Sweden’s proposed six-hour workday
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
In very broad terms, the Dutch are more likely to plan and stick to those plans. Personal time and time off are valued, so you need to be efficient in your working hours. You can't really expect someone to respond to your emails after working hours. Having to work in the weekends at all is a sign of bad project management, and should be exceptional. Meetings have agendas which are sent out ahead of time.
Americans are generally more optimistic, which makes for worse time management and planning, which leads to overtime and stress. Being seen at work somehow equals working, and internal guilt for not working efficiently while at work leads to more weekend work. There's a big focus how much you've 'worked' this week. Interruption is common for things which could be structured.
To be honest, it's been pretty difficult to adjust, but the payoff is huge. Actual free time after work, real weekends, and longer vacations are all possible because people plan... whereas friends back home are often unable to plan vacations because they/their boss don't know how busy they'll be in 5 months.
We have an 8.5 hour workday in Switzerland which we strictly stick to - we get comp time if you work over. In the u.s. we were pretty regularly working 10 hour days and 12 wasn't unusual, but we were wasting so much time.
A good example is meetings - most people get to the meeting 5 minutes before the start time. As soon as enough people arrive (usually 5 minutes before the start time or right at the start time) the meeting starts. If the meeting doesn't start by 10 minutes after because someone is missing it's cancelled. There's no smalltalk at the beginning, no socializing, no standing around stuffing your face...
Our company was bought by an American company and some of the Swiss staff transferred to the u.s. for awhile. Meetings were one of the most confusing changes for them - they'd be waiting in the conference room with no one showing up, then a few stragglers 10 minutes after the start time, and then every stands around talking about non-work stuff like they were at a high-school mixer. One colleague asked to have them start the meeting the first few time but eventually gave up and just started doing it the American way.
at one point, I was paid for more time in meetings than work. The only way this didn't happen was when we were putting out fires because mysteriously, we weren't making project goals and upper management was putting pressure on my boss.
I currently work for a fully remote company and it's completely the opposite. We do one weekly status meeting which is usually 20-30 mins. Then project planning/troubleshooting/teambuilding meetings as needed usually around 2-4 hours per MONTH.
EVERYTHING else is discussed/solved very efficiently via IM.
I hope to never work for a company with meetingitus again, big waste of time and resources.
It's acceptable to skip a few of the meetings after things inevitably turn into a cluster bomb and somebody has to start writing the actual code.
I'm lucky to have learned from some excellent meeting-chairs but have only been able to reproduce the efficiency when I formed and ran my own team. Never pulled it off when joining someone else's.
That means they're unproductive. On the other hand, if you force a venue change, you're just going to get hyper aggressive git commit messages or something equally stupid to show "who's boss". The only solution I'm aware of is to select employees for hire based on likelihood of not being "into" primate dominance rituals, at least not at work. This is pretty hard to figure out at the interview stage and once a company is eventually infected, its plague dynamics time, and much like a bad flu season, work grinds to a halt.
I don't think that's necessarily even a subconscious purpose, but most human group face-to-face interactions end up involving some elements of such rituals, and in the case of meetings they are particularly dominant when the "rich interaction" that is enabled by face-to-face communication isn't used specifically for something else.
Lots of meetings, IME, are held by one person to gather information from many people or to distribute information from one person to many people -- these kind of one-to-many or many-to-one scenarios are the easiest thing to see doesn't require a meeting (many-to-one being the more inefficient.) There's even some cases of many-to-many communication where there isn't any real need for interactivity. And plenty of cases where a meeting that is held for a many-to-many interactive purpose spends much of its time doing top-down, one-to-many communication for much of the meeting because something that ought to have been distributed to be reviewed by participants to be ready for a productive meeting was instead distributed for the first time in the meeting, wasting most of the meeting time.
I've seen this play out in social groups, too.
Technology is easy, people are hard.
In knowledge and creative work I find that if you take 4-5 weeks off a year (I've only done this once) work can bleed in to "off time" and it doesn't matter. When you take 2-3 weeks off a year you have to protect your personal time.
I do see this in some of the startups in the bay area though.
(EDIT: It's about the feeling of guild, people. It's embedded inside the Protestant Culture, alongside with working hard. As mentioned in Wikipedia link)
'Protestant work ethic' is something I've only heard talked about in America, usually couched in the form of an indirect put-down of non-protestants. Northern Europeans are more likely to view predominantly Catholic countries like France, Spain, Italy as stereotypically lazy, but this is usually ascribed to the Mediterranean climate.
The thing is that it's not necessarily so much about working hours here. It's the general feeling that every moment should be intentful, purposeful and, like our churches, generally without frills.
