5 ms·

Could the U.S. Ever Adopt a Six-Hour Workday?

30 points by spking 11y ago

hugh4 11y ago
Would you personally adopt a six-hour workday? Assuming you got paid 25% less? (Also assuming you currently only work eight hours, which may be a stretch.) I wouldn't, not at this stage in my life anyway. I'm all for flexibility, but that goes both ways.
- michaelchisari 11y ago
  The purpose of a six hour workday is that you wouldn't get paid 25% less.
  - hugh4 11y ago
    And why would I pay someone the same for working less?
    - rmxt 11y ago
      In school, was your grade determined by how long you worked at a problem, or by the quality of the work itself?
      - hugh4 11y ago
        At school I tried to do the bare minimum amount of work that I thought I could get away with, so... probably the former?
        rmxt 11y ago
        I am sorry that you felt that way in school, but "real life" shouldn't, and doesn't have to, be like that. Whether your anecdote is true or merely a creative reimagination from a prototypical brilliant slacker, the point still stands: work and pay should not (typically) be measured by the time spent doing that work, but by the output and effectiveness of the individual. Sure, certain civil service jobs inherently require a time component, e.g. firemen, police officers, etc., but many professions would benefit from a departure from the 8 hour work day.
    - Delmania 11y ago
      Do you think that just because someone is in the office, he's being productive? Most of the time, people are in the office to give the illusion of productivity.
      - hugh4 11y ago
        Of course, but what I'm not convinced by is the idea that if you lop off two of those hours it all comes out of the goofing off pile instead of the hard work pile. My own experience when I work a short day does not match that. I set my own hours, so if I thought I could be just as productive with fewer office hours I'd be all over that.
- femto 11y ago
  The proposal is for a six hour day with no change in pay. Quoting one of the articles referred to on the article: "The 1990s saw several experiments with the six-hour day for a full wage in Sweden."[1] The theory is that people should be based on work output, rather than hours input, and the six hour day typically sees an increase in productivity, so the output is maintained and the pay is maintained. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-turnover-down-sweden-experiments-with-six-hour-working-day http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-t...
  - mc32 11y ago
    I'd love to see tho applied to low level (maybe even high level -though don't interact with them to know) government workers. They are totally about hours put in and very little about work achieved, few, few exceptions of course.
  - owen_griffiths 11y ago
    but the example in this article required more workers hired, so output per worker clearly wasn't maintained.
thescribe 11y ago
Could the U.S. adopt an eight-hour workday? In my experience no.
- jinushaun 11y ago
  Seriously. But I'd rather formalize the 10 hr workday and switch to 4x10s. I think it's superior to 5x8s because you can get longer continuous periods of work and an extra day to actually rest/recover. I don't really see 6 hr days working in office jobs. With emails, meetings and lunch, I feel like I don't really get going until 3pm.
  - 1971genocide 11y ago
    To each his own. I prefer working a little each day and not stress myself too much. I think what needs to happen is an increased in flexibility. To me it seems that society has done a piss poor job in figuring out how to accommodate to women and new types of knowledge work - which requires a lot of flexibility.
    - Apocryphon 11y ago
      Agreed. Wouldn't having some people on five-day workweeks of 5x6, and others four-day workweeks of 4x10, and still others doing whatever lead to companies having to hire more people to fill in the blanks? Wouldn't that help lower unemployment?
    - imh 11y ago
      I've come to the conclusion that more flexibility often leads to a race to the bottom. Like the "unlimited vacation" that's so popular now. Same with flexible hours, I'd guess. Anyone know how to combat that aspect of it?
  - fsloth 11y ago
    " With emails, meetings and lunch, I feel like I don't really get going until 3pm." That sounds like a really wasteful work environment. You spend tremendeous amount of time just synchronizing with people. That's just bad management and lack of vision from your employers part, not a law of nature.
verylong 11y ago
We seem to be moving the opposite direction: fewer people working longer hours. It is part a consequence of the fact that there are fixed costs per employee which make it more cost effective to have one employee work 80 hours a week than have 2 employees work 40 hours a week each. It is also the case that more jobs require extensive training, skills and experience that are scarce. I don't society should encourage anyone who spent 20 years learning something useful in school (e.g., surgeons) to work only 6 hours a day ...
- 1971genocide 11y ago
  I had this conversation with a person who is studying medicine. There is obviously a limit to human mental cognition. The idea that More years studying = better Doctor, has anyone done any conclusive study on this ? Most doctors will tell you that it would be madness to try to cut the time doctors spend in training - and that we should be extending it. But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist. I think doctors and society would be better off if we reduced the learning curve and figured out how to more effectively distribute the workload among more doctors. Doctors already have high sucide rates and very low job satisfaction. And I bet its because of how long they work and the stress that comes from taking so much debt throughout one's life. Also the fact that doctors marry latter. We should try to build work around life rather than the other way round. It seems absurd to me that doctors need to choose between living their lives and their proffesional career.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - gregmac 11y ago
    > But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist. I am neither a doctor nor a quantum physicist, however, I suspect that having minutes or seconds to make a literal life or death decision does, in fact, require a bit more training than the days or months a physicist could be afforded while designing an experiment or writing a paper.
Mikeb85 11y ago
No, because the workplace in the US is too focused on competition. Workers try to put in more face time than the other guy, to climb the ladder and out-do their neighbours and co-workers. If everyone is forced to work the same amount of hours, how are they going to out-do others? BTW, the average workday in the US is currently over 9 hours.
siquick 11y ago
