If AI Lets Us Do More in Less Time–Why Not Shorten the Workweek? | Hacker News Reader

If AI Lets Us Do More in Less Time–Why Not Shorten the Workweek?

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73 pointssergeyfomkin188 comments

Because capital has realized that as long as there are bread and circuses to distract people along with convenient targets for the less well-off to blame for their misfortune (immigrants, trans folks) they can continue to vacuum up all of the wealth and power for themselves without lifting a finger to improve the lives of those whose labor makes it all possible.

Asked and answered right here. Also worth providing context:

* When we asked the same question in the 2010s with productivity gains from technology, it was the gays and the immigrants that were the reason we couldn’t

* When we asked the same question in the 2000s with productivity gains from technology, it was the gays and the immigrants and the Iraq War that were the reason we couldn’t (until the housing crisis)

* When asked in the 90s, it was the gays, the immigrants, and budget shortfalls that were the reasons we couldn’t (nevermind continued tax cuts)

* When asked in the 80s, it was the gays, the immigrants, and the Soviets as cause for not shortening workweeks

I can go back for several more decades this way. It’s seemingly always the fault of minority groups that we can’t roll back workweeks and reclaim leisure time, rather than the fault of the monied elite demanding ever more for themselves. Until enough people acknowledge and accept this, I get to spend my time fighting to exist rather than all of us enjoying more community and leisure time together.

Why workweek had been shortened to 40h then? No gays, no imigrants back then?

Imagine how productive economy will become if 996 workweek will become mandatory!

Unironically what half of HN thikn peak futurism in America should be, hyper optimized:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TikTokCringe/comments/1lo783l/hows_...

…seriously? Cannot tell if you’re being serious or just shitposting.

Here, an old-fashioned LMGTFY: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2015/10/how-did-the-40-hour-...

Wikipedia has a far more gruesome and comprehensive history of the US Labor movement, like the history of the NLRB, anti-union efforts in the 1860-1930s, the Coal Wars, Battle of Blair Mountain, etc. Everyone should know this history, at the very least so they can understand the harm that comes from delaying action further: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_union_busting_in_th...

>convenient targets for the less well-off to blame for their misfortune (immigrants, trans folks)

Immigrants maybe, but nobody in the rust belt thinks their town is being hollowed out and flooded with fentanyl because of trans people. That's not to say they have no grievances against trans people, but to think that the right think trans people are "to blame for this misfortune" shows a huge ignorance of the right's politics.

> to think that the right think trans people are "to blame for this misfortune" shows a huge ignorance of the right's politics

They're pointing out the use of Goldsteins to distract from the root cause of the issue (increasing wealth inequality) and get a significant fraction of the general population to believe the problem is more directly caused by immigrants than changes in legislation that allow for more corporate abuse. It's moot that trans people aren't a reasonable cause of economic problems because they are a distraction from economic problem.s

Evangelicals have expectations of very strict gender roles in the traditional family. The “collapse” of the traditional family is why we have social and economic problems in the United States. Trans-women are the biggest threat to their ideas gender roles, so an important part of the right absolutely blames trans people for their misfortune.

>The “collapse” of the traditional family is why we have social and economic problems in the United States.

You're making the same mistake as the parent comment, by conflating social issues with economic ones. Evangelicals have a lot to hate about trans people on the social front, but I'm not aware of any that thinks the decline of American manufacturing is due to trans people. At best it's something like "low birth rates is shrinking the labor force", but even that's more social than economic.

> but to think that the right think trans people are "to blame for this misfortune" shows a huge ignorance of the right's politics.

Then perhaps the right should stop spending a large portion of their political messaging on trans people?

I mean, for fuck's sake, nobody is making up the right's weird culture-war obsession with children's genitals. It's real, it's happening, and it's disturbing. Last election cycle Cruz was running ads depicting trans kids as big burly men who beat up little girls - literally. I'm not exaggerating. This is not hyperbole. This is actually their platform.

If your platform seems fucking stupid and completely devoid of any substance, then maybe you should not be aligning yourself with those people. Nobody should be expected to hand-hold and coddle you in the face of what can only be described as complete and utter idiocy. We're all very tired of this - you have played stupid for far too long.

> Then perhaps the right should stop spending a large portion of their political messaging on trans people?

Honestly, currently in a country led by the (far) right, I hear about the argument maybe once a year / 18 months at best.

Not even the immigrants get much discussion nowadays.

This does not reflect in the actual party platforms and political messaging the right produces.

Again, that ad Cruz ran is real. He chose to use his very precious ad space on that. A cheap, low-intelligence blow to trans people. We have to acknowledge the reality of the situation we are in: the right is mostly focused on rage-baiting hard-working Americans with stupid culture war bullshit. And it works really, really well.

I am not an American

Not that conservatives were ever trans-friendly, but their current agitated fascination with the subject in US is mostly because Dems invited it by publicly supporting some related policies (sports etc) that don't poll well, to put it mildly. It's easy pickings, so of course they go there.

It doesn't neatly map to left/right politics globally, though. E.g. Sweden massively scaled back access to puberty blockers under social democrats.

I can assure you “capital” is really happy with the dirt cheap labour that immigration brings. The destruction of the lower class is not their concern.

They're even happier with AI labor because it doesn't require nearly the costs of human labor.

For now! Vendor lock in for your workforce might end up biting folks with this approach when the bills start coming due and they enshittify

Part of the reason capital likes anti-immigrant politics is that the end policy result isn't getting rid of unempowered labor, its reducing more people to unempowered labor for capital, rather it is via detention in public facilities that provide labor, directly or indirectly, for private efforts, detention in private facilities that can have work requirements, or "temporary passes" that give the employer control of status. [0]

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/trump-administr...