In a way it feels less like 'work hard' and more like 'don't endulge yourself' to me.
Are they more productive though? That's the important part. I'm not familiar with the Dutch software industry, is it comparable to silicon valley?
Edited: Scandinavian -> Norther Europe
They didn't contribute very much to the genetic and cultural pool that exists in those areas today.
The article conflates productivity with 'working hard'. Productivity is a measure of how much value is produced ('money is made') per hour of work.
A bulldozer operator working an 8 hour day to move a few tons of dirt is more productive than a worker who needs many 12 hour work days to move the same amount of dirt with a shovel and wheelbarrow. A trader at a bank who moves millions of shares with a phone call and a few mouse clicks is more productive than the bulldozer operator. Does this mean the banker works hardest and the guy with the shovel the least hard?
A high productivity per hour in a country means fewer ditches are dug using shovels, and more credit default swaps are sold. It doesn't mean people are working harder. It also doesn't necessarily mean the shovel digging country is organizing its economy less efficiently. Where the cost of labor is a few dollar per day, investing in a bulldozer might never pay off. Hiring 100 guys with shovels and wheelbarrows could be more efficient than hiring one guy with a bulldozer.
Suppose the trader is selling credit default swaps and helping cause a big financial crash, or the bulldozer operator is destroying acres of forest to clear the way for a tobacco plantation. What they do may be very valuable to the people paying them (and hence, if they're lucky, lucrative for them personally) but have substantially negative net value by any reasonable measure.
So "amount of hard work" is at two removes from what (I think) really matters, namely amount of actual value produced.
The problem is that the definition of "actual value" turns out to be devilishly difficult to pin down. There's no objective measure for it. Value is subjective.
This is one of the central riddles of economics. But it's also why exchanges happen at all.
Ultimately, the concept of "actual value" can be defined as one of two things: money (for things that have value for an individual) and laws (for things that have value for the society, e.g. externalities). Simply said, the society values certain things (short-term profit, growth, cars, cheap food, human lives) more than others (long-term stability, the environment, clean air, rainforest, empty space). These sentiments change, but they change slowly, because we live in a democracy (and because people value social/cultural stability and safety).
As far as the financial crisis is concerned, it's easy to say after the fact. Was Einstein's research net-negatively-valuable, because it resulted in the atomic bomb, or was it net-negatively-valuable, because it ended the war? Whenever there is innovation, there is a risk of the innovation resulting in something "bad". That doesn't mean that the value of research is negative. People are simply short-sighted and/or not smart enough to foresee bad consequences. Btw, I'm sure you're doing the same thing - consuming cheap electronic devices produced using non-recyclable rare resources by workers whose raising wages will (1) significantly increase pollution and (2) significantly increase their quality of life. Is that "good" or "bad"?
My point was narrower: Unless you choose to define the value of an activity to be what someone gets paid for doing it, you will find that those two things diverge, sometimes badly. So measures of productivity (e.g., GDP) that just count how much people get paid are, at best, going to do a very imperfect job of capturing anyone's idea of what's worth while. Most likely there will be large systematic disagreements.
I was going to suggest a guy with a 50ct lighter and a jerrycan of gas, who is probably a more imminent threat to forests than the bulldozer operator.
if we were to go by entropy measures there is nothing we can do about it .
So what is of value?
And there's good reason to believe that the results/hour coefficient is lower for each individual worker regardless, when the "hour" part of the equation is higher.
The supposedly lazy Greeks and Italians work far more hours per year than the supposedly industrious Germans and Dutch, but not as much as sweatshop workers in Bangladesh.
A lot of people forget that large parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland were dirt poor as late as the 1930s. These are very harsh climates to live in if you don't have trade and modern technology.
http://www.economist.com/node/155244 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_sterilisation_in_Swe...
I think maybe we can make a bold move and call that metric 'efficiency'.
His comment when asked was he got as much work out of the teams in the usa who had 2 weeks annual leave as he did in the uk with the team having 5 weeks holiday.
When you say "value is produced", you seem to be conflating two concepts, how much value is captured by an individual/firm, and how much value is created for the whole economy.
When bankers make lots of money for themselves and their employers, are they creating wealth for the economy, or are they merely participating in a zero-sum game where their gain is someone else's loss? I expect it's a combination of the two.
Usually it's a split in the middle of the week or something, for example my manager doesn't work tuesday's, it's his "papadag" as he then spends time with his kids and don't have to send them off to day-care or get a nanny.
Another colleague of mine dropped his contract from 40 hours a week down to 32 hours so he would have an extra day to work on his music career and an upcoming album.
