[_hn_throw_away]

(This is a duplicate of a story posted this past weekend. I want to copy my comment from it for greater visibility.)

Fuck everything about 5 day work weeks.

I'll gladly switch to any job that offers a 4 day work week. It's one of the best perks.

As someone with ADHD, work days are entirely spent getting work done. There isn't any extra slack or allotment for personal tasks. They're 100% owned by the employer.

Weekends offer barely enough time to catch up with chores. There isn't enough time both to catch up and still have fun. I use vacation time to catch up on chores, so that's spent too.

I don't want to spend most of my life working. I feel like a slave, and now my youth is almost gone.

I don't care if it's a 10hr/4day schedule or a 9hr/4day 8hr/4day with less pay, I want an extra day for myself. I'm an excellent engineer aside from my ADHD quirks, and I'll go anywhere that offers this where I live.

My own startup (I almost have the capital for a long runway) will be 9hr/4day.

Fuck everything about 5 day work weeks.

[dang]

Please don't copy/paste comments on HN. Threads are supposed to be conversations. In conversation, people don't play recordings of previous conversations.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[loco5niner]

> In conversation, people don't play recordings of previous conversations.

Although, sometimes we wish we could.

[Vysero]

TBH I get 90% of my work done in the first 4-5 hours at work and then my productivity drops of significantly. When I was an independent roofing contractor me and my employees only worked in good conditions and only worked 4 days a week. I always paid them for 40 hours. I did really well as an independent contractor despite the offset in time.

[shaklee3]

Do you mind me asking why you got off of it? Housing downturn?

[dillonmckay]

Not OP, but that is quite a physically demanding job with alot of time in the sun.

[blotter_paper]

Bad on the back and knees, high risk of falling, strokes from heat for older roofers, and the careless ones start throwing hammers around. (I'm not a roofer, but used to be a jack of all trades that sometimes did roofing alongside actual roofers.)

[magashna]

No one wants to roof forever. It's hard and dangerous.

[Vysero]

Yes as other have stated the profession is rather hard on your body. I suffered some serious back problems as a result of the manual labor and decided to peruse my interests in engineering instead.

[moeamaya]

We do 4-day (32 hour) work weeks at Monograph, and we've been doing it for 3 years now. I believe we're one of the only companies in SF that are advocates for working less, but more productively.

Similar to Microsoft, we only have one 45-min meeting each week and then everything else is heads down work.

To maintain efficiency, we also have strict Slack protocols in place to keep everyone in deep work throughout the day. (No @ or DMs, everyone checks Slack at 11am and 4pm).

The major downside so far has been customer support, which the founders still manage to maintain our response rate.

Oh and we're hiring! If you're frontend engineer and like 4-day weeks + side projects, reach out directly [e-mail]

https://monograph.io/jobs/frontend/

[TomK32]

Re customer support: A company-wide four-day week doesn't mean that everyone has to work the same four days. Actually, there might be people who'd prefer their weekend to be Sunday to Tuesday for some obscure reason.

[AhtiK]

The team behind Todoist came out with a product called Twist, meant for more async and productivity focused approach and directly going against Slack distractions. I wonder if there are companies who have tried it in a bit bigger scale or why isn't Twist more known?

[moeamaya]

Thanks for the suggestion, it does seem like a compelling product. Your same questions about working at a bigger scale also give me pause to move our team off of Slack.

[andy_ppp]

Will you consider people from London who would need a H1B?

[mylons]

right on.

[logfromblammo]

...as though the 7th through 10th hours of those days will be the same quality as the first 6. We do not need to assume that a 40-hour work week must be preserved in order to cut the work days per week to 4.

A 6 hour x 4 day work week is 75% the regular work day and 80% of the regular work week, but I bet it gets a lot more than 60% of the regular work done. That is largely cutting out the unproductive "slack time", and giving it back to the employees so they don't have to look busy when they are already spent for the day/week.

If you need to squeeze more out of the workforce, please hire more employees, and worry less about their specific "qualifications". Instead, spend more on management recruiting. Get managers who can coordinate the efforts of people working together asynchronously. Just like asynchronous programming, it takes a little bit more skill than just managing everyone together in the same office location, at the same time, doing the "manager walk" and demanding status reports and status meetings. And employees are universally happier with managers that are more skilled at management.