A lot of what we call work today really is just performative. As long as people stay busy, no one questions where the value goes. AI just makes it harder to hide the fact that so much of the system runs on keeping people occupied instead of actually improving their lives.

> so much of the system runs on keeping people occupied instead of actually improving their lives

Could you give some examples outside of government? I would imagine the wealth owners would cut those jobs pretty quickly? I've always been told that private enterprise was so much more efficient and good at cutting waste.

Absolutely. Take Google or Meta — both have gone through rounds of layoffs while still keeping thousands in roles focused on alignment, planning, or internal coordination. McKinsey and other big consultancies often produce reports with minimal new insight, tailored mostly to justify executive decisions. Even in finance, layers of middle office and compliance roles exist not because they’re strictly needed, but because no one wants to take on institutional risk. These aren’t government jobs — they’re high-paid, private-sector roles that persist because the system values control and optics just as much as output.

> tailored mostly to justify executive decisions

> they’re high-paid, private-sector roles that persist because the system values control and optics just as much as output

Sounds like you've answered your own question - these jobs are needed for the system to work. They're not "extra".

Capital isn't a group of people. What does this mean? People who own capital? Like there is some proxy sent to Blackrock about "should we shorten the work week to 4 days" and they vote on it. As someone with a 401k, I must have missed that one.

What's with this low quality comment. If you have nothing productive to add, don't comment.

Or try to make a change yourself. Start a business and try a 4 day work week. Everyone should love it according to your world view and you could just be slightly less "greedy" and hire immigrants and trans folks and every other 'misfortunate' soul.

Capital is a group of people. It is a few shared dynasties, people who have hoovered up the majority of wealth, the folks running private equity, the shrinking number of real estate developers that own a larger and larger share of all apartments.

Your line about 'just start a business' is something people say but never actually execute on themselves. Try making a store to compete with Amazon, a or a grocer to compete with our consolidated giants. They can and will use the economy of massive scale they have to crush your business into oblivion, taking a short term loss to maintain a death grip on the market

That's capital.

>Capital is a group of people. It is a few shared dynasties, people who have hoovered up the majority of wealth, the folks running private equity, the shrinking number of real estate developers that own a larger and larger share of all apartments.

What about the average American with pensions and 401ks that are invested in stocks? Or the "FIRE" crowd on reddit with 6 figures invested in Vanguard ETFs? Is "Capital" just a slur to be used against owners of capital you don't like, or you think have too much?

> What about the average American with pensions and 401ks that are invested in stocks? Or the "FIRE" crowd on reddit with 6 figures invested in Vanguard ETFs?

Own capital or be owned by those who do. That's how it works.

We're trapped in a game that's taking the world to a bad place, but which we're doing really well at.

Pensions and 401ks are today's "people taking care of elders when they're too old to work" - an idea as old as humanity. It's just abstracted through markets.

>Own capital or be owned by those who do. That's how it works.

You didn't answer the question. Are those people "captial" or not? If it's just "own capital", then most Americans are "capital" because they at least have some sort of 401k or pension, but I suspect you wouldn't put them in the same group as "people who have hoovered up the majority of wealth" or whatever.

> Are those people "capital" or not?

Probably not. In the sense it's being used in this discussion, capital are people whose majority of income comes from dividends and rents. So your typical 401k (likely - I am not American) isn't in that category, rather they are labor with some savings for an old age.

The main difference is whether you need to work for someone or not. That determines your social class and to a large extent, self-interests.

>capital are people whose majority of income comes from dividends and rents

So the average boomer after retirement?

I think you're making a good point. I have an honest question for you.

Aren't you scared how American system pits retirees and their kids against each other? What you just said means, essentially, if workers want to improve their working conditions, they have to go against shareholder profits, and they're threatening their parents survival (which relies on these profits). Isn't it f'ed up?

Yes that's how retirement works. Other people work and take care of you. That's how it's always worked.

I also don't see too many boomers funding Super PACs and getting their favorite laws passed.

Social security is the largest source of income for the median boomer (the median boomer has approximately $100k in financial assets, not nearly enough to generate substantial income)

> I suspect you wouldn't put them in the same group as "people who have hoovered up the majority of wealth" or whatever.

59% of Americans have a 401k or other retirement account.[1] They accumulate capital so they don't need to work when they're old. A small fraction of them are the "Reddit FIRE" types.

The top 1% own more than 50% of all equity in private and public companies.[2] They and their kids and maybe grandkids don't need to work to live.

Would you put both in the same group? Other than "owns productive assets" they don't have that much in common.

1. https://news.gallup.com/poll/691202/percentage-americans-ret...

2. https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1212/average-net...

From my original comment: >Is "Capital" just a slur to be used against owners of capital you don't like, or you think have too much?

I wasn't aware it was a "slur" as much as it was a statement of fact. A tiny minority has disproportionate control over our economy and everyone else's lives. Depending on your ideological leanings you may find that ok or not ok.

Others (retirement savers) using the same tools as that minority doesn't make them the same as that minority. Degree of control matters. That's what I was responding to.

"You know the difference between a millionaire and a billionaire? About a billion dollars"

> 59% of Americans have a 401k or other retirement account

self-reported ? also, substantial numbers of adult people fall into various classifications that definitely do not have such a thing. Are those not counted at all ? also, how is it so precise with no caveats, callouts or error bars ?!

Gallup is pretty good at polling. If you have a better source, by all means show it.

