I can't wait for companies to use this as a way to drive down pay
Which one would you rather work for? Which one do you think will have a relative abundance of applicants (read: supply of labor)? Which other one do you think will have a lower supply of labor and might need to pay more to attract candidates?
It seems logical that a company offering 4-day workweek would be more attractive and, on a balance of factors, could pay less to attract the same workforce.
Flip it around. If a four-day workweek was the standard, I feel like literally everyone would agree that companies who are trying to introduce a five-day workweek would have to pay more.
I think that the balance of supply and demand will tend to have the market-clearing comp be somewhat lower, assuming that the offered labor for four-day weeks is well in excess of the demanded labor for four-day weeks.
If you made me bang rocks for 5 days, I'm sure I'd do an even a better job if you told me that if I finished early I could work 4 days a week.
The 4 day workweek seems to currently work without loosing productivity in wealthy service based economies like Amsterdam, the City of London, etc where a lot of "work" is just Blue Chip companies with theatrics and endless meetings while riding the gravy train of other peoples' productivity from across the globe who don't have access to a 4 day week doing all the heavy lifting(basically economic neo-colonialism), but this obviously can't scale across economies that actually depend on actually designing and making the stuff the wealthy economies speculate on.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/ageing-global-populat...
People keep saying how the declining demographics will mean the workers have more leverage but when will that come? As currently I'm struggling to find a job and a recruiter who rejected me just told me they have huge supply of "strong candidates" and they don't need to compromise anymore on offering WFH or accepting only English speaking candidates.
Maybe by the time I retire I can see that leverage?
Longer convo for another thread, but TLDR yes, "structural decline." Trajectory is a function of how fast folks age out of the working population (retire or death), because cohorts coming up behind them keep shrinking.
EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile.
For what?
That’s a particularly strange demand to make as someone who doesn’t expose your own contact info.
I’m connected with over 2k recruiters and was low key trying to help.
So I'd have two criticisms of your "X-20%" figure. The first is that just because individual workers are only in 4 days a week, doesn't have to mean the factory only operates 4 days a week; indeed a lot of steel factories do some kind of shift work anyway because firing up a furnace from cold is hugely inefficient. Sure, that means more heads total and so more HR expenses than if everyone worked 5 days, but I don't think it adds up to the 20% you quoted.
Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get this way might be enough to more than offset the losses, and even increase your profits.
[1] https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/stories/history-five-da... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/american-... (But note, the claim that moving to a 5-day week was a pay cut needs some context. The 5-day week started in 1926. But in 1914, Ford already doubled his workers' wages from $2.50/day (which was already not bad by the standards of the time) to $5/day, almost unheard of at the time - though initially with strings attached [3] which were later removed. So working 5 days a week at Ford's factory could well have still brought in more net pay a week than 6 days a week at a competitor in 1926. [3] https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5...
Henry Ford's revenue boost firstly came from his improvements to automation and innovative highly optimized production line assembly processes, not because le let his workers work 5 days a week instead of 6.
It was those innovations that allowed him to reduce the numbers of worker hours needed while get same productivity levels or higher, not vice versa as they didn't just magically come from working his workers less but from innovations to production lines efficiency. Workers working less was a consequence of that, not the cause.
> Ernst Abbe, the head of one of the greatest German factories, wrote many years ago that the shortening from nine to eight hours, that is, a cutting-down of more than 10 per cent, did not involve a reduction of the day’s product, but an increase, and that this increase did not result from any supplementary efforts by which the intensity of the work would be reinforced in an unhygienic way. This conviction of Abbe still seems to hold true after millions of experiments over the whole globe.
This was written 1913, about the time when Ford's automation was just getting going - the "many years ago" and the fact that Abbe died 1905, shows his studies were referring to a time before Ford's production lines and efficiency gains.
> That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be relearned each generation. In 1848, the English parliament passed the ten-hours law and total output per-worker, per-day increased. In the 1890s employers experimented widely with the eight hour day and repeatedly found that total output per-worker increased. In the first decades of the 20th century, Frederick W. Taylor, the originator of “scientific management” prescribed reduced work times and attained remarkable increases in per-worker output.
This too is from a pre-Ford time.
So I would reply that while Ford's innovations might have compounded any gains from shorter working hours, such gains have been found in many other places and times. indeed, the IGDA summarises their evidence by saying "five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century".
The number of widgets produced and the price asked for them is not a function of workdays.
You’d need to control for quality of widget produced - and since buyers are human that may mean perceived quality rather than some absolute assessment of quality.
You’d need to control for location & distance to market/customer for each widget produced.
You’d need to control for efficiency of production process.
You’d need to control for… you get the point. The only possible way your idea could stand would be if all else was held equal - and that’s simply not possible outside of horse shit models.
Models can be useful, but not like this. This is a BS way to think about an economic model.
Exactly. And most companies and factories in the west have already optimized for all these factors to get maximum output on a 5 day work week. Moving to a 4 day workweek would be an automatic production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness compared top those still on 5.
What you're talking about, companies who can lower working hours without loosing productivity and competitiveness are very few and far between, usually world champions who have a captive market to themselves like Nvidia, ASML, Airbus, high end service jobs, etc, but that's only a microscopic share of the total amount of players on the market. The rest are firing on all cylinders trying to overtake or catch up to those established market players, and if you ever worked at a startup, it usually means longer hours, not fewer.
>This is a BS way to think about an economic model.
What's the better way? If all companies could get the same levels of productivity form 4 days a weeks from 5 why haven't they done that already?
Factories and companies start and die all the time. The idea that some steady state equilibrium exists is only in these BS models.