[bsanr2]

Don't sell yourself short. The economy could support everyone working four 8-hour days or five 6-hour days at the same pay (or, rather, with the same median pay, better distributed) as now. Our productivity gains over the past 4 decades prove it.

People who want to work more should be able to, but we generally need a massive reevaluation of what work in America is worth, in favor of labor. We're giving up way too much because we're afraid.

[vosper]

> People who want to work more should be able to, but we generally need a massive reevaluation of what work in America is worth, in favor of labor.

We also need a reevaluation of what work is worth, in terms of self-worth and position in society. We're too far on the side of "you are your job" (and its less-savory friend "your net worth is your worth").

[izolate]

Out of curiosity, why do you feel it necessary to use a throwaway? I echo your thoughts entirely and feel strongly enough about them to attribute them to my name.

I think we (as a society/industry) need to start publicly having this discussion.

[throwawayforme1]

ADHD is considered a mental illness. That's why.

[IggleSniggle]

Thanks for taking the time to create a throwaway to share. I get why people hide what society has deemed "mental illness." It requires powerful people that are non-normative to be open about their unique condition for these conditions to be widely understood to be something folks should want on their team rather than something to blacklist.

[czbond]

Yes - it can have that stigma. ADHD is present, however, in many entrepreneurs. It can also be a hindrance in SaaS startups, I'm mentioning it as a help. Pre-plan to have someone help with the details and keep someone on track. You either focus on opportunity, or have a project manager.

I am not ADHD/ADD, but have interacted with a few in this situation..

[bobly_today]

As someone with ADHD, this is strikes me as overblown. I certainly wouldn’t require dedicated personnel to compensate for my ADHD. Especially if medicated.

[czbond]

You're not trying to get a startup off the ground - with a personality that squirrels every 5 mins. That is a distinct difference. SaaS are marathons of grit and will.

[bobly_today]

I don’t mean to be rude, but you don’t know what I’m working on :). Anyway I agree that adhd posses obstacles and I’ll consider your advice to avoid some of them should I be in the situation you’ve outlined

[codesnik]

and as someone undiagnosed, but very probably with it too, someone with less variable productivity than me, and in the same time not my manager, would be of enormous value to me. That shouldn't be a "dedicated personnel", as an assistant or whatever, but project manager for example would be helpful for other people too. I'll certainly try to have such an arrangement at some point.

[kbenson]

For what it's worth, the people I know that have ADHD tend to be very quick at picking up stuff when they can focus on it (i.e. it interests them). I have a pretty healthy opinion of my capabilities, and I do feel a bit awed at points.

Regardless of how it's classified, I tend to think of it more as just a different way the mind works, and not necessarily an inferior one (even if our society seems to make it harder to thrive at a young age when that's how your mind works[1]). Given the number of people I've seen that seem to leverage this aspect of how they function to good success as adults, I definitely wouldn't consider it a disability.

1: My daughter has ADHD and takes medication because the structure of school and the constraints it puts on the people in it doesn't really allow for other options that don't result in her failing or one of her parents devoting ourselves to her education. I have complex feelings about this, but believe it's beneficial at least for now.

[driverdan]

So? There's nothing wrong with mental illness. For the record I also have ADHD.

[CathedralBorrow]

You're right that there's nothing wrong with it, but not everyone thinks like that.

[stjohnswarts]

Because people like their privacy and not everyone is a advocacy warrior.

[caiocaiocaio]

Slightly off topic, but I was just thinking about how when I was young, I was under the impression that most of my work week would be showing up on time, and doing work for roughly 40 hours a week.

In my 10+ years of office experience I never even come close to 20 hours of actual work in a week, even if I was there for 40-60 hours. Usually, half the time or more was dedicated to office politics and making people who need to constantly socialize feel good about themselves with various meetings and team-building exercises and chit-chat. During one particularly bad period of time, work often only happened the little gap between morning meetings and noon because certain people would come back from lunch pissed out of their minds and make it impossible for anyone to do anything. I never had a problem with the actual work, but the non-work I was putting most of my time and effort into was exhausting and lead to long bouts of depressions.

