That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing".
What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.
The article didn’t make any arguments about increased productivity, it was suggesting that better work-life balance was healthier and helps parents with children.
What evidence is there for an increase in productivity when moving from 40 to 32 hours/week? I believe productivity increases have been demonstrated in some cases for hourly reductions when moving from overtime (say, 60 hours/week) down to 40. This is grounded in two parts - the diminishing returns of working more than 40 hours/week, and the fact that above 50 or 60 people start getting too tired and too focused on narrow tasks to make good long-term judgements. But I haven’t seen studies showing what you’re suggesting, which is a complete 100% reversal of productivity from 32 to 40 hours/week.
The logical extension, of course, doesn’t work. It’s not possible to work 100% less and therefore be 100% more productive or happier. (I mean, maybe happier, but not more productive, right? ;)) And we already know the delta change in productivity for a given delta change in hours depends heavily on how many absolute hours we’re starting with, and also depends heavily on the job at hand. So is the question about what number of hours gives people peak productivity for a given job? Or peak happiness? Or is this just about making sure employment has reasonable limits, and not even trying to optimize productivity?
* Edit: I googled it, and found the story about Microsoft Japan and it’s 4 day work week. I totally remember reading about this a few years ago. Lots of commentary on HN. The claim is a 40% increase when going to a 4 day week. It was measured for only 1 month, and they changed many other aspects (notably, they capped meeting times). Many people pointing out this is likely Hawthorne Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect). Personally, 40% seems completely implausible, which is why I wrote it off and forgot about it. It seems obvious that if that’s true, it means something was going terribly wrong with their 5 day week. Or that this effect isn’t measuring the change in hours at all.
I think we can agree that working 100% of the time leads to poor societal outcomes and 0% of the time leads to poor societal outcomes.
We probably have some shared view that it’s Laffer-curvish without being sure of the shape.
It just seems unlikely to me that 40 hrs is a total system optimum since it was a historical accident. Personally I think it might be 50 hrs/week but it just seems strange that we’d believe that 40 is the peak of this curve.
Exactly right, I do agree; both too much and too little exist.
I would say that 40 hours/week was no accident though. That was something workers battled for hundreds of years. It was the result of a prolonged debate about what is a reasonable work/life balance, in response to widespread employer abuse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
I’m sure you’re right about 50 for some jobs, but it really depends. There’s a big difference between blue collar and white collar work, just to point at the probably the most obvious distinction.
My own experience with long hours is in film and video game production, where in film we were on a 50 hours per week contract and it went up to usually 60-70 with overtime pay near the end of production. In video games, it was 40 hours a week with extended crunch periods of 80 or even (kill me) slightly more. At 80 hours/week sustained, all life outside of work is over, it’s barely enough time to eat & sleep and no amount of money is worth it. And my productivity went down, I’m certain. At 50 I’m compromising on my family & friends a bit, but I’m probably as productive or slightly more productive than at 40. At 30 hours/week, I feel like I’m barely working, and that meetings burn what little time I have.
When I had my own startup, when I could be flexible with hours and work from home (pre-pandemic), it was probably easier to do 60 hours/week, happily and productively, than when I was working 40 for a larger corporation.
This is moving the goalposts. The original claim is specifically that working a 4x8 week increases total productivity, not some nebulous "societal outcomes".
Personally, I find the "societal outcomes" argument much stronger. I personally would like to work less and get paid the same.
Claiming that productivity will increase as hours worked goes down is a big claim that requires big evidence.
There is little reason to believe the vast majority of workers can't keep the same work load with less hours. Sure - maybe 20% or your workers get 80% of your work done - and those people actually do work the full 40 hours (or more). But who's to say they won't continue working more than "required"?
For non-white collar jobs - particularly service workers - I think this is a completely different story. You can't give the same amount of hour-long massages in 4 days as you can in 5. You can't wait on as many tables or work the cash register for as many hours and so on... The thing is - most of these people are paid hourly - so you just need to find more workers (which currently, at full employment, is hard).
If you're trying to push up wages - this seems like it obviously will. I can see why businesses would be against that. But in a world where all wages go up - there's obviously winners AND losers. Not all businesses will be hurt by higher wages. If your labor inputs are a large portion of your COGS and you don't have pricing power - that's bad (traditional restaurants, discount retail). If labor inputs are low - and you do have pricing power (digital services, luxuries) - now you have many more people with higher incomes and more time to buy your products!