As someone who works in the Australian office of a US company with offices in SA, Europe and Asia Pacific, I am always amazed when US-based colleagues reply to emails or Skype chat after midnight. This just does not happen in any other of our regional offices.
- alukima 11y ago
  I worked in a US based office for a global company. The benefits were pretty awesome- down to them paying for my home internet, but our US based benefits were still quite weak when compared to our counterparts around the globe. The US working hours were longer and when I went on overseas assignments I found that their quality of life was higher than ours overall. It's quite depressing. When I started looking for a job last March I realized that the monetary compensation from the offers I had were within a few thousand of each other but on only one of the interviews did multiple employees bring up that they were a true 9-5 and people actually get mad if you reply to emails after hours or do work during your off time. Their offer was $4000 less than the others and they didn't seem like they wanted to negotiate. I took it anyway and I now work 40 hours or less per week, I leave my computer at the office and I don't feel guilty for not having access to work when I am not at work. So even though I make a little less yearly, I am making quite a bit more per hour. I wish more people in positions of choice would prioritize a true work life balance. Not only has it been great for my physical and mental health, non-developer employees get the same treatment as it sets a company standard. I can't believe how long I bought into the culture of giving up a personal life to get a head at work. I used to put in 60-80 hour weeks and still feel like I wasn't contributing as much as I should. Now I have hobbies(!) and I think I solve more programming problems working in my garden than I ever did sitting in front of a computer.
  - icanhackit 11y ago
    Their offer was $4000 less than the others and they didn't seem like they wanted to negotiate. I took it anyway and I now work 40 hours or less per week You made the right decision. Until time can be purchased, let alone at a decent price, time is the most valuable thing you have. You only have so much of it and we're giving it away to poorly managed companies like it grows on trees.
jonsen 11y ago
The whole idea of a standard work time is ridiculous. We only have it because for many jobs it is hard to measure actual productivity. This also leads to the destructive phenomenon of secrecy in compensation where some are heavily over compensated and many under compensated.
- wtracy 11y ago
  Not so ridiculous when you consider retail or call center jobs that require someone to be present during business hours.
  - mentat 11y ago
    There are certainly more important metrics than mere presence though, aren't there?
GigabyteCoin 11y ago
My father relayed a story to me about a factory in Toronto that he used to buy supplies from for over 40 years. It was a small, tightly knit workforce of about 50 people. Mostly immigrants with woodworking skills. When hard times hit North America in the early 1970s, the owner lowered everybody's hours to equate to 6 hours of work per day instead of laying anybody off. The owner wasn't being altruistic. He was worried that if he laid off anybody that they would go to his competitors when the economy turned around. Taking with them valuable skills and insider knowledge of how his factory operated. The workers were happy to be getting 75% of their pay instead of 0%, and the company lasted another 30 years after that with much of the same workforce.
- crpatino 11y ago
  The key is in "tightly knit workforce". Back during the Big Recession of 2008, my then-bosses announced that they were going to require mandatory unpaid timeoff* from every employee in order to minimize the number of positions being eliminated. That meeting had not even ended, and people was already bitching about how they were not going to be able to keep afloat their over-leveraged lifestyles, and how unfair it was for them to subsidize the non-unemployment of a bunch of losers. Apparently none of the complainers though they would end up on the loser side of things. *Nothing devastating, lit. one or two days per month.
ADent 11y ago
Our department was mandating 20% OT for the last 6 months. I switched to a new program and the management really would like about 10% OT (8%-12% band). Oh we used to get some pay for OT, but they took that away. 6 hour workday - how do I get to 8 hours? This is a Fortune 100 company.
SixSigma 11y ago
You might want to start gently with a 48 week working year, that seems to work OK in Europe too.
imh 11y ago
How about, "Could the U.S. Ever Adopt an Eight-Hour Workday?" I'm not talking about including off-hour emailing and such. I'm talking about a plain old 9-5. I'm probably biased by living in SF, but I don't know anyone who works such short hours. Did salaried people ever get to do eight hour days like wage workers did?
- adventured 11y ago
  Gallup put out a poll a year ago, indicating around 37% of full-time salary workers put in exactly 40 hours. For full-time hourly workers, it's 56% by comparison. And 25% of full-time salary workers are at 60 hours or more. http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-lon...
- marvin 11y ago
  Norwegian here. 7.5 hour work day, lunch included. We don't get paid as much as US software engineers, though. We are "salaried" in the sense that we have a fixed salary, but we also have strong protections in law that require companies to pay if they require more than 8 hours per day from an individual employee. I think your question is pretty obvious; as long as salaried means "fixed price to squeeze out as much effort as possible" then obviously a large portion of profit-focused companies will do just (misguided or not; organizations are rarely super insightful in aggregate) that in the absence of legislation that discourages it.
vijayr 11y ago
It will be very difficult to do this in the U.S mainly because of cultural reasons. I've a colleague who works 10-12 hour days routinely, for absolutely no reason. He could achieve his goals by simply planning better and working less. Working long hours is part of the culture here. When I first started working in the U.S I heard this (rather poor) joke many times when someone was going home at 5.30 pm - "half day today?". If the U.S wants to do it, it can be done fairly easily - same thing goes for remote working. The amount of resistance to remote working from middle/upper management boggles my mind.
meesterdude 11y ago
Can you have a team of people, working less than 40 hours a week, and still pumping out something profitable? I don't that thats too crazy an idea, especially in this industry. But I think if the company answers to stockholders, the underlying purpose of the company leans naturally towards making someone else money, so you'd be less likely to see that kind of thing. TL;DR: Yes, but not as long as profits and money are in charge.

