness of per-hour productivity for a given increase in working time is always negative. Not only are there decreasing returns on added working time, the returns in the form of added production diminish more rapidly for longer working times. When annual working time climbs above a threshold of 1,925 hours, a 1-per cent increase in working time would lead to a decrease in productivity of roughly 0.9 per cent at the threshold and a fully proportional decrease of 1 per cent past the threshold of 2,025 hours (Cette et al., 2011).

I think seven days a week would be more productive, but it's culturally impossible in the West (thank God).

I think it helps to start with the assertion that benefits from economic/productivity growth have accrued to owners, not workers, and that a correction is overdue - if you don't agree with that, discussion over working fewer hours feels moot.

Going forward with the idea that workers deserve a bit of a break:

> sounds like it's entirely wishful thinking and in a few years will be having the same amount of wasted hours in those days

I can see that to some extent, but if expectations stay the same I think "trimming the fat" would be a more likely outcome - i.e. more push-back on pointless meetings and other inefficiency. I'd expect it to take a longer time than just a few years for apathy to set in - at which point we would have more data about the effectiveness of the plan over time.

> Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5?

I think lots of us have anecdata that "meaningful work done" does not drop by 20% (if at all) in a 4-day week, and satisfaction increases substantially. I can imagine a future push to reduce further to 3 days - but isn't that a realistic expectation given further productivity-boosting technology will arrive?

>I think it helps to start with the assertion that benefits from economic/productivity growth have accrued to owners, not workers, and that a correction is overdue - if you don't agree with that, discussion over working fewer hours feels moot.

That is exactly what I meant by this being a political project to which we try to will evidence into existence.

In my opinion, especially when it comes to individual employees "productivity" is overrated.

> but I really struggle to understand how working fewer hours will not result in loss of productivity

Microsoft Japan did 4 day workweeks and saw 40% increase in productivity.

https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-japan-4-day-work-week...

Its likely because a 3 day weekend allows people to totally disconnect from work and rest. It even allows you to travel, visit family etc.

They haven't even mastered implementing standard 40 hour weeks yet. Wait until they see the productivity gains from those.

I don't really get it either. Sure I'd like to work less and get paid more, but if employees can do 5 days of work in 4 days, doesn't that mean that you should fire 20% of your staff?

I could see it have no effect at first while people appreciate the extra time off, so they work harder for four days, but if it becomes the norm that would normalize and productivity would slowly drop across that society.

> Sure I'd like to work less and get paid more, but if employees can do 5 days of work in 4 days, doesn't that mean that you should fire 20% of your staff?

No, because the argument for the four-day work week is that the extra day takes 20% more time but does not contribute anything like 20% more productivity.

People are worn out by the time they get to Friday, and so 5 people working 4 days can get more done than 4 people working 5 days, even though "man-hours" is the same.

> I assume there is some sort of middle ground between working too much and working too little. Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5?

That's the problem with this whole thing. People don't have a rationale for it. They just want to work fewer hours.

If the 4-day week happens, we will see the same arguments being made for the 3-day week, because there is no actual basis for any of this: people will always want to work fewer hours than they work now.

You can disagree with the rationale, but if you think there isn't one then you didn't read the article or any of the comments, you're just sharing your knee-jerk reaction.

Before productivity, this is also about simple social quality of life.

I know we often think in the smaller system of capitalism, but the point of any economic system is to bring overall better quality of life to citizens.

A lot of people are now observing that additional work doesn't bring additional quality of life, and so the next push for improved quality of life now might come at reconsidering the 5 day work week and maybe making it 4.

Now about productivity, there's a few arguments:

1. Reducing wasted time. Lots of work is inefficient, lots of meetings going in circles, distractions, etc. If you have only 4 days, you hope that it will push companies to reduce the waste.

2. Rest/leisure and productivity have correlations. Maybe an extra day of rest can boost people's work days and actually make them more productive.

3. Most type of work where people are considering 4 day work week is creative work. Productivity often comes simply from better ideas and better decisions. An extra work day doesn't really affect the quality of your decisions and the potential of your ideas.

4. Most type of work where people are considering 4 day work week have uneven value output. Something you did in the first quarter on its own can provide enough value to justify your entire year's salary.

Two very simple answers, which I won't bother to back up with any science.

1) Many office workers spent some 50-80% of their work hours on overhead (meetings, email), leaving very little time for actual focused tasks, things that actually need to get done. When you work one day less, you just optimize the overhead part whilst still outputting the same net productivity.

2) The human mind cannot be cognitively productive 5 x 8. Consciously or subconsciously, you'll bleed downtime into your day, quite a lot of it. Pretending to be busy, sitting out the time. Not because you're a slacker, you're just human. Office work is deeply unnatural.

Whenever I have 1 less day (like holiday weeks), my other days suffer. Just because Friday is a holiday doesn't mean the regularly scheduled meetings can just be skipped.

> Many office workers spent some 50-80% of their work hours on overhead (meetings, email), leaving very little time for actual focused tasks, things that actually need to get done. When you work one day less, you just optimize the overhead part whilst still outputting the same net productivity.

If it were that easy to cull out the overhead it'd be done by now in the existing 5-day week.

I can see no reason (and none is presented in any of the comments) why moving to a 4-day week will suddenly reduce pointless meetings. It's asserted as fact multiple times, but it isn't.

"If it were that easy to cull out the overhead it'd be done by now in the existing 5-day week."

This is a misunderstanding of the dynamic. Collaboration and overhead inflates to whatever the capacity is. There's no strong force to stop it, bizarre as that is.

When you reduce capacity, the counter force is there. I normally do 10 meetings but can now only afford 8.

> When you reduce capacity, the counter force is there. I normally do 10 meetings but can now only afford 8.

If you're doing 10 meetings in 5 days and can only afford 8 meetings in 4 days, the number of meetings haven't gone down!

The ratio is still the same - every 5 working days you have 10 meetings, even in a 4 day week.

The theory is that the weekend is not enough to "recharge" and that productivity wanes over the week.

Now, I can buy the theory of very unproductive fridays when nothing gets done, but I think a better model would be to just work 6 hours instead of 8.

Why? Other than 5x6 is less than 4x8.

You’re working less, but for 5 days, so you get more “fresh hours”.

You are quick to dismiss this as political.

Counterpoint: what makes 40 hours a week the sweet spot? Why is 40 more productive than 50?

I absolutely think that the 40 hours a week were chosen because of political reasons. That doesn't mean we should work for 7 days a week, or that the fact that we work 40 hours a week is a problem in any way. The only thing I don't understand and have trouble with is people claiming that 4 days work week somehow results in them doing more work than they do in 5 days. To me it sounds like people have decided that they want to work less (totally reasonable) and then try to use "trust the science" method to make it happen.

