The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100
scienceaim.com
scienceaim.com
An informal survey, of unknown content, of 15 unidentified people, with 6 of those people being in the "boosts productivity" camp. Cool beans. I guess that settles the matter once and for all.
The people representing the businesses in the preprint hold titles like co-founder, CEO/founder, COO, General Manager, and CEO. The size of the business and sector are also noted. I think your framing of them as "unidentified people" is therefore off, it is certainly not the same as a journalist conveniently using "unnamed sources", this is standard academic practice.
Different companies measure different things, but they do measure and that is addressed in the paper. "revenue (DM10), profit (DM4), other financial targets (DM2, DM6), customer/client satisfaction ( DM8, DM6), story points (DM14), sprint goals (DM7), billable hours (DM12), capacity ( DM4), response rates (DM10), standard operating procedure metrics (DM9), sick leave (DM1, D M 4. DM9, DM15), lodgements (DM12), employee happiness (DM6, DM15), projects delivered on time (DM15), and net promoter score ( DM4)". There were also other benefits like hiring and retention.
So this is not what "unidentified people" "thought" about productivity, this was founders and the c-suite using their existing favoured metrics. On those metrics a large number of them reported an increase in productivity, and a larger group reported no deleterious effects on productivity. This is broadly consistent with the trends in the wider research into this area globally, which continually go against the predictions that productivity will drop. Is it universally applicable? I don't think anyone is claiming that.
I've followed this area for a while and, sorry to be impolite, it is your summary that is less accurate than the the one you accuse of being AI-generated.
Calling it a study is a disservice to science. As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹
I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²:
> Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³:
> Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science.
That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”?
¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
Worth watching the clip so you can hear the argument directly. IMO his point is that peer review is not what makes something science. Nor are studies, publishing papers nor p-values, even gathering and reproducing data is not what makes science science.
The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.
If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.
You can find the study here if you wish to critique its methods: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x
"Methods This study took a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews with n=15 industry leaders" .. "Participants were identified via media reports " .. "A total of n=15 key informants participated in this study" .. "Recent research into appropriate sample sizes for qualitative research found saturation typically occurs between 9 and 17 interviews and the researchers agreed that no fresh insights or themes arose after the twelfth interview in this study (Hennink & Kaiser, 2022)"
The interviews contain invaluable insights such as: “adopting the 4DWW takes work” “Productivity up, waste removed” “Management -led/employee -driven,” “Train for leisure,”
I stand by my statement.
A qualitative study is still a study, especially considering that the subjects of the study are the sort of people that can evaluate the thing being studied.
This is such an absurd thought-terminating cliche. Science suffixation seems more an indicator of the age of the field, not its scientific rigour. Are "climate science" and "computer science" not science?
On the flip side, just because it says "ology" at the end of a word does not mean it's a science.
Computer science – applied mathematics Climate science – writing doom papers because they bring budget
Did you use them as examples on purpose?
That means the four-day-workweek is even better than we thought it was!
Pity they didn't also change the gas tax.
Share tax changes... ugh
My hope was cashed up bogans would start betting on shares instead of housing/crypto. At least it could be funnelled into something productive
In regards to other comments further down regarding Australia's tax rates being high, internationally Australia is on the lower end.
I believe the (seemingly very loud) naysayers about these tax changes are those who receive much more of their income via 'capital' than via 'effort', and so my sympathies are minimal to non-existent. Sure, I have capital investments that will yield lower returns, but I believe the changes make "the way it works" overall more fair to those who don't have the means to earn means passively.
Cashed up bogans may funnel more of their money into new house builds, which is productive...?
Semi-unrelated addition: To some extent I think that 'owning ones own house' is a motivator to work harder, so as home ownership has grown increasingly out of reach, so has some amount of motivation to actually work dried up. There's an inherent 'participation in society' to owning a home that has an intangible but high value. Whether this has anything to do with Australia's decreasing productivity, I don't know.