30 points by spking 11y ago

hugh4 11y ago

Would you personally adopt a six-hour workday? Assuming you got paid 25% less? (Also assuming you currently only work eight hours, which may be a stretch.) I wouldn't, not at this stage in my life anyway. I'm all for flexibility, but that goes both ways.

michaelchisari 11y ago
The purpose of a six hour workday is that you wouldn't get paid 25% less.
- hugh4 11y ago
  And why would I pay someone the same for working less?
  - rmxt 11y ago
    In school, was your grade determined by how long you worked at a problem, or by the quality of the work itself?
    - hugh4 11y ago
      At school I tried to do the bare minimum amount of work that I thought I could get away with, so... probably the former?
      - rmxt 11y ago
        I am sorry that you felt that way in school, but "real life" shouldn't, and doesn't have to, be like that. Whether your anecdote is true or merely a creative reimagination from a prototypical brilliant slacker, the point still stands: work and pay should not (typically) be measured by the time spent doing that work, but by the output and effectiveness of the individual. Sure, certain civil service jobs inherently require a time component, e.g. firemen, police officers, etc., but many professions would benefit from a departure from the 8 hour work day.
  - Delmania 11y ago
    Do you think that just because someone is in the office, he's being productive? Most of the time, people are in the office to give the illusion of productivity.
    - hugh4 11y ago
      Of course, but what I'm not convinced by is the idea that if you lop off two of those hours it all comes out of the goofing off pile instead of the hard work pile. My own experience when I work a short day does not match that. I set my own hours, so if I thought I could be just as productive with fewer office hours I'd be all over that.
femto 11y ago
The proposal is for a six hour day with no change in pay. Quoting one of the articles referred to on the article: "The 1990s saw several experiments with the six-hour day for a full wage in Sweden."[1] The theory is that people should be based on work output, rather than hours input, and the six hour day typically sees an increase in productivity, so the output is maintained and the pay is maintained. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-turnover-down-sweden-experiments-with-six-hour-working-day http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-t...
- mc32 11y ago
  I'd love to see tho applied to low level (maybe even high level -though don't interact with them to know) government workers. They are totally about hours put in and very little about work achieved, few, few exceptions of course.
- owen_griffiths 11y ago
  but the example in this article required more workers hired, so output per worker clearly wasn't maintained.