There's a business that I know which had a 4 day work week and all the employees just moonlighted at other jobs on Friday to make extra money...so they just opened for a half day on Fridays to give people the option to make more money there.

It was an actual service based company where more hours meant more customers served.

There are a couple incorrect assumptions in this.

First and foremost, this discussion doesn't always mean 4x8 hour days, it could very well mean 4x10. Same number of hours, in fewer days. By your admission this should be the same amount of productivity, however you define that.

You're also admitting it's reductio ad absurdum, so why not just stop with that? Clearly there is some maximal point of work-per-unit-of-time (e.g. productivity). 0 hours of work will be 0 production by definition, and 40 is whatever it is now, P. Who's to say that 38 hours instead of 40 wouldn't be 1.01P? Who's to say that 45 hours wouldn't be 0.9P? Being so against these types of experiments presupposes that we've magically landed on the 40 hour work week and it just so happens to be the maximal point of productivity. The odds of that being that case are pretty small.

> Are there any actual evidence that that optimum middle ground is 4 days and not 3, or 5?

Maybe that's the whole point of doing things like this? You don't get evidence like this in a lab or in a thought experiment, you get it by having companies try this out and see what happens to their revenue, their worker retention, their customer base, etc. Maybe 32 hours a week will result in less total revenue but a wildly loyal employee and customer base, that could be translated into a larger business in the long term even with higher per capita expense?

> What I find much more interesting is switching from a 7 day week to something else entirely, for example working on: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is free, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday is free. I can see how that might result in people being more productive, as they still work the same amount of hours, but they don't get as exhausted as before.

This is still a 7 day week you're just broken up the weekend. I'm not sure how that results in people "not as exhausted."

Oh yes, of course, it's others who are being political, obviously not me.

Edit: I simplified my math. I know there are 24 hours of work in a day. It's not about that. The point is about rhythm.

7 days is 100%

If you'd work 7 days, there's no downtime to recover. You simply just tear into your reserves, and get less productive each week until you hit diminishing "returns" in being less productive, getting to some low productive apathy state. It's productivity rock bottom. There are people who can manage this but very few can.

6 days 86%. Now you can rest for a day. Great! But there's still little time for socializing and other stuff in life. There's no way of flourishing at all. Also, if there's trouble but not enough trouble (e.g. bad sleep), then you'll be using that day and there's no socialization at all that week. Or time to spend on your hobbies.

5 days is 71%. Now you can devote 29% of every week on free time. Literally 29% of your life is free. You can now absorb fairly big shocks that aren't covered in illness protection plans. You also have time to get into a hobby.

So why 4? The cyclical nature of the week makes it to be 57%. 43% is left to free time. I'm working this amount. If I include my vacation days with it, I work an exact 50% and am free 50%. I have sleep issues that no doctor cares to know about. My free day is on a Wednesday. If my sleep is screwed over then I can rest all day during a Wednesday or a Saturday. Sunday is always left over for free time. If I have a good week of sleep, then it can happen that I feel a bit bored. I have too much free time. It results in an iron clad focus on work.

I've worked 5 days per week. I never had an iron clad focus as I was always struggling with sleep. If my sleep was screwed over on Monday, then I'd need to suffer until Friday. Now I only need to suffer until Wednesday and sometimes I even swap days and don't have to suffer at all.

So that's a simple example of how it improves my focus. It's an example of how I'm probably more productive on 4 days than 5. Why more? Productivity drops by 50% for programmers with severe sleep deprivation.

Different sectors and situations may have different results. But I'd suggest to try and sketch out different scenarios where it does and doesn't work.

So why not 3? Well maybe 3. I can tell you why not 2, because it's extreme enough for me to see why. The context of work starts to fade. Your subconscious starts to deal with issues less to not at all (in the context of programming). It takes way longer to warm up. Why is this the case with 2? Because 2 days of work is only 29% of your week. Your identity will be formed around what you'll do in your free time. Work will become a "side thing". You will be amazingly well rested to work, provided you can manage your life well. But the extra increase in focus won't make up for it. The switch between 5 to 4 days may in certain cases may not up for it either, but in my particular case it's clear that it does.

I live in Poland. We are recently being recognized as a developed economy most often. Still, we earn 1/3 in dollar terms per Capita compared to the US or Germany.

I think 4 days week would result in people having two jobs regularly. I wonder if the situation is simalar with basic job workers in more advanced economies.

One interesing point is that people in my IT company were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home. But this is IT.

I think that the right way to go is not to reduce the number of hours but just allow people to work 4 days per week with hourly rate intact. This might be a very welcomed option by many people.

Also - signing up for this in the high inflation time might work well instead of raising compensations. So this is a good time to carry such experiments.

> were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home.

Why? The company is going to use your home as an office and they should be paying that 5-10% extra. Why business paying corporate landlord for office space is okay, but when Joe Public offers his own lowly place then it's a no no? When people don't recognise their value, they are prime for being exploited.

There is no inherit value, it is determined by market, mostly supply and demand.

Maybe you folks don't have to pay property taxes, but in the US we do, and that's a pretty clear indication of an "inherent value".

Sorry if it was not clear, I meant value of work.

We did the experiment to check if people are serious about WFH. There is a lot of work to make it happen inside a company. In particular to treat remote people as first class citizens. WFH was also a choice after covid and not necessity.

With a pay cut we are sure people are serious about WFH and not only demanding.

> With a pay cut we are sure people are serious about WFH and not only demanding.

How that correlates with "seriousness"?

Wouldn't pay rise equally make sure people are serious about it?

In that case, I'd be seriously considering moving to another company.

>Still, we earn 1/3 in dollar terms per Capita compared to the US or Germany.

It's not a meaningful comparison without cost of living adjustment. You're not paying 3000 dollars for a one bedroom apartment either. In fact last time I visited Poland I think a place in central Warsaw was like 600 bucks. Poland is exceptionally affordable.

>Poland is exceptionally affordable.

For those on tech wages, which have reached near parity with the west, or work remotely for western companies, yes. But not everyone in Poland earns tech wages.

Rents in the West aren't high just for tech workers.

I am also from Poland and I would be willing to sacrifice 20% of my salary for 1 extra day off per week. I would certainly not look for another job. Also in my employment agreement there is a rule stating that I need my current employer approval before I get a side gig.

I even expect that this would have a rather minor impact on my work (like 10% decrease). I think for jobs like writing CRUD screens for entire week the productivity drop may be more significant.

Actually this inspires me to ask my employer this January for such offer.

Disclaimer: Single person, no children or other commitments.

> Also in my employment agreement there is a rule stating that I need my current employer approval before I get a side gig.

I do not think this is lawful. In our agreements we only prohibit doing a work for our competitors or directly competitive work. If you like your employer then do not come up with this with them, but stay informed of your rights.

