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Comment by dankben | Hacker News Reader

The right to a part time job has been around for about twenty years i think. The current discussion is to rethink the workweek as four days, there are multiple models in talks (4x 10 hours, 4x 8 hours with less pay, etc..)

In my opinion the real problem is that the german tax system incentivises working less instead of more, as the marginal tax increases even for hours worked beyond the 40h work week -> the more you work the less you keep per hour.

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4x10h 4 times per week, every week sounds horrible IMHO. I personally definitely can't be 20% more productive per day by working 2 extra hours.

This would only work if you clock in 10h on paper, but actually work much less hours from home where nobody tracks how much you actually work, but if have to actually clock in 10h per day at the office, plus commute time, I'll most likely just space out and watch the clock for the rest of those two hours. And then that extra free day per week would be to recover from the long working day at the office nullifying any advantage.

Healthcare workers often work on six-week rotations that average out to 37.5/40 h per week. The key word is average, because shifts are usually 12 hours and some weeks (one or two per six week rotation) are composed of 3 days on, 2 days off and 2 days on.

This is 60h / week.

>This is 60h / week.

That's not something we should praise. It's probably why healthcare workers are so burned out and make so many mistakes leading to malpractice.

Maybe in certain healthcare cases, longer hours can be more tolerable when you're doing repetitive things you've already done a million times that you can do "on autopilot" without the risk of mistakes, but for mentally intensive tasks where you're constantly thinking and problem solving and need to stay sharp, there's no way I can pull 60h/week of productivity. I'm not even fully productive for the whole 40h, let alone more.

I could pull 60h weeks if I were working on my own projects being my own boss answering only to myself and working at my own pace and deadlines, but not part of the soul crushing corporate machine with constant bullshit interruptions, meetings, theatrics and management breathing down my neck.

There's a source somewhere for the greatest number of errors happening because of shift change, where e.g. a doctor's notes are incomplete and don't mark down a detail that later turned out to be important. The study found that much-longer-than-i-thought shifts were better than shorter ones, I believe e.g. 16 or even 24 hour shifts were safer than 8 hour shifts.

Just 4 days a 6 hours, same pay, but fewer stupid meetings

> In my opinion the real problem is that the german tax system incentivises working less instead of more, as the marginal tax increases even for hours worked beyond the 40h work week -> the more you work the less you keep per hour.

Unless the marginal tax goes over 100% don't you still earn more total by working more?

This is a common misunderstanding in the United States, as well.

Parent stated you earn less per hour, not in total. Tax rate stays below 100%, but increases as you earn more

Yes, but they also stated that this incentivizes working less instead of working more. Generally if you earn more by working more that is incentive to work more not less so I wanted clarification.

Each additional of unit of time you work in a given period of time is one less unit of time for something else.

For example, regardless of taxes, working 8 hours can mean you have dinner with your family. Working 12 hours means more money, but missing dinner with family so the additional 4 hours would need to be compensated more than the first 8.

Taxes would be similar. If setup the tax rate so high, say 90% for the amount of income one would earn for the average wage beyond 8 hours, then there wouldn’t be much reason to give up your leisure time.

Kind of related to this concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_utility

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