thescribe 11y ago

Could the U.S. adopt an eight-hour workday? In my experience no.

jinushaun 11y ago
Seriously. But I'd rather formalize the 10 hr workday and switch to 4x10s. I think it's superior to 5x8s because you can get longer continuous periods of work and an extra day to actually rest/recover. I don't really see 6 hr days working in office jobs. With emails, meetings and lunch, I feel like I don't really get going until 3pm.
- 1971genocide 11y ago
  To each his own. I prefer working a little each day and not stress myself too much. I think what needs to happen is an increased in flexibility. To me it seems that society has done a piss poor job in figuring out how to accommodate to women and new types of knowledge work - which requires a lot of flexibility.
  - Apocryphon 11y ago
    Agreed. Wouldn't having some people on five-day workweeks of 5x6, and others four-day workweeks of 4x10, and still others doing whatever lead to companies having to hire more people to fill in the blanks? Wouldn't that help lower unemployment?
  - imh 11y ago
    I've come to the conclusion that more flexibility often leads to a race to the bottom. Like the "unlimited vacation" that's so popular now. Same with flexible hours, I'd guess. Anyone know how to combat that aspect of it?
- fsloth 11y ago
  " With emails, meetings and lunch, I feel like I don't really get going until 3pm." That sounds like a really wasteful work environment. You spend tremendeous amount of time just synchronizing with people. That's just bad management and lack of vision from your employers part, not a law of nature.

verylong 11y ago

We seem to be moving the opposite direction: fewer people working longer hours. It is part a consequence of the fact that there are fixed costs per employee which make it more cost effective to have one employee work 80 hours a week than have 2 employees work 40 hours a week each. It is also the case that more jobs require extensive training, skills and experience that are scarce. I don't society should encourage anyone who spent 20 years learning something useful in school (e.g., surgeons) to work only 6 hours a day ...

1971genocide 11y ago
I had this conversation with a person who is studying medicine. There is obviously a limit to human mental cognition. The idea that More years studying = better Doctor, has anyone done any conclusive study on this ? Most doctors will tell you that it would be madness to try to cut the time doctors spend in training - and that we should be extending it. But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist. I think doctors and society would be better off if we reduced the learning curve and figured out how to more effectively distribute the workload among more doctors. Doctors already have high sucide rates and very low job satisfaction. And I bet its because of how long they work and the stress that comes from taking so much debt throughout one's life. Also the fact that doctors marry latter. We should try to build work around life rather than the other way round. It seems absurd to me that doctors need to choose between living their lives and their proffesional career.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- gregmac 11y ago
  > But I fail to see how a single profession could be so much more complex then say quantum physicist. I am neither a doctor nor a quantum physicist, however, I suspect that having minutes or seconds to make a literal life or death decision does, in fact, require a bit more training than the days or months a physicist could be afforded while designing an experiment or writing a paper.

Mikeb85 11y ago

No, because the workplace in the US is too focused on competition. Workers try to put in more face time than the other guy, to climb the ladder and out-do their neighbours and co-workers. If everyone is forced to work the same amount of hours, how are they going to out-do others? BTW, the average workday in the US is currently over 9 hours.

siquick 11y ago

As someone who works in the Australian office of a US company with offices in SA, Europe and Asia Pacific, I am always amazed when US-based colleagues reply to emails or Skype chat after midnight. This just does not happen in any other of our regional offices.

alukima 11y ago
I worked in a US based office for a global company. The benefits were pretty awesome- down to them paying for my home internet, but our US based benefits were still quite weak when compared to our counterparts around the globe. The US working hours were longer and when I went on overseas assignments I found that their quality of life was higher than ours overall. It's quite depressing. When I started looking for a job last March I realized that the monetary compensation from the offers I had were within a few thousand of each other but on only one of the interviews did multiple employees bring up that they were a true 9-5 and people actually get mad if you reply to emails after hours or do work during your off time. Their offer was $4000 less than the others and they didn't seem like they wanted to negotiate. I took it anyway and I now work 40 hours or less per week, I leave my computer at the office and I don't feel guilty for not having access to work when I am not at work. So even though I make a little less yearly, I am making quite a bit more per hour. I wish more people in positions of choice would prioritize a true work life balance. Not only has it been great for my physical and mental health, non-developer employees get the same treatment as it sets a company standard. I can't believe how long I bought into the culture of giving up a personal life to get a head at work. I used to put in 60-80 hour weeks and still feel like I wasn't contributing as much as I should. Now I have hobbies(!) and I think I solve more programming problems working in my garden than I ever did sitting in front of a computer.
- icanhackit 11y ago
  Their offer was $4000 less than the others and they didn't seem like they wanted to negotiate. I took it anyway and I now work 40 hours or less per week You made the right decision. Until time can be purchased, let alone at a decent price, time is the most valuable thing you have. You only have so much of it and we're giving it away to poorly managed companies like it grows on trees.