Now that I'm freelancing from home, with no commute and no babysitting egos, not only am I spending most of my work time on work, but the time I do spend is about 10x more productive, due to lack of office (and commute) stress.

[JJMcJ]

Worked 4 x 9 at one job, so only 36 hours. Would have gladly worked 4 x 10 for the joy that having a day off added to my life.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

I'm with you, though I'd go further and say that 3 day work week is probably the maximum I could be content with. I'd gladly trade half my salary for half my work hours back.

[technofiend]

I worked at Chevron when they were first toying with 4/40s and 9/80s. The firm decided people could either choose Monday or Friday off. It was glorious! Suddenly 40% of the schedule was free of meetings since there was no way to get a quorum on Monday or Friday.

[paco_sinbad]

Your own startup will probably be 12hr/7day until it's funded or otherwise self-sufficient.

It could be 9hr/4day, and you will do that until you run out of capital after 1800 work hours.

[buboard]

OK don't get mad - just work remotely

[ponsin]

Be careful starting a startup. It will be hard to find an investor willing to invest in a company whose founder only works 4/7 days a week

[strictfp]

Guilt tripping much? Also, that work ethic attitude isn't exactly healthy, just a chimera confusing bullheadedness with productivity.

[edf13]

Not every startup seeks investors

[magashna]

Not everyone wants to be a CEO.

[dillonmckay]

Sounds more like a lifestyle business strategy.

[methehack]

I understand this thinking. I think, though, that the more we understand about cognition (and sleep and health in general and its impact on thinking), the more we'll tend toward somewhat lighter hours (more like 30-40 hours a week even in a startup situation). Not because we can get away with it, but because the output is actually superior.

From a business strategy standpoint, my experience has been that sometimes companies try to compensate for poor strategy by piling on the hours. To me, it's like trying to do push ups to solve math problems faster.

Similarly, I have noticed that strategic structural soundness is vastly more important than hours worked. When the structure is there, all your efforts are leveraged many times over such that, effectively, 30 hours a week becomes more like 300.

Hard work is important and satisfying but duration is not the real measure we should look at, imo.

[metalliqaz]

You're going to have a startup that doesn't demand life-consuming overtime? I find that hard to believe.

[treyfitty]

I know plenty of non unicorn startup founders that don’t work overtime, and they net about $1Mm per year. Sure, not a path to billionaire status, but not too shabby either.

[bernierocks]

That doesn't sound like a startup. It sounds like they are running a lifestyle business, which isn't a bad thing.

Startups, by definition, try to scale up quickly..which means lots of money (investors) and lots of time (overtime and long hours).

[hervature]

Show me a definition of startup from a reputable source that claims that scaling up quickly is a requirement. All companies start off by being a startup [0]

[0] - https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/startup.asp

[riffraff]

I don't understand this point of view.

Developers generally agree that it's better to spend some time writing tests, as even if it increases our latency in the small term, it will improve output it in the long term.

Yet, we also seem to think that it's totally fine to sacrifice mental and physical being for the sake of short term gains instead of long term ones?

I am not saying one should not do the occasional push, but surely as a founder it's better to work 40 hours a week and keep yourself sane, than push yourself into burn out after 1 year of 70h/week and no holidays?

[kbenson]

Not everyone thinks of the same thing when they think startup. I think the main difference is that some people also include starting a lifestyle business, or a business that's much less ambitious in scope than being a globally known name. There's nothing wrong with a business that employs less than 20 people, and nothing that necessarily means it has to grow.

[mikestew]

I find that hard to believe.

Only because you've surrounded yourself with people that don't know any other way to do it. Find more creative people to hang out with.

[metalliqaz]

So... stop hanging around ycombinator? no u

[ryanmercer]

>I don't want to spend most of my life working. I feel like a slave

I've never understood this line of thinking. Providing for yourself is being a contributing member of the species, work is a means of providing for yourself. For all of human history you've either had to get up every day and go be productive bringing resources in or you had to depend upon someone else to do it for you.

I see this "working is slavery" attitude constantly in /r/leanfire and other personal finance subs and I just don't get it. Every single thing you use required labor to come into existence. Your phone, your computer, where you live, the clothes you are wearing, the food you eat, all of that required human labor to produce.