>> production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness
Apple is less competitive because it makes less iPhones than Samsung?
>> What's the better way?
Stop pretending models predict reality perfectly.
But what it reality to you and how do you describe it if not by models?
Complicated. It’s rare for any interesting scenario not to be complicated.
>> how do you describe it
By aiming for honesty and accuracy but with enough humility to realise these absolutes are unachievable in most interesting cases. To make it more concrete in this particular case It means being careful to state assumptions is essential.
How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
It's my goal indeed, but not the goal of my country, the economy and the businesses in it who provide the jobs I work for and also lobby for the labor laws my EU country has.
Of course doing no work at all while getting paid loads would be the dream, but I wasn't talking about dreams, I was talking about reality. And the reality is way different than what you dream of.
How do we make less working days a reality for everyone, instead of just ~60 companies form the UK?
Solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 40 hours a week will take a toll on your brain that solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 1 hour a week empirically cannot.
>How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
Through the exact science you say you "don't buy" because you seem to believe companies operating in a flawed market are better at finding ground truth than literal science.
I'm saying companies believe in science that leads to profit, as the market can stay irrational longer than companies can stay solvent.
Same how science showed switching to EUV lithography is better than sticking to DUV and then all companies adopted that, if science would also show workers working 32h per week results in more profit for them than 40h, then they would all switch in a heart beat to capture all that money left on the table by their competitors still stuck in their ancient 40h workweek.
But that hasn't happened.
The problem is if they pay you $x per year, they don't care how many hours you work, as long as the job gets done. So something that makes their life a bit more annoying (no replies on Friday) but makes your life amazingly better won't get done.
Because more money is what most candidates prioritize when job hopping, because when buying a house they can pay it with that money but can't pay it with more time off.
The only people who prioritize less hours for less money are those who are already fortunate enough to have enough money but those can always choose to work less hours for proportionately less pay.
Like it or not, there are so many people in this rat race trying to build wealth that 40h and more money is preferable to 32h and less money. That's why the 40h sticks and the negotiation is done on money.
Although you could argue that's already the case in a lot of Europe vs. parts of the US. Of course, it's an imperfect comparison because of the barriers to moving countries or even acquiring a remote job in a different country.
And there are things you can do to turn money into time, it's possible but not as easy to go the other way around when you're salaried.
When was the last time you saw a widget factory running 8 hours a day 5 days a week? Factories already run 24/7/365. They hire enough workers for their own economics to make sense (either enough so they all work no more than 40 a week or they just pay a bunch of overtime). If a 4 day workweek became standard it would just mean hiring more people or giving more overtime, since it's not the people that need to be optimized in that equation.
But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week.
But then why hasn't it become the norm already and even in some cases, like in Asia, people are forced to stay in the office way more hours than 40?
If I take that research and show it to my boss saying I should work 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay, he'll most likely laugh in my face and tell me to go back to work.
Clearly the vast majority of companies don't believe the same research, otherwise we'd be working 32 hours/week a long time ago.
I think my manager would also like to work just 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay. So weh do we stop blaming them?
It's the C-suite that is doing it. The C-Suite got where they are because they are extroverts who excel at in person interactions. They can't use that skill unless you're there in front of them. They also came up in a world where everyone worked in an office 40 hours a week. And since they are in charge, they get to choose the rules of engagement, and are seemingly choosing to ignore productivity studies that show their decisions don't make sense.
Eventually they will be eclipsed by C-Suites that follow the science as they will get out-competed. But it will take decades.
I also don't buy this. Companies are all profit oriented and don't like leaving money on the table if research shows there is left over money on the table.
They can't monetize control but they can monetize money. If research would show they would make more profits using AWS instead of Azure(example pulled out of my ass for simplicity), they would immediately switch to it.
So if research would be universal and clear cut that working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40 hours, then at least a significant proportion of companies would be using this new way of work as leverage to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them at profits and market share, and then that would become the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since that's how competition in capitalism works.
But so far that's not been the case.
https://www.businessinsider.com/return-to-office-mandates-re...
"Any one of the three economic factors described above (real estate, retention and recruitment), by itself, could justify the alleged loss in productivity. When you consider all three, it is extremely hard to imagine any organization for which the losses resulting from a strict RTO policy would be offset by a possible increase in worker productivity. As a further consideration, a strict RTO policy will also disproportionally impact certain traditionally disadvantaged groups, leading to further decreases in organizational diversity.":
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paologaudiano/2023/08/14/here-i...
People return to offices, productivity plunges:
https://ktla.com/news/money-business/people-return-to-office...
The return to the office could be the real reason for the slump in productivity. Here’s the data to prove it:
https://fortune.com/2023/02/16/return-office-real-reason-slu...
Expecting a return to office will boost worker productivity is ‘magical thinking,’ says Meta’s former director of remote work
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/expecting-return-office-boost...
> So if research would be universal and clear cut that working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40 hours, then at least a significant proportion of companies would be using this new way of work as leverage to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them at profits and market share, and then that would become the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since that's how competition in capitalism works.
If only it were that simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/15/alibabas-jack-ma-working-ove...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/175400/workers-sense-identity-j...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90955495/happiness-work-survey-u...
https://www.careerchange.com/newsletters/working-standards-u...
Also, "immediately" switching across cloud vendors is not even a pipe dream, it's an impossibility and the very act of switching is incredibly expensive both short and long term (unless your cloud usage is one VM or so). So there's no simplicity in that example, it's a counter-example.
There is a massive hole in your logic.
It's inevitable really.