Gallup doesn't poll capital but retirement accounts- a lot of those are invested in cash and cash equivalents - CDs, bonds, etc. That's not the capital-as-control which we're discussing here.

More importantly, the 401k-s invested in the stock market aren't capital either but they do provide intermediating third parties with controlling power without any assurance that it will be used in the interest of the account holders - pretty much like bank accounts work.

Thus, 401k holders are not holders of capital, they only notionally own a share of pooled assets which are controlled by third parties for those parties' own ends and connections - mutual funds, banks, etc.

> That's not the capital-as-control which we're discussing here.

I feel you. I'm saying the exact same thing all over this thread.

> 401k holders are not holders of capital

There's capital and Capital. All 401k holders own capital. But the run of the mill retirement saver has no outsize influence on politics or business beyond what's available to a private citizen. Capital, with a capital C (haha!) controls both.

I have a 401k and a decent amount invested in the stock market. I have almost no power because my capital cannot be meaningfully exercised in the same way other groups of capital can. My influence (as a middle class software engineer) has dwindled over the past 30+ years or so because more and more power (ie, capital) is being taken from the lower classes and being distributed to fewer hands at the upper end of society.

The market, emergent phenomena greater than the sum of their parts etc. I don't think it's unreasonable in 2025 to speak as if these things have agency beyond the level of individual humans living within the system.

Of course they could start their own business with better morals but they'd be outcompeted by businesses which didn't care, that's the whole reason we need regulations and all the rest of it.

> make a change yourself. Start a business and try a 4 day work week. Everyone should love it according to your world view...

Back to reality, we would have 16x6 workweeks if not for government regulation. That much is not up for debate. Moving to 4x8 workweek is just a logical next step demanded by the circumstances.

I'm pretty sure there's no law that says you can't require people to work 16x6 and plenty of bankers do that. We don't because someone else offers us better options (i.e. competition)

We also don't because the law mandates overtime pay. But then for some mysterious reason we specifically exempt quite a lot of (mostly white-collar) jobs from that.

"We need more sheep to fleece" cried the Wolf.

Fleecing sheep doesn’t hurt them. Especially during the summer they really love it.

so do the MAGAts apparently. Make Amerikkka GILDED Again!

While people simultaneously scream for people to have more children. See you at terminally low total fertility rates.

I follow the pro/anti natalist space and I'm not sure if anybody is "screaming" at people to have more kids.

How about the vice president

https://apnews.com/article/jd-vance-childless-cat-ladies-bir...

Is this "screaming?"

I happen to live near a very religious community, and I share some common spaces with some of the families coming from that background (swimming pool, parks).

They don't scream, but the social pressure is absolutely there.

It’s less “screaming” and more “tut-tut moralizing and shaming”. Ironically, it’s mostly from the same people who spent the previous decades going “don’t have kids you can’t afford!” and are now appalled that people took their advice.

Wasn't the previous advice meant for black and muslim people, rather than WASPs?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44423897

https://www.npr.org/2025/04/30/nx-s1-5382208/whats-behind-th...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bridget-phil...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2025/jun/25/parenti...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/may/25...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/what-is-pron...

https://www.vox.com/policy/363543/pronatalism-vance-birth-ra...

https://www.heritage.org/marriage-and-family/commentary/the-...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/style/women-pronatalist-m...

https://fairerdisputations.org/have-more-kids/

https://world.hey.com/dhh/the-parental-dead-end-of-consent-m...

As someone who also follows pro/anti natalist space closely, I'm not worried pronatlism efforts are going to move the needle though.

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...

https://iop.harvard.edu/youth-poll/50th-edition-spring-2025

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

This is people talking about the issue, not "screaming."

If you were going to have children, you'd have them regardless of what your income was. There are people in the developing world living on a dollar a day who become parents.

There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who would definitely have more children if they won the lottery tomorrow. Maybe not in your surroundings, or even in your country, but very much so elsewhere.

>There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who would definitely have more children if they won the lottery tomorrow.

If this were true (and I don't concede that it is), then you've just stated that the minimum bribe sufficient to persuade someone to become a parent is a lottery jackpot.

Mostly though, people who won lotteries would rather spend that on themselves. Demographic collapse is inevitable, and you'll die without even understanding why it happened.

It is true, but they're in cultures and countries you haven't experienced. Here it's common for people who have experienced a sudden windfall to get a second child that they had been wanting to have but weren't having because of financial reasons. Zero chance this is the only place in the world where that's the case.

As the other person pointed out, a lottery jackpot is also far above the minimum, it was just the most obvious example of a sudden windfall. And even then I was considering lottery jackpots here which are usually $0.5m-5m, not tens or hundreds of millions which seems common in the US (I could be wrong on that).

They absolutely said nothing about a minimum.

They did. The implicit statement is right there... if there were something significantly lesser that had the same effect, then that would be the salient example. If he had any such examples to choose from, why choose the absurdly improbable one?

Well, the reason why you choose the absurdly improbable example, is because it's still the least absurd/improbable. Why does this need to be explained to you?

In other news, Cattle are are being inseminated to not only provide milk, but also to have their children culled for meat after birth.

Children have been treated like state/church assets for multiple centuries if not millennia now.

That’s very simplified but the base reason is correct.

> That’s very simplified but the base reason is correct.

Case in point: the “but capitalists don’t form a group”/“Why workweek had been shortened to 40h then? No gays, no imigrants back then?” on this submission.

Because nobody's TODO list is empty. Just because you can "accomplish" tasks in less time does not mean that the next task doesn't need to be started until next week. It just means you can close your tickets faster, not that there's nothing left to do.

