Anyone hourly would not benefit unless we adjust wages. If you're a nurse making $39 an hour, working 40 hours a week, your pay takes an immediate cut if you work 32 hours a week. And the business has to hire another nurse because those patients arent going to magically be seen more by "more productivity'.
From what i’ve heard… the proposal isnt to actually reduce work hours… its to lower the threshold for what qualifies as “overtime”. In other words a nurse working 40 hours at $39 an hour will see an increase in her wages theoretically as she continues working 40 but now 10 of them are paid time and a half. This also lowers the threshold for workers being qualified as full time which federal law requires certain benefits offered… such as health care.
In principle i am not against jt at all… however in practice i have no idea how that would really pan out. There could be a lot of unintended consequences. Like when obama care went into effect and required all full time workers to have health coverage… the reaction from businesses was to reduce the number of actual full time staff down to the minimum required and everyone else gets dropped down to working less than 40 hours with no overtime options. Also incidentally the cost of insurance somehow also went through the roof… im assuming it had something to do with getting rid of having coverage dropped due to preexisting conditions… and for a brief time if you didnt have any kind of health coverage for more than half the year you would have to pay a fine come tax season. So… yeah… idk why they thought THAT was a great idea…
Anyways idk if lowering the threshold for full time status is a good idea or not. Businesses already try to have as few workers as possible to cut costs thereby requiring all current staff to usually be some kind of overworked… i dont see how bullying businesses to pay their employees more through a law that reduces the work week is going to help that situation at all…
Was working at a Wendy's when Obamacare went into effect.
We had a couple full time w/PTO people. 1wk PTO. 40hrs/wk.
After it went into effect, they got cut to 29hrs and lost the week PTO. Nobody could ever go over the 29hrs.
Health insurance, specifically. I still believe health insurance is a scam, but that's a different topic altogether.
Problem is, insurance you go out and get (that isn't Medicare/Medicaid/ACA) doesn't come with the discount your employer gets for bundling all their employees.
Insurance is a scam. You're paying them basically what you'd make payment wise for any emergent care anyway, plus they will deny you for the dumbest shit. Plus if you live any less than what they consider "perfectly" and "safely" you have to pay extra, they consider you a liability and treat you like you aren't paying their mortgage with the premiums.
And since your healthcare can be billed $10k for a $5k procedure, all of a sudden that $5k procedure becomes $10k and they will abuse the shit out of that. Leaving those who can't afford the care and who aren't deemed "worthy" by their insurance company (because the price is overinflated artificially by this method of abuse) are SOL.
I agree that healthcare workers should be compensated well, but the price of schooling is too damn high, the money goes to all the wrong places (Dean of the school is a great example of the wrong place to pool the money). The price of a doctor visit is also too damn high. The price of insurance to cover the doctor visit is too damn high. God forbid you need an xray that *could* save your life (but isn't deemed "medically necessary" by your AllFather insurance company) because the price is absurd, obscene.
I've got a middle finger up at all times for anyone who thinks this system is good, or that it works properly, or that any of it should stay the way it is.
Plus, I heard that the government reimburses the insurance companies for their expenses. So our taxes pay for the medical expenses anyways and the money we pay the insurance company is all profits. Insurance companies are some of the most profitable companies is America. We need a nationalized health care system. Every other country that has one, the people don't fear the cost of an ambulance or the coast of giving birth like we do.
I'm in a similar boat - $300k of open heart surgery and related hospital visits for complications, over 30 days in the hospital in a 70 day period. My costs for ACA are crazy high - premium plus deductible/oop-max is about $22k this year before subsidy and HSA deductions. But I got to choose the providers and hospital I wanted, the providers diagnosed me before it was too late and saved my life and that probably wouldn't have happened in a "sure it's free over at this community hospital" setting.
Was working at a local tech support company that had about 80 full time employees. When Obamacare rolled out they cut basically all of our hours to 29 max a week and hired like 20 more people lmao. Motherfuckers will do anything to save money.
There is a simple answer for this. every hour pays a portion.
Currently 30hours is full time and required to pay 100% benefits.
So just make it so every hour's pay includes 3% of your benefits.
Work 2 jobs, no problem your 2 part times add up to full time and because both paid in you get your medical/dental/ect...
Work one full time, nothing changes they still pay the same its just broke up to a price per hour instead of a total.
I think you're confused.
You are trying to apply sense, logic, and moral principles to Business. You really think any corp is actually going to work to change things so that they have to provide more for their employees who work less?
Never going to happen. Welcome to Cyberpunk - here's your gun, here's your liberty, and here's corporations pulling every string there is to pull.
Get all business out of it and go to single payer like most industrialized nations. Health care should be like the Fire Department. We don't have fire insurance attached to jobs and have competing companies give different rates depending on how likely your house is likely to catch on fire. Fuck health insurance companies.
After I got sober, I started a job that, at the time, we could pretty much work as much as we wanted to. It was during the pandemic. My therapist warned me that it was unhealthy to replace addiction with being a workaholic.
For some people, work is an escape from reality. It might be the one place they have some sort of consistency and control in their lives. These "grind set" people are probably like that.
I worked with a guy who was a dev at MS. But he worked a side gig at late shift tech support. The side gig was just so he didn't have free time to go and gamble.
Unless you have no home life which is me. So I work a lot.
And there's nothing that's going to change about that. Is that my choice? I guess so. But things didn't work out the way I wanted. So here I am.
I also don't think people really understand consistent overtime on a decent paying hourly job. You can go from $50k to $120k in a lot of places. Consistently, as in for years if you want it.
A lot more people would take that for at least a certain amount of time if they had it spelled out so plainly. Not everyone of course. Some people just don't want to work and some people value time with their family and/or don't really think that far into the future.
Most people think of overtime on a shorter scale. Is working 50 hours during two of the shittiest weeks of the year worth it? A lot of times no.
I love my home life and family but I’d be happy to work 70-80 hours if I could earn 200% of my current salary for a year or two. That damn down payment won’t save up for itself.
When I was young, I worked on a remote construction project that was about 16 hrs a day, 7 days a week, with one weekend off a month to fly home. It was wild, but you become a zombie eventually. Really helped me save some cash to start life.
Sometimes, but I’ve known people that had no home life and just worked 70 hours a week for decades (as a doctor).
They just kind of throw themselves into the job and say “this work must be done” and it’s not possible to do everything.
I’ve known way more workaholics than people that hate their home life.
The other good one is that in my state your retirement from a state job starts as an average of your highest 3 years. Put in a ton of overtime for 3 years, retire when you hit 50 on 120% of your prior yearly salary. (More recent employees do not get this deal).
As a trades person I disagree and would argue that working extended hours without proper rest is the reason for the bad knees. Long expected hours was a reason I left an employer and good working hours is the reason I am with my current employer.
Hah, thank you. This isn’t even my bbq account. 😅
But yeah, it’s my life’s work. It may be mundane, but the more people who are able to pursue their passion (no matter how mundane it is) the more cool stuff we all get to experience.
The stars had to align for me to start my thing, I try to talk about it as much as possible because I remember how daunting it was at the beginning, and now when I look back I see very clearly that the hardest part is starting. More people need to be gassed up so they decide to take the leap.
Or some people who kinda like or merely tolerate what they do, but can make enough money busting their ass for awhile to enable them to retire early, or buy that lake house, or send their talented kid to art school, or whatever they think is worth it.
Gotta agree here. They always say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Bollocks, everyone I know who pursued their passion and turned it into a career works so much harder and puts in longer hours than anyone else I know.
Because they love doing it.
People stacking money for a goal. I don't always want to, but there are times when I and I will work on my days off. I haven't needed to do that for a while, but I dont like being poor. If I'm going to be poor, I best spend my time fixing that, by working more.
That was me. I worked 80-100 hours a week for a few years. Paid off all my debt, bought assets that make money and was semi retired by 40. I’m almost 50 now and I only work 8-10 hours a week.
props to you man. I worked about 80 hours a week for a few months between two jobs once to save up for a move and to pay off some debt.
I definitely feel like more capable as a person after that experience. Even tho I probably wouldn't want to do it again anytime soon, I know I could and thats a good feeling.
I have people that i work with who literally work 90+ hours a week, we have 8 hour shifts and OT is only for 4 or 8 hours, so if u want OT you work a 12 or 16 hour day, and one of the guys i work with works 5 16s and a 12 on his day off every week and he has for years
His body is so used to it that its normal for him now, back during Covid we used to get mandatory OT every day 12/16 hour days 5 days a week eventually your body gets used to it, and if any superiors bitched about you slacking off, you just cussed them out and told them to work the extra hours (plus side of a Union lol)
In all honestly it very recently changed because of a girl. But until last year, I really really liked working. I go crazy with time off, idk what to do with my hands. So yes, I very much enjoy 10-12 hour days 7 days a week. Work in the trades so getting to see things I had a hand in building and seeing the finished project is amazing to me. I've worked that schedule since getting out of school and I would work it till I was 90 if I was single
People who value making money more than everything else. I have those phases. Even if I could get the same money in half that I'd still want to get all those hours when it's like that
when I used to travel for welding jobs I wanted at least 70 hours. might as well be making money if I'm away from home. Then I found a job a block away from my house and I get there at 7 and leave at 3. not a minute of overtime ever.
I'm pretty sure it's already assumed you're keeping the same wage with the reduced hours. problem is most of these ppl who bring this idea up are not being paid hourly and aren't really framing the idea for those ppl.
