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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

No, but you could cut everybody to 30 hour workweeks and hire more people.

Once it becomes the norm even for a small section of the economy it will spread.

People are more productive in an absolute sense working fewer hours anyway.

It just takes a union, an ambitious company, or a state to force that 30 hour workweek to show some success with better talent attraction and retention and better corporate results to start a trend.

It is possible for everybody to get a piece of the pie.

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Strongly agree. Reduce the work week today to 4 days 32 hours, the US already generates $5T in profits per year. That is time taken from workers from the one life they get. If corporations want to be more productive, take your best shot with LLMs. If it works, great, we keep reducing the work week. If it doesn't work, well, take it up with who sold you the magic beans.

We are already productive enough to have a shorter work week and more leisure, anyone saying no has specific incentives to not support it (either via financial gain from the capital accumulation funnel or work bound to their identity).

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=4+day+week

(we get there eventually with structural demographics, it’ll just take longer)

Yes, in theory but if working more confers an advantage then work expectations will stay the same and will show up as higher productivity. So the real question is how will that productivity be distributed. Right now it's being concentrated into shareholders value rather than wages.

It is not.

Eventually a new startup will replace your large inefficient employer with people working 10% of their time.

So tax them as much as needed, or require state ownership of some amount. Startups, and company entities in general, exist because a jurisdiction allows them to, or allows them to accept payments, control accounts with financial resources, pay vendors and workers, and operate within a commercial framework. That is a privilege, not a right. The rules are a shared agreement and delusion, the rules can change at any time.

Actually participating in commerce is considered a pillar in defining a liberal democracy, in the words of John Locke, so I would say that is a right.

It’s certainly an opinion, but not law, and laws can always change.

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