Work fills the time you allow it to (Parkinson's law). We could all work 7 days a week. Should we? Why? You get one life. Work is like oxygen; you need it to survive, but it isn’t the point of living.

You'd need regulation to prevent people from working more.

If I want to live in a particularly desirable house, I have to earn more money than the other people who want to live there too, so I can outbid them. So I'll work harder than them to do so.

(Trivial concocted example for illustration purposes, not meant to be nitpicked)

Obligatory: username checks out.

The Chinese "996" work system refers to a schedule where employees work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, totaling 72 hours per week. This system is common in some Chinese tech companies and startups. While not officially mandated, it is often encouraged or expected...

Not really sure what this has to do with the price of tea in China, but okay, now I know a new term. When you accepted a job at a company, there was an agreement on wages earned for work performed. If there was a definition of the hours to be worked that you agreed to, then you should not be shocked when you realize the company expects that many hours from you. Just because you have become more efficient does not mean you owe less hours than what was agreed upon when accepting the position. If you want to renegotiate your position, that’s between you and the employer. Do not be surprised if your desire for fewer hours is followed by a lower wages as a response.

Such a 2025 response.

I really have no idea what your point is with that

I'm from the US. People didn't used to be 'work units'. Even the most coked out 1980s corporate raider would not talk the way the average pro-capitalist does today. And the 1980s was considered the era of exploitive greed. It is wild to see the shift where all human dignity/consideration has been removed by businesses/managers as if that's acceptable/the reasonable position. You're comment is very 2025. It would have made you an outcast in the semi-recent past and seen as a sociopath if used outside of very academic economics discussion, not entertainment discussion forums.

People used to be able to sell themselves/their children into slavery and business people were just fine with it. Then we made them feel shame to treat humans that way. Then we made them feel shame for employing little kids. Them we made them feel shame for threatening a person's ability to provide for their family as leverage to dictate. As soon as they could, they backslid on the last one. Certain states are repealing their child work laws.

This is not normal. This is not how the US was the majority of my life.

it might mean that you are obtusely defending a point of view that ultimately, rationalizes any amount of work for any amount of hours assigned to a helpless cog knowledge worker. "We pay you for that" turns into "you are responsible for that" turns into "do it or you are fired" and "its not done you cant leave until it is done and why did you waste time and why are you failing at this task I gave you" etc..

Some countries have labour laws you know. Where I'm from, if I start a new job that bait-and-switched me into working one hour more than 40/week they will get into a lot of trouble.

I'm not saying overtime is not allowed, but if it's expected to be the norm then it very much must be in the contract. If the overtime is not a regular expectation then it must be compensated appropriately, and even then there are upper limits to the amount of overtime.

Do you come in on Saturdays, since your TODO list is still not empty?

When I was an hourly employee, I used to come in on Saturdays and earn 1.5x and then on Sunday to earn 2x. That was when I was young and dumb with nothing else to do to fill those hours so why not make some extra money? Now that I’m no longer hourly, I work for as long as necessary to accomplish task by deadline. It is none of my employer’s, nor yours, business how I spend that time as long as deadlines are being met

> It is none of my employer’s business how I spend that time as long as deadlines are being met

This contradicts what you already said ("there are always more TODOs"). Which one should I reply to?

If your employment has fixed deadlines, and your employer does not react to efficiency increases by setting earlier deadlines, then you should expect the headline effect (efficiency increases mean your weekly hours decrease).

Again though, how I manage my time is my business. If I'm assigned a task on Monday with a deadline for Friday, I can finish it on Monday and have it ready for the Friday deadline and then spend my time how I wish OR I can report the task completed and then expect to have more tasks assigned. There's no need to have a negotiation with how any tools that I use makes me more efficient. You seem to be unable to manage your own time and need to be told by employer when to have time off. That's something you should try changing rather than expecting the world to change to how you want to spend time.

If how you manage your time is your business, why are you replying to an article about changing the length of the work week? You are telling us that nobody mandates your work week. Most employees are not in that situation.

> I can finish it on Monday and have it ready for the Friday deadline and then spend my time how I wish OR I can report the task completed and then expect to have more tasks assigned

Are you serious? Do you think you just have free choice of whether to do more work or not? If you completed a task in 15 minutes and spent the rest of the week surfing do you think that would be allowed by your employer? Most employee contracts would forbid it.

"If tractors and fertilizers lets us grow more food with less time - why not shorten the workweek?"

For instance the amount of people employed in agriculture in France dropped from 60% in the 1800s to 3% today, a 95% reduction. Assuming everyone worked 40 hour weeks back in 1800s, that means everyone should only have to work 2 hours a week today, right?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-...

You also have to factor in the jobs that transport the food, parts of the jobs that make the roads/railways/airplanes (not all places are self-sustained food-wise, so this isn’t just about getting bananas from the tropics), jobs involved in refining food, and more.

We didn’t when we got computers. We didn’t when we got calculators. Or typewriters. Or the Industrial Revolution. Or anything else.

Work expands to fill available hours. We don’t get more leisure time. That’s not ‘allowed’.

To offer (maybe European) perspective.

The industrial revolution coincides more or less with when starvation started to disappear from the developed world.

In many countries, holidays and PTO are a norm. I personally know a few people that choose to work 4 days a week, I know another bunch that actually retired early or simply don't jump from a job to another because they can free ride for a bit (no judgment).

That also means that you 1/ have to actually prioritize leisure over money 2/ have actually something leisurely to do.