Just because someone doesn't invest in shares, doesn't mean they are a bogan. I'm sick of this term being thrown around at people you look down upon...
I can apply Australian citizenship next year but I will leave ASAP after becoming a citizen for Singapore, Dubai or Hong Kong where the tax is < 20%
perhaps try a different perspective of, "it's good i live in a place where we contribute for a common good"
I preferred living in Hong Kong and Singapore and do not enjoy living here honestly, but if you treat it as payment for my+partner’s backup citizenship, it seems more justifiable.
What a miserable, selfish view of the world you have
If you hate taxes and fees, Singapore has a 60% Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty on residential property applied to foreign buyers, on top of an already insane property market. There's huge fines and government intervention into _everything_ and a massive high-stress culture.
Hong Kong is equally absurd for property and has a sword hanging over its head, that falls if China ever makes a move on Taiwan; the inevitable US and global sanctions would decimate HK.
Dubai is just a comical option.
Not sure if serious.
If serious: This is a really weird and almost sociopathic thing to say. I really don't get where you're coming from. It's certainly not the cultural direction I'd like to see Australia moving in.
https://www.life.gov.sg/guides/domestic-helper
https://www.immd.gov.hk/eng/services/visas/foreign_domestic_...
Describing it as "pretty good value" bothers me in a number of contexts.
I'm also fine with this never becoming a thing in Australia. Not sure how out-of-touch or in-touch that makes me, but that's how I feel nonetheless.
@Loocid, thanks for saying what I was dancing around.
The whole power dynamic is extremely exploitable which results in a lot of abuse cases.
I don't consider taking someone out of a shit situation into a slightly less shit situation for your huge benefit all that benevolent personally.
> shell0x 3 months ago | As a white person, I’d probably never get PR too but I think it’s good that they maintain the current percentages, otherwise the country would turn unrecognizable like Germany or France
To pay $89,000 in taxes you'd have to be earning in the range of $350k. Do you think you're hard done by? I'd be rather annoyed if you were eligible for family support allowance in that earning range? (partially because I'd be missing out on a decent chunk of government support myself)
What am I missing about your situation that makes it remotely sympathetic?
I just treat it as paying for Australian citizenship to make me feel better and it still comes out cheaper than buying a Saint Kitts and Nevis passport. Australian passport also opens up the E3 visa to go to the USA
It's a privilege to come into this country, its a privilege to live in Sydney. If you don't like it, you can leave.
I make less (even before tax) than you PAID in tax, yet you still want handouts.
I hate to put it like this, but that's exactly what the poster is doing.
Oz needs the immigrants or it would be screwed. It isn't a fecking privilege.
In NZ ~30% of the population was born overseas. We do it because NZ requires more people of working age - because our demographics are shit and they're becoming deeper shit (aside AU is part of our problem). We need young workers and we bribe them here with lifestyle, money from jobs, and houses for the fortunate.
It's a compounding bad debt solution - since those immigrants also get older and will become unaffordable retirees for our country.
I think Aus has similar dynamics - but not as badly because Oz is much wealthier than NZ.
I'm some years away from retirement age - but the demographics mean that I'm screwed. Everyone will be screwed. If you're fortunate enough to have been able to save for retirement, say goodbye to those savings over time.
I expect NZ will start to increase immigration because there's too many undesirable jobs (jobs that NZers don't want to do, or that there simply isn't enough NZers for the jobs).
Immigrants work. It is a only a stop-gap solution.
Our politicians lack the ability to encourage enough business growth: therefore taxation income can't keep up with NZ government expenses.
people that count their tax dollars are usually very selfish to begin with.
i generally think the gov can do better with how money is spent though.
I want to know why you are keen to become an Australian citizen if you’re not enthusiastic about contributing your share.
Constructive discussion about appropriate levels of taxation is important, but let’s at least agree that the things we rely on (roads, hospitals, schools, defence, …) cost something.