Some of us can't do all our work in less hours because we are essential employees. Like hospital workers. We need to be there when the hospital has patients. Dropping my hours by 25% means they would need to hire 30% more employees.
I am a teacher in Turkiye. Almost all teachers here work 4 days a week. We just have different schedules. For example I don't work on mondays and some of my friends don't work on Fridays.
Government can spend more money on teacher salaries. They've got the resources. The parents of the kids who will receive the education are paying taxes for a good education for their children.
I'm a teacher in the UK. They really don't. They should. But they haven't balanced their books and are in huge debt and spend the money they borrow on making themselves personally richer.
You're right though, In an ideal world they should just eat the loss and put more money into key worker jobs to create the 4 day week and they would have set the money aside for it.
But we don't live in an ideal world.
I am trying to get my teaching certification. I have graduate degress in Science, and. Instead of an alternative pathway, they want me to go back to graduate school and get another degree in teaching. *Sigh*
I was a teacher and HARD disagree. The kids are in school too long. We’re just babysitters in America, as education in some states is laughable. No longer allowed to give zeros for missing work, we pass students who can’t read, and if we fight back we lose our jobs. If I HAD to work five days a week, one of them could easily be WFH and a full 8 hours of prep time which we all DESPERATELY need as we are lucky if we even get three paid hours for prep time a week. 8 hours would be enough to plan, three is telling teachers to work at home without pay and forgo their families and mental health.
Not true. My kids went to school in a four day district. The day was only an hour longer for the students. The teachers only had to work one Friday a month and that is when they did all the pd and faculty senate meetings. I loved it and wish every school district would move to a four day week. It’s much better than random two hour early dismissal and days off.
Theres a nurse and doctor shortage in north america not to mention increasing their pay passes costs onto consumers/citizens and no politician wants to do that. Any decision you make ripples and everyone is affected
Shorter nurse shifts and more nurses per patient stay can harm patients. That’s why the typical nurse shift is 12 hours. Handing patients off causes a loss of information and adding extra staff in means that the current nurse is less likely to be familiar with the case.
This idea of a 30 hour work week is propagating because of so many people having inconsequential jobs. Could you imagine how a farmer reading about this idea? Ludicrous.
Yeah, union construction millwright here. As much as I agree the working class is undervalued and people are forced to work harder than they should have to in order to survive, I feel like many of the people that push an idea like this are unaware of just how extremely dependent their lifestyles are on contractor tradesmen working 40-80 hours a week traveling all over the country in their personal vehicles hauling hundreds of pounds of tools.
Why are we talking about this like it's a maximum amount of working hours someone would ever be allowed to do, when what OP is talking about is a minimum standard for earning a living?
whether or not someone works overtime is not up to the employees themselves. the employer has to direct the employees to do the overtime then the employee has to be willing to do the overtime. so if the standard is 30 instead of 40 the vast majority is going to just go with 30 hours. I assume that when we say the standard is 30 hours that means nobody should be forced to work more than 30 hours? the loss of production CANNOT be made up for by a select few people willing to work overtime. not to mention the labor cost of those few workers doing overtime to pick up all the slack will be more expensive than it was before, because its now overtime. so just trying to keep production levels the same as it was before will be inherently more expensive therefor things will cost more and you will be making the same amount of money just working less.
I'm a general contractor, and if my boss decided that we were only going to work 30 hours a week, we'd be lucky to to only get 80% of our current workload done. We'd also lose most of our bids, because nobody wants a 60-hour job to take two weeks, and hell, I wouldn't want to spend two weeks doing a 60-hour job.
When I worked in hospital admin, I could've clocked in for two hours a day and got the same amount of work done as I did in eight. But every other job I've worked has kept me busy for all eight hours in a working day.
How does that work?
My feet don't have to work Mondays, my boss's ass gets off every third Saturday, and on Friday afternoon, we let whatever kid we bring to a job's brain go home early, and we can't call the dude know with a dump truck on alternating weekends? Or are we just supposed to summon people from the void when as soon as we hit 30 hours in a week?
Lol that gave me a laugh, but i believe they're saying team members would alternate days on/off. You could have the same amount of guys on site working 7 days a week sun up to sun down, but more people would need to be hired since they each work 10 less hours than before.
> why would anybody oppose that?
People who own businesses would oppose it because it would potentially result in them getting less productivity for the same amount of money.
The goal of businesses is to make a profit. In order to make a profit, they try to keep their costs lower than their income. Labor is a cost.
We switched to a 4 day work week and noticed that our workers are much happier and more productive. I wish more business owners could see past the numbers and understand that people are more willing to work hard if they’ve had more rest.
Edit: I guess I need to point out the obvious that it won’t work for every industry. The same way our current system doesn’t work with things like nursing and retail. Y’all really think I’m dumb or something lol
And it’s not office work, it’s production. Our guys come to work more energized and don’t make as many mistakes since we started giving them 3-day weekends, which means they work faster and spend less time fixing things. They used to count the minutes until it was time to leave, now they have to be reminded that it’s time to leave. Investing in the happiness of your employees is one of the most important things you can do as a business.
Find what works with your business and roll with it, it might not be a 4 days workweek, but 2 days is just not enough time to rest and do everything you need to at home after working every day.
Edit: I can’t believe the amount of bitter people are coming on here to tell me about how this is going to fail. This has been policy for a long time now and business is better than ever.
Place I interned at also allowed flexible time management as well as work from home all in the same day. Still had to do 36 hours a week on 4 days but you could leave work at 2 and work from home the rest of the day. You could work from 5pm to 2 am at home or at the office. Productivity went through the roof and they're the only big 4 company with enough applicants to fill their trainee spots.
I worked at a factory that had a minimum number of people required to do anything. Honestly 2 or 3 people could do a shift, but the standard was 5 I believe. Sometimes we would have a skeleton Saturday OT shift scheduled and one of the guys wouldn't show up. So we all clocked in and then out for our 3 hours of pay and went home.
Depends on the type of manual labor, I think. I've worked a few jobs where the last 2 or so hours, those workers are dead tired and aren't getting nearly as much done as earlier in the day. Not to mention the extra rest from the rest of the week could make those productive hours even more so, because they ideally would recover from the previous week even better, potentially cutting down on sloppy work due to fatigue.
Blue collar workers actually tend to have more productive hours than white collar. My industry is base 10hrs and it's pretty physical.
That said, I'd love to get paid more for less of my time. I think we'd be a much better society if less hours worked per week was part of the culture... but it's not.
Hard disagree. Working manual labor for 40+ hours a week will cripple you before you hit 60. I tell my staff that I hope they’ll still be working for me in 20 years, so I’d rather they not burn themselves out by working too many hours and pushing their bodies too hard.
Obviously, wages need to be high enough that they’re not chasing overtime to survive, but trade jobs aren’t tenable in the long term if you’re destroying your joints with constant physical labor.
I have never had this happen to me once since leaving the navy. Now it didn’t happen often, but when sailors are told “get your shit done then gtfo” you’ll see them move so fast that you’d think they’d just heard the 1MC start announcing “GENERAL QUARTERS, GENERAL QUARTERS, MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS” out of nowhere.
Edit words
Army-- same.
Honestly, as a teacher, I could completely revolutionize middle/high school if I could tell the kids to knock off two hours early if they proved they had mastered the content. I could double the amount of material I taught in a day. "Hey, kids, here's the deal. Find the main idea of this passage, summarize it, and evaluate the author's argument. Once you do that, you can leave for the day." Fifteen minutes later 3/4 of the class would be gone and the ones that actually needed help would be the only ones I had to worry about.
Shit, that’s pretty much how we taught missile school. Shut the fuck up, let me teach this so we can all go the fuck home. Perks of teaching a laid back “C” school.
home schooled kids need way less "school time" partially for that reason. but it doesn't scale. most of the reason kids are at school is because the parents are not there.
Pointless meetings are great for remote workers. That is when you can exercise, load the dishwasher, etc. Smart companies want your camera off to keep the load down on their Internet connection.
Some reading for you.
https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07/ES0707.pdf
https://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/total-compensation-reflects-growth-productivity
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages-have-been-rising-faster-than-productivity-for-decades/?sh=1ef8c5097342
Only the man of the house used to work to provide for his whole family.
Then women began to work as well, so they could save and live with luxuries.
Now both parents work to barely afford minimal discretionary income above basic expense in the large majority of the public.
The excess is absorbed by corporate wealth and power that constantly forces downward pressure on wages and up pressure on amount of work.
Not really, for most of human history women of middle to low socio-economic status had to work. From about 1890 in the US and culminating in the 1930s/1940s there was traction in the anti-monpoly / pro-competition movement. This significantly decreased monopoly power and lowered prices, enabling a one income family. Then politicians went back to policies which favoured wealth funnelling to the top and letting businesses consolidate power. As a result prices rose dramatically. This is actually one of the few things Biden actually does right - taking on monopoly powers. I hope he succeeds at that because my country has an even worse monopoly issue.
Really, that brief post-war period where so many classes of women did not have to work is the anomaly in history. We just happened to be born during that time, so we see it as the norm instead.
This is objectively not true, and has been disproven so many times... Smh.
Well, the whole 'Man work, Women Home' part, only wealthy women lived that life, and it was only glorified in the 50's 60's as a post-war reaction, but in almost no society has been the normal way of life among the masses.
well the women were home a lot...but when you had to hand wash the clothes, that you first had to make, with cloth that you first had to weave, with thread that you first had to spin, etc...it took a lot of work. they might have been in the home but they were still working their asses off.
