13 ms·

How three-day weekends can help save the world

163 points by harwoodleon 10y ago

sien 10y ago
It's arguable that people are actually choosing fewer hours by working part time. Part time work has shot up as a percentage of all work. In Australia it has gone from 1/10 to 1/4 of work from 1966 to 2007. Most other countries are similar. AU numbers in the link. http://www.pc.gov.au/research/supporting/part-time-employment http://www.pc.gov.au/research/supporting/part-time-employmen... Before people point out that people would actually like to work more it's worth quoting the link that this goes both ways: "Since the early 1990s, 20-25 per cent of female part time workers and 30-35 per cent of male part time workers have indicated a preference to work more hours. At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that two full time workers want to move to part time work for every part time worker who wants to move to full time work."
- loeber 10y ago
  I would suspect that part-time work has shot up because traditional full-time roles have evaporated in many sectors, so people are trying to make ends meet by hustling several part-time gigs at once, or in short succession.
- dugditches 10y ago
  From the paper: '..over the last thirty years there has been an increase in involuntary part time employment.' 'There has been no sustained or substantial decrease in the level of involuntary part time employment among women since it increased during the recession of the early 1990s.' 'involuntary part time employment increased strongly during the economic recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s, as well as the economic slowdown in 2001.' Your paper was published in June 2008, before the '08 Crisis. Choosing to work Part-Time is a privilege. Companies use Part Time work to avoid paying benefits, leave, etc. Keeping employees in a sort of limbo to save costs.
  - sien 10y ago
    For those who are not Australians it is important to note that in Australia there is universal health care independent of your employer. Also while benefits are not usually the same as for full time they are sometimes and even if not the same are not as different as they are in the US.
surfmike 10y ago
I think a three day weekend should be a societal goal we strive for, as productivity per worker goes up. Let's use our extra wealth to give people some more leisure time. Besides there's a good chance people will probably get the same amount of work done with four days as five.
- eyelidlessness 10y ago
  What is the productivity threshold? How will workers hold anyone accountable for this? These questions arise from the fact that profits and productivity have soared, while employment and most people's incomes have stagnated or dropped.
- TaylorAlexander 10y ago
  I agree wholeheartedly, but I wanted to provide an alternative choice of language that I think better describes what we must do: Rather than: "Let's use our extra wealth to give people some more leisure time." We could say: "Let's use our extra wealth to take more leisure time for ourselves." My life goal is to help end the necessity of human work for our survival, and I think it's critically important that we understand that this will only happen if we take the time. John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that as productivity rose, working hours would drop and at some point we would all be working 15 hour work weeks. That didn't happen though, and it seems in a huge part related to the fact that, as productivity rose business owners turned that in to profit for themselves rather than sharing the profits with workers. So suggesting business owners "give" us that time seems unlikely, and I think we need to take it for ourselves. We can do that by becoming business owners ourselves, either by joining a cooperative[1] or by starting our own business, or we can do that by earning a high enough salary that working 4/5 as much would still pay the bills, and then negotiating hard with prospective employers until you find one that needs you enough to accept a 32 hour a week schedule. Anyway, I'm completely agreeing with you, I've just spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about this and I think the language of suggesting we "give" this to workers critically misses out on the workers' agency and ability to take what they want for themselves. Certainly, achieving this will not be easy and there are many problems, but I think it's a goal so worth achieving that we ought to work hard to figure that out. [1] For more information on the benefits of a cooperative-business based economy, see the excellent book "Democracy at Work" By Richard Wolff: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13591849-democracy-at-work http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13591849-democracy-at-wor...
dbg31415 10y ago
Wouldn't an extra day working from home each week give pretty much the same benefits, while keeping productivity the same? Nice middle ground, I think. I think for businesses that require customers to be around... restaurants, taxis, coffee shops... losing a day would be pretty brutal. Likely see less coffee shops, for example, as they would struggle to make rent. Probably more chain coffee shops, as a result. I see a lot of consequences like this to adding another weekend day.
- santaclaus 10y ago
  > Likely see less coffee shops, for example, as they would struggle to make rent. The coffee shops everywhere I've lived are more crowded on the weekends than during the week.
  - ljf 10y ago
    Yes - many 'services' might still be 7 day, just cycling additional time off amongst the workers. That relies on owners happily sharing their profits, which is unlikely to happen outside of co-ops.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  Actually, I think those businesses would have a better go at adjusting. A lot of stores, coffee shops, and the like are almost completely staffed with part time workers that only work 3-4 days a week anyway, though they might have to have slightly more hourly management. Taxi drivers are often independent contractors. The bigger issue I would be things like nursing homes, hospitals, and other such things because suddenly you'd need more CNAs and nurses and doctors on staff. It would really need to be planned in a way that gets nursing programs (for example) expanded and folks enrolled in such programs. The businesses would benefit overall, however - Somewhere in sweden they experiemented with 6 hour nursing shifts not so long ago. They found less stress, better care, and less absenteeism among the nursing staff. Short term loss that some planning can help with for what seems like long-term gain.
madengr 10y ago
We have a 9/80 work week at my employer, and even then, they want people coming in on their days off. Never gonna happen in corporate America.
- mschuster91 10y ago
  What does 9/80 mean? 9h/day minimum, and 80h/week? That 'd be straight out illegal in Germany, for example (8h/d maximum on long-term average, 48h/week max on long-term average). If any accidents happen with this excessive overtimes, the employer is fully liable for any damages claims. What the US desperately lacks is a federal workers' protection laws.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - thrden 10y ago