To me, this seems like it is good for the biggest businesses and lower-end salary workers and bad for the most common small businesses and upper-end salary workers. But I have no clue how this will turn out. I don't think anyone does, really. But I think it's a very exciting experiment we shouldn't be too pessimistic about.
Another way of phrasing this is that people tend to be productive for 50% of the time they spend "working". It's not self evident that people will still be productive for those 20 hours if the work day was shortened. It could just as easily be the case that people will still goof off for 50% of the shortened work day.
Right. Even if I, say, spend half the day taking a walk, vaguely mulling some task in background, doing some vaguely related reading, chatting with colleagues etc. doesn't mean I'd get as much work done if my hours were 9-1. Would I get more than 50% of my work done? Probably. But I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be 100%.
I actually think if I took every Friday off, I could probably hit pretty close to current productivity but I work a pretty flexible schedule and don't have to do a lot of coordination.
The “why” is groupthink, at least if the proponents’ claims are correct.
For the “how”, from l what I’ve been hearing, actual productivity follows a curve analogous to the Laffer curve for taxes, where 40 hours weeks is only the most effective weekly rate for manufacturing jobs in particular, while it’s probably more like 20-30 for intellectually focused work.
I have no idea what the “best” might be for e.g. baristas or bank tellers, where it’s important to have someone physically present even if there’s no actual customer at any given moment.
If the value of employees scaled linearly with time, and you can employ people profitably, why wouldn't you employ an infinite number of people and make an infinite amount of money?
Clearly some tasks are more like an endless thing that can be mined at, while others are more like you are paying for the availability of some expert. Since people do a combination of both types, the proper compensation for 80% of time should be somewhere between 80% and 100%, depending on the weight.
The more interesting thing is that, if working 50 hour work weeks was the norm - how would the capitalist class take it to us suggesting its 40 hours?
40 hours isn't some magical "right" number. It was something that was decided before computers, Internet, global fast communication, etc etc etc.
I think its beyond late for us to reconsider those hours and decrease them.
To answer your question directly: Why would they change what's been "working" for them for decades? The only way we can see big companies change this is if a startup gets really successful and just has this as the norm. That'd create market pressure for change.
Where that market pressure doesn't exist, regulations can play the same role.
It wasn't even really decided. Like most current worker protections, it was arrived at through struggle between industralists and the then still powerful labor unions.
They won the 12 hour workday, then the 10 hour workday, then the 8 hour work day and that's when the unions were defanged.
>then the 8 hour work day and that's when the unions were defanged.
And now the working hours are going back up. I can talk about my country in Europe, that after the 2008 crisis, and due to the increased competition pressure form globalization, many workers' rights and protections were reduced "to increase economic competitiveness", and many professionals, blue and white collar, are now doing more than the 8h/day either willingly or forced by the circumstances of a poor jobs market with little alternatives.
And with stuff like real estate getting more and more expensive, faster than wages are growing, it's tough for anyone but the most privileged, to have the luxury of working less than 8h/day and maintaining a good lifestyle.
This is effectively a description of neoliberal politics. There's going to be a pushback against it, and I hope that pushback doesn't get taken advantage of and go full nazi-lite movement.
We're already kinda seeing something similar in the US. Where a lot of republican voters are part of the "lower class" of society, and their anger is being taken advantage of and translated to xenophobia.
Combating this and creating a fair society is the hardest (yes, including climate change) challenge I see in us going forward.
> You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing".
That's not remotely true. There's a real stigma about part-time work and most employers would just say NEXT! if you said "please can I work 4 days a week for 80% pay?".
Yes, but the person you're replying to is talking to an employer who wishes they could hire someone to work 80% time for 80% pay, but somehow isn't able to do that (Hint: It's because they don't really want to)
Not as much as they would like to. I'd love to exchange a day for 20% cut, but it's not an option. Nobody will agree to that. Same with my colleagues. We don't need that 20% money but nobody cares. Even now when we're working from home at least a few days a week. It's simply not an option.
But thanks to global changes, country by country, this mentality will slowly be changed and finally 4-day week won't be some strange option but a norm.