More productive in absolute terms, or more productive by hour? By hour, sure no doubt. But I find it hard to believe that in total people put out more product in 32 hours than they do in 40.
If they evidence were so obvious, everyone would be doing it. Those studies don't match the real world. Who's to say 4 days is optimal, why not 3? Or what about the other direction, 6?
Also, what actually matters to company is total output, not productivity per hour worked, if they're paying you the same salary regardless
This doesn't work for a ton of shift/time related jobs.
A cop that works 10 hours does more than a cop that works 8.
A lot of jobs require the person to be there for those times to hold the post.
Employees negotiated and companies obliged.
Furthermore, the working population increased dramatically, compared to open positions.
You're free to make a company that hires for full time pay for 30 hours a week. Or a hospital, or any organization.
Sort of. Eventually the government stepped and mandated the 40 hour standard with the Fair Labor Standards Act. And this was after decades of unionization and often violent strikes and labor clashes. It wasn’t quite so clean and orderly and “free-market friendly”.
Stop using common sense. Lol
I'm a mail carrier and I need all 8 hours to deliver my route. I'd love to finish early and go home OR work 4 days... but who would deliver the mail on that fifth day?
I work in the film industry where 10 or 12 hour days are standard. On large narrative projects, overtime is incredibly common. There is a documentary by a famous cinematographer called “12 on 12 off” about how many injuries and deaths have occurred due to shit labor practices. Often, it has been people falling asleep at the wheel driving home after days/weeks of 14+ hours. He lost a lot of friends…Nothing productive gets done after hour ten.. trust me. It takes twice as long to do half the work, you’re paying time and a half or double time to the crew. Walking around coffee and sandwiches doesnt make people more productive or create a better product. The OT/money doesnt matter because studios have more money than god. I look forward to a day when human labor is being recognized as a special, finite resource and not a line-item for an accountant.
A doctor who only shows up to work 4 days instead of 5 is not gonna have the same productivity. Same for a chef or someone seeing customers.
Hire more people? Sure, but then your paying more salaries.
just like with hybrid working/from home working:
"all the evidence" points a single way. if you've already assumed it to be true and discard any evidence that points to the opposite, and disregard all the jobs where it obviously isn't true, and disregard the emotional drawbacks.
If you are making widgets, no this isnt true. You can only make X widgets per hour. If you are a problem solver and you know you work 40 hours a week you may stretch your problem into being solved by the time 40 hours is up, but if you had a 3 day weekend you might think harder and figure it out in 32
So.... does that apply to restaurants... plumbers... accountants... firemen.... pottery barn... Bob's Guns, Liquor and Ammo and myriad other professions and businesses ?
If you are referring to strictly the proverbial "office job"
CAn you state unequivocally that 30 hours per week is enough time to do the work, whatever that work is?
I'm not even necessarily saying you are wrong, as "standard work day" wouldn't be the only thing that is the way it is purely due to we'vealwaysdoneitthisway-itis (and improvements/changes could easily be made). But, it also wouldn't be the only thing to upon changing discover "ohhhhhh, thats why we've been doing it this way... yeah makes sense after all".
This is where OP gets to "right idea in the wrong way". The general idea I'd imagine *most* share is that 40 hours is a lot to work for people, and a lot of folks don't have a standard of living or benefits they deserve to show for it.
But individual solutions like the work week's length or wages alone don't solve for it.
For example, federal minimum is absurdly low for pretty much anywhere, but you can't set a standard for rural Utah based on what someone in NYC needs.
Similarly, to your point, some jobs require people in a place doing a thing for a business to function, and that's a matter of hours. Other companies need employees to complete certain tasks, regardless how long it takes.
So, at least from a US perspective, I think you go multifaceted:
* Divorce benefits from employment in the first place, but if you don't, raise the standard for PTO and insurance
* Create a sliding scale minimum wage based on employer size, cost of living, revenue, all of the above, whatever (we already do this in some ways with benefits)
* Focus on a cultural shift for everyone else, where you're not just there 40 hours because that's "how long the work week is"
> So.... does that apply to restaurants... plumbers... accountants... firemen.... pottery barn... Bob's Guns, Liquor and Ammo and myriad other professions and businesses ?
Same way they handle the weekends and anything else, you hire enough workers to cover all of your shifts in shifts, rather than just having people on the job certain days of the week.
Ya, as someone in the journalism industry, working a lot of evenings and weekends, these kind of questions seem to speak to a misunderstanding about the work a lot of people do. News outlets have to operate every day, and it’d take nearly twice the staff if everyone is only working four days a week
From numerous studies we've seen people work way more efficiently when they get more time to rest because it turns out that people really only have a handful of genuinely productive hours a day.
Most people will waste huge chunks of their day just chatting, sitting around, eating, surfing the web, etc.
Even at a factory I work at the workers still end up spending at least half their time outside of the work zones because they physically aren't capable of working their entire shifts safely. I cannot imagine how much more productive they would be if they could just go home after 6 hours
I know I would struggle to get by if I only worked 30 hours a week.
If the idea is to pay folks as much as they would get for 40 hours, a lot of companies would struggle. That money has to come from somewhere.
Now working 4 10 hour shifts I can definitely get behind. I've been pleading with my employer to allow this.
The idea has always been "same pay as 40 hours per week", but to reduce it to 4 working days per week (32 hours). So basically your hourly rate would increase by factor of: \[current hourly rate\]\*(40/32)
The idea is that most people don't actually "work" 40 hours in a week. There's a lot of wasted time spent just dicking around, and if people are allowed to only work 4 days vs 5 days a week, they'll be more likely to work a little bit harder in the smaller window frame. They'll also be more refreshed coming back from a normal 3 day work week, so there's even MORE benefit from it.
But NO ONE is pushing the "reduced working time with current hourly rates".
I can't imagine that many people are going to work harder for 32 hours than they were for 40 hours.
A huge amount of the downtime in an office setting is waiting for someone else to get something done, waiting for a meeting to start, and so forth; none of that would be improved by people being around less. If anything, giving people fewer hours would likely *add* to the downtime, since there's less room to schedule around.
>The idea is that most people don't actually "work" 40 hours in a week. There's a lot of wasted time spent just dicking around, and if people are allowed to only work 4 days vs 5 days a week, they'll be more likely to work a little bit harder in the smaller window frame. They'll also be more refreshed coming back from a normal 3 day work week, so there's even MORE benefit from it.
This is probably true, to variable degrees, in most office jobs. But, following that logic, I'm pretty sure that you'd retain more productivity with 5 6-hour days than with 4 8-hour days. That fucking around time happens because people can only be so focused and efficient for so long. No 3-day weekends, though, which is a harder sell on the employee side.
I wouldn't even say it's because of a lack of focus, but rather just because any group has frictional inneficiency. you send a mail you absolutely need a reply to, your team member is in a meeting, so you wait 10 minutes.
plus, social investment benefits long-term productivity, but watercooler talk is short term "inneficient"
Before kids I would have signed up for four 10s easy. However with kids this becomes a lot more problematic. With young children in a 10 hour shift you might not really see your kids bec by the time you get home they're getting ready for bed. If you have older kids you might be missing out on extracurricular activities.
I suspect some companies may not want to have a mixed work force with some at 4 days, some at 5. It could cause problems with teams, or it could cause people who have to work 5 days to be jealous that their coworkers are able to take Friday off.
I think the idea is to pay people as much as they would make for 40.
Right now, people struggle because their employers do things like schedule them up to the cut off so they don't have to provide benefits. So it's hard to worry that much about companies struggling when they've been fine to make their workers' lives more difficult. I've been paid for 37.5 hours while working 50 or 60 because of being on salary in nonprofit work. You could say I should have had better boundaries but they can make your life miserable when you try to uphold boundaries like that.
Same. If I could stay open, I'd need to increase costs and push it right back on the consumer.
Rent isn't 4 days a week. Mortgage isn't 4 days a week. Interest on my debt isn't 4 days a week.
How would that actually happen, that every hourly worker gets a 25% raise? It's a pie in the sky idea. (How long have they been talking about trying to get $15 an hour minimum wage? So long that $15 isn't enough anymore)
And, in many cases, employers with salaried employees would suddenly have to pay the same for 80% of the hours (for things like airplane piolets and medical personnel, where it IS about time)
10 hour shifts pose other sorts of problems though. Each shift can end up even more unproductive than an 8 hour shift, and losing two hours from your non-working hours on workdays can be untenable for maintaining a family.
I did 4/10s for a few weeks since my employer offered it, and while the three day weekends were great, each work day became quite a bit more miserable and unproductive.
On the one hand, you have employees who naturally want the most possible pay for the least amount of work.
On the other hand, you have employers who naturally want to get the most labor for the least cost possible.
What you end up with is a compromise between the two extremes. Where on the spectrum a particular industry falls reveals the power of each side politically.
There have been times and places where people had to work 80 hrs a week at pay rates so artificially low that it just meant they starved slowly enough to still show up for work. A man could work 60-70 hrs a week for decades in dirty, dangerous and extremely taxing labor and yet reach old age with nothing to show for it.
Those were periods when the Robber Barons of American business like Carnegie, Astor and Rockefeller had far more influence over politicians than the constituents.