>Still, we earn 1/3 in dollar terms per Capita compared to the US or Germany.

How could that be if Germans already make 1/3 dollars compared to the US.

I live in Vietnam.

The first time I saw this, I asked my colleagues: Who would want to work one day more per week, for half what someone makes in the UK?

We were all willing to do it without hesitation (actually many of us already do this for less revenue -- side gigs are fairly ubiquitous here).

One of us added that they hope the West shifts to a three day week soon, so we can get 2 more days of work!

I know this misses the point about time vs. productivity, but thought I'd share that the attitude here is very different.

I think some industries are going to be "better suited" to this than others. But it doesn't have to be that way. If we could shift ever so slightly away from "Biggest Number at end of year - bigger than last years number - at all costs" we could increase staff by just a little bit and move just about any industry to 4 or even 3 day work week.

This and worker-cooperative-businesses. I've yet to hear a legitimately compelling argument against, especially when we see the results. (I mean, the arguments are typically, "They have problems, too!" and "Bob Votes to be CEO") Theory is great but how can you hold onto the theory when the experimental data is at least promising?

I imagine the main argument has to do with having enough surplus to innovate. That said of course there’s plenty of times where surplus doesn’t go to innovation.

The fact that a company has profit at all means there is surplus. They mean the same thing.

as a side note; "Innovation" in my view is not a reason in and of itself to do something. Its too nebulous a term to have real meaning. Like - how much innovating are 7-11's doing or most other commercial shops? Would that money be better spent elsewhere? What percentage of 'innovations' actually fail vs those that prove worth it? etc etc.

> If we could shift ever so slightly away from "Biggest Number at end of year - bigger than last years number - at all costs" we could increase staff by just a little bit and move just about any industry to 4 or even 3 day work week.

The problem with this approach is buyers are looking for the lowest price, so it requires efforts on the national government scale (or multiple national governments, even significantly all of them) to put a floor on this lowest price.

Otherwise you will get outcompeted by someone able to obtain/perform labor for cheaper.

I'm not sure I understand who the parties are in your example.

Who are the buyers? (Employers? People buying your product?) How does any business not get outcompeted by a race to the bottom where people are always willing to perform/obtain the labor more cheaply? Why do the costs of goods get more expensive every year?

If our system is so dysfunctional it can't give an inch towards the quality of life of the people living under it. Burn it to the ground, I say. We used to say the Divine Right of Kings was the best we could do.

Buyers are anyone buying goods and services, from people who vote for politicians that promise lower taxes due to negotiating more labor hours per dollar, or someone going to Walmart and buying a $10 shirt from Bangladesh over a $20 US made shirt (made up numbers).

People who buy from McDonalds over the local burger place that is more that twice as expensive.

>How does any business not get outcompeted by a race to the bottom where people are always willing to perform/obtain the labor more cheaply?

They do get outcompeted, hence manufacturing and textile businesses moving to other parts of the world from US/UK/Europe. And people opting to shop at large businesses with economies of scale like Walmart and Aldi over mom and pop places.

>Why do the costs of goods get more expensive every year?

The cost of some goods gets more expensive. A lot of consumer goods went down in price for people in US/UK/Europe for many of the post WW2 decades. It is only recently that labor costs might have started pushing prices up in real terms.

I think we're still using "Biggest number profit, bigger than last-year number at all cost" thinking here.

Because from my understanding and using some of the language you're using - Costs are going up "Due to labor costs going up" but these same companies are showing record profits. So it seems to me that there's room for the cost of labor to go up without increasing prices, necessarily. But the idea that companies Profit a little less - and I will never let anyone forget that profit is excess - is unfathomable to some.

My actual experience with 4 day work is the closer the team is to operations (2nd and 3rd shift 7 days per week) and the closer to contractor/consultants the easier the transition.

I would caution people to be careful what they wish for; my longest 4-day gig involved sun-wed and wed-sat shifts. 4-day doesn't necessarily mean mon-thr ever week for everyone. Another problem was our overlap day was wed thus "wednesday is non productive its for meetings and stuff" so you really only worked three days because you couldn't trust not to be interrupted on wednesday. Its probably of enormous productivity value to move all interruptions to exactly one day every week, however you don't need 4-day to do that, technically speaking.

Another oddity probably of more interest to bean counters is our overlap day was wednesday so with all hands on deck we did maint and rollouts and upgrades on wednesday, but the rest of the world did maintenance windows on the weekend at 2am so our meaningless measure of fake uptime was lower than non-4day companies. Now does your employer value rolling out better stuff faster, or do they value a "better" meaningless heavily gamed number? So 4-day might be better or worse depending on if your local management lives in reality or spreadsheet-metric-land. "Oh no how will we get fake nine nines of uptime if we roll out new SaaS on Wednesdays?"

I never really understood the push for a 4 day work week here. As things stand, part time work seems really common in the UK anyway. Loads of people I know work 2-4 days per week for a variety of reasons. There's no stigma. It's already pretty normal?

The keyword here is "no loss of pay." These people will work 4 days a week for their previous 5-day salary.

But perhaps pay rises will stagnate and they'll gradually not be competitive with 5-day companies at full pay.

Edit: Oh, it's started already, from the article:

> "With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we're starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution."

Yes, with inflation and stagnant wage growth ( even before the pandemic ) I think and hope the 4 days work solution will push for increase in productivity per working hours.

Unfortunately not every industry is suited for 4 days work. But May be UK should start with Civil Servant?

Work life balance

You've been downvoted but, in simplicity, that is the message and what employees want now. Employers/managers, listen up.

It's worth emphasising beause many bosses still haven't got this message.

I'm currently quiet-quitting, and will actually-quit shortly, because of this attitude.

It's not about being work-shy. It's about busting your arse for a company (and self/respect) and then when the realisation dawns on everyone that flexibility is not only possible but has helped productivity (n=1 our productivity and balance sheet improved during covid), and then to have the door shut on that realisation ... you can expect employees to switch off.

Our entire team feels this way. We'll all be gone soon.

/rant

From a macroeconomic perspective, this doesn’t seem like the best time to be trying this sort of thing. We already have a labour shortage and a lot of inflationary pressure!

If we had high productivity, high unemployment, and low inflation, then introducing a 4 day week would be a great solution.

This is the best time to try it. Labor has all the power, and will into the future due to structural demographics.

For capital, it never seems to be a good time to try anything that doesn’t allow for maximum extraction or any semblance of labor power or quality of life improvements. For example, US railroad workers are about to strike because they dare ask for paid sick leave. It’ll cost $2B/day to the US economy, not because of unreasonable demands (paid sick leave!), but because of unreasonable management and shareholders.