>To offer (maybe European) perspective.

Aren't retirement ages being raised everwhere across Europe?

Yes, to reflect the rising life expectancy.

To reflect a looming demographic crisis as well.

“Europe” also has active unions.

GP's comment is also entirely true for the US. PTO and paid holidays are the norm here for full-time (salaried) work. It's not just a European thing.

Not exactly true. The typical work week was longer in the 1800s than in the 1900s. The limiting of the work week to 40/5 was an explicit political movement. Of course it was not reduced as a direct consequence of increased productivity, which I guess is what you meant.

Yes. 8/8/8 and 5 days a week was a labor movement in the early 1900s.

Before that labor was exploited. After that labor was exploited.

We don’t seem to be willing to do that again.

Yet. It's funny because it's coming and business is determined to make the process as adversarial as possible.

As strange as it is hear this in this day and age, these kind of improvements bring more profits to the capital that uses them.

The working class will only get any benefits through class fight and collective action, but that ship has sailed.

Capitalism has won.

It's never over it's just also never easy

Even if you get time, it gets consumed by the internet or by equally silly things like shopping.

Atomisation, which liberalism promotes heavily to the underclass, has all but destroyed humanity.

I've heard this one before.

There is no business in the world, except those already financially unhealthy, that would choose no-growth + reduced cost over growth + same cost.

It just goes against every business ethos except Arizona Iced Tea.

Right, which demonstrates the unfortunate: this has to be done politically, not economically. The only way you can get rid of the 40 hour work week is if you make it illegal, much like we did with more exploitative working practices in the early 20th century.

I agree with that, but do people want to work less than 40 hours a week? I know I do, but I don't speak for everyone.

It feels as though we've reached a compromise some time back where people are roughly ok with trading 40 hours of their productivity per week for enough units to live a pretty comfortable life on (comfortable is relative, and we're relatively much more comfortable than 99% of humans who ever lived).

>No business would choose no-growth + reduced cost over growth + same cost.

If that were the case, why are so many companies bent on eliminating some employees and equipping the rest with AI to make up the difference? Wouldn't it be in their best interest to retain ALL those employees and equip them all with AI?

In my strawman/false dichotomy world, I'd explain that by saying those companies are facing the certainty of being not financially healthy.

The AI wave is masking a lot of poor economic outlook at the moment

This discussion seems entirely uninformed by history.

We have continuously been able to do more in less time because of new technology for 250 years, since the Industrial Revolution since.

The increased productivity has benefited workers either by higher wages or shorter hours. Mostly the former.

I'm sure this trend will continue.

> I'm sure this trend will continue.

Is it still the 90s? I thought after that wages stagnated compared to productivity.

The great majority of the returns to those productivity increases have gone to capital, not to labor. Inequality just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Eventually they are going to kill the goose that has been laying all these golden eggs.

Increased productivity has not benefited workers since the neoliberal turn in the late 70’s, at least in the US. Productivity has gone up while wages have stagnated.

Most people in the world today are way better off than they were in the 70s.

That wages have stagnated is not a lie.

People might be better off according to some metric despite the fact that wages have stagnated. Could you not move the goalpost?

This is the part I responded to:

> Increased productivity has not benefited workers since the neoliberal turn in the late 70’s

Your metric is that "wages have stagnated", but that is a meaningless statement without context. Have they risen faster than inflation? Yes. Do people have more purchasing power today than the 70s? Yes. Is your definition extremely narrow to include your cherry-picked countries? Yes.

Most of the world is much better off today than the 70s.

I know I'm fighting against the populist zeitgeist here, so unlikely to make much traction, but anyway.

> This is the part I responded to:

By moving the goalpost.

> Your metric is that "wages have stagnated", but that is a meaningless statement without context.

It is meaningful and has all the context you need if you fill in the minimal blanks.

- Wages stagnating means they were trending better before

- Trending like they did before meant that wages would be better by now

> Have they risen faster than inflation? Yes. Do people have more purchasing power today than the 70s? Yes.

Argue that stagnated is misleading if you want. For all I know that means that they have only marginally gone up or done, not literally stayed the exact same.

Maybe you think marginally better wages is enough. Fine for you.

The point I’m making is quite pointed and can’t be so easily dismissed with the empty rah-rah-progress slogans.

- Productivity has gone up under Neoliberalism

- Wages have stagnated

- Which means that Neoliberalism has not benefitted normal people

- Which means that relatively speaking people are worse off compared to if the wage trend of yester-decade continued

- ... even if one thinks that people are in absolute terms better off now

Which means that neoliberalism has been bad for regular people.

> Is your definition extremely narrow to include your cherry-picked countries? Yes.

Cherry-picked countries? Bro this board is the US. Not in terms of people but the country of origin and the majority of the focus on topics.

But the lopsided distribution is the case for the whole world of course. Percentage-wise:

- The bottom is a little better off

- The middle is a little better off than the bottom

- The top is massively better off

> Most of the world is much better off today than the 70s.

This could be argued for or against subjectively for hours. People have smarthpones. Housing is expensive. As is typical the elitist[1] side goes for the subjective angle.

What I referred to is objective. But more narrow.

> I know I'm fighting against the populist zeitgeist here, so unlikely to make much traction, but anyway.

It’s you and the ghost of Marie Antoinette against the world huh.

[1]: In general: elitist or uninformed.

>It’s you and the ghost of Marie Antoinette against the world huh.

That is silly. The populist zeitgeist is very much anti "the thing they call neoliberalism".