Obviously these arrangements will affect your salary as you work less.
For single parents going from 40 to 32 hours per week can be a net-neutral operation from a money perspective. The various tax breaks will increase with just about the same as your net salary drops. In rare cases you'll even end up with net a bit more than before. Going from 32 to 24 might still be the same, below that the balance shifts and you end up with less.
I just ran the numbers with one of my employees in NL and we came to this exact conclusion so she decided to work one day less. In countries with a strong social net the equation is not always as simple as time*hourly rate, your situation should be taken into account as well.
brb talking to the boss.
The research here also says that the 32 hours can be just as productive as the 40.
I don't really find this obvious or self-evident. One of my very biggest complaints about the economic climate today is that all of the productivity gains go to the owners, and very little to workers. If I as a worker am producing more, it follows that I should be working less, or paid more (which amounts to the same thing.) to do otherwise eliminates jobs that would otherwise need to be done, and takes advantage of workers.
If there is such an obvious imbalance, why doesn't everyone just quit and start their own company?
Your point would make some sense if all owners of companies bootstrapped them from startups, when in reality they were likely just someone who was otherwise wealthy and became owners once it was already a successful company when the original owners already cashed out (or passed on, depending on the age of the company).
The solution to this is to become an owner. Now, creating and operating a company is probably harder than working for it, for it it weren't, why wouldn't people just become owners if it pays better?
I think the dad does 3 days and the mum does 2 days. They have found it worked for them and they can share the joy of looking after their kids on a weekly basis. They still do the 8hr/day for 5day/week. In this way, they are having vatertag and muttertag every week.
I'd much prefer increased flexibility over less hours.
Would they still get one if the daycare was cheaper and with plenty of room for everyone or would they prefer the salary increase?
Being able to work 4 days instead? A god-send. I couldn't think of anything I'd like more. Thankfully, my current job gets me part of the way there -- I work 4 days in the office and one day at home (where I do just as much work but either condensed or spread out during the day depending on the current project workload).
It will be interesting to see what differs from 8-hour days, both in free time, shopping, traffic, and more.
Imagine that the 6-hour day is successful, and we can make shifts. Some people go to work from 8 - 2, others from 12-6. That could lighten some traffic jams I venture.
That's only assuming there are no constant(independent of how long he work) costs to employ someone. In many countries it's not true.
For example, Dutch workers are on par with American workers in terms of productivity per hour. They pay higher taxes and earn less than Americans. But on average, they work roughly 11 weeks less than their American counterparts each year, have access to government-funded health care, pay little or nothing for a college education, and have far more leisure time than the American. When UNICEF recently ranked 21 industrialized nations by well-being for children, Netherlands was on top and the United States was near the bottom, in 20th place.
> For example, Dutch workers are on par with American workers in terms of productivity per hour.
If it's productivity per hour, doesn't that mean that the total productivity of Americans per week (or year) would be higher? Because as you're saying it, then Americans work 40h a week, and you work 30h a week, yet Americans are able to maintain the same level of productivity per hour.
So can you clarify whether it's really same productivity per hour, or whether you meant same productivity say..per week, or month, or year. Because if it's per week, then the Dutch productivity would have to be higher per hour than the American productivity, in order to be the same "per week".
gp is saying that:
* Netherlands' productivity ($/hour) is on par with US' * during 1 year, the Dutch work less hours per capita * so GDP/capita is lower in Netherlands * but that's OK, because Europe
For example, consider when somebody asks, "Well, $country has light rail that's cheap, punctual, and goes everywhere. Why doesn't the U.S. have it?"
They ignore that the U.S. is the fourth largest country in the world by land area. The state of Oregon has roughly the same land area as the United Kingdom. While light rail may be something that's very good to have, it can be otherwise impractical for a country as large as the U.S.
The land area argument is often trotted out by Americans ignoring that there are many other countries with even lower population density, and ignoring that population density varies greatly by area and average population density for the US as a whole is only relevant if we're asking questions about the US as a whole.
Your overall point that it's dangerous to compare is fair enough, though.
(I'm just tired of the population density argument being trotted out, coming from Norway, with a population density well under half that of the US that's a poster child for why average population density is irrelevant - things like rail etc. works well in Norway only because the main population centres covers only a tiny portion of the land mass; and that's largely true for the US too)
edit:
http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/factbook-2013-en/images/g...
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405297020375260...
http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2013/11/netherlan...
Which means that as a country the people will have to either fall into bankruptcy, dramatically cut their quality of living, or work a lot more. All that leisure time came at a very high cost.
