I’m starting to believe the obfuscation and lack of information regarding “four days but actually working longer” or “four days with reduced hours” models is deliberate.
The authors almost always have conflicts of interest. The studies are often funded and/or staffed by proponents of the 4 day work week.
The outcomes are mostly subjective and self reported, which is problematic because employees clearly have a vested interest in claiming they are more productive than they really might be.
They’re also short term, and dont address the doubt every executive has which is whether employees eventually mean revert back to their historical hourly productivity levels.
Then there is the fact that they don’t bother controlling for how much work the employees were previously doing. Many white collar workers are underworked. If you cut their hours it won’t impact output, because they were bottlenecking on work availability not time. What employers want to know is not what happens in over resourced offices, but rather what happens in well managed offices where employee workload was already optimised.
And that is also entirely irrelevant. The relevant question is whether our society can maintain similar levels of good fortune if we all worked less. And the historical evidence is clear: there are many times more workers today, using tools that are monumentally more advanced, than in the 1930s or even 1950s. And yet, we are all required to work just as much as we used to 100+ years ago, while being paid less in real terms.
> The productivity benefits of automation have not led to a 15-hour workweek, as predicted by economist John Maynard Keynes in 1930, but instead to "bullshit jobs": "a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case".
What I want to know is, whether we can manage a society, where one part is not always overworked and the other part bored to death. But rather a healthy balance. 4 days workweek might help as a step in that direction, but I agree that there is way too much wishful thinking involved in those studies proposing them.
Throughout human history, this has always been the only model that has ever brought social progress. Voting for more enlightened leaders sounds nice, but the reality is that massive pressure from working people (in the form of actual strikes and violence) has been the only thing that has actually worked. Not to say that it has always worked: even when the riot is not successfully suppressed , it can be co-opted into bringing in even worse regimes and problems (see Russia, China).
That model worked when people were much more equal in output, before the ambitious could leverage skills and tools to become an order of magnitude more productive than average.
It’ll never work today, because there’s too many people in too many industries who outperform the average worker 10:1.
Collective bargaining is quite unfair to those people and they’ll never accept it.
It's much more often managers who don't want to have this type of employee, because they fear for their positions or other similar issues. In particular, this happens via the absurd practice of refusing to give significant raises year to year, forcing the best workers to leave for a new company, taking all of their hard earned organizational knowledge.
Not to mention, I'm not talking about collective bargaining for salaries. This is about an economy-level change, not a company level or even industry level change. And it would benefit the best workers just as much as the worst.
(Not that I’m against a 4-day week. My company moved to compressed hours and it’s been fantastic.)