But the argument is ridiculously shallow. It cherry picks a few decades in human history, in a few western countries, where we observed very high increases of standard of living. It then sets that as the standard by which we should compare to.

It does not lower itself to examine, what caused that period in all of human history? How did it compare to 50 years prior to that period? Does it make sense to set that period as the benchmark? In other words, was it an anomaly, what caused the anomaly, was it sustainable?

None of this is addressed in any social media post (reddit, hn, wherever). It is far easier to just repeat the manta.

The workweek does shorten, in those quiet moments when workers are not doing much of anything. Lord knows that software engineers, who already spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing, are now doing even less thanks to improvements in AI automation. I’d bet that software engineers are down to about 3 day work weeks when you sum up all the time they spend actually doing something. It doesn’t feel like it for some people though because they are imprisoned in offices, where they are restricted from doing anything with their time that isn’t work. It is a cruel condition that leads to burnout and long term loss in productivity. It only gets worse as even more efficiency in automation results in having to perform even more office theatre to fill the down time.

My advice to would-be CEOs and managers is to just let people be, don’t try to squeeze blood from a stone. It’s good to have some slack in the workline for when you need it, because the workers who have been treated well are far more likely to jump into an emergency and dump massive loads of work all at once, since they have a lot in reserves. Those emergencies are moments that make or break companies.

Yep, the irony is that the workweek has quietly shrunk — but instead of freeing people, we trap them in offices and force them to fake productivity. It’s not about output anymore, it’s about control. That’s what a formal 4-day week could challenge.

I think a 4-day work week isn’t really ideal.

The problem is you will increase cycle times. There is a sort of time dilation that occurs around weekends. Thursdays will become the new Fridays and on Mondays people will be kind of groggy from being out for 3 days. So basically Tuesdays and Wednesdays become the days to really do hardcore work. That means it takes longer to get big projects done as people naturally schedule things around Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

A better model is to just have people be remote, and do a little bit of work each workday. This keeps people a little more fresh and boils their days down to just getting 1 or 2 important decisions made.

Totally agree with your last point — I’ve tried exactly that model myself: working a little every day, remotely, and it works incredibly well. It keeps the pressure low, the mind clear, and people don’t mind doing an hour or two even on a Saturday if needed. But yeah, it only works for people with high self-discipline — otherwise it just turns into doing nothing at all.

It would lead to people having more free time, which leads to self-determination and independence from corporate power structures, which empowers the middle class, which the owners and controllers of global financialized capital do not want.

Your job will continue to be at least 40 hours, the base pay adjusted for inflation will decrease, the "benefits" that are too complicated to understand and extract yourself from will increase, and you definitely will come back into the office one day. =)

Because employees compete to sell more or less of their time for more or less money, and it’s generally an over-served market where they have little pricing power.

As a business owner I’m using AI to hire fewer people for less time, massively reducing HR headaches. It’s great!

Because the world is not about the wage-slaves; it's about the elites and their power games.

And they'll exhaust humanity, destroy ecosystems, and kill all the flora and fauna to achieve this.

Because for capital, shortening the work week is leaving money on the table! Leisure time for the masses does have technological requirements, but actually increasing it across the society is more of a problem of power and politics than of technology. It's been this way for a long, long time.

It was like this when we won the 8-hour day norm that we have now! The 8-hour day may have been enabled by technology in some sense, but it was won with a fight.

32-hour workweek still is too much. For six-hour workdays would be a reasonable change. Specifically for the United States - also a mandatory 20-workday vacation (I live in the EU, heard Americans only have 2 weeks an that sounds nightmarish).

People need to have lives, not just jobs+recovery. Working for 5 consecutive days feels like living in the office and only coming home to sleep and do home chores - this doesn't even justify commuting.

Not just “2 weeks”, most offer 10 days - and that has to include sick time off.

I once had 4 days sick, and my manager had to call me into a meeting with HIS manager to impress upon me that there was 6 months left to the year and I could only take 2 more sick days before they would have to count it against me on my performance review.

By the way, I meant "foUr six-hour workdays would", sorry for a typo.

They won't reduce the workweek without reducing your pay. There might be some 3-card-monte-style shuffling so that it seems like they didn't (at first), but no rational person (or company) pays more for less product.

In the United States, employees have no leverage.

> but no rational person (or company) pays more for less product.

Spending time at the office looking busy not a product.

If someone will consistently pay you to do it and you consistently agree to sell that, then it is a product to be bought and sold. Pretending otherwise just leads to mental illness, like leftism.

> In the United States, employees have no leverage.

If only there was some kind of organisation that workers could form to improve their collective bargaining power...

People negotiate things like a higher salary or more PTO etc every day. How can you say employees have no leverage?

Please put the snark down for one second. Unions have been intentionally eviscerated by both the government and the media (eta: as evidenced by at least one sibling comment). It took a heroic effort to start one union in one Amazon factory, and that was under "the most pro-union administration in American history" (and it is sad to realize that it might be near the top of that list).

Setting that aside, employees still have no leverage as many benefits that people rely on are tied to employment requirements. People can't take off time to retrain for a better job, have to come in when they're sick, etc., because if they upset their employer, they may lose their job which means losing food assistance they need for their kids, and employers know this...

This is a systemic issue.

> have to come in when they're sick

To infect more people. This should be outlawed as sabotage and bioterrorism. If an employee would come in sick to my office I would be really mad at them, fire them if they do so twice.

> This is a systemic issue.

And the only way you will fix it is by collective bargaining. Not by giving up.