    I'm fairly sure it means that you work 80 hours over 9 days (instead of 10), which can actually be pretty nice, because its fairly rare for professionals to actually work 9-5. To me it seems to codify an existing trend, and provide a benefit that acknowledges the reality of work. personally I don't think this represents a lack of workers rights, but an improvement by offering a more flexible schedule.
  - andrewwhartion 10y ago
    “The 9/80 work week… occurs over a 2-week period as follows: employees work seven 9-hour days in a 2-week period, one 8-hour day and then receive one “free” day off every other week.” https://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/glossary/n/nineeighty-work-week-definitions https://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/glossary/n/nineeighty-work-... Google is your friend.
  - labster 10y ago
    Working 80 hour days, 9 days a week. Gotta make all of our goals in crunch.
  - xur17 10y ago
    9/80 means you work 9 days over a two week period, 9 hours per day, with 8 hours 1 day.
jnordwick 10y ago
> As anthropologist David Graeber recently has contended, many of us work jobs that, at least partially, seem pointless. Indeed, economists long have been aware of the redundant hours contained in many working days Wait! Are these the same Keynesian economists that say doing pointless work, literally digging holes and filling the up again, can improve the economy?
jnordwick 10y ago
While increasing productivity will definitely allow people to find work that allows them either less time or more flexibility, there is always that issue of want. Ten years from now, let say you can find a job where you can work 32 hours a week (or 40, but 8 from home -- slacking a little on that), but let's say you don't earn enough to afford that new iPhone. You can only afford the previous years model. You can't quite have the new curved behemoth TVs that everybody has, nor can you take a vacation any time soon, but you can to take a mini one every weekend. Is this going to be okay for you? I would argue, many people might be able to do this now. I think that desire to consume is pretty strong. I definitely have it. These decisions all come with tradeoffs. If your neighbor decides to work 48 hours, taking the 8 your decided to forego, and he can afford these nice little things, are you then going to be calling it unfair that he he's paid more than you? Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it?
- RodericDay 10y ago
  http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers. So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be). But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”
notliketherest 10y ago
Every time someone makes the comment "oh if America was just like Europe and had X number of days off and relaxed attitudes towards work and a strong work life balance etc", I feel obliged to point out that there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Europe and B) Don't mind the 5 day work week and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone. Not to mention the abysmal state many European countries and economies have found themselves in. While they were taking their siesta, the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world.
- deleted 10y ago
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- Ygg2 10y ago
  Isn't America 108th of 140 countries by happiness index.
  - burkaman 10y ago
    US is 13th on the UN's World Happiness Report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report I don't know how many of these lists there are, but 108th would be a little hard to believe. The UN puts Palestine at 108.
    - Ygg2 10y ago
      Here are my sources. I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would choose Trump as its Presidential candidate. Truth is probably somewhere in the middle. http://happyplanetindex.org/countries/united-states-of-america http://happyplanetindex.org/countries/united-states-of-ameri...
      - burkaman 10y ago
        Well these rankings would be a lot easier if it was just a boolean happy or unhappy. Phillipines is 20th. "I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would choose Duterte as its President." Brazil is 23rd. "I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would impeach its President". Palestine is 22nd. I was gonna write a sentence of that form for each one but it seems a little unnecessary. Pakistan is 36th. Haiti is 57th. Iraq is 67th. Egypt is 86th. America does at least barely squeak by Afghanistan and Syria at 110th and 113th. There certainly is no objective way to measure happiness and the UN method does seem flawed, but come on.
quantumhobbit 10y ago
Keynes famously predicted we'd be working much less by now due to increased productivity, but that hasn't happened yet and probably never will for the same reason we still have to work five days a week.
- fma 10y ago
  If it weren't for unions we'd all still be working Saturdays. But we all know unions are only for the good for nothing & the lazy. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/09/viral-image/does-8-hour-day-and-40-hour-come-henry-ford-or-lab/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/...
  - hueving 10y ago
    If it weren't for unions, we'd still have a competitive manufacturing industry that would be allowed to reward competence rather than seniority. Unions stagnated decades ago and have achieved little more than strangling many of the industries they are involved in.
    - vacri 10y ago
      > a competitive manufacturing industry that would be allowed to reward competence rather than seniority. Because that's how it was for labourers before unions? Yes, life with unions sucks. But life without unions sucks even more.
    - rdm42116 10y ago
      Is there any real evidence of this that's not from conservative talk radio? It's amazing how workers, who got fired by the hundreds of thousands, voluntarily gave up pensions only to lose their jobs, dealt with numerous health issues and cancers working in horrible conditions, even in modern times, and still get blamed.
    - eon1 10y ago
      Yeah.. and if it weren't for unions most of us would've been working from the age of 7 or so in a country with no safety regulations. Imagine how competitive those businesses would be though, oh boy! Sorry if the unions in your particular area/industry don't live up to your expectations, but unions have done far more good than bad, and it's been over a lot longer than decades.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
marmot777 10y ago
I went back and read this again and the effect of these sort of changes compounded over time could actually save the world. It wasn't just a click bait headline. :-)
pbarlik 10y ago
Increase in productivity and all the remote work tools now available are supposed to gives us option to work less, but it is not that easy when we bring our work everywhere thanks to smartphones. Even when working part-time you end up checking your e-mail or Slack. It would be great to push changes like the ones proposed in article, but there is nobody out there who will want to advocate for them - corporations? government? unions? ourselves? (when the consumerism argument seems to please everyone):/