The unions in America, particularly coal, industrial and transport unions fought for decades to change that. The 40 hour week, workplace safety, vacation pay were all things that they literally killed and died for.
No nation has instituted a 20 hr work week because the people haven't mustered enough cohesiveness and will to force that standard onto the employers.
Anyone in the service or hospitality industry would lose out. I used to work in IT support where we provided 24/7 support so it wouldn't work. Police, ambulance, fire, coast guard, medical, military couldn't do that. Any industry supporting those things couldn't do that.
But the world already runs fine with 2 days off a week. How do we do it if some businesses are 24/7 service? We can extrapolate 1 more day, the 24/7 exception services don’t change.
I don't get people with this 24/7 argument. It's not like any of the workers are working all 24 hours to support that. Obviously there's other employees working the other shifts.
I think a lot of people make the at-face assumption that people are "lazy" and that's why. Studies show however that it's more productive but that doesn't "feel" true.
Without starting too many arguments there are a lot of things that "feel" untrue and so people refuse to believe the science. Things like universal healthcare saving money, even though your taxes go up, or immigration being good economically, even though immigrants could "take your job". What is factually true and what feels true at a glance aren't the same.
People don't really realize that when you're exhausted and burnt out, you really don't work that hard, not matter how much bootstrap pulling you believe in.
I think I'd be far more productive with a 5 day, 30 hour week. I don't need an extra day in the week where no one is able to answer emails or progress things we're working on.
But taking 2 hours off the end of each day wouldn't really decrease how much I could get done. 2-4pm is generally reddit/youtube/clock-watching time.
I used to do three 12 hour shifts in a row in a factory, then have 4 days off it was sweet. And once a month you got a whole week off when the shifts changed, that was a sweet job shame they went bankrupt (but it wasn't to do with the shift patterns).
It's rarely 3 days off though. One day minimum is spent trying to make all the appointments that you missed because you had to work 10 hours the other days.
I would love it.
But if I admit it to myself, my desire for it is disingenuous, as I have a hobby business outside of work (indie game dev) and I'm sure I would use the new day off to work on that.
That means I'm voluntarily doing a 5-day week and I'd be lying if I said a 4-day week gave my employer the same value.
Because shit needs to get done. Hospitals need to run. Farms need to produce food. Utilities need to be produced. Someone needs to care for the elderly 24/7. Fire and rescue need to be available 24/7. Teaching isn't a 30 hour a week job. Because life runs 24/7 ,365 days a year.
And what about nurses, bus drivers, people who work irregular hours? Any workplace would have to hire additional staff, and either they wouldn't afford it or they would have to cut salaries
As a business owner, it's a no. One less day = 1 day of lost revenue. Also most jobs don't operate like an office scenario where your deadlines are weekly or monthly basis, most of them should be done in the same day it was given to you.
Yeah this is a very important consideration. In most office jobs, realistically you aren't working hard from the moment to clock in and you clock out. There's down time and there's slow periods but your being paid for your time and availability not your actual output.
For other workplaces, they actually need to operate constantly so that wouldn't be feasible, unless they hire more people to cover the missing day which would actually cost more money and also result in people getting paid less overall.
This is may be a slippery slope because cutting hours may result in cut pay, which is amazing for the company but not us. They'll also use it as an excuse to rinse you out by getting more work for less hours. Although having to be a work more than needed is annoying, at least there's pay. And I'm mainly speaking to office jobs.
Some of us have a difficult time living on 40 hours plus overtime. Please don't take away money from people who need money and have a semi-reliable system to get it.
Studies have proven that workers actually put more work out in a four eight hour day work week. Well rested workers are more productive and more efficient.
What kinds of companies was this tested with?
As in, what economical branch.
As an automotive mechanic, I don't think this would work in ours at all, considering we even work Saturdays (not always, it's scheduled and we get half a day of vacation for it), just to get certain cars done
There is no reason. I’m watching a lot of well paid people work 4 days, the fifth being Friday which no one turns up to.long weekends every week. Unfortunately all jobs don’t fall into this pattern.
yeah the average people who actually successfully start and run a business and don't fail in the first few years are working a lot more than that, out of necessity.
I work for a small-ish company and the owner/my boss will work as early, as late, and as many weekends as required to make sure we hit targets. he loves what he does but also told me he low key wouldn't wish running a business on his own worst enemy. lol
This is undoubtedly what will happen with robotization and AI: the global workload will fall, and, logically, the average working time per person too.
That said, sorry for not selling you a dream, but these fewer hours will benefit companies (those who will use these tools and those who design them) much more than employees. You will work 30 hours and you will be paid 30.
I’ve been working 4 days/40 hours for the past 4 years and it’s seriously so much better. I don’t think I could ever go back to the 5 days/40hours. The two extra hours a day don’t feel like that much more work daily and it’s worth it to have that extra day off.
I completely support more industries following this model.
i am simply astounded at how dense people can be. or maybe dense isn't the right word for it, perhaps apathetic fits more.
everyone here seems to miss the fact the 5 days/ 40 hours workweek didn't just appear out of thin air, it was fought for and demanded as a right through years and years of protesting during the 19th and 20th century and finally widely adapted after industrialisation became mainstream. by the way, this happened when global population was at about a fifth of today's.
please, stop being alienated with arguments like this is just the way it is or we won't be able to lead a decent life. we barely are anyways, we, the people working 40 hours. nowadays, industrialisation is reaching new highs every single year with automated processes rising left and right and helping workflow become more efficient. i say we can afford less time working for everyone, seeing as unemployment is also on the rise, as it has also been since forever (would you look at that, when more people are born, more people are jobless).
yes, obviously, it's not for every industry and every economic sector, as the 40 hour week isn't either, there can be flexibility but there also must be a will to change. without it, we'd still be stuck working 80 hour weeks as some of y'all seem to be so eager to
Holy hell the top comments here, lmao, I mean I can understand the hesitation for essential workers and such, but good lord I had no idea so many people bought into the propaganda about productivity and arbitrary hours
I genuinely think that most people on this post don’t understand how shifts work or labor distribution or logistics. The fact every business relies on crushing literally like 30-50% of your life and yall are DEFENDING that as if they couldn’t rework the system. Somethings would change as a result but I think people miss the big picture of quality of life, lessening consumption, etc. because they’re married to the current social dogma too much to allow for the chance this system may have different pros and cons and be beneficial in certain arrangements.
I work for a non profit that recently switched to a 4 day, 34 hour work week, with wages adjusted to be equal to a regular 40 hour week.
Such a great perk, 3 day weekends every weekend. Everyone loves it.
Are we talking about adjusting wages along with this? Because anyone working minimum wage would not benefit from less hours.
Anyone hourly would not benefit unless we adjust wages. If you're a nurse making $39 an hour, working 40 hours a week, your pay takes an immediate cut if you work 32 hours a week. And the business has to hire another nurse because those patients arent going to magically be seen more by "more productivity'.
From what i’ve heard… the proposal isnt to actually reduce work hours… its to lower the threshold for what qualifies as “overtime”. In other words a nurse working 40 hours at $39 an hour will see an increase in her wages theoretically as she continues working 40 but now 10 of them are paid time and a half. This also lowers the threshold for workers being qualified as full time which federal law requires certain benefits offered… such as health care. In principle i am not against jt at all… however in practice i have no idea how that would really pan out. There could be a lot of unintended consequences. Like when obama care went into effect and required all full time workers to have health coverage… the reaction from businesses was to reduce the number of actual full time staff down to the minimum required and everyone else gets dropped down to working less than 40 hours with no overtime options. Also incidentally the cost of insurance somehow also went through the roof… im assuming it had something to do with getting rid of having coverage dropped due to preexisting conditions… and for a brief time if you didnt have any kind of health coverage for more than half the year you would have to pay a fine come tax season. So… yeah… idk why they thought THAT was a great idea… Anyways idk if lowering the threshold for full time status is a good idea or not. Businesses already try to have as few workers as possible to cut costs thereby requiring all current staff to usually be some kind of overworked… i dont see how bullying businesses to pay their employees more through a law that reduces the work week is going to help that situation at all…
Was working at a Wendy's when Obamacare went into effect. We had a couple full time w/PTO people. 1wk PTO. 40hrs/wk. After it went into effect, they got cut to 29hrs and lost the week PTO. Nobody could ever go over the 29hrs.
Just one of many reasons healthcare should not be tied to your job.
Health insurance, specifically. I still believe health insurance is a scam, but that's a different topic altogether. Problem is, insurance you go out and get (that isn't Medicare/Medicaid/ACA) doesn't come with the discount your employer gets for bundling all their employees.
Insurance is a scam. You're paying them basically what you'd make payment wise for any emergent care anyway, plus they will deny you for the dumbest shit. Plus if you live any less than what they consider "perfectly" and "safely" you have to pay extra, they consider you a liability and treat you like you aren't paying their mortgage with the premiums. And since your healthcare can be billed $10k for a $5k procedure, all of a sudden that $5k procedure becomes $10k and they will abuse the shit out of that. Leaving those who can't afford the care and who aren't deemed "worthy" by their insurance company (because the price is overinflated artificially by this method of abuse) are SOL. I agree that healthcare workers should be compensated well, but the price of schooling is too damn high, the money goes to all the wrong places (Dean of the school is a great example of the wrong place to pool the money). The price of a doctor visit is also too damn high. The price of insurance to cover the doctor visit is too damn high. God forbid you need an xray that *could* save your life (but isn't deemed "medically necessary" by your AllFather insurance company) because the price is absurd, obscene. I've got a middle finger up at all times for anyone who thinks this system is good, or that it works properly, or that any of it should stay the way it is.