The WSJ article specifically mentions that this relates to secured debt (mortgages), not credit card debt. Interest rates are fully tax deductible in the Netherlands, which incentivizes higher mortgage debt than in many other countries. Many people own homes, and the ones that do borrow the majority of the market value when buying.
Housing prices did fall recently (and are now headed back up), but they did not tank as they did in the US. Similarly, the rules on mortgages were on the whole much stricter than in the US; this, combined with the relatively low unemployment rate, resulted in a foreclosure rate which is the lowest in Europe.
The housing market during the crisis, and to some extent now, looks a lot like people stuck in the place where they live. They can make the mortgage payments just fine, but their hopes of swapping that starter house for a larger one have been put on hold until either they build up more equity or the housing market improves.
Another factor (IIRC) is that before the crisis, housing prices just went steadily upwards, doubling or even tripling their values during a lifetime (probably less if you take inflation into consideration). This caused a lot of people to extend their mortgage or take a second or even third mortgage on the gained value of their house, which was used to add to the house or buy a car or things like that.
Second, who said anything about the United States? Why is that always the knee-jerk reaction? Mortgage debt is included in the US calculation anyway, so what's the point exactly? The US doesn't get a special calculation for household debt that is different from the Netherlands. Non-the-less I wasn't comparing the two. Let's compare the Netherlands to the rest of Europe who they are in theory most similar to: their individual debt is drastically higher than basically all of Europe.
Third, having eg 100% of your home consumed by debt, means you do not own equity in your home. That's household debt, and it should count just as much as credit card debt should: you have to pay for it, it's going to come out of your future earnings one way or another, and if you do not pay for it there will be serious financial consequences. And when the number is 250%+, you can bet that is coming home to roost sooner rather than later.
My point stands: to deal with that extreme level of household debt (and that's assuming there isn't another crisis any time soon that tips a dangerous situation into an untenable situation) will require a dramatic change to how the people of the Netherlands live. Most likely part of that equation will have to be working more. My argument is that a social trade-off has been made between work, leisure and debt, and to the extent that compromise has been made, in the future it will have to be reversed.
A high household debt implies that there's relatively less money left over for domestic consumption, compared to similar countries with less debt. Low domestic consumption is a drag on employment. That means that new jobs must come from the export sector, but with the current worldwide stagnation, that does not look hopeful.
I fear another decade of very slow growth, not a sudden collapse: unemployment is stable, mortgage requirements have been fairly strict, so people who can pay their mortgage this month, can pay it the next.
Jobs that need full time cover tend to have a schedule for their employees. And when it's 24x5 or 24x7, you're going to need a schedule anyway, because a regular 40 hour work week doesn't cover that either.
I also found out that during the off day I'm processing the stuff that has happened on the job and this helps me in my focus and deciding what the next steps are. Considering this, my productivity and effectivity both went up.
As you might conjecture this can lead to some friction where people only meet between Tuesday and Thursday. This leads to slight inefficiencies but in my experience these are small in well managed teams.
>The Swedish town of Kiruna actually gave up its six-hour working days in 2005 after finding that the increased intensity of work was not a positive. "People have seen there that the intensity of the job increases significantly, with negative effects on health as a consequence,"
Could that be because we are used to fit our work in 8 hours and work accordingly? Doing 100% of your work in 75% of the time does sound more intense.
It might be interesting to see how the stress changes as people get used to a 6h day.
Tony Schwarz's "Leading at Google" talk on this topic is excellent - http://youtu.be/tke6X2eME3c
Makes the stats look much more progressive than reality, even though 32/36 hour work weeks are common.
The norm is 37.5 hour work weeks. We're entitled to a 0.5 hour lunch break every day, but that's unpaid unless you're required to spend it on-site.
I too work 4 days a week, and wouldn't have it any other way. I have had to reject at least one very interesting job offer for it, though. Even when employers know full well that a 4 day work week makes sense, some of them still have trouble accepting it. It makes for weird conversations where they totally agree with me, and still cannot do it.
The US union that is now the AFL-CIO leadership in pushing for the 8 hour day led directly to making May 1st the international day for labor demonstrations, in part in commemoration of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre.
If you want your employers to be able work less, nothing is stopping you most places. But experience is that not having an upper bound caused employers to take massive advantage.
When laws were passed to mandate 8 hour work days, what % of companies had 8 hour work days already? 10%? 20%? 80%?
Nowadays we know that total productivity is higher if you have 8 hour work days, even though you work less total hours, because your productivity per hour is much higher. Was something like this known at the time? Or was the push to 8 hour work days only so that people could spend time with their family? What kinds of arguments were used?