Worse, I often seen the 'work is slavery' form 6-figure salary types (at least in /r/leanfire) that have great benefits and are griping they won't be able to retire by 35 or from people that are on their first job (usually retail) and think it is unfair they can't sit at home playing video games and having all their needs met.

This sort of mentality can't be good for the future of mankind. Sitting in an air conditioned building, listening to spotify, while you decide if you want to go get the catered lunch or sit in your cubicle while you screw around on HN/reddit and pretend to work is NOT slavery.

If you genuinely feel this way, go get a job throwing trucks/planes in the dead of summer or go get a landscaping job for a few weeks. Seriously, go get a manual labor job part time on the weekends and realize there are people doing that 40, 50, 60 hours a week all year long.

Go tell someone from the 1950s, 1850s, 1750s, 1650s how hard you have it and how bad it is having to sit at a computer all day in a climate controlled building. They'd look at you in utter disbelief and beg you to tell them how to have such a wonderful life.

I've had a job since I was 12 and working full time since the day I turned 18. I'm grateful that I get to work, grateful that I am able to provide for myself, grateful that I do get to sit a desk and am no longer humping a backpack full of diesel weed eating and digging graves. I'll take sitting at a monitor over getting sunburn to the point of blistered skin from being outside working all day with no cover any day.

[LeifCarrotson]

I am overwhelmingly more productive and valuable now as a specialized, highly educated, experienced engineer than I would have been as a subsistence farmer. As a result of my efforts and the efforts of the rest of society, I have a much higher standard of living.

However, I can't truly pick when I want to work. There are no jobs in my area that pay 80% of my current rate for the same task done 4 days a week.

If a job was truly an even exchange of value between employer and employee, I would expect to see some people working 7 days a week and making 40% more than me, and some people working 3 day weeks and making 40% less. But aside from service workers with work on nights, weekends, and holidays, everyone in my city went to work in the dark this morning and will go home in the dark tonight.

I am not against trading labor for money - that's the point of a job. I am against trading freedom plus labor for money.

[zozbot234]

> There are no jobs in my area that pay 80% of my current rate for the same task done 4 days a week.

You can totally get this kind of flexibility as a self-employed contractor. The fact that you aren't just as easily allowed it as an employee is ultimately due to excess red tape in the paid-employment sector, nothing else. Every bit of red tape in the employment arrangement is an extra fixed cost that has to be paid-for somehow, meaning that the employee has to work that much more just to break even.

[edanm]

> If a job was truly an even exchange of value between employer and employee, I would expect to see some people working 7 days a week and making 40% more than me, and some people working 3 day weeks and making 40% less.

Why? There are plenty of concentration effects that go against this; e.g. it's better for everyone to work the same hours for communication reasons.

[ryanmercer]

>I am overwhelmingly more productive and valuable now as a specialized, highly educated, experienced engineer than I would have been as a subsistence farmer.

I've got some news for you, many manual labor jobs aren't just picking up a shovel and digging a hole or picking up a box and setting it back down.

Your first sentence, to me, reads "I'm more valuable than you because I know thing, so I want more resources for less effort".

[logfromblammo]

That is a perfectly reasonable sentiment. It is the essence of a specialization economy. Skills that bring more value to the market can take away more resources from it. From each according to ability; to each according to the best deal they could negotiate in exchange for their abilities.

One can state a fact without making it into a brag. Saying, "I get paid more than you" is not the same as saying, "I am a better person than you", despite the culture that the rich prefer to cultivate that equates the two. A person that gets paid $15/hour is the same amount of person as someone paid $100k/year. The latter is "more valuable" only in the economic, marketplace sense, and gets roughly 3x the resources for the same amount of labor, which likely does not involve work that requires separating ass from chair.

If you don't pay people more to acquire the difficult skills, they won't bother, except in rare cases.

[LeifCarrotson]

Sorry, I didn't mean at all to suggest that I am a better person or have greater intrinsic value as a sentient being. My economic output is entirely decoupled from those moral or ethical concepts.