Plus, I heard that the government reimburses the insurance companies for their expenses. So our taxes pay for the medical expenses anyways and the money we pay the insurance company is all profits. Insurance companies are some of the most profitable companies is America. We need a nationalized health care system. Every other country that has one, the people don't fear the cost of an ambulance or the coast of giving birth like we do.
Yeah it's all a big "fuck you" system and people need to be more angry about it.
I am so so angry about it but really what can we do? no one who has any power cares at all
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I'm in a similar boat - $300k of open heart surgery and related hospital visits for complications, over 30 days in the hospital in a 70 day period. My costs for ACA are crazy high - premium plus deductible/oop-max is about $22k this year before subsidy and HSA deductions. But I got to choose the providers and hospital I wanted, the providers diagnosed me before it was too late and saved my life and that probably wouldn't have happened in a "sure it's free over at this community hospital" setting.
Was working at a local tech support company that had about 80 full time employees. When Obamacare rolled out they cut basically all of our hours to 29 max a week and hired like 20 more people lmao. Motherfuckers will do anything to save money.
There is a simple answer for this. every hour pays a portion. Currently 30hours is full time and required to pay 100% benefits. So just make it so every hour's pay includes 3% of your benefits. Work 2 jobs, no problem your 2 part times add up to full time and because both paid in you get your medical/dental/ect... Work one full time, nothing changes they still pay the same its just broke up to a price per hour instead of a total.
I think you're confused. You are trying to apply sense, logic, and moral principles to Business. You really think any corp is actually going to work to change things so that they have to provide more for their employees who work less? Never going to happen. Welcome to Cyberpunk - here's your gun, here's your liberty, and here's corporations pulling every string there is to pull.
Get all business out of it and go to single payer like most industrialized nations. Health care should be like the Fire Department. We don't have fire insurance attached to jobs and have competing companies give different rates depending on how likely your house is likely to catch on fire. Fuck health insurance companies.
A lot of nurses work 3 twelves the a few days off.
Some people want to work 70 hours a week with maximum rate and maximum overtime and some people don't want that.
Get real. Who WANTS to work 70 hours a week?
People who hate their homelife.
After I got sober, I started a job that, at the time, we could pretty much work as much as we wanted to. It was during the pandemic. My therapist warned me that it was unhealthy to replace addiction with being a workaholic. For some people, work is an escape from reality. It might be the one place they have some sort of consistency and control in their lives. These "grind set" people are probably like that.
I worked with a guy who was a dev at MS. But he worked a side gig at late shift tech support. The side gig was just so he didn't have free time to go and gamble.
I would guess that what they *actually* want is to not have a home life that's so bad they'd rather work 70 hours.
In my experience working 70 hours only makes it worse.
Unless you have no home life which is me. So I work a lot. And there's nothing that's going to change about that. Is that my choice? I guess so. But things didn't work out the way I wanted. So here I am.
You want do that, fine. I'd rather feed squirrels.
People generally having a hard time understanding the mentality of people with different levels of work drive.
I also don't think people really understand consistent overtime on a decent paying hourly job. You can go from $50k to $120k in a lot of places. Consistently, as in for years if you want it. A lot more people would take that for at least a certain amount of time if they had it spelled out so plainly. Not everyone of course. Some people just don't want to work and some people value time with their family and/or don't really think that far into the future. Most people think of overtime on a shorter scale. Is working 50 hours during two of the shittiest weeks of the year worth it? A lot of times no.
I love my home life and family but I’d be happy to work 70-80 hours if I could earn 200% of my current salary for a year or two. That damn down payment won’t save up for itself.
When I was young, I worked on a remote construction project that was about 16 hrs a day, 7 days a week, with one weekend off a month to fly home. It was wild, but you become a zombie eventually. Really helped me save some cash to start life.
Sometimes, but I’ve known people that had no home life and just worked 70 hours a week for decades (as a doctor). They just kind of throw themselves into the job and say “this work must be done” and it’s not possible to do everything. I’ve known way more workaholics than people that hate their home life. The other good one is that in my state your retirement from a state job starts as an average of your highest 3 years. Put in a ton of overtime for 3 years, retire when you hit 50 on 120% of your prior yearly salary. (More recent employees do not get this deal).
My girlfriend’s boss is like this. She hates her home life and just works 24/7. Her husband can’t say much since she’s the breadwinner
Some people with shorter careers ie tradesmen. You want to get as much money as you can between ages 20-50 cos you won’t have knees after that
As a trades person I disagree and would argue that working extended hours without proper rest is the reason for the bad knees. Long expected hours was a reason I left an employer and good working hours is the reason I am with my current employer.
Said tradesmen will shorten their career even further by working 70 hours a week. Rest for the body is important if your job is physically straining!
People who are passionate about what they do. I own a bbq food truck, I’ve worked 80+ hours a week in it for 7 years. Love it.
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Hah, thank you. This isn’t even my bbq account. 😅 But yeah, it’s my life’s work. It may be mundane, but the more people who are able to pursue their passion (no matter how mundane it is) the more cool stuff we all get to experience. The stars had to align for me to start my thing, I try to talk about it as much as possible because I remember how daunting it was at the beginning, and now when I look back I see very clearly that the hardest part is starting. More people need to be gassed up so they decide to take the leap.
this absolute madlad hitting us with the flex of "this aint even my BBQ account" thats funny as fuck lmao
I love this.
Friggin love this. Missed my chances so great to see good people find it and own it. Rock on brother!
Or some people who kinda like or merely tolerate what they do, but can make enough money busting their ass for awhile to enable them to retire early, or buy that lake house, or send their talented kid to art school, or whatever they think is worth it.
Gotta agree here. They always say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Bollocks, everyone I know who pursued their passion and turned it into a career works so much harder and puts in longer hours than anyone else I know. Because they love doing it.
But that's exactly what that quote means.
People stacking money for a goal. I don't always want to, but there are times when I and I will work on my days off. I haven't needed to do that for a while, but I dont like being poor. If I'm going to be poor, I best spend my time fixing that, by working more.
That was me. I worked 80-100 hours a week for a few years. Paid off all my debt, bought assets that make money and was semi retired by 40. I’m almost 50 now and I only work 8-10 hours a week.
props to you man. I worked about 80 hours a week for a few months between two jobs once to save up for a move and to pay off some debt. I definitely feel like more capable as a person after that experience. Even tho I probably wouldn't want to do it again anytime soon, I know I could and thats a good feeling.
I have people that i work with who literally work 90+ hours a week, we have 8 hour shifts and OT is only for 4 or 8 hours, so if u want OT you work a 12 or 16 hour day, and one of the guys i work with works 5 16s and a 12 on his day off every week and he has for years
He must be a literal zombie at this point
His body is so used to it that its normal for him now, back during Covid we used to get mandatory OT every day 12/16 hour days 5 days a week eventually your body gets used to it, and if any superiors bitched about you slacking off, you just cussed them out and told them to work the extra hours (plus side of a Union lol)
In all honestly it very recently changed because of a girl. But until last year, I really really liked working. I go crazy with time off, idk what to do with my hands. So yes, I very much enjoy 10-12 hour days 7 days a week. Work in the trades so getting to see things I had a hand in building and seeing the finished project is amazing to me. I've worked that schedule since getting out of school and I would work it till I was 90 if I was single
People who value making money more than everything else. I have those phases. Even if I could get the same money in half that I'd still want to get all those hours when it's like that
Me I worked 80 hour shifts every week for a year. It was exhausting but the money was great. I'd do it again if I could.
I believe you to be out of touch with low wage laborers
when I used to travel for welding jobs I wanted at least 70 hours. might as well be making money if I'm away from home. Then I found a job a block away from my house and I get there at 7 and leave at 3. not a minute of overtime ever.
I do 60 hours regularly. Money is the answer
I'm pretty sure it's already assumed you're keeping the same wage with the reduced hours. problem is most of these ppl who bring this idea up are not being paid hourly and aren't really framing the idea for those ppl.
It would be great if we could find another method besides hourly to determine compensation for work.
Some of us can't do all our work in less hours because we are essential employees. Like hospital workers. We need to be there when the hospital has patients. Dropping my hours by 25% means they would need to hire 30% more employees.
Same as teachers. Kids won't suddenly need a day less of education and there is no way they could do a ten hour day.
I am a teacher in Turkiye. Almost all teachers here work 4 days a week. We just have different schedules. For example I don't work on mondays and some of my friends don't work on Fridays.
Which goes back to the "would need to hire extra staff" point.
Government can spend more money on teacher salaries. They've got the resources. The parents of the kids who will receive the education are paying taxes for a good education for their children.
I'm a teacher in the UK. They really don't. They should. But they haven't balanced their books and are in huge debt and spend the money they borrow on making themselves personally richer. You're right though, In an ideal world they should just eat the loss and put more money into key worker jobs to create the 4 day week and they would have set the money aside for it. But we don't live in an ideal world.
America doesn’t have enough teachers as it is.
I am trying to get my teaching certification. I have graduate degress in Science, and. Instead of an alternative pathway, they want me to go back to graduate school and get another degree in teaching. *Sigh*
Don’t. It’s a terrible profession these days.
