Germany's 4-Day Workweek Pilot | Hacker News Reader

Germany's 4-Day Workweek Pilot

4dayweek.io

My company (located in Canada) has experimented with 4 day weeks, and adopted a "4-day weeks for summers" perk

Personally I noticed the same things. I am less stressed, but more or less just as productive. It seems counter intuitive, I suppose but the extra time to rest does mean I'm more fresh and alert for the time I work

I'm glad to see countries taking this research seriously and I hope more companies move towards this

I think there are two components to this, from a systems perspective. The first is sentiment. Lots of people in positions of authority and power have their identity tied up in their work. They would work 7 days a week if they could. This is the culture they want to push down (think Jamie Dimon [worth ~$2.4B] demanding 5 days a week in office in typical Boomer fashion). Sentiment takes time to change (Overton Window [1]). The second component is worker rights and power to demand reduced hours since we're already so productive in the aggregate [2] [3]; this is inevitable due to structural demographics [4] [5].

(4 day week proponent, almost all 4 day week trial results are very favorable, work to live, don't live to work)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window

[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/a-visual-breakdown-of-who-o...

[3] http://oxfam.org/en/research/multilaterialism-era-global-oli...

[4] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...

[5] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-42657-6

> Lots of people in positions of authority and power have their identity tied up in their work. They would work 7 days a week if they could. This is the culture they want to push down (think Jamie Dimon [worth ~$2.4B] demanding 5 days a week in office in typical Boomer fashion). Sentiment takes time to change (Overton Window [1])

Yes, unfortunately this doesn't seem likely to change much either because people like this tend to promote other people like this, which makes it difficult to displace the outdated attitude

Organizing, unions, labor law. Otherwise, you're always under someone cracking the whip for shareholder returns and management comp. I am not against those gains, but in moderation, we only get one life.

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