I was only saying the engineer version of myself adds greater resources to an economy than a hypothetical hunter-gatherer version of myself - who, being myself, obviously has equal moral worth.

[deathhand]

>"I'm more valuable than you because I know thing, so I want more resources for less effort"

Congratulations you just described capitalism.

[SketchySeaBeast]

That's not even true - it's "I'm more valuable than you because I have more resources". That's literally it - sometimes it matches up with knowledge, but many times it doesn't.

[stjohnswarts]

Then go dig holes and make less money and he can continue on with his life. No one said an engineer was worth more than a ditch digger, just that an engineer is going to be economically better off. I'm an engineer who dug ditches in his youth but also took the time to go to school and put off having a family until it became economically viable to have one. Communism doesn't work it, it kills passion and leads to authoritarianism. Capitalism isn't going anywhere.

[Miner49er]

When you take a normal job you're submitting yourself to a tyranny. The only true power you have is the ability to quit, but depending on your circumstance, you may not even have that (seems most people don't). Plus, you quit and you'll just have to find a different tyranny.

That's how it is for most people anyway. Sure there's other options like starting a business or whatever, but those are restrictive in their own ways and aren't possible for most people.

There's no reason work needs to be structured in the tyrannical matter it is. Work could be democratic, but it's not.

Obviously work is necessary, but not _all_ work is, especially in today's world. Society as a whole is taking the path of working more in order to consume more, instead of working less and having more free time. It's hard to escape this. Most part-time jobs are minimum wage type jobs.

[samvher]

Consuming more vs working less is totally within an individual's control though. Current productivity is amazing, even with a relatively average salary (let's say $50k) it's completely possible to spend only a third to half of that if you don't have children. That means for every week you work you get 1-2 weeks of life with no work responsibilities.

You'll have to choose that though, it means you adjust the location where you live so that rent is reasonable, and it means not constantly buying new shit. Of course if you're working for an employer you more or less have to do what they tell you but I don't think there has been any time in history that it was this easy to earn your freedom.

[anon9001]

I think you're wrong.

I make a typical SF software engineer salary and I live in a low cost of living area. The reality is that I still need about $3M to permanently stop working. Healthcare is expensive and the dollars that I'm making now will be worth much less later in life, even when prudently invested.

I'll probably be able to achieve independence by 40 or 45 instead of 55 or 65 because I have a low CoL and won't have kids. I'm very much looking forward to the freedom I'll have purchased for myself, but it's still an absurdly long time to wait to start living.

Until then, it's more pills and more work.

I have no idea how people manage to live fulfilling lives while still working 40+ hours a week, but I sure can't do it.

[samvher]

Do you mean that you don't expect the gains of investment to offset the losses from inflation? Because I would find that surprising.

$3M is a lot, typically the rule of thumb is that you need 25 years worth of living expenses to be financially independent. That means you expect to spend $120k yearly? That's up to you of course but that fits exactly in what I said about choosing how much you spend. My monthly expenses are currently < $1500 per month (for 2 people, in Sweden), and I think it's more likely that I will taper off working (work fewer hours, more fun but lower paying jobs) than that I will stop working altogether. That means $300-400k would probably be enough to provide a significant level of freedom especially once my girlfriend graduates and has an income as well.

My salary is far from an SF salary and I do work full-time but I find my work quite fulfilling. If it weren't I wouldn't have much difficulty finding work with more freedom for e.g. part-time employment.

[anon9001]

The gains of investment can offset the losses from inflation, yeah, but I'd also be drawing down. The problem is that I might live longer than 25 years and I might not be able to work by that point.

I checked my math again with https://www.firecalc.com/

I would need about $50k/yr in expenses at present (adjusted for inflation in the future). If I'm planning for 50 years out, that means I need a portfolio of about $1.6M to have a high probability of being able to make it 50 years.

So not quite $3M, and maybe I could cut more expenses, but I think at least $1.5M in liquid assets is what I need. If by some miracle I can get a $1M payday when my current employer sells, then maybe I've got a chance at being done in the next few years.

If I could get my spending down to $30k/yr, which might be possible, then I could get away with $1M, but I'll still have to put in another 5 years or so to hit that $1M number.