jonsen 11y ago

The whole idea of a standard work time is ridiculous. We only have it because for many jobs it is hard to measure actual productivity. This also leads to the destructive phenomenon of secrecy in compensation where some are heavily over compensated and many under compensated.

wtracy 11y ago
Not so ridiculous when you consider retail or call center jobs that require someone to be present during business hours.
- mentat 11y ago
  There are certainly more important metrics than mere presence though, aren't there?

GigabyteCoin 11y ago

My father relayed a story to me about a factory in Toronto that he used to buy supplies from for over 40 years. It was a small, tightly knit workforce of about 50 people. Mostly immigrants with woodworking skills. When hard times hit North America in the early 1970s, the owner lowered everybody's hours to equate to 6 hours of work per day instead of laying anybody off. The owner wasn't being altruistic. He was worried that if he laid off anybody that they would go to his competitors when the economy turned around. Taking with them valuable skills and insider knowledge of how his factory operated. The workers were happy to be getting 75% of their pay instead of 0%, and the company lasted another 30 years after that with much of the same workforce.

crpatino 11y ago
The key is in "tightly knit workforce". Back during the Big Recession of 2008, my then-bosses announced that they were going to require mandatory unpaid timeoff* from every employee in order to minimize the number of positions being eliminated. That meeting had not even ended, and people was already bitching about how they were not going to be able to keep afloat their over-leveraged lifestyles, and how unfair it was for them to subsidize the non-unemployment of a bunch of losers. Apparently none of the complainers though they would end up on the loser side of things. *Nothing devastating, lit. one or two days per month.

ADent 11y ago

Our department was mandating 20% OT for the last 6 months. I switched to a new program and the management really would like about 10% OT (8%-12% band). Oh we used to get some pay for OT, but they took that away. 6 hour workday - how do I get to 8 hours? This is a Fortune 100 company.

SixSigma 11y ago

You might want to start gently with a 48 week working year, that seems to work OK in Europe too.

imh 11y ago

How about, "Could the U.S. Ever Adopt an Eight-Hour Workday?" I'm not talking about including off-hour emailing and such. I'm talking about a plain old 9-5. I'm probably biased by living in SF, but I don't know anyone who works such short hours. Did salaried people ever get to do eight hour days like wage workers did?

adventured 11y ago
Gallup put out a poll a year ago, indicating around 37% of full-time salary workers put in exactly 40 hours. For full-time hourly workers, it's 56% by comparison. And 25% of full-time salary workers are at 60 hours or more. http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-longer-seven-hours.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-lon...
marvin 11y ago
Norwegian here. 7.5 hour work day, lunch included. We don't get paid as much as US software engineers, though. We are "salaried" in the sense that we have a fixed salary, but we also have strong protections in law that require companies to pay if they require more than 8 hours per day from an individual employee. I think your question is pretty obvious; as long as salaried means "fixed price to squeeze out as much effort as possible" then obviously a large portion of profit-focused companies will do just (misguided or not; organizations are rarely super insightful in aggregate) that in the absence of legislation that discourages it.

vijayr 11y ago

It will be very difficult to do this in the U.S mainly because of cultural reasons. I've a colleague who works 10-12 hour days routinely, for absolutely no reason. He could achieve his goals by simply planning better and working less. Working long hours is part of the culture here. When I first started working in the U.S I heard this (rather poor) joke many times when someone was going home at 5.30 pm - "half day today?". If the U.S wants to do it, it can be done fairly easily - same thing goes for remote working. The amount of resistance to remote working from middle/upper management boggles my mind.

meesterdude 11y ago

Can you have a team of people, working less than 40 hours a week, and still pumping out something profitable? I don't that thats too crazy an idea, especially in this industry. But I think if the company answers to stockholders, the underlying purpose of the company leans naturally towards making someone else money, so you'd be less likely to see that kind of thing. TL;DR: Yes, but not as long as profits and money are in charge.