You sure can, and you can enjoy not having health insurance, vacation time, retirement contributions, or anything else that makes working less unbearable.
Well, it's not 80% pay given benefits and overhead costs associated with having an employee. Probably more like a 30%+ cut.
ADDED: Assuming it really is a 20% cut in productivity which, for office workers, probably isn't the case but would be for many others including white collar jobs like lawyers, doctors, consultants, etc.
It is possible, you need to be at a company where work is viewed as work and the rest of your life as the rest of your life. Not all companies are like this, some companies think that your work is your life. With those companies they'd probably next you.
As an employer there are plenty of jobs that I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to work 20% less, as long as they cost me 20% less.
The point of the 4 day week is to decouple the link between output and time. Most employers aren't paying people for 5 * 8 hours of their time. They're paying them for "however much of X work you can do in 40 hours". But, and this is the key point, if tech has moved forward to enable people to do "40 hours of X work" in 32 hours then people could work a 4 day week for the same money that they're earning now.
For a large number of jobs that absolutely is the case, and people sit around wasting 8 hours a week doing very little because they can get all their work done in less time. Rather than them wasting the time, which doesn't benefit you at all, why not just work 4 days? People get more time for themselves, so they're happier, and you benefit from happier, more motivated staff. Everyone wins.
Companies are made up of people, and people get things wrong. A great example is working from home - prior to the pandemic many companies refused to consider it. They didn't believe it works. They refused to trust their staff. They thought the IT issues would make it unworkable. It was only being forced to try it that made them understand that it's actually really good for many people. So much so that lots of companies continued to do it, and recruited people remotely because they don't plan on stopping it.
It takes a leap of faith to make big changes like this. Sometimes the decision makers don't have the courage to try.
Good question and one way to approach it, for sure. But it appears paradigms shift in waves. Running a business means focusing on the most important things for that business. It’s likely that things like these are microoptimizations.
For instance, there are many companies that have taken the pandemic as an opportunity to enable permanent remote work even post-pandemic. It would have been a massive recruiting improvement to have had that pre-pandemic. (And it was, I worked at a place that was like this). But in the end, it was better to just focus on the business itself. There’s only so many things it’s worth not standardizing on.
As someone who prefers both in-office and more than 40 hrs of work, I find this whole thing interesting
If workers were more productive working less hours you wouldn't need the government to do anything - businesses acting in their own interests would do this automatically.
The government doesn't know how to run businesses better than the businesses themselves.
Well many private businesses are already, take MSs pilot recently. Do you know how the 40 hour 5 day week was initially established in the US?
The postwar era status quo of people travelling hours each way to their job, then to spend most of it in meetings or in an open plan office (chosen for managerial oversight, not productivity, which is a clue we will come back to) with too much noise to be productive are being challenged (cv19)
The research is clear, most white collar workers report much less productive work time compared to their work hours.
Reporting and data collection in this ever increasing era of cognitively demanding work is becoming far more accurate. In previous times, people's fear of redundancy has caused false overreach of business hours, and competitive presenteeism. Between this, and micromanagerial institutions like the open plan office, there is plenty of activity that doesn't accurately report productivity up to the business. Assuming the business has perfect information here is the fault. There are forces shaping these standards that are beyond the reach of produtivity, cultural normalisation of unhealthiness is rife. Look at China.
Assuming that a person will always be productive for X hours a day, regardless of how long they are in the office, is naive.
The reality is that people spend some percentage of their time being productive. During the day they take coffee breaks, chat with coworkers, check Twitter, etc.
Assume people are productive for 20 hours now. If you reduced the work week to be 20 hours, productivity would go down. There would still be meetings, coffee breaks, etc that eat into those 20 hours. Now people are only productive for, say, 15 hours a week.
You know that workers will just piss away the extra two hours a day and then take Friday’s off.
I mean, I and most of my colleagues did that when my employer had 4 day work weeks during the summer. Instead of “summer hours” we called it “some of the hours”.
European countries do not have at-will employment, you cannot just fire people around without a clear justification and first trying to resolve the issue with the employee.
Is it really a good use of an agile employer's time to come up with linear compensation schemas for the workers? I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to use the bathroom given it costs me a couple percentage points less...
What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.