Is a good read on the subject and the referenced links are even better (as usual). The 12 hour workday had to be fought for... that tells you something about what %age of employers had 8 hour workdays already, left to their own devices that percentage would be very close to 0. Each and every reduction in hours had to be fought for somehow.
When I was an employer in Canada and we had the standard NL holiday/compensation package our employees were so happy, and other companies nearby cautioned me not to be too open about it lest it 'would spread' and their employees would demand similar. Employers do not tend to be on the same side as their employees in arguments like these (though they should be: happy employee = loyal employee).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Duncan_Parnell
Here's a PDF that gives some stats from 1890 until the 1930's: http://www.nber.org/chapters/c4124.pdf
Prior to the 1890's, it took decades to even get down to the 12, and then 10 hour workday.
I don't remember specifically when there started being actual research into the productivity effects of shorter work days, but it definitively was not known at the outset - at the outset, it was driven by workers rights movements.
But for the sake of argument, the percentage would be very low, probably pretty much limited to professionals that could work their own hours. Most people were working poor, for whom the workday was 10-16 hours long, six days per week (in the Western world).
To give you an idea of the significant lenghth of prior work hours, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day has a pair of phrases: "Women and children in England were granted the ten-hour day in 1847. French workers won the 12-hour day after the February revolution of 1848."
We know? Surely on a planet with 7 billion people, some of them can maintain their work efficiency for more than 8 hours. What about the Steve Jobs and John Carmack's of the world? I don't see them being 9-5 people.
During the week (when i work more protracted hours) I'm sleeping about 8 hours at least, and I'm also not beholden to an alarm, so I get as much sleep as my body needs. I think I'm probably one of the most well rested people I know, despite pulling twelve hour 'shifts' three days a week.
Obviously I'm more tired after I do the 12 hour shifts than during the week, but I haven't felt so tired that I was at risk of falling asleep on the road (which happened from time to time when I was in grad school).
In principle, this is stuff that insurance companies should be on top of...
I will never be a world class ballet dancer or world class basketball player simply by putting in a little more time than the next guy.
Plus, in certain fields, even if you are experiencing diminishing returns, you can still squeeze more value out of those additional hours than someone else can.
Imagine one Friday your company calls the law firm you have on retainer. The guy handling your case has already put in 50 hours this week and is only operating at 80% capacity. You are still going to get better work out of him than his coworker, because your guy has everything about your case stored in his head without reading any notes.
On the other hand, if someone was on some type of monitoring duty, where usually nothing happens but if something does happen it's very important that he make the right call (ie guard duty, nuclear power plant operator) I would want to split his work over many people.
Sometimes two 30-hour workers perform better than one 60-hour worker, and sometimes they perform worse.
If Steve Jobs would have worked less, he may not have been removed from the Apple Board. If he had spent more time with his family, maybe the Lisa wouldn't have had the connotations that it had.
These are not conclusive, but they do point us in a direction.
I'm a marxist, and I hate many forms of socialism. Karl Marx hated many forms of socialism. He even devoted a chapter of the Communist Manifesto to ripping apart forms of socialism he didn't like.
I believe even the 40-hour week is not statutory. At least in Denmark (maybe the same in Sweden?), the basic parameters of employment (maximum working hours, overtime pay, minimum wages, etc.), are negotiated between the employer's confederation and the union confederation, rather than set by statute. However, since the unionization rate is over 90% and the basic parameters are set through overall framework agreements (applying to all workplaces covered by the confederations, not separate company-by-company negotiations), these negotiated agreements de-facto set the conditions at almost all workplaces.
The Danish switch in 1992 from 40-hour to 37-hour weeks, for example, was entirely through union negotiations, not done by legislation.
Yes, the same is true up here.
On the other hand, you can see these regulations as a collective bargaining between employees and business. Individual employees have no negotiating power against any corporation, but they all together can elect a government that will have an upper hand there, so it's just market behaviours.
And no, what you said about 20 hours work week doesn't work like that. I believe that many employers would be happy to pay only 20 effective hours a week for a software engineers, but sorry, my workday consist of some time needed to concentrate, get in the flow, release some stress, let the brain work in the hammock time, and you also need to pay for this, since you won't get these effective 20 hours a week without these other 20 hours. It just doesn't work like that. Maybe I would agree to be paid only for 20 effective hours a week, but my rate in that case will easily go double.
Work hour limits are a reasonable solution in a democratic society where the majority doesn't want to be beholden to the work habits of the minority. Although, such a society should expect that some of those long-working folks will emigrate to countries like the U.S. where they can get outsized rewards for working longer than other people.
It's not that one company would have excess hours; all of them would. So, you would be free to find a new position. . . at another company with a 60 hour work week.
