A 30-hour workweek in America? It nearly became law | Hacker News Reader

A 30-hour workweek in America? It nearly became law

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This was during the depression, I kinda doubt this would have survived through WW2.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stabilization_Act_of_1942 (“The Act authorized and directed the President to issue an order stabilizing prices, wages and salaries to the levels they had had as of September 15, 1942, and to issue additional regulations related to the Act.”) might have had a few more provisions and it would have been reinstated after the war.

Many countries have legal mechanisms to limit freedoms if the sitation calls for it.

I see a lot of cynicism about “code monkey” and privilege. For physical labor, 8h with mandatory breaks is possible. For the “code monkey”, it is scientifically known that brain can’t focus and perform well for more than 4h. In addition the soul killing meetings and the wasted commutes also sap one’s mental energy.

That all being said, such disdain for knowledge work in this thread is immensely alarming. Also, the example of going to another cubicle, chatting with colleagues, getting a coffee, going to the loo etc are for people in Corp where it is easy to hide your incompetence, for rest of us plebs, those are bs that probably count up to may be 15 minutes.

On most days, I barely have time to complete enough pending reviews and doing my own stuff on top of useless meetings watching management flexing their arms on turf wars and irrelevant processes, after which am brain dead.

At my workplace, only people spending 1h on coffee break and chitchatting or smoking are just management discussing their life and family, for us, such discussions are left for after work when we are still alive for a walk.

Also this hour thing sounds to me suspiciously like a build up for statistics that, meatbags are so unproductive and lazy, look how our chatbot can gurgle stackoverflow examples in adequately coherent manner to replace all these lazy monkies.

Disclaimer: Opinions are my own, you have right to disagree and share your constructive criticism.

Because the hacker-nature of knowledge work subverts all other work and tries to leach the profitability out of all other work towards itself? It grows.. and wonders allowed why everyone else grows hostile towards the growth..

This would have a different dynamic in recent decades due to the chronic shortage of skilled labor.

Where is this chronic shortage of skilled labor? Every company is doing layoffs.

Construction

Yeah fair point, in blue collar and trades there's definitely a shortage. Hopefully more people will see trades as a career path instead of getting a bachelor in human resources management.

I wonder if that's actually a good idea. The best time to start learning a skill/trade (includes white collar stuff) seems to be when it's not YET in demand. For example, the worst time to start learning software development was at its covid peak in 2018/2019. If trades are going to be in huge demand now, a lot of people will start learning them and in 5 years of so we're back to square one with low pay and huge competition.

Then again it still probably is more useful than bachelor in hr. Trades are awesome "emergency" / "economy downturn" skills to have.

> covid peak in 2018/2019

That was before COVID though so I think you mean 2021/2022. 2018/2019 was a perfect time to have gone through a boot camp and get just enough certifications to get hired in a 6-figure job in 2021/2022 and then to get laid off in 2023/2024.

I meant 2019 but admittedly I only know of the Polish market and choices most "normal" (statistically) people make - which is to study the thing at the university without getting any job experience in the meantime. Here bootcamps were something maybe 1-2% of people did.

So if you started in 2019 you'd be graduating right into the "layoff" market in which juniors have virtually no possibility to get hired.

As I understand it, there is a shortage of decent working conditions for skilled trade jobs that don't involve writing code.

Ablative human materials labour.

The existence of layoffs has little bearing on if there is a shortage of skilled workers. A layoff in marketing does not imply that a shortage of surgeons cannot exist.

> chronic shortage of skilled labor

Yet hiring portals programmatically reject viable job applicants for being the wrong age, for insufficient job history for unskilled jobs, for multitudes of other irrelevancies kept secret in a black box.

Does anyone know what is special about 30 instead of 40?

If 30 is better than 40, why not a 10 or 5 hour workweek?

That's trite. You could make that argument in reverse, why not a 50 hour or 60 hour week?

It's not linear, and the curve is not the same for all people and tasks.

I always find it fascinating when the very people oppressed by the system defend it with these kinds of comments.

Is there anything special about working 5 days a week ? Why not 7 days like we had back in the good ol days ?

And what about kids ? They use to work at 10 years old now they just sit on their asses until 18+...