It is always funny to see how many think they are hard done even though by the numbers they are the winners by a wide margin.
I pay private medical so don’t benefit much from tax anyway. No kids, no car, paid off my apartment. I can get much better value elsewhere right?
If I tell you you can pick 3 dishes
a) singapore: safe, low crime, low tax, efficient, excellent public transportation, better roads b) hk: safe, low crime, low tax, politically getting worse, excellent public transport, better airport c) australia: higher crime compared to the other too, high tax but bad services
I basically pay for an overpriced dish with bland taste, so why would I keep doing that?
I'm in a similar boat, and can relate to the on-going management and suppression of lifestyle creep in order to reach worthwhile goals. It feels like a never-ending battle, even after 20 years.
Again, my understanding is that the (only) difference is when the business is sold, and the 50% discount to CGT is no longer applied and instead there is an inflation adjustment instead (what I don't understand here is how to get an initial valuation, and would it be essentially $0, so the entire amount is capital gains? which feels somewhat unfair)
So it will be a hit at the time the business is sold, not at any point during the running of the business. My (potentially naive) take is that the hard work that goes into running and growing a business is about the provision of the goods or services, but if it's about maximising "the exit", then that feels to me like not the kind of incentive that it should be. The 'running' of the business being more important than the selling of it.
The 50% CGT discount has set a bad precedent. It should have been lower, or should have scaled over time. It has deformed the expected reward structure.
Can a business agree to be sold in tranches over time? If such a thing helps minimise tax then I can see that becoming the norm. I know that selling a house is a big, singular chunk of money that generally needs to be 'managed' in order to pay the minimum amount of tax. Maybe fractional selling is going to become a thing.
Wouldn't paying yourself a higher salary (since it's your own business) and/or putting more into superannuation offset the 'retirement' hit of not getting a golden exit parachute?
The new 30% floor completely throws that out the window for capital gains. It means even if your total income for the year is low enough that your normal tax rate should be 16% or 0%, the government steps in and forces a flat 30% tax on the asset sale anyway.
So, contrary to what the government is saying, this new regime taxes the poorer even more.
There's a whole spectrum of examples that can be used to demonstrate fairness or lack of fairness. Can you elaborate on your example of taxing a poor person even more by forcing a flat 30% tax on capital gains? Is this person you? What does your life entail whereby you are poor whilst also living almost entirely off capital gains?
You can still get all your capital out before the 1st of July 2027, and then re-distribute into areas that have better tax incentives, like new house builds. Sounds like that might solve two problems at once.
Let's say this works and those people who already have assets get taxed a bit more, when they are gone, there would then now very little incentive to work hard and start a business.
Such short term thinking will pretty much destroy the economy in the long term. You can't tax an economy to health and fairness.
This isn't short term thinking. It's the opposite.
Allowing the super wealthy, whom are the actual ones that benefit from capital gains, accumulate untold wealth is clearly resulting it a multitude of societal ills (including the dismantling of democracy itself here in the US).
Looking at even a little bit of recent history will clearly show you what happens when we let the super wealthy just get more wealthy (have a look at the Gilded Age).
The propaganda around taxation causing economic slowdown is so tired...
It closes the loop holes where wealthy people approaching retirement would spend a few years paying very little tax and living off capital gains instead at a ~20% tax rate.
From the budget:
"Recipients of means-tested income support payments, such as the Age Pension or JobSeeker, will be exempted from the minimum tax if they receive any payment in the financial year in which they realise the capital gain."
The flat rate is to stop people from dropping their income artificially and claiming the reduced rate. Most people won't run foul of this. Something like 90% of the capital gains discount was taken by the top 1%.
So your argument only applies to people who earn between 20 & 45k who don't get any government benefits (which are means tested, so they cannot be cash or asset rich), and realise a capital gain from an investment (is. not their house).