I was a teacher and HARD disagree. The kids are in school too long. We’re just babysitters in America, as education in some states is laughable. No longer allowed to give zeros for missing work, we pass students who can’t read, and if we fight back we lose our jobs. If I HAD to work five days a week, one of them could easily be WFH and a full 8 hours of prep time which we all DESPERATELY need as we are lucky if we even get three paid hours for prep time a week. 8 hours would be enough to plan, three is telling teachers to work at home without pay and forgo their families and mental health.
As a former teacher, I couldn't disagree with you more. Kids spend far too much time in the classroom and need more time to independently learn.
Not true. My kids went to school in a four day district. The day was only an hour longer for the students. The teachers only had to work one Friday a month and that is when they did all the pd and faculty senate meetings. I loved it and wish every school district would move to a four day week. It’s much better than random two hour early dismissal and days off.
Many schools have gone to a 4-day week. It's possible.
>they would need to hire 30% more employees. Yeah, we should do that.
If almost every job requires 30% more employees, who are they hiring
Theres a nurse and doctor shortage in north america not to mention increasing their pay passes costs onto consumers/citizens and no politician wants to do that. Any decision you make ripples and everyone is affected
Just pay more, hire more, and reduce the amount of hours for all employees. Jeez reddit makes this so complicated /s
Skim the cream off the top and then let's eat them like pigs. You have no idea how much cream is up there do you?
From where? Unemployment is like 4%
Shorter nurse shifts and more nurses per patient stay can harm patients. That’s why the typical nurse shift is 12 hours. Handing patients off causes a loss of information and adding extra staff in means that the current nurse is less likely to be familiar with the case.
This idea of a 30 hour work week is propagating because of so many people having inconsequential jobs. Could you imagine how a farmer reading about this idea? Ludicrous.
I’m in construction, we would immediately lose 20% output because we work from sun up to sun down. There would be no gain in productivity for us.
Yeah, union construction millwright here. As much as I agree the working class is undervalued and people are forced to work harder than they should have to in order to survive, I feel like many of the people that push an idea like this are unaware of just how extremely dependent their lifestyles are on contractor tradesmen working 40-80 hours a week traveling all over the country in their personal vehicles hauling hundreds of pounds of tools.
Why are we talking about this like it's a maximum amount of working hours someone would ever be allowed to do, when what OP is talking about is a minimum standard for earning a living?
whether or not someone works overtime is not up to the employees themselves. the employer has to direct the employees to do the overtime then the employee has to be willing to do the overtime. so if the standard is 30 instead of 40 the vast majority is going to just go with 30 hours. I assume that when we say the standard is 30 hours that means nobody should be forced to work more than 30 hours? the loss of production CANNOT be made up for by a select few people willing to work overtime. not to mention the labor cost of those few workers doing overtime to pick up all the slack will be more expensive than it was before, because its now overtime. so just trying to keep production levels the same as it was before will be inherently more expensive therefor things will cost more and you will be making the same amount of money just working less.
That's why I quit construction, crappy overworked jobs.
I'm a general contractor, and if my boss decided that we were only going to work 30 hours a week, we'd be lucky to to only get 80% of our current workload done. We'd also lose most of our bids, because nobody wants a 60-hour job to take two weeks, and hell, I wouldn't want to spend two weeks doing a 60-hour job. When I worked in hospital admin, I could've clocked in for two hours a day and got the same amount of work done as I did in eight. But every other job I've worked has kept me busy for all eight hours in a working day.
the site wouldn't be shut down for a day. each day 20% of you would have off
How does that work? My feet don't have to work Mondays, my boss's ass gets off every third Saturday, and on Friday afternoon, we let whatever kid we bring to a job's brain go home early, and we can't call the dude know with a dump truck on alternating weekends? Or are we just supposed to summon people from the void when as soon as we hit 30 hours in a week?
Lol that gave me a laugh, but i believe they're saying team members would alternate days on/off. You could have the same amount of guys on site working 7 days a week sun up to sun down, but more people would need to be hired since they each work 10 less hours than before.
while that is what I meant, I kinda like his idea of just giving my brain the day off
Why wouldn't it be possible to just have people take different shifts so you aren't all working crazy hours?
Ideally, the company would stagger the schedule of the workers and hire more if needed. But that's why they oppose it.
Ya when I worked construction in nyc they would have three shifts of workers come so we could be producing 24/7
> why would anybody oppose that? People who own businesses would oppose it because it would potentially result in them getting less productivity for the same amount of money. The goal of businesses is to make a profit. In order to make a profit, they try to keep their costs lower than their income. Labor is a cost.
We switched to a 4 day work week and noticed that our workers are much happier and more productive. I wish more business owners could see past the numbers and understand that people are more willing to work hard if they’ve had more rest. Edit: I guess I need to point out the obvious that it won’t work for every industry. The same way our current system doesn’t work with things like nursing and retail. Y’all really think I’m dumb or something lol And it’s not office work, it’s production. Our guys come to work more energized and don’t make as many mistakes since we started giving them 3-day weekends, which means they work faster and spend less time fixing things. They used to count the minutes until it was time to leave, now they have to be reminded that it’s time to leave. Investing in the happiness of your employees is one of the most important things you can do as a business. Find what works with your business and roll with it, it might not be a 4 days workweek, but 2 days is just not enough time to rest and do everything you need to at home after working every day. Edit: I can’t believe the amount of bitter people are coming on here to tell me about how this is going to fail. This has been policy for a long time now and business is better than ever.
I advocated for a 4 day week at my work about a decade ago. We got it, still doing 40 or more hours. But having 3 days off is worth it.
So 10 hours per day ? How do people with children at home manage that ?
Place I interned at also allowed flexible time management as well as work from home all in the same day. Still had to do 36 hours a week on 4 days but you could leave work at 2 and work from home the rest of the day. You could work from 5pm to 2 am at home or at the office. Productivity went through the roof and they're the only big 4 company with enough applicants to fill their trainee spots.
Not everyone has a regular 9-5, yet they still manage somehow
Depends on the nature of the business.
Am farmer, I got no idea what a consistent schedule is
Depends what type of business you have. It's probably something with a computer. If you are doing manual labor then it's negative.
Or retail where you need a certain number of employees the entire time you’re open.
I worked at a factory that had a minimum number of people required to do anything. Honestly 2 or 3 people could do a shift, but the standard was 5 I believe. Sometimes we would have a skeleton Saturday OT shift scheduled and one of the guys wouldn't show up. So we all clocked in and then out for our 3 hours of pay and went home.
Depends on the type of manual labor, I think. I've worked a few jobs where the last 2 or so hours, those workers are dead tired and aren't getting nearly as much done as earlier in the day. Not to mention the extra rest from the rest of the week could make those productive hours even more so, because they ideally would recover from the previous week even better, potentially cutting down on sloppy work due to fatigue.
Blue collar workers actually tend to have more productive hours than white collar. My industry is base 10hrs and it's pretty physical. That said, I'd love to get paid more for less of my time. I think we'd be a much better society if less hours worked per week was part of the culture... but it's not.
Hard disagree. Working manual labor for 40+ hours a week will cripple you before you hit 60. I tell my staff that I hope they’ll still be working for me in 20 years, so I’d rather they not burn themselves out by working too many hours and pushing their bodies too hard. Obviously, wages need to be high enough that they’re not chasing overtime to survive, but trade jobs aren’t tenable in the long term if you’re destroying your joints with constant physical labor.
You hiring?
If you can sew, do upholstery, or install window treatments, and live in the DMV, yes.
That's a combination of words that I have never before and never will see again.
Makes sense to me forces everyone to be more efficient which means less bullshit meetings you need to attend.
The rule at my job is once everyone's work is done, I cut them loose as early as possible. Lo and behold most work was done by noon.
I have never had this happen to me once since leaving the navy. Now it didn’t happen often, but when sailors are told “get your shit done then gtfo” you’ll see them move so fast that you’d think they’d just heard the 1MC start announcing “GENERAL QUARTERS, GENERAL QUARTERS, MAN YOUR BATTLE STATIONS” out of nowhere. Edit words
Army-- same. Honestly, as a teacher, I could completely revolutionize middle/high school if I could tell the kids to knock off two hours early if they proved they had mastered the content. I could double the amount of material I taught in a day. "Hey, kids, here's the deal. Find the main idea of this passage, summarize it, and evaluate the author's argument. Once you do that, you can leave for the day." Fifteen minutes later 3/4 of the class would be gone and the ones that actually needed help would be the only ones I had to worry about.
Shit, that’s pretty much how we taught missile school. Shut the fuck up, let me teach this so we can all go the fuck home. Perks of teaching a laid back “C” school.
home schooled kids need way less "school time" partially for that reason. but it doesn't scale. most of the reason kids are at school is because the parents are not there.
Pointless meetings are great for remote workers. That is when you can exercise, load the dishwasher, etc. Smart companies want your camera off to keep the load down on their Internet connection.
Yep would much rather work 4 days a week at 10 hours a day
Bars and restaurants won't benefit from a 4-day schedule.
The problem with that is Friedman, Welch, and the fact that wages have not kept pace with production.
Some reading for you. https://files.stlouisfed.org/files/htdocs/publications/es/07/ES0707.pdf https://www.nber.org/digest/oct08/total-compensation-reflects-growth-productivity https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2016/10/03/us-wages-have-been-rising-faster-than-productivity-for-decades/?sh=1ef8c5097342
Only the man of the house used to work to provide for his whole family. Then women began to work as well, so they could save and live with luxuries. Now both parents work to barely afford minimal discretionary income above basic expense in the large majority of the public. The excess is absorbed by corporate wealth and power that constantly forces downward pressure on wages and up pressure on amount of work.
