Survey Shows Overwhelming Interest in a Four-Day Workweek | Hacker News Reader

Survey Shows Overwhelming Interest in a Four-Day Workweek

spectrum.ieee.org

17 pointsjtr16 comments

> About 95 percent of the respondents said they want to work a shorter week—which to me means employees think they can complete their tasks in four days rather than five.

The poll didn’t ask if respondents thought they could finish their tasks in four days rather than five. It only asked if they were interested in a four-day workweek.

The exact question is in the linked poll:

> Would you like to work a four-day workweek?

There were fewer than 600 responses and most of them said yes.

Obviously people are going to respond “Yes” if you ask them if they want to work fewer days.

I don't understand what's wrong with this. The world has gotten so much more productive over decades, while most of the gains go to the top 0.1-1% [1] [2]. People work to live, they do not live to work (except the minority of people who enjoy their jobs, it's their identity, whatever).

Anyway, I don't think it matters in the long run. Labor supply shortages will continue due to structural demographics, and younger folks don't drink the Protestant work ethic koolaid. 4 day week trials are proving very successful [3] [4] [5]. Like all progress, it just takes time for younger folks to age into voting and labor force participation and older folks to die out.

[1] https://www.epi.org/publication/swa-wages-2019/?chartshare=1...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/18/the-wealthiest-10percent-of-...

[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=4+day+week+success

[4] https://4dayweek.io/countries

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-day_workweek

What's going to happen if the law allowed up to 20hr work weeks? Employers would pay twice less at first, but they would have to hire twice more staff, thus creating more competition for labor and driving wages up.

They wouldn't necessarily have to hire double because they would be able to tap into a different pool of workers: experienced and wealthier people who can afford to work less. This pool is going to grow, as the world becomes wealthier.

Gradual normalization of reduced hours is how we get to eliminating work. The goal should be to give everybody the freedom to work as much or as little as they want.

Knowledge worker companies would invest more in countries that didn’t have such laws, then hire remotely.

Manufacturing companies would move even more operations to countries without those laws.

Labor that couldn’t move would become more expensive. Unfortunately this means a lot of things that consumers use directly: Plumbers, transportation, grocery store work. Things would be expensive.

Also, don’t underestimate the issues that come from frequent shift changes. Imagine if you hired a plumber and they had to drop their tools and leave the job site ASAP because they just hit 20 hours for the week, but another plumber would stop by later and try to pick up where they left off.

Some time later, in the near future:

"Survey Shows Overwhelming Interest in a Three-Day Workweek"

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