Sweden's Six-Hour Workday Experiment Officially Kicks Off Tomorrow

You can't actually hide control/experiment status from the test subjects, though. You usually know if you are working more or fewer hours in a week. There is some danger that people will intentionally slack off while doing 40s and bust their ass while doing 30s, just so the experimental results suggest shorter work weeks. To counter that, you have a huge number of people following the protocol, and the researchers and participants simply don't know exactly whose data will be randomly selected for inclusion in the study.

At best, I think one should view this experiment as a preliminary test in order figure out how to do a real test with a larger sample size.

> A similar experiment involving 250 workers in the Swedish town of Kiruna was scrapped in 2005 after 16 years. With shrinking hours, job pressures intensified, reports The Local, and as a result, the city council concluded that sickness actually increased.

None of the places I have worked were 3rd world working conditions including the subsistence farming (we had much nicer/safer machinery). Granted it's a small sample size, but still.

Anyway. Stop with the hyperbole. It's an ineffective argument tool, it's insulting, and it shuts people off from debate.

In my personal experience, office work involves a lot of pure time wasting, time I'd rather spend doing other things than browsing reddit in my cubicle: grocery shopping, being in the sun, exercising, reading, or anything else.

At the Gothenburg office I worked in, literally everyone I talked to about a 6 hour work week saw it as extremely desirable. I didn't ask the manager, and she'd probably work more anyway, but I don't think she'd oppose it if it made employees happier.

Shouldn't it be? Aren't there jobs that should be automated? And if we automate all the jobs shouldn't we no longer have to "work"? Why work if you can provide resources without said work?

People will still create. People will still pursue goals. What we call "work" will just become fuzzy. There is no point in work for work's sake.

Even though only certain groups of Protestants (Quakers, Mennonites, etc.) believe in the original version of the ethic, that work is a route to religious salvation, weaker versions still persists in many places where Protestantism is or was common -- including much of North America.

These weaker versions manifest as the idea that work is intrinsically good; or the reverse, that not working is intrinsically bad.

Because a lot of us are only productive at work for 4-6 hours per day. But we waste the next 3-6 hours in the office trying to look busy. What a waste of our lives.

Hours/week should be indexed to a productivity index, just as entitlements are indexed to inflation/CPI.

The issue is of cause that in many large companies some people jobs are more or less defined as keeping you from doing yours. The owner of a Danish consulting company once postulated that: "Many larger (Danish) companies could fire all of their CUSTOMERS, and 40 - 60% of the employees would still have a job to do." - His point being that a large part of the workforce isn't in anyway related to providing services or products to the customers. Having worked for a large telco, I wouldn't be surprised if he's right. The point is that a portion of these people, which doesn't really produce anything will eventually do something that distrupt the "makers", because they need to make their presents known.

What I personally would like to see it how applicable these results are between jobs. The jobs in question here are quite unskilled such as caring for the elderly, and are physically demanding. What works for them might not work for a programmer for example.