Keep in my mind for US people, we have to buy our own health insurance, and if something medical goes wrong and you can't work, you can easily go bankrupt that way. There's such little safety net that I'd like to have more than I think I'll need.

[staticassertion]

Your entire post feels like a boomer meme. You're just telling people to be happy with their job, ignore feeling miserable, and how much worse they could have had it.

[faceplanted]

I want to hone in on the part about "all of human history".

I don't know if you've met tribes people or those living in agrarian societies, but while they do tend to have excellent work ethics and do a lot, they also tend to have _more_ down time and family time than someone working a 40 hour week, tilling fields is hard fucking work, maintaining all your own equipment and making things by hand is slow and laborious, but you do get to finish. Sometimes there's weeks that you're working every single day, but there's also seasons where you aren't.

[hellllllllooo]

Really, you can't understand it? You've never had to work long hours at an unfulfilling, repetitive job you hate just to pay the bills and survive without being able to save anything? You're lucky, a lot of people in the US are not so lucky.

[efa]

Saying "just to pay the bills and survive" implies you are barely scraping by. We're still talking about 6 figure IT incomes correct? I think that's a little dramatic.

[ryanmercer]

>Really, you can't understand it? You've never had to work long hours at an unfulfilling,

I've literally dug graves for a living.

I've thrown trucks for a living in 90F heat in 80%+ humidity.

I've worked 40 hours for a company and 40-50 hours a week for myself trying to get ahead some.

I've been working since I was 12 years old just to help make ends meet. Sitting at a desk doing 'unfulfilling, repetitive' work is the easiest thing I've ever done and I'd take it over every single other job I've ever had without hesitation. I get to sit in a temperature controlled office all day, I can go to the bathroom when I need to, I'm not in the heat/cold all day getting sun poisoning anymore, I have set hours with a reliable schedule and steady pay. It's amazing.

[logfromblammo]

Have you ever dug two or more graves for one dead person, then filled in the ones that didn't actually get used for the interment?

Probably not. You wouldn't want to waste time on back-breaking labor that has no productive purpose, would you?

But the white-collar desk job does that every time it says "work 8 hours every day" while the worker consensus is that the 7th and 8th hour is mostly useless, and subsequent hours in the same day are often counterproductive.

If you spend 8 hours digging a grave by hand with a shovel, your muscles get tired. But if you do it long enough, the muscles get stronger, and you can dig graves for longer before getting fatigued. If you spend 8 hours a day thinking about difficult problems, your brain gets tired. If you do it long enough, you get smarter, but also burn yourself out, go slightly insane, and lose the ability do the job at all any more.

They're different kinds of cells. They have different physiological processes for maintenance and repair. Muscles don't sleep and flush with CSF; brains don't bulk up and add additional nuclei.

[volkk]

i think your argument of "just be happy that you're not in grueling conditions of working hard labor outside" doesn't really apply to the argument of "work less and be more efficient."

its the same argument of saying "yeah well someone in a insert 3rd world country has it way worse than you so your problems dont matter."

you need to step back and understand that people in white collar jobs are allowed to be miserable regardless of whether theyre breaking their back or not, and if that misery can be subsided by having an alternate schedule to work to produce efficiency, then why is that such a crazy ask? because that's just "the way things have always been done"? when was the last time that argument has ever worked out well?

[ryanmercer]

>"work less and be more efficient."

This doesn't apply to MANY jobs, unless you're talking about replacing humans with robots with superior strength and agility that do not need to rest.

The majority of HN, and silicon valley types in general, are incredibly myopic. The vast majority of people here automatically assume everyone else in a thread works in CS, they assume everyone has a degree, they assume everyone hammers away at code in a comfy office all day.

The vast majority of the world is not sitting at a computer coding for 6 figure salaries with great benefits and profit sharing.

[volkk]

FYI im not downvoting you, but a large portion of the modern workforce (at least in the US) do have their asses in seats 9-5 at a desk. whether its administrative tasks, finance, law etc. there's a giant world out there aside from CS peeps, and im not even approaching it from the tech angle. either way, you havent addressed anything i mentioned except immediately indirectly attacking the people that visit these forums.

[post_below]

That makes sense, I can see why you appreciate your current job.