- jnordwick 10y ago
  Don't do it. There are plenty of people who become unavailable after work hours (when they are not supposed to be on call). Every YC article that comes up about the topic there are plenty that will tell you how. In the end it comes down to people making a decision. They are willing to take their work home with them essentially, either literally or via phone, because they value that job enough to compete with the others who are willing to do the same. There are plenty of slightly less demanding jobs or even fields that will give you that ability, but that drive for the little more financially comfortable life is quite powerful. Too many people act like they are powerless when in reality they have the power to start looking into jobs or careers.
  - pbarlik 10y ago
    It is good point. In general the only people who can change the workplace are the employees who put the pressure on the employer or like you say make career choices that better reflect work/life balance we seek. This is best visible in tech where we are used to perks that we already consider basic, another discussion is whether those perks are actually a way to make us work more. On a personal note I remember working in advertising and being on my Blackberry 24/7. Was it necessary? I don't think so, but neither my ad agency nor myself had an effective productivity system in place. Workplaces has changed so much in the last 5 years, that we may want to consider teaching people how to work less, remotely and avoid re-work at any cost. My proposal would be putting that as obligatory course in every college. Sort of like d.school Design Your Life, and instead Design Your Work.
pif 10y ago
> In its first 10 months, the move saved the state at least $1.8 million in energy costs. What is such a statement supposed to mean? What was the total energy cost in those months? Did they shave a 1% or a 20%?
pif 10y ago
> Utah abandoned the experiment in 2011 after residents complained they were unable to access services on Fridays. The idea of a three-day weekend looks nice, but it should be applied to people, not services! Services should be still open Monday to Friday, just with 80% of the people working in.
- ljf 10y ago
  Yes I was wondering why they didn't either cycle the extra day, or have 100% Tue-Wed-Thurs then 50% Mon&Fri - using hot desking so that much of the office space can be shut down. Other advantages are that 2 working parents who each had an opposing day 'off' would only need child care for 3 days instead of 5, resulting in lower costs and more family team. I know that would be great for me!
tonyedgecombe 10y ago
You can save the world by gradually shifting taxes to fossil fuels, let the market sort everything else out.
cousin_it 10y ago
Yes, it's virtuous to sacrifice each other's economic freedom (though not political freedom) to increase average happiness.
vatsal 10y ago
I recently read an interesting take on the same topic by Carlos Slim Helu. He actually advocates a 3 day work week for certain industries. Telmex is already offering this option to some of it's employees. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/mexico-s-richest-man-wants-a-three-day-workweek http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/mexico-s-r...
squozzer 10y ago
So now the question becomes -- which day should become the third day? I vote for Friday. It's the Muslim worship day - and snuggles nicely against the Jewish and Christian worship days. It would give "Thank God It's Friday" an extra dimension of meaning. Most people are halfway home mentally anyway. Monday also has some claims, but think of all of the songs that would have to be re-written to make Tuesday the new "most hated." I Don't Like Tuesdays (tell me why.) Rainy Days and Tuesdays Always Get Me Down. Blue Tuesday. That's all I got to say about that.
- wishinghand 10y ago
  It absolutely needs to be a day that people can choose themselves, so that not too many services will be unavailable on this new off day.
imgabe 10y ago
> Utah abandoned the experiment in 2011 after residents complained they were unable to access services on Fridays. This is part of the problem I think. I've worked 4-day weeks in the past and one of the best things about it is you have a free day during the week to do all the things you normally can't get to. Go to the doctor, visit other business or government offices that are normally only open while you're at work. Of course if everyone does a 4-day week, then you lose that benefit. Then you have to cram all those errands into the 4 days, during which you now also have more work to do. Instead of "everybody take Friday off". It might make more sense to stagger days off so everyone has a chance to have a day off while things they need are open.
- overcast 10y ago
  Well service roles get screwed no matter what. Irrelevant of standard work weeks. Restaurants/hospitals/retail are already open all week regardless. What people are arguing is all the white collar jobs that feed back into the service jobs.
  - Declanomous 10y ago
    I personally think the issue is that we have defined Saturday and Sunday as the weekend. I worked retail, and I loved having Saturday as my "Friday", and Sunday and Monday as my weekend, because services had normal hours on Monday, and I could relax on Sunday. The downside at the time was that my schedule often didn't overlap with that of my friends, such as those who worked as servers in restaurants. I find three day weekends to be much more relaxing than the standard weekend. It means I can spend time with my friends on one day, do chores on another day, and spend the remaining day relaxing. As long as I still have a day I can spend with my friends, I'd be okay with a different schedule than M-F or M-R. There is a barrier to a shorter workweek I don't see touched on often, and maybe it's just me. I'm hesitant to work less because I'm afraid that people would find out that I'm just not that necessary around the office, and that the work I do isn't important as I think it is. Realistically, I think such a realization would be more damaging to my personal pride than anything else. I think I base too much of my self-worth on how replaceable I am to my organization. It's a bit ridiculous to seek validation from an organization, but it is one reason why I'd be hesitant to have a day off while other people are working.
test6554 10y ago
This sounds like something you can potentially achieve today just by negotiating with your employer. 20% less work for 20% less pay. It affects only you and the world keeps on turning.
justin_vanw 10y ago
Why not a 5 day week? 5/7 == 71.4% of days are work days 3/5 == 60% of days are work days So we would lose 11% of working days, but you would get a weekend after every 3 work days. I think the main objection would come from various religions which have hard-coded a 7 day week, but if they picked one holy day out of 5, that is even more visits to the designated building of that religion every year, so it seems like they could get on board with that.