Edit: (can’t reply, HN throttling) Good luck attempting to solve for labor power with immigration. Folks who lean right (and a cohort of centrists) don’t want it, and they still have enough voting power to be somewhat relevant for the next 5-10 years (in the US, the UK, and many parts of Europe; Italy’s most recent elections showcase this), as electorate turnover takes time, not to mention declining fertility rates everywhere squeezing the young, productive cohort globally.

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/21/1137640529/railroads-freight-...

Capital will just push for ever bigger immigration to counter labour.

How? Labour has all the voting power, capital only wins if they can manipulate labour to vote against its own interests like they managed in USA.

It looks like in US labour can vote either for corporations or for importing ever more cheap labour.

Some in Europe were labour was manipulated to vote for migration-friendly parties. Although now this seems to be changing with growing economically left but anti-immigration so-called „right wing“ parties.

"Labor" in many EU countries have been manipulated into voting against their own interests on several topics (Brexit, anti nuclear energy, pro illegal immigration, anti taxes for the rich, longer working hours, etc.) to the point most voters don't care anymore.

And plus, even if the "pro-labor" leader would win elections, there's nothing that forbid him/her from following up on the election promises till the end of his/her term. They can just do whatever their campaign donors/lobbyists pay them to do as once their political career is over, they'll have a cushy job guaranteed in the private sector enterprises they "helped" during their term. It's the classic political-private sector revolving dor.

Case in point, all EU leader have promised to tackle housing, and yet, during their terms, housing has gotten more and more out of reach with each passing year, proving that your voted leaders are not on your side, they just claim they are to win your votes. German and Austrian politicians who helped kill nuclear, took major lucrative jobs in Russian oil and gas companies afterwards. The list can go on. We basically have legalized high level corruption.

Doesn't European labor want to move to the US for the higher wages?

Eh? The majority don't. Quality of life in western Europe is generally excellent.

Pay in the US is attractive, but doesn't make up for what you lose from being in many European countries. Health care, public transport, well maintained roads, better work-life balance, more vacation time, less poverty, won't get murdered in a mass shooting etc. Your mobility as a citizen in the EU is excellent as well, free to travel to so many different cultures.

I live in the UK, and this country is probably going to get much worse. But I still wouldn't trade it just for a higher US salary.

Simply invite labour over from countries like Poland - then deny them a vote, because they're not citizens.

Only sub-Saharan Africa is left with fertility rates above replacement. China is likely to start seeing population decline within 15 years or so. Which is not to say that they won't try, but we're about to see competitive pressure applied to immigration as well, coupled with a significant number of voters still opposed to immigration.

> ”China is likely to start seeing population decline within 15 years or so.”

China’s population may already be declining. 2022 is likely to be the first time China’s population has declined in over 60 years.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/franklavin/2022/10/12/chinas-de...

(Incidentally, India will overtake China as the world’s most populous country in 2023.)

So? There's still lots and lots and lots of cheap labor to import for decades.

The „competitive pressure“ will just worsen corporate pressure on local labour. Oh, immigration is getting lower, so we need more tax exemptions for new arrivals! Think „digital nomads“ (or whatever fancy term nowadays) visas.

It's insufficient to have cheap unskilled labour. Shortages of skilled labour will come much sooner.

More importantly, even small changes in demand means immigrants can and will be more picky about where to go.

Growth in their original countries also means a reduced supply of willing candidates. E.g. the UK saw that with Polish immigrants in the building trade who started returning as salaries increased at home, despite the disparity still being huge.

As the demographics shift starts hitting more countries, it's not just that the total number of people in working age in those countries drop, but the proportion of them who has it financially bad enough at home to want to leave drops.

> ”Polish immigrants in the building trade who started returning as salaries increased at home, despite the disparity still being huge.”

There has always been steady flow of Polish migrant workers to and from the UK. Workers would make money and develop skills in the UK, sometimes remaining permanently but also often returning after a number of years, particularly once you get you the “raising a family” stage in life where lower cost of living and being close to extended family becomes a bigger attraction.

The difference now is that the supply of new workers has been reduced by Brexit, so only those existing workers with residency rights remain. I doubt there has been any significant increase in the number of workers leaving, aside from temporary changes during the pandemic.

The return of Polish workers and falloff of new ones started several years before Brexit, as Poland started experiencing a lack of skilled builders and salaries grew significantly as a result. Exchange rate changes also contributed significantly. The same effect was seen elsewhere too, e.g. in Norway.

The first reports of a massively reduced influx goes as far back as 2008, which is also when we started seeing reports of a significant outflow w/the Home Office estimating in 2008 that about 25% returned.

>Folks who lean right (and a cohort of centrists) don’t want it

Right wing isn't really that popular in most developed/rich EU countries though. Most of them have quite left leaning population and leaders.

And many of the richer countries want immigration but not publicly admitting it, but do it under the table, due to pressure from business groups and lobbyists, who hope this will aid with the labor shortage (translation for jobs with shitty pay and downward pressure on wages) while also pushing up demand for housing/rents, and demand for consumer goods in the retail sector. All of which benefit the business and ruling elite.

Immigration to UK is at its highest year ever despite Brexit and Covid having thrown wrenches in immigration movements.

Same for continental Europe. Refugees and migrants are coming weekly by the thousands by sea and land, and there's nothing the right wing parties can do about it, as long as migrants can cross the border then claim refugee status and know how to play the refugee game, the host country can't deny them that as it's guaranteed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and if they do deny them that right, then the country can be sued and will lose.

So, for that to work, the right wing leaders would have to first get their country out of the ECHR, and then they can deny refugees/migrants.

The argument is that in a lot of jobs, working 4 days a week isn't significantly less productive than working 5 days a week but you get all the benefits of an extra day off every week (less time/money spent commuting, more free time, etc). If the productivity argument is true, then not only would going to a 4 day work week not have economic downsides, but it would potentially be even better economically.

I'm not sure I 100% buy that argument, but I do think many jobs have a non-linear relationship between time spent working and productivity and you end up reaching the point of diminishing returns. I also think it would be a mistake to assume that 2 days vs 3 days off per week is the optimal trade-off just because that's what we're already used to.

Thats why for me, I want it. It increases my days off by 150%. I’d gladly take a 20% pay cut to have proportionally far more free time

With problem solving jobs, like software engineering, you end up with equal or greater productivity.

There is a low-level of constant burnout that occurs with 5 day weeks, but you don't notice the difference between feeling normal and that low-level burnout until the first week back from holiday (after which it starts again).

I've simulated 4-day-weeks before using annual leave one day a week spread out over a prolonged period, and those times have been some of my most productive. Every week has had that post-holiday high.

There's no such thing as a labor shortage, only a pay shortage.