Do we even need or want vacation days ? Think about the productivity !!!

Did you know the average human spends 2,555 hours a year sleeping? In a country like America that is 851,581,500,000 hours wasted. Think about the productivity !!!

There is commuting to and from work - but we can't optimise that one out ...

> There is commuting to and from work - but we can't optimise that one out ...

Remote work, building housing that's closer to the office, high-speed public transit, etc.

Ok, you know of nothing significant about 30 rather than 40.

Have you tried it ? I worked part time for years (32 hours instead of 40), it's a completely different lifestyle. I had my wednesday off which meant I never worked more than two days in a row, when you go back to full time it's definitely significant, more than you would expect

well 37.5 hours to 30 hours is 5 days a week to 4 days a week. You work 20% less but get 50% more off days, sounds like a great deal.

4 to 3 days, your productivity would go down 25%, and your vacation up 33% (3 to 4 days), so it's still interesting I guess but seems more balanced.

3 to 2 days, your productivity would go down 33%, but you only get 25% more off days (4 to 5 days).

My incredibly scientific analysis says that it would make sense down to 3 days a week, or 22.5 hours, but not so much after that.

Marginal utility of time off, perhaps.

Sounds like an interesting concept, a "work as you please" approach where compensation is unrelated to your hours worked (and ofcourse it being at least some livable amount).

The old slogan was 8 hours work, 8 hours rest, 8 hours for leisure

Which is of course complete nonsense and just not the case in practice.

> Does anyone know what is special about 30 instead of 40?

It's special because that's not 40 hours. More free time.

Probably wouldn't have applied to exempt employees which many of us are anyway.

I think it could potentially have had a cultural effect. Right now, working 50 hours feels like "going the extra mile" because you know the standard is 40. Well, maybe 40 hours would have become that extra mile.

I believe the pandemic moved most white collar work to work from home. This has allowed softer work requirements in terms of hours and needs to step away from the desk.

Seeing posts of employers imposing spyware to monitor employee keystrokes / time at the desk should serve as warnings and must be pushed back. Historically, pushing back meant union-driven actions. WFH brings a challenge to how union-seeking employees will organize moving forward.

I believe we should absolutely push for 30 hour workweeks or 4 day weeks.

Between dog walking, grocery store trips, attending to children, most people are working <= 30 hours from home as it is

(If you're in office, replace that with walks around the building, coffee/smoke breaks, long lunches, hanging out in your co-workers cube talking about whatever...)

For people who can do those (mostly the ones doing creative activities, such as software, marketing, etc.) the 30 or 40-hour week doesn’t matter anyway. This is more important for service jobs or physically intensive jobs, where the hours spent on the job may correlate pretty heavily with the total work done by the worker.

Who said you're not working when walking your dog? I certainly think better when I walk than sitting at my desk.

This certainly isn't the impression I have. Work from home increased a great deal and still isn't the majority of hours.

BLS has pretty clear statistics for the whole workforce, I didn't find one that broke out salaried positions (which is an okay proxy for white collar, though not great).

At my office it's the rare exception.

I have no idea how many hours I work.

Just no idea how to measure it.

Hours at laptop? Hours thinking about it? A 1 min slack reply at 8pm, does that count as 1min?

I could argue that I work anywhere between 25 and 60 hr / week.

Output vs median employee?

I could argue that some weeks I work 300 hrs, some weeks 0 (feels like -60) hours.

To bill my hours, I estimate them within a range. Then I move the needle depending on my productivity and the value I delivered.

I'm afraid it's not precise. It's more of a happiness-based metric (for me and the client).

Now go ask the factory worker, truck drivers, delivery drivers, &c. who are tracked minute by minute up to the bathroom break

As code monkeys we have it easy but it's far from the norm

For some jobs, hours worked isn't a practical measure of productivity or value. I used to pick orders in a warehouse. The more hours I worked, the more orders they shipped, the more orders they could take, the more profit they could reap.

Now I work as a data analyst. I have some required duties spelled out in my position description, plus a catch-all "requests from other divisions as assigned." If I'd spend more hours working, nothing would really change. The only guaranteed value for each hour they're paying me is having me on call that hour. Which is worth something, I guess, but good luck calculating it.

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