Look at the history of the labor movement. Those in power tended to abuse those that weren't; long hours, unsafe conditions, etc. Now, unless you work in a coal mine or foundry, we can count out unsafe work conditions.
That really leaves one other option. . . . . .
First off, it's not the same. There is no, or very low incentive for gun owners to commit crimes; especially when compared to the possible consequences.
If there are no protections for workers, though, there is every incentive for businesses to abuse their employees. History proves this statement true. That is, of course, unless I'm just not aware of a number of businesses who willingly limited their abuse before the labor movement.
And yes, the average startup and google and other tech sector businesses offer good perks. . . . That is not normal for a majority of careers, you know that, right?
And this, "Low skilled jobs? Who cares about them." Is either one of the most terrible statements I've read on HN, or one of the best trolls I've seen; boy, oh boy, did it get me worked up.
That is a terrible way to live. Do you understand how much of your life relies on low skilled jobs? Do you buy your food from a grocery store? Do you shop for clothes? Do you purchase anything that you don't personally create? At some point, low-skilled workers interacted with the goods you purchase.
The attitude that the only reason people work low-skill jobs is because they aren't smart or capable enough for anything else is very, very immature and incredibly ignorant. Specifically, your attitude that they apparently deserve to be treated worse and (in the context of our conversation) deserve to be abused by their employer because of their low-skilled jobs is awful, just simply awful. You should be ashamed.
This is something I've been trying to say for years now. Thanks for putting it in words so succinctly.
The 8 hour working day was first promoted by Robert Owen in 1817, using the slogan "Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest".
It was picked up by various unions and other organizations towards the middle of the century, such as the first International - the International Working Mens Association, where people like Marx and Bakunin were leading forces. But in most places they met fierce opposition, and many places it took decades of strikes and demonstrations and campaigning to push it through.
If anything politicians are pushing for more work (though not longer days). Lower sick pay, later retirement and conversion of part time jobs to full time have been implemented or proposed.
(Also, it is not Volvo Cars that is downsizing, it is Volvo Group).
So there is definitely a push to reduce the work day (Though possibly not to 6 hours).
When I was a kid, my own family - mostly blue-collar, unionized workers - would've only supported a reduction in the work week if that meant they could start getting overtime sooner. They didn't have to, because they were unionized, but they worked as much as they could. They'd happily work holidays like Christmas because it meant they got triple-time. If you gave them a six-hour day at the same rate of pay, they'd celebrate - and then go looking for a part-time job. They did this because they wanted a better life for themselves and their children - not too many six-year-old working class kids had a TRS-80 in their bedroom, but I did.
If they didn't believe a better life for themselves or their children was particularly possible, perhaps they would've wanted to work less - but that cultural trait was such a big part of their lives, they would've been entirely different people without it. I have a hard time even picturing it.
Because of this, when I read articles like the one linked, they seem so strange - I'm not judging, not at all, but it really highlights how different cultures are wired completely differently.
The difference you speak of may be due to the fact that making lots of money more strongly determines whether your son will too.
And is going to be required to hire more employees because of regulations on how many available workers per shift on typical government job.
Göteborg has of 2013 a debt of 37,5 billion SEK. On top of that it has 13,5 billions SEK in unfunded penions debts.
There is a reason why Göteborg, or Röteborg (Rottenburg) in "folkmun", has one of the highest taxes in Sweden - poor management.
In many European cities and regions one does not commute for hours every day. For instance, my brother lives in a 2000 year-old city and walks to work -- it takes him 2 minutes. When I lived in London it took me 15-20 minutes to get to work, with the tube. In a Swiss city before that, 15 minutes driving. And for my job before that, 4 minutes biking.
Of course it's depends how lucky you are. When I lived in Stockholm for a short while, I had an 50 minutes commute from the outer parts of Stockholm (still within city limits) to the city, first by buss then subway.
In Göteborg, if you need to pass Göta älv (Göta river) in rush hour, good luck with that. It is the main bottleneck in Göteborg with only two bridges and one tunnel, all of the jammed.
Sure buses have their own lane so that runs faster, but the nightmarish slow tram is just painful, half the speed of a subway.
http://www.treehugger.com/cars/average-commute-times-usa-int...
> Is there something wrong with your public transport system?
There's actually a bus stop almost outside my front door, and Edinburgh has a reasonable bus service. However if I was to take the bus to the train station, then take the train and be picked up the other end it would take me about 90 min, which is longer.
An hour a day is only 30 min journey time and I suspect many people in the UK spend longer than that travelling to work. I certainly have in the past.