While philosophically I think it wrong that someone who earns very little cannot spread a tax liability over multiple years, the way corporations can.. I cannot think of a way that a disjoint could be given for this cohort that does not also open the door to loopholes for the 1%. Plus the number of people effected will be vanishingly small, and the amount to which that small number of purple are effected will also be small.
So, largely, contrary to what you are saying, they are not..
Is this a common thing in Australia cause it's not here in the US.
If you're saying instead that it applies to people living off their investments, then I have no sympathy for them as they're able to live off of ownership not labor. They should pay the same or more tax than anyone else.
But let's be honest, we're talking mostly about the sale of assets like stock ownership. That's how the super wealthy accumulate even more wealth. Then combine that with "buy, borrow, die" and you're paying almost no taxes.
All most people is for the rich to pay a proportionally fair amount of tax.
They call you lazy for not wanting to compete against the entire world in your own country.
Think again: this is entirely homegrown.
You'll have to spell out what you're suggesting here. "Think again" only works on LLMs, and then only sometimes.
The responder is saying that domestic American capitalists do not need foreign influence to abuse or exploit labor. The H1B visa program has absolutely nothing to do, for example, with Walmart telling their full time employees how to apply for government assistance programs because they refuse to pay a livable wage.
I brought up Walmart as an example, it was never intended to be a 1:1 analog with H1Bs.
The H1B is a byproduct and a tool of corporate greed.
They more or less got rid of it last September, yet the job market has only worsened. Scapegoating minorities, whether it be trans people, brown people, Muslims or immigrants, doesn’t work. All it does is destroy lives.
> You give away your bias when it is the other way around.
How so?
In many ways the current system is cruel to every international company which forces their local wages to compete with the United States.
So, when foreigners want to come to the US to work, these foreigners find the working conditions (say, 996 of today) is better than working for the corporate and the government exploiters in their home countries.
- travel a gamble on whether you'll be able to re-enter
- a layoff pretty much the end of your ability to stay and work in the US
... in other words, making the workers far, far more exploitable. Make that make sense.
archagon was attempting to paint declan_roberts comment as blaming H1B workers on working conditions, which they did not do. But H1Bs will be used to suppress wages by working more hours 996 under worse conditions (oncall, etc). This is low rhetoric. To call out how H1Bs are being used is not scapegoating nor is it racist. It makes zero difference where they come from. The cause is corporate greed, the effect is more H1Bs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-h-1b-hiring-faces-1230...
https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/05/20/amazons-33181-h-...
Amazon has cut, what 30k+ folks while increasing their H1B allocation.
I never said it's racist, unsure where you got that from, but it absolutely is scapegoating, when the issue isn't immigrants, who are powerless and cannot fight back, but the admin that's vilifying them while being the actual villain.
The problem isn't with immigrants specifically, but how they are used by these corporations to suppress wages and reduce the agency of labor. I don't want to see anyone hurt. But the way the H1Bs are being used harms everyone.
In the early to mid 90s, I worked at a Silicon Valley based software startup. We had something called "The Century Club". You made the club if you'd done 3 consecutive months in the last year without working less than 100 hours in any week of those months (averaging 100 hours was not good enough). More engineers were in the club than not. We were told that making the club was not mandatory, but nobody in the club was ever fired and most not in the club were eventually fired.
The next startup I was at had a similar culture without the cute name. I remember my most exhausting stretch there was coming in on a Saturday morning, for a database migration that had to happen outside business hours, and working straight through without sleep (other than nodding off at the keyboard) until Monday afternoon. Our CEO was kind enough to bring us food. Even in regular times there, I would go exercise from 10-11 PM, and more often than not I'd go back to the office after.
A decade later I was at Amazon. Our entire group of ~100 engineers was required by our VP to work weekends, in the office, for months at a time when approaching ship dates. The VP would send an email every Friday during this period to remind us to be there. Of course he wasn't there.
