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.
I think one has to be very careful with taking the narrative of lower class, "hillbilly" republicans too much at face value. While yes, these people definitely do exist, the perception that this group is representative of republicans is something that is deliberately cultivated for political means.
As examples like recent protests show, the true core are people like business owners and wealthy suburbanites who are very much voting for their interests, not against them. This is also shown by how in every presidential election since at least 2012, voters below $50k always voted firmly in favor of democrats while voters above $100k voted firmly in favor of Republicans.
I don't know of a consensus, but I've seen many studies where >20% of people self report working ~20 hours per week.
Many studies like this: https://www.inc.com/melanie-curtin/in-an-8-hour-day-the-aver... - say that the average white collar worker only works ~20 hours per week.
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.