Why isn't public transportation better than it is a lot of places? I'd attribute it to lack of funding by local governments due to politicians who don't consider public transport to be important at all (most of them would be embarrassed to ever be seen riding in a bus rather than a mercedes or something). It is considered transportation for the lower classes (who should be embarrassed they aren't wealthy!), and thus isn't reevaluated or improved at all.
Anywhere that has hour long traffic daily should probably be big enough to have better public transport so I'll give you that...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor
Some cities (even some small ones) have EXCELLENT public transport but some places have zero public transport. And with widespread suburban sprawl it gets worse since you generally need a car to live in suburbia.
Not sure why a train would actually come through here though.
Personally, I don't think this is that simple. Heck, humans just aren't that simple. I think some people and some professions are more productive above 40 and others are more productive under 40. That's why I'm in favor of a system that leaves this as a point of negotiation between the employee and employer. Just like there is no one-size fits all salary for, say, a java developer with 5 years experience (how fast is he? how buggy is his code? can he work independently? etc), why would expect to find a one size fits all for work day length?
While you are correct that people vary, many managers seem extremely ignorant of 200 years of research on this topic and start from grossly wrong initial conditions (e.g., "40 hours is the bare minimum and should be considered slacking: a professional works until the job is done and we really expect 50 hours; we prefer passionate people, which starts at around 55 hours"). It would be far better for almost everyone if the typical standard expectation were based on a typical standard human, not on outliers (e.g., people who carry the DEC2 mutation and need only 6 hours sleep).
Look at it another way: the 75% of the workforce who is average would stop burning themselves out to the point of negative productivity, and supermen like yourself would be truly recognized for your outstanding contributions, rather than just "meh, meets expectations".
[0] e.g. http://www.slideshare.net/flowtown/rules-of-productivity-275...
"An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much as one working 40 hours per week in 1950. (The data here is from the US, but productivity increases in Europe and Japan have been of the same magnitude.) The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours per week."
I find that knowingly working only six hours lets me take better breaks because I don't feel like I'm supposed to be working eight hours.
My biggest concern is that my salary won't be enough to pay my ~$1k/month student loan debt.
There are many variables in the process:
- Demand for money of the employee (poor father of five vs. rich single)
- Demand for work of the employer (company needs a helping hand vs company needs to recruit a new team)
- Scale effect of product (does one additional hour or man lead to one additional unit produced?, compare laying bricks vs programming)
These variables are unknown to the lawmaker for each specific instance, so any a-priori determination of the amount of work hours per week cannot be optimal.
But I agree with the imbalance of power, at least in the common case. However, the more specific and difficult your job is, the more the power leans towards the employee.
Still, I believe any kind of power inequality will manifest itself somewhere whether you fix working hours or not.
It's not like the "invisible hand" simply discovered the optimum life arrangement for all workers everywhere.
Who mentioned lawmakers? I only see two contracting parties here: the municipal government in Gothenburg, and a group of its employees.
This idea that there's a short and slippery slope between 'City municipality experiments to find the most efficient working day for its employees' and 'GOVERNMENT BANS ANYONE WORKING MORE THAN SIX HOURS' is, ISTM, dubious.
Software developers with the same skills working on the same product are generally closer to the former than the latter, but it depends.
The other thing is that there are many fixed costs associated with hiring an employee. They need a desk and office space and computer, they need health insurance/unemployment, you need HR to manage all of this. So it ends up being much more expensive (and complicated) to have two part time employees than one fulltime one. If most benefits were decoupled from employment, a lot (but not all) of these costs go away.
Organization is key (not hours).
So the title is wholly misleading. I guess politicians of a certain style in Sweden need to lock in the public employee vote?
Call me when innovation starts and not grand standing and vote buying
You know why people demonstrate and celebrate workers right on May 1st? Because then largely socialist and anarchist US unions decided, led by the AFL, in 1888 to restart demonstrations for the 8 hour working day with a major demonstration on May 1st 1890 in part in honour of those who died during the Haymarket Massacre. In 1889, the AFL approached the socialist Second International to suggest coordinated demonstrations internationally, and the Second International agreed.
So when you enjoy your "American-based 8-hour" working day, remember it came to be thanks to socialist unions.
> My point is that system evolution via democratic process is much better than bloody revolution that left-wing quite often has on its mouth.
It was not evolution via democratic process that gave us the 8 hour day. It was not bloody revolution either, but plenty of blood has been shed during the fight for decent working conditions. People were outright killed. People were arrested. People were intimidated; blacklisted.
The current system is only as good as it is because our forefathers were brave enough to stand up and fight even when they had to break the law, and even when they in many cases risked their life to fight the conditions of the time.