I find the work week is often short to get bigger multi-person things done, and when doing them over 2 weeks the weekend in the middle really breaks the rhythm. A lot of the discussion centers on individual productivity - but so little of what companies do is individual! My dream scenario in terms of getting stuff done would be something like a 10 day work week, 10h per day (nice round 100h block) - and then something like a 5 day weekend

I've loved the idea of moving to an 8 day week, where two 4-day a week people share the same 7-day a week job, and use the surplus day to coordinate with each other or work on tasks that would be better with two.

> They argue that a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity, meaning they can create the same output using fewer hours.

The idea that there is a population-wide 25% productivity boost just lying unnoticed on the sidewalk sounds asinine to me. Strong claims require strong evidence and I don’t see it.

That said, I have worked a 4-day week before and it was great, but I took a proportional pay cut and wasn’t expected to somehow become super-productive.

Some more charitable interpretations of why this approach might be great:

* We can afford to take the pay cut and would be happier (and perhaps a little more productive) working fewer hours;

* Companies with a 50-60 hour work week might have pervasive burnout and therefore get a substantial performance boost by decreasing their workload by 20%, with “4-day workweek” being a better coordination point than “only work 9-5”;

* Optionality will be a good perk for employees allowing the small number of companies deploying this to get better employees (this doesn’t work if 4-day is widely adopted).

> The idea that there is a population-wide 25% productivity boost just lying unnoticed on the sidewalk sounds asinine to me. Strong claims require strong evidence and I don’t see it.

When the UK went on a 3-day week during the '70s, production was 96% of normal.

The idea that people are being actually productive for 40 hours/week sounds pretty absurd to me.

Citation? What was the context? And why did they go back if they were actually not getting more productivity?

> The idea that people are being actually productive for 40 hours/week sounds pretty absurd to me

The alternative is surely far more absurd. Employees could be working 3 day weeks and producing just as much, and somehow nobody noticed? There exist employee-owned co-ops, and employee-owned startups. If there was an equal-productivity yet far more enjoyable way of working, these companies would be stealing all the best workers. The absence of any evidence of these companies existence is strong evidence that no such effect exists.

Indeed the evidence points in the opposite direction; there are plenty of examples of scrappy small companies putting in crazy hours and getting loads done. I have experienced this first hand, and pick any successful startup and you’re likely to find evidence of positive marginal productivity beyond 40h/week.

The objective research I’ve seen on the subject points to net-zero marginal productivity around 55-60h/week, WAY higher than the 40 you are claiming: https://docs.iza.org/dp8129.pdf

You're being sold "work less hours, get paid the same". In actual fact:

> “With many businesses struggling to afford 10% inflation pay rises, we’re starting to see increasing evidence that a four-day week with no loss of pay is being offered as an alternative solution.”

When compared to inflation, you'll get paid less. It says 10%, but wages have been frozen for years.

Worse still, you will still be expected to achieve the same amount in less time. The only difference is that they will expect your most productive hours without also paying for your less productive hours.

_You_ may be in a position to take a 20% pay cut, but as they mention, they want this to become the norm for everybody. As the cost of living increases less and less will be in this position.

>It says 10%, but wages have been frozen for years //

And, in UK at least, we have more billionaires and an ever increasing wealth gap .. we've got more efficient production than ever it's just that the wealthy are taking all the benefit. That's only going to get worse; we act now or workers will have too little money to mount any sort of opposition.

My under-informed perception is that the UK is suffering from an overall productivity crisis, having prioritized other things for the last decade.

This resulting in inflation and a weakening of the pound, and with a lower quality of life on average than they would have otherwise.

When people produce less, then there is obviously less to go around. Will these folks produce as much in 4 days as 5? Maybe, I guess we'll see. Maybe they'll produce MORE. But unless they do, or find something economically productive to do with their extra time, the UK will have less as a result.

Will the farmers work less? How about those in the energy sector? Or medicine? Or construction?

I'll be happy to hear from people with better information who can corroborate or refute my perception.

> This resulting in inflation and a weakening of the pound, and with a lower quality of life on average than they would have otherwise.

> When people produce less, then there is obviously less to go around. Will these folks produce as much in 4 days as 5? Maybe, I guess we'll see. Maybe they'll produce MORE. But unless they do, or find something economically productive to do with their extra time, the UK will have less as a result.

Well, these people are pretty much guaranteed to get better quality of life immediately. Will that come at a cost in production? Maybe. But piling on more work hours hasn't worked.

> Will the farmers work less? How about those in the energy sector? Or medicine? Or construction?

I sure hope so. The UK has more farmers than reasonable, working tiny farms, propped up by subsidies. Medicine loses far more to the mistakes caused by overlong working hours than it gains from those hours, and I wouldn't be surprised if energy or construction was the same.

This is ‘shrinkflation’, but for worker-hours. Like when you buy some potato chips and the packet is smaller, but you pay the same price as before.

At the startup that I work at the biggest complaint from customers is no 24 hour support, but my company doesn’t want people to work on weekends or work overnight. Doesn’t four hour week mean even less support? You’d have to deal with crappy AI - automated bots with canned response, awful self checkouts at groceries and restaurants, waiting even longer at DMV for an appointment, etc.

Hire more people.

Why doesn't your company want people to work on weekends or overnight?

Hire some people to do it, those who want to will apply. Some people would rather work on weekends and have days off in the week. Some people are night owls who would prefer to work overnight.

No other 24/7 company with good compensation struggles to hire for these jobs.

There seems an unnecessary presumption that this means 4/5th of the work hours, with an implication of 4/5ths of the output.

But a 4 day week can also be four 9 hour days. So long as management adjusts daily expectations to match, there's no need to expect lower productivity, or to demand a salary cut.

Overall though it's a fairly open secret that, especially in big companies, you can set a 40hr work week, but you're not getting 40hrs of actual work from them. And for some jobs this is just beyond people's fatigue limits anyway.

To hazard a guess, for in-office, the average would likely be around 25 to 30 hours. The rest goes into the ping pong table, chatting, morning coffee, reading HN etc.

So there's plenty of margin to lower scheduled hours and raise expectations during those hours. There's also plenty of room to give 3 days of rest in exchange for 4 days all-hands-on-deck.

You can already try that by taking 4-8 days (depending how many bank holidays are around) out of your 28 days and work for two months 4-days a week. I did so in July and June and it was a blast.

From my tests, as long as you manage other people expectations, nobody will notice or care if you’re not there in IT.

And it’s not only 4 days of work. It’s also 3 days of rest. It’s obviously for the same reason but still… it does feel more powerful once you feel it on yourself. Distressing is amazing.

Once you try you will never want to go back.

Tbh I already work 100% remotely with flexible hours I want, and as long as I deliver nobody cares how much I work. Why anyone would? Seriously, who cares? As long as value is delivered: nobody.

I suspect some of the gains found in the trial companies will be short-lived if /all/ companies transition to a four day week.

