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Comment by bastardoperator | Hacker News Reader

The question I think needs answering is why we wouldn't do it. Obviously most people would love to have an extra 52 days a year to themselves to spend with family, do hobbies, handle personal business. Outside of greed or operational commitments, why aren't we doing this?

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> why aren't we doing this?

because cultural inertia (see also why USA still uses imperial units instead of metric)

but agree that we should have more poeple working less instead of a few people working a lot (or making all the money)

6 hour workdays would also be cool, instead of 3 shifts to cover a 24 hour period companies would be forced to have 4 shifts a day (for 24/7 operations)

For the US it's simply because with free time employees can look for better opportunities.

This is famously why shitty minimum wage jobs have endlessly changing schedules. Many companies have actual rules against setting regularly scheduled shifts.

Was interesting watching the shift happen, regular schedules used to be the norm and it was far easier to work several jobs. Especially once everything became part-time in the 90's.

politicians don't want the plebs to have too much time for anything other than working ... that's just asking for trouble. the less people work, the more they think, come up with ideas and even start to realize that working is for most people in most situations a mere waste of their life time. personally I do believe that work in some way is essential for human life and well being - but I write "some way" because it would be difficult to describe how that would look like but the present state of what working is like for most people is a pathogenic perversion in my opinion.

If you don't grind yourself to a nub on the wheel of the economic machine then our country will be overrun by those OTHER people! Play the national anthem!

I always thought that in a highly automated world, reducing the mandated working hours would be the solution to bring prosperity and peace, but there are some obvious problems with that. For example, in a global economy, nations compete with each other, and for developing nations, an average german producing for fewer hours, but consuming the same or even more resources, would be a great competitive advantage. For something like this to truly work I think it would have to be rolled out globally, or certain tariffs would have to be in place against nations that don’t follow the practice - and let’s be honest, certain nations do much worse things today to gain competitive advantage, and really nobody cares, most people love cheap stuff, however morally questionable the source is.

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