Those were all pretty counterproductive, but didn't seem that unusual. The difference in the US back then was that even asking about such things during an interview would often result in no offer because the candidate didn't have a "good" work ethic. Things have gotten a lot better in the US in the last 10-15 years, but a lot of that came from competition for talent. The more that competition eases, the more likely it is that we'll go backwards on this.
Relating back to the article... For the last 3 years of my career (I retired a few years ago), I worked 4-day weeks, and it was all remote. This is just as anecdotal as the article, but I felt I got far more done, with higher quality, than at any point in my career. It was such a revelation.
It's a big company, though, so other teams might be different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02259-6
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/19/four-day-week-...
Take all that AI productivity and found a one-day work week company. One day of focused collaboration each week, let bots and brains chew on stuff in the interim.
there are a lot of parallels with crypto 'mining' a transaction and AI slopping a functional output.
Though for myself, I like having time to think about ideas in between when I collaborate with folk on them, so I have a lot of optimism about the success of the experiment. :)
You can't because they didn't sell out completely. In fact they still have some power to protect the companies from foreign products.
The result is a mishmash of protectionism and globalization.
Humans are weird.
Paying high prices and losing your job are bad, but not as bad as changing your mind.
But let's say it's true. Great. Punish them with tariffs. They also have diminished political power because they're no longer a local employer.
We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society that will soon mint its first trillionaire. This is beyond even French revolution levels of wealth inequality.
“Oh but businesses will leave”
Yeah so what, if they do, we either didn’t want them, or they _actually won’t_ despite the squealing, or they will go, and if their segment of the market is useful, will get snapped up by new/local versions which do respect local constraints from the get-go.
All of these are better outcomes than not doing anything because “what if”.
Aren't poverty rates being reduced basically everywhere and people getting richer across all deciles? The truth is that even if 90% tax rate was enforceable it would not change much - many problems plaguing societies right now are due to bad legislation and NIMBYs, with housing being the prime example. Somehow people want at same time: more houses, cheaper housing and as little new housing development as possible.
On the whole though, I'd say yes, people do care about productivity so long as they feel it's connected to their world and oriented in the right-ish direction.
A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?
I thought about this a lot. Some of it is expectation wrapped up in the American Dream. You work hard, and get those rewards. But that isn’t true because life isn’t fair and capitalism isn’t particularly humane or ethical.
Some of it is perceived. The people who strike gold without hard work expect to keep striking more gold, and when the yield shrinks you’re appalled because that’s not how things should be.
US is a deeply individualistic society, now more so than ever. We don’t always sacrifice for the common good, because they’re supposed to work hard just like me.
Anyway if you read all that, thank you.
For a relatively short period it was true. Now majority works hard, lives from paycheck to paycheck and can not even own a house. Most results of what they produce goes to feed ever growing appetites of Musks
Seems to me, the question is more why all that supposed prosperity doesn't translate to the living quality improvements one would expect.
Employees are expensive, good employees are hard to find, and sometimes things need to be fixed outside 9-5 to avoid having an angry client on your hands.
Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost.
Most things we buy are priced according to what the consumer is willing to pay for it, and the balance sheet of the companies that sell most of the things we buy show there’s a lot of wiggle room there.
Services and goods where lots of human labor is required get much more expensive with larger cost of labor. E.g. fast-food, food delivery. And there's nothing wrong with that of course - I'd rather pay 2x more for delivery than have people working on wages that are not enough to even feed them.
Surely there is more slack in the system than the Epstein class wants to openly admit.
The problem is that people with power are largely incentivized to push this rate lower than the optimal-for-the-median-person rate in order to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
Yes, obviously. The bulk of work of the company is done by the workers. That is to say, most of the value is generated by the labor of the workers. If a commensurate share of the profit is not returned to the employees, they’ve clearly been undercompensated.
Most of the time these public companies do regular mass layoffs just to make their investors happy to do short term stock price manipulation so they can get a bump in their executive salaries. This happens all the time
Sure doesn't seem like an IPO makes anyone but the tops lives easier in my book...