At the moment, trial companies offer a rare and coveted perk. They’ll attract a large pool of candidates for their roles, and they’ll choose the best. Generally speaking, the best from a larger pool are better than the best from a smaller pool.

Trial companies will also retain their staff more easily. Four day week employers are hard to find, so no one would want to give up such a rare perk.

But the playing field levels off when all companies offer this perk.

So I’d be suspicious of the results of this trial. I don’t think four day week companies will enjoy the same success forever.

Even a single 4 day week a month is a huge bonus for most people I’d say.

There are likely several hundreds, if not thousands of companies already offering a 4-day work week or something similar.

For example, I work at a company called Forestreet (https://forestreet.com) and we already offer a 9-day fortnight.

The idea is that you condense your work week into 9 days, and take the 10th day off.

There are pros and cons to this model, but overall it's working very well.

We've had that "9-day fortnight" for years. Initially, it was slow to catch on, as the "10th day" was Wednesday. Once it was changed so that employees could pick the day, most people picked Monday or Friday.

An added "bonus": It all but eliminated meetings on Mondays and Fridays, as there were always some people out on those days. On Sundays, you don't need to worry about a meeting the next day; on Friday, you can catch up on stuff.

An oft overlook topic is childcare.

And I'm not just talking about little kids, big kids too.

For those companies that went from 5 days x 8 Hours ... to now 4 days x 10 hours (8am to 6/7pm), what happens to children during this extra time?

Our entire society is based on the assumption parents end work by 5pm.

Who's going to feed and get kids ready for bed if the parent are now arriving home 2-hours later, which might be the kids bedtime.

One of the things I wondered was: if everyone generally works Mon-Fri 9-5pm. Then a large part of consumers are at work while everyone is hoping to meet their needs.

Maybe a roughly equal split of Mon-Thurs and Tues-Fri business will allow more freedom for consumers to consume on Mondays and Fridays.

Thus benefitting the precious GDP numbers by which everything seems to be judged.

I think it was Henry Ford that originally came up with the concept of a weekend because he wanted everyday people to buy motorcars for leisure time. So they needed to have some leisure time. I wonder if a five/two day cycle is the balance that optimises production and consumption in a modern economy? Maybe the weekends should be longer… or shorter?

This type of discussion always leads me to believe that the current model does not work. I always had the impression that, on average, we are all or will be enslaved in some way, what differentiates are values and benefits. So, one additional day to do my activities, be with my family, or just do nothing, seems very fair to me.

> They argue that a four-day week would drive companies to improve their productivity, meaning they can create the same output using fewer hours.

I am very new to this subject. I am also skeptical of the claim above.

However, one assumes that if Guardian is printing the above, there is some ‘evidence’ that it might be true.

Is there any?

At my previous place we did half day Fridays. But there was MASSIVE overtime from Monday to Thursday. I don't want a four-day week where I'm expected to "compensate" by working for free. Companies should stop bullshitting their employees before offering a four-day week.

I think more companies should sign up for this. It would really help the employees. Others might say it's just one added day to the days of rest you have. But an additional day can go a long way.

So instead of developers working 3 hours a day for 4 days, they work 3 hours a day for 3 days. Because Thursday become the new Friday, which was already an "off" day.

The corporate insects will just suck out your life energy in four days instead of five so that you need three days of recovery instead of two.

Some progressive stuff coming out of the UK; there isn't much of it, as political chaos unleashed by Brexit remains all consuming for the party that runs the country, but this experiment was the largest of its type, and so far, looks a great success. Remains to be seen whether firms who make this commitment will be able to outcompete traditional '5-day-ers' in a recessionary environment, you hope they will but that will be the big test

This is a secret tool that will help us increase the disparity between casual and permanent employees later.

Has anyone else noticed that after the layoffs most of these articles have been vanishing lately.

"4-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee

"3-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee

"2-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee

"1-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee

"0-day work week brings no loss of productivity" -employee

"Yeah, that's why we're firing you." -Boss

Contrast the attitude here with the attitude from this guy:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/12821/making-steam-the...

Having worked at a company that did a four-day week, I'll chime in that it was both amazing and eye opening. I say that as someone who had read Tom DeMarco's now-classic book Slack[1] long ago, after a lot of up-close and personal with the antipatterns described therein. Intellectually, I expected something(??) good but the reality was even more suprising. With a four-day work week, I was able to complete (solo!) a production website application upgrade (Rails 2.x to 4.5) in a very reasonable timeline, and less than I'd heard competent teams failing the same task elsewhere. This wasn't because of any "10x developer" nonsense - it was clearly because I had a /three-day weekend/ every week and came in on Monday clear headed and ready to HIT IT, BABY.

Let me be clear: I later realized that this project would have been a soul-draining death march at many other places I'd worked in my career. Exhausted just a few weeks in, with management hounding the team for schedule estimates that can't possibly exist because management failed to fund maintenance for years.[2] (There were actually rational reasons for this, in this case. tl;dr the project got renewed interest and investment due to a new business case.)

To those who lament on this topic about "devs (in country X) just aren't motivated these days" or whatever, let me suggest something. If you have poor clarity of purpose, poor giving-a-fsck about humans, or a number of other culture failings then yes, you may encounter problems. Your solution is still not to tie your knowledge workers to their desks. You need to fix the root causes of your underlying productivity debt, not pave over them with an overwork-butts-in-seats mentality which just makes things worse in the long run (<--- read DeMarco).

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Slack-Getting-Burnout-Busywork-Effici...

[2]: Pro tip: "evergreen" ecosystems, especially young and rapidly changing ones like early-mid Ruby/Rails and a lot of current npm/JS-based stuff, often have a wickedly non-linear cost curve if/when maintenance and dependency updates fall off. Some of the most expensive I've encountered of this ilk is when /test infrastructure/ incurred a lot of past churn that wasn't tracked, but suddenly (cough) needs to be updated.

> they can create the same output using fewer hours.

but the hours cost more, so ?

The UK wages are laughably low, so these corporations are doing no favours. The still enjoy record profits and their board members probably laugh that serfs even think that these corporations are being so "generous".

Genuine question though - isn't there some tradeoff for this like labor benefits (vacation, healthcare, etc)?

If you had 25 days of PTO per year before, I would view having 20 days per year as the equivalent, but others will no doubt disagree.

Earlier this year I went from a 5 day week to 4 days spread over 5 with no loss of PTO / benefits etc.

Some people were already on a 4 day week and they were essentially given a 25% pay rise instead

I've worked a couple places like this and the real argument is "thanksgiving in the USA is always a thursday which is unfair to the wed-sat team" if they're forced to work or "unfair to the sun-wed team" if they wanted to work for triple overtime holiday pay and similar arguments about election day always being a Tuesday there are five federal holidays IIRC that are off on Mondays but no federal holidays on fri or sat, etc. Usually whining problems were solved by "this system has been here since your grandparents and you signed up for it so suck it up or transfer teams or quit" Technically the system was only there for their grandparents in operations and finance always worked 9-5 m-f until thirty years ago so it is new out of operations, but whatever.