If there were some kind of organization like that, mobsters would take it over, and they'd collude with the business to squeeze the workers for all they're worth. Believe it or not, some of us have first and secondhand experience with unions, so we don't pay much attention to the communist propaganda bragging about them. Besides, in an economy where many are unemployed and desperately seeking jobs, they tend to want fewer barriers to getting hired, not more. Only the most mature companies can afford the extra overhead of a unionized workforce... how many of the people here reading your comment work for startups? Do you think that they read it and say to themselves "gee, I know that we can barely afford to keep the lights on and we're just six, but I wish there was a union here holding the CEO's head under water until he gives us more raises"?

I get that you don't like unions but this is a weird argument. Unions being corruptible isn't a great reason to imply companies should be able to do anything they want to their workers and the workers should placidly accept it. Neither is your next implication that some companies wouldn't be viable if they had to pay more so therefore paying more is bad.

In a labor market, companies aren't entitled to labor and laborers aren't entitled to jobs. If a company isn't viable then it isn't viable. If a job doesn't pay what you want, you dont have to do it. Things get complicated (intentionally?) when companies control large swaths of jobs at once or have outsized impacts on their employees' lives and future careers. Employees don't have nearly as much impact in the other direction (individually) and this asymmetry is the cause of lots of abuse historically. Unions are one way to help steady and maintain the labor market in order to keep it fair and efficient and powerful.

In general, things are worth improving even if there aren't perfect answers.

>Unions being corruptible i

Never really heard of one that didn't end up corrupted. Usually from the get-go. To call my argument "weird" tells me how little personal experience you have with unions.

>Neither is your next implication that some companies wouldn't be viable if they had to pay more so therefore paying more is bad.

Not some. Practically all companies. In tech, maybe only the FAANG set would be able to shoulder that burden.

>If a company isn't viable then it isn't viable.

Some companies are viable in one environment, but not in another. If you're changing the environment to make fewer companies viable, then you're putting more people out of work. This should be obvious. It isn't, I think, because some second grade teachers pass children who should have flunked out.

>In general, things are worth improving even if there aren't perfect answers.

Dimwitted people will try to "improve" things right until the world burns down around them. Any attempt to point out to them that this is occurring will be met with even more ambitious-but-ill-conceived attempts at improving things.

> Never really heard of one that didn't end up corrupted.

We have them across the pond and they work for us - they are us. We can run for election in them. We can run them.

> To call my argument "weird" tells me how little personal experience you have with unions.

Sounds like you are the one with a limited experience of the world. The world is much bigger than America. The idea that "unions can't work" is fed to you and you gobble it up.

> Not some. Practically all companies. In tech, maybe only the FAANG set would be able to shoulder that burden.

In Europe, companies have to pay a living wage and they still function. They just don't always turn into giant funnels to siphon wealth into the hands of the ultra wealthy. If that's failure, then let them fail!

> Some companies are viable in one environment, but not in another. If you're changing the environment to make fewer companies viable, then you're putting more people out of work. This should be obvious. It isn't, I think, because some second grade teachers pass children who should have flunked out.

We have unions in the UK/EU and companies are still viable. Only people who failed geography and don't realise there are other countries out there would think that.

> Dimwitted people will try to "improve" things right until the world burns down around them. Any attempt to point out to them that this is occurring will be met with even more ambitious-but-ill-conceived attempts at improving things.

Whereas the really clever people want to keep things the same, because they are terrified of change.

> seeking jobs, they tend to want fewer barriers to getting hired, not more

Like it or not, this is worth highlighting indeed. As I heard unions are an extra barrier for job seekers: in some occupations a union also has to approve an employee, not just the employer and this can make getting in the occupation prohibitively hard. Whoever knows better pleas comment, especially if and why this is not a problem.

Of course it would be a problem. We don't have that on this side of the pond. Unions are meant to be democratic institutions - members can table motions and other members can vote. If members of a union vote to keep such a barrier for new employees, it's not the concept of unions that's broken. It's the members. Unions aren't some kind of demon you summon from the dark side.

Depending on what you consider a startup, they employee less than 10% of full time workers in the US. The great majority of folks are not working for startups.

Possibly higher than that on HN though.

>The great majority of folks are not working for startups.

I was speaking to a particular audience, here, which isn't a randomized sample of the American workforce. And the sort of people who do the sort of jobs that we all do here, we're the ones that it's being talked about "shortening" the workweek... because for the other crowd, shortening the workweek happens when you piss off the assistant manager, and they only schedule you for 3 hours next week.

Additionally, you might consider that instead of focusing on the less than 10% that are startups, you should talk about the more than 95% that aren't gigantic fortune 100 companies with employee head counts numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands.

> Believe it or not, some of us have first and secondhand experience with unions, so we don't pay much attention to the communist propaganda bragging about them.

So the UK and Europe are communist now?

In the EU I've never heard of a single union other than itself. Every time I see the word "union" it's about the US. This doesn't mean they don't exists in the EU, in fact it some googling uncovers they pretty much do, yet somehow they appear invisible unless you look for them actively. Meanwhile it seems they are always hot in the USA as they get mentioned so often.

>So the UK and Europe are communist now?

It this rhetorical?

No. I'm just baffled, it's like I'm talking to an LLM that was trained on capitalist propaganda.

One might say the same about you and the communist twaddle that you peddle. Yo guys zinged me for 30 or 40 internet points yesterday, but the only votes that counted were cast last November.

So the fact that we have unions in the UK and Europe, <40h weeks, >25 paid days of annual leave and 8+ days of public holidays, employment rights and don't beg for tips, free healthcare and, shockingly, free enterprise.... makes us communists? Do you even know what communism is? Sounds like you deserved to lose these internet points.