Of course the rich tried to work around it. But culturally they also understood that paying a lot of taxes was considered their duty to society, especially in times of crisis.
Do tell, what is the effective tax rate that the rich pay today?
Worker wealth is absolutely not relative to the overall wealth in this country; that disproportionately goes to the top 1% (we're now at 1920s levels) and it's getting worse every year.
The average first home purchase age is 40 compared to the 20s then. Getting a college degree was free or cheap for many of our parents/grandparents, now it's mostly a luxury. Healthcare costs put people into permanent debt. Most people are struggling paycheck to paycheck.
Is your argument that life is all around better for the average person now because we don't tax the wealthy/let them accumulate most the wealth in this country?
Were there other factors? Absolutely but it's disingenuous to claim there was no difference in tax policy now vs then.
> widespread tax avoidance, capital flight, and a reduction in domestic investment
Do you not think the US has the capability to enforce their tax laws despite these efforts? It absolutely gets its tax dollars from foreign earned income, it can penalize such tax avoidance strategies (these companies operate in the unite states after all).
> The rich do not make the bulk of their wealth through a salary
Yeah, because it's a method to avoid taxation obviously. That's why we need to tax loans against assets ("buy, borrow, die") and increase capital gains to be at least above that of labor.
It's so incredibly obvious the wealthy do whatever they can to avoid taxation. Why are you so dead-set on furthering their agenda?
I'm curious, what's your solution to wealth inequality or do you think we should just let the super wealthy return to the robber barons/kings of yesteryear?
So if someone (you mean an entire, large company with many employees) offers public shares and people buy them, then what happens in your mind? I'm genuinely curious.
If I, this newly IPOed founder, 100x my company, now my paper wealth has 100x correct? Now, with that wealth I can follow "buy, borrow, die" so I pay near 0% taxation on these shares. Then, when I do need to liquidate some of my wealth I just pay capital gains. I pay myself $1y in salary so I pay no income tax. I now am 100x wealthier but pay little to no tax on that wealth while all my employees pay 30%+ on nearly every dollar they earn via their salaries.
This seems a bit... unfair... don't you think? The employees of this now very wealthy persons company are required for his wealth to continue but they pay at least 2-3x the taxes on a per dollar basis. Add to that the corporation also probably pays a 0% tax rate.
A reasonable bare minimum would be to make sure the wealthy and the companies they run pay their fair share in taxes as everyone including these companies benefit from the systems that taxation pays for.
It's amazing how many people are falling for billionaire taxation propaganda despite how blatantly obvious it is now...
I didn't realize the US was the Soviet Union, how ironic!
I’d much rather pay the prices corrected-for-supporting-livelihoods, than the artificially inflated prices used to line the pockets of the rich.
But unless you do central planning (which doesn't work) you can't really separate these two, can you?
Speaking as someone born in Yugoslavia.
That's almost how it was in Yugoslavia. Companies where "owned by society", but workers had voting rights. Whenever there was a vote to decide whether extra profit should be used for capital investments and/or operational improvements or assigned to salaries budget, everyone voted to increase their salaries.
Not every employ should be a co-owner, or at least not everyone should have voting rights.
There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
(Certainly not "naturally")
E.g. the Russian Revolution (one of the main workers' requests in the events leading up to the Revolution was the 40 hour work week and fair treatment).
The unions were just a symptom to mediate the threat of violence in exchange for a larger share of the added value generated by the worker.
Also, I guess it's worth noting I've been "exempt" all my life (not subject to 40 hours a week), so that particular labor win I guess didn't really cross my mind.
In a much more equal society this would go away to a great extent, but we don't live in anything close to that. So, if any co-op finds some useful niche, it will easily be out-competed by some company taking billionaire investors. The only exceptions are fundamentally limited businesses, where billionaires don't care to invest to outcompete, or the rare situations where it happened to not go that way before the co-op grew large enough, such as Mondragon in Spain's Basque Country.