The vacation problem was solved by providing "weeks" to everyone along with the interesting legal fiction that everyone worked ten hours so our "weeks" were implemented using "hours". So new employees got "two weeks" which on paper were implemented as 80 hours.

These are all very old issues in 24x7 operations environments including outside IT/tech/computer-stuff. The only "innovation" is when the payroll clerk starts doing 4x10s like she's a front line nurse, or the graphics artist in marketing starts doing 4x10s 3rd shift like he's a field service tech.

The UK has a National Health Service for all its permanent residents, which is over-stretched right now because people keep voting for Tories who claim to cherish it but won't fund it (and divert funding to their pet projects). Also COVID burned out medics at a high rate and Brexit made it harder to attract foreign medics to work here.

UK workers are (with some narrow exceptions) entitled to 5.6 weeks per year of paid leave. Employers can choose to make you take some of this leave when they want it taken rather than when you want it, including the Bank Holidays (national holidays). In a tech job you are almost certainly going to get 5.6 weeks plus the Bank Holidays and maybe more.

It's calculated as 5.6 weeks because logically if I work 5 days per week, and you work 4 days per week, and our employer gives us both 20 days of leave to take whenever we like, for you that would be five weeks whereas for me it's only four weeks which isn't the same. 5.6 weeks will be 28 full days for a full time Monday-Friday office worker, but only 14 full days for their colleague who only works Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning in a job share.

Only two companies were mentioned, Atom Bank and Awin - neither of which I would describe as 'corporations'?

I think it's a gimmick that some businesses will use for publicity purposes and nothing more.

Anyone looking for a bit of an SEO boost for their website can feel free to jump on board...

What would you describe as a corporation then?

> I think it's a gimmick that some businesses will use for publicity purposes and nothing more

Google "theguardian four day week" and you'll see this outlet has form on the topic.

Q: Can you work a four-day week at full pay if you're employed by Guardian Media Group?

The Guardian also reports on war. Does this mean you can go to war for the Guardian?

Dozens of articles but no genuine explanation of the employer's end of this issue.

If the Guardian newspaper were to let all its staffers take every Friday off without any reduction in pay, I wholeheartedly agree that the staff would be much happier and more productive too (at least on Mondays to Thursdays, when they're actually working).

However, wouldn't the newspaper EITHER need to cancel Saturday's edition completely, thus losing a big chunk of revenue, OR employ more part-time staff to cover the missing work on Fridays - and out of interest, where would the money for those additional fractional salaries come from? Are we seriously suggesting that the product on Monday to Thursday becomes so much better due to the happier staff that consumers are going to pay more for it? <boggle>

"Details", I can almost hear you say :)

Aren’t the Guardian reporting news? Rather than giving an option themselves? It isn’t a gotcha to say the Guardian don’t do it, unless you think it’s a gotcha that they reported on the invasion of Ukraine but have not also invaded Ukraine.

> It isn’t a gotcha to say the Guardian don’t do it, unless you think it’s a gotcha that they reported on the invasion of Ukraine but have not also invaded Ukraine.

From one of their articles on this topic, from June 2022:

"More than 3,300 workers at 70 UK companies, ranging from a local chippy to large financial firms, start working a four-day week from Monday with no loss of pay in the world’s biggest trial of the new working pattern."[0]

"The trial is based on the 100:80:100 model – 100% of pay for 80% of the time, in exchange for a commitment to maintain 100% productivity"

Q: How can you 'maintain 100% productivity' when you're not there 20% of the time?

Like I already said, no actual discussion on how this can [possibly] work in practice at any company. They certainly don't say whether the chippy is going to be closed every Friday when all the previously "full time" staff are having their additional day off...

The issue suits someone's agenda, though, or why would they be pushing it so hard?

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/jun/06/thousands-w...

> Q: How can you 'maintain 100% productivity' when you're not there 20% of the time?

That's a question for the 4 Day Week Campaign, not for the Guardian, and the research they publish and the people who peer-review it. The Guardian are reporting what other people think and say, not thinking it or saying it themselves.

> That's a question for the 4 Day Week Campaign, not for the Guardian

Umm ... I don't think we get to give media outlets a free pass like that. Reporters used to ask these questions and get answers before they published.

Gushingly positive reporting about a topic that your reporters and/or your readership agree with is almost certainly part of the reason that only 25% of people trust journalists[0]. I suppose that's marginally more than than trust politicians (21%)... :)

"[The Guardian has] a slight to moderate liberal bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by appeals to emotion or stereotypes) to favor liberal causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information but may require further investigation [..]

Overall, we rate The Guardian Left-Center biased based on story selection that moderately favors the left and Mixed for factual reporting due to numerous failed fact checks over the last five years."

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-guardian/

I'd never come across mediabiasfactcheck.com until a friend recently referred me to it over a source that I'd quoted which he claimed was biased :)

Full disclosure: I grew up in a household where The Guardian was on the breakfast table every day, and I still call up theguardian.com every morning. Either it's changed, or I've changed :(

[0] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/politicians-are-still-trusted-le...

> where would the money for those additional fractional salaries come from?

From corporate profits. It's not like they are struggling.

> neither of which I would describe as 'corporations'

What do you mean? The former looks like a public limited company and the latter a private limited company, both of which are forms of incorporation, as opposed to a partnership. What kind of company did you think they were?

OK, yes, they are technically corporations - as am I, a sole director limited company. However, a banking app and an affiliate marketing network are not what I think of when people are talking about 'corporations'.

What the hell is a corporation to you?

FORD, GM, Microsoft, etc, etc. No need for the anger, it's just an opinion.

Yeah, and now they save on heating also.

Just what we need to fight global inflation.

Australian standard working day is 37.5 hours. What is this 40 hours of which you speak?

Australians work 37.5 hours out of the 24 hours in a day regularly? What an incredible display of work ethic.

On a less sarcastic note off of your typo, in the US and presumably UK, the regular work week is 9-5 M-F which translates into 40 hour work weeks.

9-5 with a .5 hour lunch break comes out 37.5 hours.

I want to support this, but I guess I just don't understand how the economics of it works?

Firstly, I would just note that wealth can't be legislated into existence. It has to be created against entropy, with effort. If something is effortless then there is no value in it.

So in an efficient economy where all labour was being used productively at all times it's basically just physics that a 4 day work week would reduce total economic output, and as a consequence lower per-capita wealth.

However, being charitable here, I think there are some nuances in the real world because labour isn't always used productively -- especially when companies are unprofitable due to high energy bills.

