US Job Market Clues Seen in Drop in Employee Hours Worked | Hacker News Reader

US Job Market Clues Seen in Drop in Employee Hours Worked

bloomberg.com

18 pointspg_123430 comments

I worked for a place which allowed a high amount of “leave without pay”.

There was a limit based on years with the company but a new employee got 3 weeks paid leave and up to 9 weeks unpaid. You pay the company the unpaid time x salary and then they give it back to you when you use it.

It worked out pretty well so if I was sick I could take the day off or if a coworker was sick and came to work, I could leave. I tend to keep a cold twice as long as other people.

I was able to take 3 one month vacations or every Friday off for a long time or somewhere in between.

What would happen if you paid for unpaid leave and didn’t use it?

Paid back to you at the end of each year like it never happened. I don’t think it happened much at all.

I could also work and bank comp time up to 80 hours (no overtime, 99% of the time). Use comp time like vacation time but no pay.

Never heard of that, but that’s really a moonlighters dream.

Here I am planning how to use every single one of my vacation days strategically so I can grow my $1k/mon business to $10k/mon. If I had up to 2 months unpaid it would be a game-changer.

Maybe I’m missing something, but what’s the point of paying for the unpaid leave if you get the money back afterwards?

So you don't have to go without pay during the break period. I know a lot of teachers do this for the 3 month summer vacation.

Is this a sign for the old 20th Century economy, or a peek over the horizon at the new 21st Century economy? I suspect it's mostly the latter, but with a heaping scoop of status quo and denial.

That is, for years there's been chatter about the 4 day work week, perhaps the tipping point is coming? Maybe X aggregated 40 hr week hours are better off distributed based on a 32 hr week?

Side note: A couple of dev gigs ago, I negotiated every other Friday off (with a pay adjustment). It was inspiring. Mind you, not everyone can swallow a pay cut, but if you can I'd say it worth trying. See how your health spectrum improves, etc.

Lot of folks are already doing this with remote simply without the pay cut.

It's fair when someone is able to accomplish the expectations before the allocated time but a lot of individuals are not equipped or built for remote and don't meet expectations but cut their hours.

I'm pro remote but don't think a lot of individuals are equipped to be able to effectively do it. What I see and when talking to leaders in other companies it is about 20% truly justify the remote and the other 80% would be more effective in the office.

But if those remote workers keep their jobs and continue to get paid, then it doesn't really matter how "effective" they are, does it?

Their employer keeps paying them, so the amount of work they are doing is about right.

companies do not, and at times cannot, simply hire and fire as inefficiencies are noticed. it is a process, and often a poor one.

the employer keeps paying them, so the larger system evidently tolerates their current efforts. for the time being. this is not the same as their amount of work being about right.

unless you intend to say that milking a system without hitting the breaking point is optimal.

> milking a system without hitting the breaking point is optimal.

That's how the people on the other side of the table feel.

well as long as everyone is in agreement, this wheel can keep on turning.

> That's how the people on the other side of the table feel.

Of course, you can't say such a general thing about a very diverse group of people with different motives and incentives.

Why shouldn't workers maximise their utility?

If you want someone to work harder than they "should", you need to motivate them somehow.

Yeah. I accepted adjustment in pay as their default for everyone else was the typical 40 hrs. But it was well worth it.

That said, a 4 day WW can work anywhere. It ceratainly not remote-only. My general sense is, most managers/leaders can't imagine beyond the status quo so they stick with ehat they know. Yeah, I know. Not actually leadership then :(

What is “effectively” in this context? Is it the same level of efficiency (provided efficiency can be defined for the given type of work) as working in the office? The company is trying to extract as much as possible for as little pay as possible. They obviously want workers to be as efficient as possible. However, I see no problem with workers pushing back against this and doing as little as possible for as much pay as possible. Why should the company be at the winning end of this tension? The state of the labor market over the last 4-5 decades has favored the company. Perhaps it is time it favored labor.

> The state of the labor market over the last 4-5 decades has favored the company. Perhaps it is time it favored labor.

Has it ever actually favored labor?

It seems to me that other than very brief blips, the economy has always made companies (and owners and executives) very wealthy by extracting as much labor as possible as cheaply as possible

Favored labor? Probably not out right. But labor certainly fared better when unions were stronger and had more members.

Yes, companies have been winning. But the sociological friction is adding up. They'd be wise to adjust their game plan (i.e., be less greedy). We'll see.

I tend to agree and I hope we are correct.

Meanwhile many of us have cut the commute out of our day, resulting in hours of extra butt-in-chair per day/week. Additionally, we spend much less time at the (proverbial) water cooler. And for anybody who needs to actually think to work effectively, a private home office is much better than the racket of an open plan office filled with people in zoom meetings.

Taking a 20% pay cut has never been an issue for me and I doubt it’s an issue for most software engineers who are pulling six figures even at 80% their “full” salary. The issue is getting a “manager” to agree to it. I would suppose the crux is that MiddleManager doesn’t give a shit about the company’s payroll expenses and would rather not have to explain to anyone else, higher up or otherwise, why I’m never at work on Fridays. I think people underestimate how shitty others are when they’re jealous and/or perceive someone as working “less” than they are. Coworkers will absolutely ruin an arrangement like you getting a 4-day workweek if they can, even if you’re making proportionally less money.

So unfortunately it seems the buy-in must come from the C-level, where the IQ tends to be the lowest in an organization.

The 4 day work week won't take off because it gives employees a benefit and not an employer. The employers will see the 5th day as added productivity and get us to work it. I don't know of anyone who benefits from productivity. Sure, we keep boosting productivity but that just means we can do more work. Until we divorce ourselves from capitalism we won't see the benefits. They said we'd get down to four day weeks in the 70s. That didn't happen but productivity went up.

Employers benefit from less burnout, this is important as the population of workers continues to shrink.

Employers don't care about burnout. If you are unfit for use they will discard you and get another person. They'll work the rest of your coworkers harder. It would only matter if everyone were to feel burnout at the same time. I mean, in the US, we don't even have a minimum PTO threshold and sick days are often from the same pool.

Smart employers do, some don't.

Smart employers care about quarterly profits. They do not care about anything else.

Most companies are not publicly traded and therefore care less about quarterly profits than the public ones.

The people in positions of power get their bonuses just the same. It doesn't come from stock price but it does come from meeting targets. If you can burn out a few devs to get there you just hire more and slowly replace them. That's just how things work.

I am a cloud solution architect in Germany and since April I switched to a 4 days work week (Fridays off) for a 20% pay cut (actually less than that since now I pay a bit fewer taxes). The way I think about it is it’s 50% more free time each week for about 17% pay cut, which for me is a great deal.

https://archive.ph/F8oY1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com