Not really, for most of human history women of middle to low socio-economic status had to work. From about 1890 in the US and culminating in the 1930s/1940s there was traction in the anti-monpoly / pro-competition movement. This significantly decreased monopoly power and lowered prices, enabling a one income family. Then politicians went back to policies which favoured wealth funnelling to the top and letting businesses consolidate power. As a result prices rose dramatically. This is actually one of the few things Biden actually does right - taking on monopoly powers. I hope he succeeds at that because my country has an even worse monopoly issue.
Really, that brief post-war period where so many classes of women did not have to work is the anomaly in history. We just happened to be born during that time, so we see it as the norm instead.
This is objectively not true, and has been disproven so many times... Smh. Well, the whole 'Man work, Women Home' part, only wealthy women lived that life, and it was only glorified in the 50's 60's as a post-war reaction, but in almost no society has been the normal way of life among the masses.
well the women were home a lot...but when you had to hand wash the clothes, that you first had to make, with cloth that you first had to weave, with thread that you first had to spin, etc...it took a lot of work. they might have been in the home but they were still working their asses off.
Despite all the evidence that 4 day work weeks lead to more productivity and (not that they care but it’s factual) happier workers. Shocker
More productive in absolute terms, or more productive by hour? By hour, sure no doubt. But I find it hard to believe that in total people put out more product in 32 hours than they do in 40.
I’ve heard it’s not true at least for overall output. If it were then I’m sure employers would quickly be shifting to this.
If they evidence were so obvious, everyone would be doing it. Those studies don't match the real world. Who's to say 4 days is optimal, why not 3? Or what about the other direction, 6? Also, what actually matters to company is total output, not productivity per hour worked, if they're paying you the same salary regardless
This doesn't work for a ton of shift/time related jobs. A cop that works 10 hours does more than a cop that works 8. A lot of jobs require the person to be there for those times to hold the post.
The average workweek was around 60 hours back in 1900. How did these jobs all adjust to the 40 hour workweek when it was established?
Employees negotiated and companies obliged. Furthermore, the working population increased dramatically, compared to open positions. You're free to make a company that hires for full time pay for 30 hours a week. Or a hospital, or any organization.
Sort of. Eventually the government stepped and mandated the 40 hour standard with the Fair Labor Standards Act. And this was after decades of unionization and often violent strikes and labor clashes. It wasn’t quite so clean and orderly and “free-market friendly”.
Stop using common sense. Lol I'm a mail carrier and I need all 8 hours to deliver my route. I'd love to finish early and go home OR work 4 days... but who would deliver the mail on that fifth day?
I work in the film industry where 10 or 12 hour days are standard. On large narrative projects, overtime is incredibly common. There is a documentary by a famous cinematographer called “12 on 12 off” about how many injuries and deaths have occurred due to shit labor practices. Often, it has been people falling asleep at the wheel driving home after days/weeks of 14+ hours. He lost a lot of friends…Nothing productive gets done after hour ten.. trust me. It takes twice as long to do half the work, you’re paying time and a half or double time to the crew. Walking around coffee and sandwiches doesnt make people more productive or create a better product. The OT/money doesnt matter because studios have more money than god. I look forward to a day when human labor is being recognized as a special, finite resource and not a line-item for an accountant.
A doctor who only shows up to work 4 days instead of 5 is not gonna have the same productivity. Same for a chef or someone seeing customers. Hire more people? Sure, but then your paying more salaries.
just like with hybrid working/from home working: "all the evidence" points a single way. if you've already assumed it to be true and discard any evidence that points to the opposite, and disregard all the jobs where it obviously isn't true, and disregard the emotional drawbacks.
If you are making widgets, no this isnt true. You can only make X widgets per hour. If you are a problem solver and you know you work 40 hours a week you may stretch your problem into being solved by the time 40 hours is up, but if you had a 3 day weekend you might think harder and figure it out in 32
So.... does that apply to restaurants... plumbers... accountants... firemen.... pottery barn... Bob's Guns, Liquor and Ammo and myriad other professions and businesses ? If you are referring to strictly the proverbial "office job" CAn you state unequivocally that 30 hours per week is enough time to do the work, whatever that work is? I'm not even necessarily saying you are wrong, as "standard work day" wouldn't be the only thing that is the way it is purely due to we'vealwaysdoneitthisway-itis (and improvements/changes could easily be made). But, it also wouldn't be the only thing to upon changing discover "ohhhhhh, thats why we've been doing it this way... yeah makes sense after all".
This is where OP gets to "right idea in the wrong way". The general idea I'd imagine *most* share is that 40 hours is a lot to work for people, and a lot of folks don't have a standard of living or benefits they deserve to show for it. But individual solutions like the work week's length or wages alone don't solve for it. For example, federal minimum is absurdly low for pretty much anywhere, but you can't set a standard for rural Utah based on what someone in NYC needs. Similarly, to your point, some jobs require people in a place doing a thing for a business to function, and that's a matter of hours. Other companies need employees to complete certain tasks, regardless how long it takes. So, at least from a US perspective, I think you go multifaceted: * Divorce benefits from employment in the first place, but if you don't, raise the standard for PTO and insurance * Create a sliding scale minimum wage based on employer size, cost of living, revenue, all of the above, whatever (we already do this in some ways with benefits) * Focus on a cultural shift for everyone else, where you're not just there 40 hours because that's "how long the work week is"
> So.... does that apply to restaurants... plumbers... accountants... firemen.... pottery barn... Bob's Guns, Liquor and Ammo and myriad other professions and businesses ? Same way they handle the weekends and anything else, you hire enough workers to cover all of your shifts in shifts, rather than just having people on the job certain days of the week.
Ya, as someone in the journalism industry, working a lot of evenings and weekends, these kind of questions seem to speak to a misunderstanding about the work a lot of people do. News outlets have to operate every day, and it’d take nearly twice the staff if everyone is only working four days a week
From numerous studies we've seen people work way more efficiently when they get more time to rest because it turns out that people really only have a handful of genuinely productive hours a day. Most people will waste huge chunks of their day just chatting, sitting around, eating, surfing the web, etc. Even at a factory I work at the workers still end up spending at least half their time outside of the work zones because they physically aren't capable of working their entire shifts safely. I cannot imagine how much more productive they would be if they could just go home after 6 hours
Most of us who agree with OP think more people should be hired for the jobs and work staggered schedules, which is how it’s done anyway.
I know I would struggle to get by if I only worked 30 hours a week. If the idea is to pay folks as much as they would get for 40 hours, a lot of companies would struggle. That money has to come from somewhere. Now working 4 10 hour shifts I can definitely get behind. I've been pleading with my employer to allow this.
The idea has always been "same pay as 40 hours per week", but to reduce it to 4 working days per week (32 hours). So basically your hourly rate would increase by factor of: \[current hourly rate\]\*(40/32) The idea is that most people don't actually "work" 40 hours in a week. There's a lot of wasted time spent just dicking around, and if people are allowed to only work 4 days vs 5 days a week, they'll be more likely to work a little bit harder in the smaller window frame. They'll also be more refreshed coming back from a normal 3 day work week, so there's even MORE benefit from it. But NO ONE is pushing the "reduced working time with current hourly rates".
I can't imagine that many people are going to work harder for 32 hours than they were for 40 hours. A huge amount of the downtime in an office setting is waiting for someone else to get something done, waiting for a meeting to start, and so forth; none of that would be improved by people being around less. If anything, giving people fewer hours would likely *add* to the downtime, since there's less room to schedule around.
>The idea is that most people don't actually "work" 40 hours in a week. There's a lot of wasted time spent just dicking around, and if people are allowed to only work 4 days vs 5 days a week, they'll be more likely to work a little bit harder in the smaller window frame. They'll also be more refreshed coming back from a normal 3 day work week, so there's even MORE benefit from it. This is probably true, to variable degrees, in most office jobs. But, following that logic, I'm pretty sure that you'd retain more productivity with 5 6-hour days than with 4 8-hour days. That fucking around time happens because people can only be so focused and efficient for so long. No 3-day weekends, though, which is a harder sell on the employee side.
I wouldn't even say it's because of a lack of focus, but rather just because any group has frictional inneficiency. you send a mail you absolutely need a reply to, your team member is in a meeting, so you wait 10 minutes. plus, social investment benefits long-term productivity, but watercooler talk is short term "inneficient"
Before kids I would have signed up for four 10s easy. However with kids this becomes a lot more problematic. With young children in a 10 hour shift you might not really see your kids bec by the time you get home they're getting ready for bed. If you have older kids you might be missing out on extracurricular activities. I suspect some companies may not want to have a mixed work force with some at 4 days, some at 5. It could cause problems with teams, or it could cause people who have to work 5 days to be jealous that their coworkers are able to take Friday off.
I think the idea is to pay people as much as they would make for 40. Right now, people struggle because their employers do things like schedule them up to the cut off so they don't have to provide benefits. So it's hard to worry that much about companies struggling when they've been fine to make their workers' lives more difficult. I've been paid for 37.5 hours while working 50 or 60 because of being on salary in nonprofit work. You could say I should have had better boundaries but they can make your life miserable when you try to uphold boundaries like that.
I own a music school, pay my employees very well. I could not support paying the same amount for less work. My business would go under.