163 points by harwoodleon 10y ago

sien 10y ago

It's arguable that people are actually choosing fewer hours by working part time. Part time work has shot up as a percentage of all work. In Australia it has gone from 1/10 to 1/4 of work from 1966 to 2007. Most other countries are similar. AU numbers in the link. http://www.pc.gov.au/research/supporting/part-time-employment http://www.pc.gov.au/research/supporting/part-time-employmen... Before people point out that people would actually like to work more it's worth quoting the link that this goes both ways: "Since the early 1990s, 20-25 per cent of female part time workers and 30-35 per cent of male part time workers have indicated a preference to work more hours. At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that two full time workers want to move to part time work for every part time worker who wants to move to full time work."

loeber 10y ago
I would suspect that part-time work has shot up because traditional full-time roles have evaporated in many sectors, so people are trying to make ends meet by hustling several part-time gigs at once, or in short succession.
dugditches 10y ago
From the paper: '..over the last thirty years there has been an increase in involuntary part time employment.' 'There has been no sustained or substantial decrease in the level of involuntary part time employment among women since it increased during the recession of the early 1990s.' 'involuntary part time employment increased strongly during the economic recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s, as well as the economic slowdown in 2001.' Your paper was published in June 2008, before the '08 Crisis. Choosing to work Part-Time is a privilege. Companies use Part Time work to avoid paying benefits, leave, etc. Keeping employees in a sort of limbo to save costs.
- sien 10y ago
  For those who are not Australians it is important to note that in Australia there is universal health care independent of your employer. Also while benefits are not usually the same as for full time they are sometimes and even if not the same are not as different as they are in the US.

