Four-day workweek makes for healthier, more satisfied workers | Hacker News Reader

Four-day workweek makes for healthier, more satisfied workers

newatlas.com

46 pointsdabinat13 comments

Hah. Another study where the results are 100% determined from simply surveying the employees afterwards about how happy/stressed/etc they are.

I'll save you the trouble - You'll get the same result with a 3 day work week for the same pay. The employees will be nice and happy.

You'll even get the same result if you perform the same study with 2 day work weeks.

Heck, employees will report the highest satisfaction possible, lowest stress possible, if you allow them to work 0 days a week while giving them the same pay.

That's it, the science is settled. 0 day work weeks here we come.

I Agree. I know people on a four-day work week with loss of pay (20%, proportionate to the one less day).

They are all happier. It's the "...with no loss of pay..." part of this article which is problematic.

I had 4-day weeks with a 20% loss of pay for a few years. It made a disproportionately big difference in my everyday life. Felt a lot less stress.

The downside was that I had to be very careful with which meetings to attend, because they now had a noticeable effect in my weekly coding, so as a result I was kind of out of the loop most of the time.

There are so many stupid studies that design their methodology to prove their hypothesis. We should force people to reject Occam's razor applied to their methodology.

"But I don't want to cure cancer. I want to turn people into dinosaurs."

Capital owners don't want healthier, more satisfied workers. They want to maximize the surplus labor from which their wealth is built.

Someone will probably come in with "happier workers will be more optimal for that" and maybe I guess but it doesn't seem that way to me. Doesn't seem that way to the owners either or it would already be like that.

We'll need a labor movement to fight for this, just like our predecessors had to fight and sometimes die for things like the weekend and the eight hour workday.

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/125/992/944...

Well, you need someone to buy your stuff and patron your establishments, so having more time to do that might be beneficial for business, probably more than the productivity gain that a 4 day workweek would bring.

Instead of fighting it, I think we need more ways for independent workers to thrive, also to launch profitable businessess, without being tied to specific hours. General freedom of which hours to work and which not to is good.

When you think about the increase in productivity per hour worked, a four-day workweek makes even more sense: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...

Can you please explain the insight about reduced workweeks you are deriving from what you've linked? It is not obvious to me.

I was trying to point out that the productivity has been steadily increasing without an obvious benefit to the workers (such as pay increase), so basically workers have been producing more without getting a larger share of that increase. Therefore, keeping all the other things constant, reduced workdays might be a benefit for that increased productivity.

Okay, that makes perfect sense. Thanks for the explanation!

If I'm not wrong, productivity is measured as economic output/ hours worked. It seems pretty obvious that when people decide to reduce the hours worked, they will start pruning the less economically rewarding tasks first. How's that old adage: "work expands to fit the time available".

So I would expect that by cutting the hours, the economic output decreases less than proportionally, and therefore productivity grows.

Related advocacy groups:

https://www.4dayweek.com/

https://www.4dayweek.co.uk/

https://workfour.org/

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