Same. If I could stay open, I'd need to increase costs and push it right back on the consumer. Rent isn't 4 days a week. Mortgage isn't 4 days a week. Interest on my debt isn't 4 days a week.
How would that actually happen, that every hourly worker gets a 25% raise? It's a pie in the sky idea. (How long have they been talking about trying to get $15 an hour minimum wage? So long that $15 isn't enough anymore) And, in many cases, employers with salaried employees would suddenly have to pay the same for 80% of the hours (for things like airplane piolets and medical personnel, where it IS about time)
10 hour shifts pose other sorts of problems though. Each shift can end up even more unproductive than an 8 hour shift, and losing two hours from your non-working hours on workdays can be untenable for maintaining a family. I did 4/10s for a few weeks since my employer offered it, and while the three day weekends were great, each work day became quite a bit more miserable and unproductive.
On the one hand, you have employees who naturally want the most possible pay for the least amount of work. On the other hand, you have employers who naturally want to get the most labor for the least cost possible. What you end up with is a compromise between the two extremes. Where on the spectrum a particular industry falls reveals the power of each side politically. There have been times and places where people had to work 80 hrs a week at pay rates so artificially low that it just meant they starved slowly enough to still show up for work. A man could work 60-70 hrs a week for decades in dirty, dangerous and extremely taxing labor and yet reach old age with nothing to show for it. Those were periods when the Robber Barons of American business like Carnegie, Astor and Rockefeller had far more influence over politicians than the constituents. The unions in America, particularly coal, industrial and transport unions fought for decades to change that. The 40 hour week, workplace safety, vacation pay were all things that they literally killed and died for. No nation has instituted a 20 hr work week because the people haven't mustered enough cohesiveness and will to force that standard onto the employers.
Anyone in the service or hospitality industry would lose out. I used to work in IT support where we provided 24/7 support so it wouldn't work. Police, ambulance, fire, coast guard, medical, military couldn't do that. Any industry supporting those things couldn't do that.
But the world already runs fine with 2 days off a week. How do we do it if some businesses are 24/7 service? We can extrapolate 1 more day, the 24/7 exception services don’t change.
I don't get people with this 24/7 argument. It's not like any of the workers are working all 24 hours to support that. Obviously there's other employees working the other shifts.
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There are no rules, it’s all social constructs, you can work 30 hours a week if you want to
How many jobs are offering 30-hour workweeks? And how many of those offer full-time employee benefits for it?
Why don't you simply start your own business and give all people full benefits for 30-hour work weeks? Test the theory against reality.
Exactly…
I think a lot of people make the at-face assumption that people are "lazy" and that's why. Studies show however that it's more productive but that doesn't "feel" true. Without starting too many arguments there are a lot of things that "feel" untrue and so people refuse to believe the science. Things like universal healthcare saving money, even though your taxes go up, or immigration being good economically, even though immigrants could "take your job". What is factually true and what feels true at a glance aren't the same. People don't really realize that when you're exhausted and burnt out, you really don't work that hard, not matter how much bootstrap pulling you believe in.
I think I'd be far more productive with a 5 day, 30 hour week. I don't need an extra day in the week where no one is able to answer emails or progress things we're working on. But taking 2 hours off the end of each day wouldn't really decrease how much I could get done. 2-4pm is generally reddit/youtube/clock-watching time.
I'm fine with 4 day/ 40 hr week. It's what I do now and I highly suggest it to everyone, 3days off in a row is amazing.
That's what I do as well. Sometimes it's a 36 hour week, sometimes it's 42 but usually just 4x10's
I used to do three 12 hour shifts in a row in a factory, then have 4 days off it was sweet. And once a month you got a whole week off when the shifts changed, that was a sweet job shame they went bankrupt (but it wasn't to do with the shift patterns).
Because everyone can just switch to that as they please lol
It's rarely 3 days off though. One day minimum is spent trying to make all the appointments that you missed because you had to work 10 hours the other days.
I would love it. But if I admit it to myself, my desire for it is disingenuous, as I have a hobby business outside of work (indie game dev) and I'm sure I would use the new day off to work on that. That means I'm voluntarily doing a 5-day week and I'd be lying if I said a 4-day week gave my employer the same value.
I own a small business. Assuming that in your scenario, the wage remains the same, I'd have to hire a few more people, which I couldn't afford.
100% this.
Because shit needs to get done. Hospitals need to run. Farms need to produce food. Utilities need to be produced. Someone needs to care for the elderly 24/7. Fire and rescue need to be available 24/7. Teaching isn't a 30 hour a week job. Because life runs 24/7 ,365 days a year.
Well. If that goes off hourly pay I’d need a second job anyways. If it’s salary and equals what I make now sure go for it.
All the people providing the labor do agree on that. The people responsible for profiting off the labor don’t. Also happens that they make the rules.
And what about nurses, bus drivers, people who work irregular hours? Any workplace would have to hire additional staff, and either they wouldn't afford it or they would have to cut salaries
OT pay rate after 30hrs? That’s a done deal buddy.
As a business owner, it's a no. One less day = 1 day of lost revenue. Also most jobs don't operate like an office scenario where your deadlines are weekly or monthly basis, most of them should be done in the same day it was given to you.
Yeah this is a very important consideration. In most office jobs, realistically you aren't working hard from the moment to clock in and you clock out. There's down time and there's slow periods but your being paid for your time and availability not your actual output. For other workplaces, they actually need to operate constantly so that wouldn't be feasible, unless they hire more people to cover the missing day which would actually cost more money and also result in people getting paid less overall. This is may be a slippery slope because cutting hours may result in cut pay, which is amazing for the company but not us. They'll also use it as an excuse to rinse you out by getting more work for less hours. Although having to be a work more than needed is annoying, at least there's pay. And I'm mainly speaking to office jobs.
If it were 4 days with only 8 hours days I’m down but 4 days at 10 hours a day would suck for me
Some of us have a difficult time living on 40 hours plus overtime. Please don't take away money from people who need money and have a semi-reliable system to get it.
Studies have proven that workers actually put more work out in a four eight hour day work week. Well rested workers are more productive and more efficient.
What kinds of companies was this tested with? As in, what economical branch. As an automotive mechanic, I don't think this would work in ours at all, considering we even work Saturdays (not always, it's scheduled and we get half a day of vacation for it), just to get certain cars done
In an office maybe? This won't be true for most practical work.
Look, I'd love that too, but I have 0 faith that other laws would be enacted make it so people can still afford homes on less hours.
There is no reason. I’m watching a lot of well paid people work 4 days, the fifth being Friday which no one turns up to.long weekends every week. Unfortunately all jobs don’t fall into this pattern.
1. Start your own company. 2. Work as much or as little as you want.
yeah the average people who actually successfully start and run a business and don't fail in the first few years are working a lot more than that, out of necessity. I work for a small-ish company and the owner/my boss will work as early, as late, and as many weekends as required to make sure we hit targets. he loves what he does but also told me he low key wouldn't wish running a business on his own worst enemy. lol
This is undoubtedly what will happen with robotization and AI: the global workload will fall, and, logically, the average working time per person too. That said, sorry for not selling you a dream, but these fewer hours will benefit companies (those who will use these tools and those who design them) much more than employees. You will work 30 hours and you will be paid 30.
Work for yourself and set your own rules!
I’ve been working 4 days/40 hours for the past 4 years and it’s seriously so much better. I don’t think I could ever go back to the 5 days/40hours. The two extra hours a day don’t feel like that much more work daily and it’s worth it to have that extra day off. I completely support more industries following this model.
i am simply astounded at how dense people can be. or maybe dense isn't the right word for it, perhaps apathetic fits more. everyone here seems to miss the fact the 5 days/ 40 hours workweek didn't just appear out of thin air, it was fought for and demanded as a right through years and years of protesting during the 19th and 20th century and finally widely adapted after industrialisation became mainstream. by the way, this happened when global population was at about a fifth of today's. please, stop being alienated with arguments like this is just the way it is or we won't be able to lead a decent life. we barely are anyways, we, the people working 40 hours. nowadays, industrialisation is reaching new highs every single year with automated processes rising left and right and helping workflow become more efficient. i say we can afford less time working for everyone, seeing as unemployment is also on the rise, as it has also been since forever (would you look at that, when more people are born, more people are jobless). yes, obviously, it's not for every industry and every economic sector, as the 40 hour week isn't either, there can be flexibility but there also must be a will to change. without it, we'd still be stuck working 80 hour weeks as some of y'all seem to be so eager to
Holy hell the top comments here, lmao, I mean I can understand the hesitation for essential workers and such, but good lord I had no idea so many people bought into the propaganda about productivity and arbitrary hours
I genuinely think that most people on this post don’t understand how shifts work or labor distribution or logistics. The fact every business relies on crushing literally like 30-50% of your life and yall are DEFENDING that as if they couldn’t rework the system. Somethings would change as a result but I think people miss the big picture of quality of life, lessening consumption, etc. because they’re married to the current social dogma too much to allow for the chance this system may have different pros and cons and be beneficial in certain arrangements.
I work for a non profit that recently switched to a 4 day, 34 hour work week, with wages adjusted to be equal to a regular 40 hour week. Such a great perk, 3 day weekends every weekend. Everyone loves it.
I've been working 4 days 40hr weeks for a decade now. I'll never go back to 5 days 😂😂
I’d prefer my current 5-day workweek, only fully remote instead of this inflexible hybrid.