Beyond this, there is of course the problem of the chicken and the egg. There are vanishingly few co-ops, so there are very very few people who know how to successfully lead and manage a co-op. So, many co-ops will face internal organizational issues and fail, as often happens with any other type of org run by people with little experience. But this then perpetuates the cycle. The same thing happened in the regular business world - many historically common organizational practices seem absurdly bad from today's standards, but they took time to be understood and repaired.
And finally, especially in B2B scenarios, there are real biases that the corporate owner class has against this type of organization, both personal and structural. Lots of B2B deals are built on interpersonal relationships between the owners and executives of these companies, a world in which the elected leader of a worker's co-op would not have the financial means to participate, even if the deep classism of the corporate elite wouldn't keep them out either way.
Because is advantageous for employers to keep workers as close to the brink of burnout as possible as a method of control
I heard one economist on the ABC give the example of carwashes[2]. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, car washes in Australia were largely automated and hand-wash car washes were relatively uncommon. However, the abundance of cheap labour has since led to a proliferation of hand-wash car washes.
1. https://files.littlebird.com.au/SCR-20260525-ietj.png
2. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/the-pr...
I wonder how it truly factors into productivity, though. How is productivity measured, and does that measurement capture what is true?
You mention automated car washes as a baseline. I never used those in the past because I figured they’d be rubbish or would scratch the car or whatever. So I’d occasionally wash the car myself, and that’s it. Now that we have manual car washes available, I use them from time to time. They clearly (I assert) do a better job than anything automated. And they do it inside and out.
So I find the comparison interesting, but in need of elaboration.
Good.
Developed countries should not aim to emulate the US. To get the same productivity you’d have to lower the standard of living of all the employees to the same level as those in the US.
No. Don’t do it.
Quality of life matters much more than profits.
If you wanted to live with a QoL of the 1940s you could do so today working 2 days a week. Of course you’d have no air conditioning, shitty food, no running water, etc etc.
You don’t have to LIKE corps but you should at least understand your world before calling for the guys with guns to get involved.
I would love a three day weekend every weekend. in fact I'd even "pay" for that (My father used his LSL one day a week every week.. a genius idea imho).
But I dont see it happening any time soon.
The point was never productivity, it was about humiliation and control.
If it were about productivity, workers would be paid substantially more to reflect the immense productivity gains we’ve created through automation; we are not.
If it were about effective time management or efficiency, we would be on four-day, 32 hour work weeks to reflect the real productive output of labor; we are not.
Just like how RTO excuses of “mentoring Juniors” and “improving team cohesion” went out the door for mass layoffs, despite data showing that a flexible schedule adapting to the needs of the team rather than whims of leadership have better outcomes and higher productivity; we now pay higher commute costs, fuel costs, energy costs, and opportunity costs so real estate investments don’t invert.
It’s all bullshit and lies, and this is one more study to add to the Alexandria-esque library of research proving that there is no single good way of working, and the insistence of refusing to change how we work is ultimately costing us more than if we just learned to adapt.
"Participants were identified via media reports featuring Australian firms trialling the 100:80:100 model, in addition to companies listed on recruitment sites that specialise in 4DWW jobs. In other instances, eligible organisations were recommended by the participants themselves."
I'd expect organisations with positive results will be the ones recommended by other participants - "talk to these people, it worked for them too!"
I'm also interested in whether or not organisations converted all staff to 100:80:100, or if it was optional. Is the performance driven by peer pressure?
Finally, the participants' measures of productivity will have significant lag time in them, so it depends on trial's length, e.g. "revenue", "profit", "csat", "projects delivered on time", "net promoter score".
Table 1 has "Duration", but the units are unlabelled, if it's weeks, it's less than a year, months is probably better for seeing performance changes.
It's an interesting qualitative study, I'd certainly like a four day work week with no change in comp.