There is a famous essay on the topic (although it talks about employment rather than workweek, but that's just an extra lottery on top of workweek length): https://jacobin.com/2018/05/political-aspects-of-full-employ...

Because your peers are still working.

In the West there’s a 40-hour work week. In China there’s 996. In Japan you don’t go home til your boss does - even if you hardly see your family.

Each society has norms that stop people working even more than they otherwise would. Everyone converges on that amount of work, regardless of productivity.

If you want to work less, you need to get everyone else to work less.

Because the workers don't have the bargaining power to shorten the workweek at the moment. It's a fine idea in principle.

When was the last time that productivity gains were translated into fewer working hours per week?

Or higher wages or greater employment. Never, of course.

Lump of labor fallacy strikes again.

Why economists dislike a lump of labor - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/003467607016358...

Sorry but I'm not going to pay 56 dollars to read a 17 year old paper with 18 citations.

Yes, there will be many new jobs as cannon fodder for the upper classes in various overseas wars.

Or like as therapists as we continue to 'do the work' via buying new and increasingly strange forms of self exploration.

But also get real if you don't believe that kill bots won't take all the cannon fodder jobs. Computer programs don't have the nasty habit of disobeying orders or revolt.

I'm pretty sure we will, because we already have? Remember work used to be 6 days a week.

Labor now does not have the power that it did then because people have been convinced to vote based on fear of pronouns and immigrants.

but to share the gains from new technologies

AI has nothing to do with this. Worker productivity has already been shooting up and workers have been given nothing to match their efforts. As long as capitalism is the default economic system, any pro-worker change will have to be taken. Most corporations can't even allow workers to toil anywhere but under their direct supervision. Giving people more free time is clearly out of the question.

Competition drives ever increasing growth. China uses the same AI and they aren’t decreasing their work weeks. Are you going to let China steam roll America like it already has in almost every major industry?

I've gotten a shorter work week a few times by asking my boss.

You can just do things!

My company is in the midst of laying off thousands of people and I'm certain if I requested a 4 day work week I would be short listed for the door.

I'm aware my workplace experiences are atypical, but I would expect that they'd count that as 20% of a layoff, and that would be appreciated.

Because people would rather work more to get more money.

that isn't the problem, the problem is that people actually work more to get same or less money too :)

Given the choice between working 20% less for the same money and earning 20% more for the same work many (most?) people will take the latter.

I hope that working more for less wouldn’t have many takers but there may be a few.

I hope that working more for less wouldn’t have many takers but there may be a few.

I would venture a solid guess that for 88.91% of the population - if their salary is reduced by their employer by 20% they would stay in the same place and not look for another job...

Because more people will be building things, business competition will not decrease. There will be even more to do.

Because the masses need to be be busy, otherwise they would get ideas.

> otherwise they would get ideas.

No, they won't. They'll just spend more time on their phones watching cat videos.

True, that usually works, but not in the time of economic downturn.

But why not work 8 days a week? 7 regular days and one extra day spread out. 9.5 hours 7 days a week.

That way, masses won't ever have time to think!

The current balance of engagement / sustainability of 8 hours per day, 5 days a week was reached after decades of trial and error. One might argue that it converged during the industrial age (it was 6 days a week in agricultural age), but it worked fine in a post-industrial economy as well.

You do understand that asking to work 32 hours rather than 40 is exactly the same thing as asking a 25% raise right?

I'm not against workers asking for more money in the slightest, they don't do that nearly as often as they should, but this sounds a bit like "big brain idea: give me more money lol".

No it's not the same thing. The difference is productivity growth. If you ask 25% more ceteris paribus, someone has to give something up. In this case, nobody has to give something up.

>No it's not the same thing.

... screams the economics-illiterate left. If they pay you money for your work/time, then it's by definition fungible.

No sense in responding, people. This person can't be saved. Move on.

It is different, because productive output does not go down by 20% when working hours go down by 20%.

e.g. See "Four-day week trial: study finds lower stress but no cut in output" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19198649

The OP is arguing this is even more true when AI does routine tasks, and the remaining tasks are more creative, strategic, inspiration-based.

I'll be sure to remind myself of that next time I wish I had more time to spend watching my daughter grow up. Sure, I may miss some seminal moments but the raise I get at the end of the year is just as good.

If asking someone to work during an evening or during the weekend in order to make a deadline is not lowering their salary, then someone working less hours per week is not raising their salary.

Despite what they say, time does not equal money.

Or it’s "asking" for more of the productivity to go to workers instead of the capitalists.

Since at least the last 100 years any value surplus due to some technological advancement was added to top rich wealth. Few was used to raise salaries and very few to shorten work hours. At the past, the top rich were centimillionaires, now billionaires. AI is time to create trillionaires...

Because you can shorten workforce instead!

Because they don’t want to pay you more.

You've got to learn to play the game, the only reward for working hard nowadays is more work so you have just work just the right amount

"This question is increasingly central to debates about the future of work" Nope. The only question my company is asking is how to get more efficiencies from AI so that they don't have to hire so many people.

Because AI is the property of the owning class and they use it to spend less for labor from the working class?

Because the enterprise is not owned or controlled by you, and you don't get to set the rules. If you can negotiate better conditions, and nobody else on the market can undercut you, then you can have them. This isn't even an abstract consequence of capitalism, it is an axiomatic, defining feature. If you don't like it, you are rejecting capitalism.

Unfettered capitalism is bad. We are just discussing which fetters it should have.

I am rejecting it. Enough is enough.

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