Manufacturing does not work like software engineering. There is an extremely direct link between people showing up to the job and parts rolling off the line. The workers aren’t watching YouTube for half the day.
It is not as simple as you picture it.
Sounds like a net benefit for everyone, frankly
Let's say 1 worker works 40 hrs/week, but gets a day off every second week, i.e. 70 hrs/2weeks.
I need to hire a worker to keep productivity the same on that day off.
Now what if 9 other workers are staggered with their days off? My worker has a full time position (well, they need to have a day off too, but for the purpose of example.
"We need someone to work when people are off" being plugged by someone who is, implicitly, covering multiple people's days off keeps productivity exactly the same.
And if you make 100 widgets a day as a worker, you make 100 a day that you're working - we don't count your day off and say "Oh, you're only making 90/day now, worker productivity is lowered!"
There is no financial difference between paying someone to not work one day every two weeks, and having them show up that day but not do anything (which we can agree would be unproductive).
Paying someone to stay home, and then paying someone else to cover them, reduces productivity of the factory because it requires more total labor to produce the same number of parts.
You can argue that the person will be more refreshed or whatever, which I think is probably a good argument for many types of jobs that are not manufacturing line work.
People who have engineering or creative jobs constantly think that you can get the same work out of four days as five. And for their jobs, because they have significantly decreasing marginal productivity per hour worked, they might be right. But that's very different than line work. The 40th hour worked does not have appreciably different productivity than the 35th hour worked in a week on a line.
PTO is a "fringe benefit". Factoring it into productivity levels is orthogonal, as its goal is to increase desirability of the employer, not to ensure "maximum output per employee".
That's what I'm saying - productivity per employee doesn't change. They still make the same widgets/hour on the line on hour 1, hour 35 and hour 40 of their week. The company just employs 1.1 people to run that line full time (well, 40 hours a week, leaving aside 24/7 ops for the sake of simplicity) rather than the mathematical minimum 1 person.
> Paying someone to stay home, and then paying someone else to cover them, reduces productivity of the factory because it requires more total labor to produce the same number of parts.
Maybe it's the pedant in me as I approach an MBA program, but while there are multiple definitions of productivity, in industry it's usually an expression of the output as a factor of input. And generally it's the equipment that's the limitation. A factory whose equipment can produce 200,000 widgets/year can still only produce 200,000 widgets/year, even if you have twice as many employees working 20 hour weeks, i.e. productivity is the same.
"I work just as hard, I just don't work as much."
The thing about values is they only count when they're actually tested and have consequences.
Under GM management.
But if you list the causes of SAABs demise you get pretty far down the list before coming to "2 months vacation and 36 hour workdays" (it's 25 days and 39 hour work weeks btw).
You're saying that a company that employees thousands of people should have died earlier and cost those folks their jobs because....it annoyed you personally?
¹) Yep, see dagw's sibling comment.
There's a reason they ended up as a GM brand.
More socialist countries are inherently bad a creating and maintaining profitable businesses.
Your second sentence it a strawman. Of course it's not capitalism to bail out manufacturers. How's that working out for the US? All you've proven is that when the US implements socialist policies it's detrimental. So, thanks for proving my point.