Why does that mean other people should feel the same way you do?

[remote_phone]

Agree. I love working for someone and not having to worry about sales, finding customers, etc. I don’t feel like a wage slave at all. I’m actually very happy with my choice in career and still love programming after decades.

[jacquesm]

You can contract for 4 days per week at plenty of employers. It's called a part-time job.

[drakythe]

I'm gonna borrow OP's mindset for a second:

Fuck this.

In the United States the benefits of full time employment are mandatory if you want to live a much less stressful life. Tying benefits to employment has given employers far too much control over their employees lives, without a huge savings or secondary income source anyone without insurance is one bad day away from bankruptcy (and too many people /with/ benefits are as well).

If a 4 day work week lowers stress and increases productivity that much, I don't see why many industries shouldn't adopt it. And don't tell people that "You have a choice, just get a part time job instead". Thats not a choice, thats a financial death sentence.

[jacquesm]

The US economic system is broken in many ways and workers rights there are next to non-existent. It is also not the only country in the world and there are plenty of examples of how it can be done better.

If you want to change that start with changing how you vote, the two party system is broken beyond repair, the US would fare much better under a coalition government.

[realbarack]

I agree with your sentiment regarding benefits in the U.S. Couldn't companies provide the important benefits (healthcare, 401k matching) to employees who worked a 4-day week as well?

One potential issue is that I think there are fewer legal requirements, but competitive employers already provide benefits that exceed the legal minima.

[wonderwonder]

Employers should not be involved in the health care game at all. It should be a universal right provided by the government as it is in many other countries. This would lead to a healthier population as a whole. It would also lead to a reduction in costs associated with poor people who put off going to the doctor due to inability to cover even co-pay ending up in the emergency room and defaulting on a ~50k bill. In addition government could negotiate for vastly cheaper medications as they would essentially be the only game in town.

This would also allow industry to focus on what industry does which is make money. They no longer would have to spend on expensive Cadillac health care plans in order to compete for employees. Governments job is to keep its populace safe and healthy, that is not the job of private industry.

The only reason we don't have this is due to lobbyists.

[higeyuki]

My only question is why do employers have to be responsible for healthcare?

Retirement makes sense as this is your source of income. I feel that company resources would be better spent elsewhere than on healthcare.

This would, of course, require universal healthcare or direct market healthcare. This would help new businesses thrive, especially the "mom and pop" types.

I guess I am jaded on this as my parents lost their business when I was growing up due mainly to the cost of healthcare. Not all companies have monolithic budgets.

[hindsightbias]

Well, Henry’s Ford and Kaiser were there before the govt was, and Sen. Edward Kennedy didn’t want to help Nixon with health care reform so Edgar Kaiser’s HMOs won out.

I doubt most Fortune 500 employees would support turning their company plans into some medicare-for-all. Next step would be turning Social Security over to Goldman Sachs.

[beat]

Well, they could, but. Benefits, particularly health care, are very expensive for employers as well as employees, so employers, especially for lower wage work, look for ways to cut that. Not-quite-full-time is one way that's done.

Getting health insurance, whether public or private, out of the hands of employers is probably the single best thing that could be done for working conditions in America.

[lowercased]

amen

[Osiris]

My understanding of the current law is benefits are mandatory for employees working more than 32 hours a week. I don't know what the rules are for exempt employees.

[jhenkens]

Which is the problem. We're trying to say we've generally exhausted our productive capabilities after 4 days of work per week, which is what this article was saying as well.

If I've contributed my maximum amount in 4 days rather than 5, it should not be called part time. Part time should be reserved for instances where you are indeed contributing less than a full amount per week, such that you could hold two part time jobs.

[jacquesm]

Well, if enough people do it then it will be full time. It's more about what is considered to be the norm than anything else, and of course you will get paid for four days, not five. But over time pay will go up again and then we can repeat the cycle with three days. The interesting question is not 6, 5 or 4 but what the lower limit is. I suspect still quite a bit lower than 4.

[rectang]

For the purposes of health care in the US, 30 hours is the threshold for full time. At my last gig I was 32 hours a week and considered a full time employee.

So the question is really why some employers insist on the full 40 rather than being open to a range from 30 to 40.