And they had to: Plenty of people died because of the disproportionate powers of employees to dictate conditions. Such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where 146 people died when the factory burned because the employees kept the doors locked during working hours to prevent unauthorized breaks(!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fir...
This is extremely important and often overlooked. Those pesky government regulations save lives. The idea that dangerous conditions and unsafe product won't happen in the free market because that's "bad for business" is a pipe dream.
Most of us weren't alive when regulations for safety wasn't a "thing" and can't appreciate them.
As bad as capitalism is it will never, ever be as bad as communism can be.
Surely, "employers" rather than "employees" is meant here!
And in fact it was one of the so called Capitalist robber barons, Henry Ford, who had the greatest impact on shifting to the 40 hour work week. He proved it could work and blazed the path for all other industrialists to follow (either by choice or by Ford stealing their labor via better terms).
Even the traditionally a-political AFL sent representatives to the socialist Second International.
And crediting Ford for the 40 hour work week is just pure, unadulterated bullshit. By the time Ford cut the work week for his staff, large segments of the work force already had achieved it, and provided the evidence needed that a shift to the 8 hour work week was economically feasible.
I certainly wouldn't know where to put the chemistry lab or the industrial robots. I barely have room for the mine-shaft.
Standard of living and various happiness indices include so much more than could be fitted into the term purchasing power (which is higher in the US than in most of the world).
My standard of living is very dependent on 5-6 weeks paid holiday, 6-12 months paid paternity leave and so on. In my income bracket I could afford those things just by saving, that is, I pay more for them through taxes than I receive back, but I'm still strongly for them. Among other things because only through normalizing long paternal leaves did it become acceptable to employers to interrupt your career 6-12 months 1-3 times in a career, without being classed as "not motivated" or passed over for promotions etc.
OH BOY.
Having a huge house doesn't actually make you happy. You only think it does.
http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/qa-stuffocation-...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/dont-indulg...
You can't say that in "better standard of living", home size matters and home location doesn't. Europeans have less sprawl but smaller houses, that's just it.
Different strokes for different folks, Benji. Not everyone wants to live in the city where everything is so tight and expensive. Not everyone wants to live in the country where everything is so god damned far away.
Some want to live relatively close to their work, have large sized yards like you would in rural areas, but still have access to shopping and amenities similar to cities.
And urban city outskirts aren't so much fun (still small apartments but not much life; crime is sometimes a problem too). Not much better than suburbia.
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/national/story.html?id=78c...
It is not non-existent in Sweden.
"Somehow socialists are always one step behind Mother Nature, i.e. free markets."
The free market has nothing to do with "Mother Nature" (animals and plants don't trade at all). Sweden has a free market economy, much like the US. Not exactly sure what is meant by socialists here. Anyone who advocates shorter working hours?
Personally I've become less of a fan of working from home, because you see the people you work with less. Particularly the daily standup in Scrum emphasizes the problem with people working from other locations. But if you don't work in a team, working from home is a great option.
On socialism, Sweden is generally seen as a really nice mix between the good part of capitalism (free market), and the good parts of socialism (equality, workers' rights).
They/we don't. The "Progress Party", which is the furthest right party represented in parliament, got 16.3%. Down from 22.9%. They're for the most part to the left of the Republican Party. That they were invited into a coalition government for the first time was shocking to us, as it means it's the closest we've gotten to "American conditions" - a traditional slur in Norway, as most people, including a substantial majority still, do not want most of what the Progress Party wants.
You'll note that despite getting into a coalition with the conservative party (which got 26.8%, up from 17.2%), they have been unable to get through more than a few token tax cuts. Why? Because the centre-point in parliament is to the left of either one of them. They have to lean on the Liberal Party (Venstre), which is social-liberalists that'd fit in roughly on the left of the Democratic Party, or the Christian Democrats, which are social-conservative centrists, to get a slight majority.
Similarly, they've gotten through a few minor token changes to immigration policies, but have to give up on most of their policies because no other party in parliament agree with them on immigration.
About 50% of parliament is made up of the social democrat Labour Party, the Socialist Left party, and the slightly left of centre Centre Party who ruled for the preceding 8 years.
Norwegian "tradition" is that right wing governments sits for less than one period, up to almost two. No right wing government has survived a second election.
With only 16% of the votes they also lost 1/4th their seats from the previous election, which was won by a labor/left coalition.
1) I live in the US and only one person I know works from home but she is a very special case (her employer made an exception). When I mention I have the option of working from home once in a while (and I mean once in a while, like a few times a year) everyone is like "REALLY!? THAT SOUNDS AMAZING!"
2) "Europe" isn't a single entity.