With population declines locked in almost globally (About 71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size), working age population decline, reducing labor supply, is also locked in. Reduced go forward labor supply reduction means labor power.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/fertility-rate-of-world-pop...
https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680794 (US specific citations)
My my, seems like we gots ourselves a socialist o’er here. We don’t take kindly to your kind ’round these parts. What’s yer idea? Improve folks lives? Treat others with respect and dignity and give e’ryone meaning? Are ya cuckoo in tha head? Git him, boys.
I see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.
Similarly, have you ever been “in the zone” and worked non-stop on a fun project, being super-productive for a full week or even multiple weeks, but then “crashed” (or even burned out) and your output got worse?
New companies are on a race against the clock. At the beginning everything is a cost, you’re constantly losing money. So you plough through to survive until you become stable. Then you need to scale back and take it slower to allow yourself to recuperate and keep going.
Also, keep in mind that small companies can often be very productive simply by having fewer employees and “red tape”. You can have an idea, send a message to someone else, get an immediate OK and get going. When a company gets too big and has lots of processes to keep things running, a lot of effort is wasted on even getting started.
Problem is there's no such thing, monopoly powers, government subsidies, inter-company issues, contracts.
All these things can mean that a less functional, more wasteful and less productive organisation performs (in the sense of the metric that companies care about , line go up) better than a 4 day week startup.
Eventually, but what's the typical lifecycle of a company? And if e.g. Treehouse succeeds or fails, was that because of their 4 day work week or because of any of the hundreds of other reasons a company might succeed or fail?
Then Australian real wages have also declined. So there is already low motivation to work beyond the minimum expectation.
Australia also has strong social security, at least until now, and there are plenty of odd jobs due to the real estate and tourism industries, so there is little pressure to survive unless you owe too much credit.
Automation and technology adoption also lags behind. For example, people still wait thirty minutes on a call to get an appointment with a doctor instead of making an online booking.
For all of these reasons productivity has been low and declining. An extra day off work is a strong stimulus for squeezing what gets done into the rest of the days.
In my opinion this is an extreme, just as the work yourself to death culture in India and China is. On a scale of a few decades economies where people worked agressively harder have grown tremendously but at the expense of the long-term wellbeing of the people. Places like Australia that were well off and felt little pressure to compete have sustained good quality of life but at the expense of having no competetitve edge anymore.
Fixing the work week to just 5 days have similar issues. Some weeks will be less work and other weeks more work but you spend the same five days there. So the what you learn that matters is to spend 5 days physically there and perform a minimum workload so you don't get fired. You drag the weeks with less work and pick up inefficient habits as a result. That is what a 5 day working week teaches. Again there will be exceptions.
Now assuming this study is correct I am not surprised with the results. You just incentivized workers to get the same amount of output done with the condition that you gain 1 day off. Off course workers will find better and quicker ways of working to get that day off.
Even if we did a 4 working day week the problem of working based on time either fixed or paid by the hour remains. The incentivisation is the problem.
Likewise the office worker working 40 hours per week, five days a week. If on some days the worker can come home early because they completed what actually needs to be done then that is better for the worker. But instead companies have a fixed 40 hours + overtime expectation. On the weeks with less work, people do busy work but instead could be using that time doing what they want.
Again the problem is the incentivization.
capital, not labor, captures almost all those gains
Same as every study of open-plan offices shows that they suck.
The psychopaths in charge do not care.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x
Hopkins, J., Bardoel, E.A. & Djurkovic, N. The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of the 100:80:100 model. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07536-x
This is the actual problem to discuss, not the days per week.
Stressors vary a lot by industry and experience level. A senior manager in IT may do more than 40 hours a week plus be on-call with almost no stress as long as their projects are doing well. Meanwhile, there may be no sane amount of overtime pay that will convince a young guy doing roofing in his first year, and he's highly stressed out either way.
Anyone spinning this as a political issue is plain ignorant.