I used to work on the a high street in the UK and we'd often close an hour or two early in the winter if it was quiet. Reason being it made little sense keeping the shop heated and powered for us just to be sat around doing nothing until close of business. In those few hours (late on the day in winter, often when raining) the company was briefly unprofitable to operate and therefore closing early made economic sense.

I can only assume a lot of shops and restaurants are in a similar position in the UK today. So if you can do 95% of your typical business over just 4 days then this probably makes a lot of sense. But what I don't understand is that surely in the vast majority of cases it would make far more sense to close a bit earlier instead of closing for an entire day? If you're a restaurant for example, just operating at peak times could be a good idea.

But whether this is good or bad will massively vary from business to business. Companies which don't have peak days or times will see little benefit from something like this. Perhaps some companies could neglect certain customers and clients for more profitable ones. A plumber might just focus on jobs for wealthier clients for example then perhaps they can take the Friday off.

But what I don't understand here is this idea that we can reduce the work week to 4 days without cost as a general rule. Let's take a fairly typical company which has a 5% profit margin and where 50% of costs are labour costs. Eg, for every £100 in sales, £50 goes to labour and £5 is profit. Lets now increase the hourly cost of that labour by 20% as suggested... Now for every £100 in sales, £60 goes to labour and -£5 is made in profit.

Of course, big business with better margins will probably be fine but a move like this would likely bankrupt most typical highstreet businesses. The economics just doesn't make any sense without some plan to increase productivity by 20%.

And then how would something like this work in the NHS? Can we even afford to reduce nurses hours by 20%? Are we really suggesting that would have no economic impact or would we need to increase the NHS workforce by 20%? Could we even afford that?

But if you really want to reduce your work week by 20% the correct way to do it (imo) is to find more productive uses for your labour. If you can increase your income by 20% you can spend 20% less time working at no cost to your annual income. Or you can just take a 20% hit to your annual income. Most of us here could probably afford to do that now. We just choose to work because we're greedy.

> Of course, big business with better margins will probably be fine but a move like this would likely bankrupt most typical highstreet businesses. The economics just doesn't make any sense without some plan to increase productivity by 20%.

The assumption is that you inherently increase productivity, because realistically people can only produce so much in a week and they don't need 40 hours to do it. Whether that's actually true, well, we'll find out.

> And then how would something like this work in the NHS? Can we even afford to reduce nurses hours by 20%? Are we really suggesting that would have no economic impact or would we need to increase the NHS workforce by 20%? Could we even afford that?

Given how much of the NHS's workload is from fixing previous mistakes, hospital-acquired infections etc., a well-rested workforce that can avoid those could potentially "pay for" itself.

I'm curious how much of the 4-day workweek movement is driven by religious obligation.

Jews rest on the Sabbath which typically falls on Saturdays, plus high holy days.

Christians rest on the Lord's Day, which falls on Sundays, plus holy days of obligation for Orthodox, Catholic, etc.

Up until now in the Western business world we've standardized on a five-day week which allows Jews and Christians to have their rests, and soccer moms to have their bloody soccer matches.

But with an increasing number of Muslims in the mix, there is a demand from Muslim faithful to rest and pray on Fridays.

Create a four-day work week and now you've got 3 days of rest, 1 for each type of Abrahamic faithful person to go pray.

Muslims already have won major concessions in terms of prayer times and spaces in office buildings, college campuses, etc.

Currency collapses a bit and the government plans to print money to subsidize 4 day work week. The world sounds more and more like a Ayn Rand novel by the day.

This will only work if the labor laws allow for easy firing. The 4-day week at a regular market salary will be very attractive and will attract top performers as long as the company has the flexibility to remove the underperformers.

Getting rid of underperformers in regular private sector roles in the UK isn't really that bad; certainly closer to Germany than the US, but on the whole about right. Public sector is another matter; getting rid of dead weight in the civil service is a tough problem and suppresses the salaries of other employees there, leading to a downward spiral.

> Getting rid of underperformers in regular private sector roles in the UK isn't really that bad; certainly closer to Germany than the US, but on the whole about right <...> Public sector is another matter

The uk has practically no employment rights when you have less than 2 years service. One of the (many) articles on the subject [0]. The employment rights in the public sector are similar, with most of the "unfireable" aspect being people who have been there long enough that it's easier to move them around than it is to get rid of them. The civil service in the UK has an unreasonably long probationary period (9 months) which if people actually cared about removing unproductive employees could be much better applied.

[0] https://www.davidsonmorris.com/dismissing-an-employee-with-l...

I'll repeat a comment I saw here on HN some time ago about the productivity issue: if an asteroid were to hit the earth in one month, and there were a team of NASA engineers working to stop it, would you rather say them to work 4 days per week, or 6-7?

I guess I'd rather live on a planet where most people didn't have to work like their life was in dire jeopardy all the time...

Most people have working lives spanning decades, so maximizing the output of any one month is generally counterproductive.

However, if you have a well-rested, happy and productive team that has adequate time for leisure and recreation, you can turn up the pace for those exceptional months that are really make or break.

But if you try to get people to run at that pace continuously, you'll get a lot of resignations and a few heart attacks at 50.

Working in a crisis (crunch, etc) mode 100% of the time is not healthy or sustainable.

People can stretch to meet a deadline, or avert a crisis—but they need time to recover afterwards. The extra effort and productivity comes at a cost that needs to be repaid for their health and wellbeing.

The purpose of the 4 day week trials around the world has been to evaluate if there’s a measurable drop in productivity, and it seems overwhelmingly there hasn’t been.

Stretch the timelines out a bit. Say the asteroid is two years off (a fairly typical startup runway). I would much rather know the planning, decisions and execution of the one thing that could save my life were done by well rested and level headed individuals, not stressed out sleep deprived people more prone to missing details and making mistakes.

6-7 for the month, then take the next several months (or longer) off.

I'd like to see them round up as many engineers as possible and rota them on a healthy 24/7 schedule. There comes a point where you just can't be productive for 7 days a week. If 4 days is proven to be productive, then put them on a 4 day rota. Otherwise, the status quo of 5 days.

Some of the greatest ideas are conceived when away from work with just time to think on your own. We always need breaks and rest.

Zero. Everyone is going to die anyway

I make web apps for a living. Why would anyone use a human-race saving, rocket-science complexity, literally life and death situation analogy to determine my working conditions?

I mean, if those scientists are successful they'll be getting a congressional medal of honor, millions of dollars in speaking fees, and probably given their choice of job in space science afterwards. Am I getting those things for pushing some HTML?

4 days/week, and I'd want them to be getting good catered food and the best sleeping quarters money can buy. Not working when you're tired and fucking up makes a lot more difference than squeezing out a little more.

> comparing planetary extinction to shipping widgets

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