surfmike 10y ago

I think a three day weekend should be a societal goal we strive for, as productivity per worker goes up. Let's use our extra wealth to give people some more leisure time. Besides there's a good chance people will probably get the same amount of work done with four days as five.

eyelidlessness 10y ago
What is the productivity threshold? How will workers hold anyone accountable for this? These questions arise from the fact that profits and productivity have soared, while employment and most people's incomes have stagnated or dropped.
TaylorAlexander 10y ago
I agree wholeheartedly, but I wanted to provide an alternative choice of language that I think better describes what we must do: Rather than: "Let's use our extra wealth to give people some more leisure time." We could say: "Let's use our extra wealth to take more leisure time for ourselves." My life goal is to help end the necessity of human work for our survival, and I think it's critically important that we understand that this will only happen if we take the time. John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that as productivity rose, working hours would drop and at some point we would all be working 15 hour work weeks. That didn't happen though, and it seems in a huge part related to the fact that, as productivity rose business owners turned that in to profit for themselves rather than sharing the profits with workers. So suggesting business owners "give" us that time seems unlikely, and I think we need to take it for ourselves. We can do that by becoming business owners ourselves, either by joining a cooperative[1] or by starting our own business, or we can do that by earning a high enough salary that working 4/5 as much would still pay the bills, and then negotiating hard with prospective employers until you find one that needs you enough to accept a 32 hour a week schedule. Anyway, I'm completely agreeing with you, I've just spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about this and I think the language of suggesting we "give" this to workers critically misses out on the workers' agency and ability to take what they want for themselves. Certainly, achieving this will not be easy and there are many problems, but I think it's a goal so worth achieving that we ought to work hard to figure that out. [1] For more information on the benefits of a cooperative-business based economy, see the excellent book "Democracy at Work" By Richard Wolff: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13591849-democracy-at-work http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13591849-democracy-at-wor...

dbg31415 10y ago

Wouldn't an extra day working from home each week give pretty much the same benefits, while keeping productivity the same? Nice middle ground, I think. I think for businesses that require customers to be around... restaurants, taxis, coffee shops... losing a day would be pretty brutal. Likely see less coffee shops, for example, as they would struggle to make rent. Probably more chain coffee shops, as a result. I see a lot of consequences like this to adding another weekend day.

santaclaus 10y ago
> Likely see less coffee shops, for example, as they would struggle to make rent. The coffee shops everywhere I've lived are more crowded on the weekends than during the week.
- ljf 10y ago
  Yes - many 'services' might still be 7 day, just cycling additional time off amongst the workers. That relies on owners happily sharing their profits, which is unlikely to happen outside of co-ops.
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
Actually, I think those businesses would have a better go at adjusting. A lot of stores, coffee shops, and the like are almost completely staffed with part time workers that only work 3-4 days a week anyway, though they might have to have slightly more hourly management. Taxi drivers are often independent contractors. The bigger issue I would be things like nursing homes, hospitals, and other such things because suddenly you'd need more CNAs and nurses and doctors on staff. It would really need to be planned in a way that gets nursing programs (for example) expanded and folks enrolled in such programs. The businesses would benefit overall, however - Somewhere in sweden they experiemented with 6 hour nursing shifts not so long ago. They found less stress, better care, and less absenteeism among the nursing staff. Short term loss that some planning can help with for what seems like long-term gain.

madengr 10y ago

We have a 9/80 work week at my employer, and even then, they want people coming in on their days off. Never gonna happen in corporate America.

mschuster91 10y ago
What does 9/80 mean? 9h/day minimum, and 80h/week? That 'd be straight out illegal in Germany, for example (8h/d maximum on long-term average, 48h/week max on long-term average). If any accidents happen with this excessive overtimes, the employer is fully liable for any damages claims. What the US desperately lacks is a federal workers' protection laws.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- thrden 10y ago
  I'm fairly sure it means that you work 80 hours over 9 days (instead of 10), which can actually be pretty nice, because its fairly rare for professionals to actually work 9-5. To me it seems to codify an existing trend, and provide a benefit that acknowledges the reality of work. personally I don't think this represents a lack of workers rights, but an improvement by offering a more flexible schedule.
- andrewwhartion 10y ago
  “The 9/80 work week… occurs over a 2-week period as follows: employees work seven 9-hour days in a 2-week period, one 8-hour day and then receive one “free” day off every other week.” https://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/glossary/n/nineeighty-work-week-definitions https://workfamily.sas.upenn.edu/glossary/n/nineeighty-work-... Google is your friend.
- labster 10y ago
  Working 80 hour days, 9 days a week. Gotta make all of our goals in crunch.
- xur17 10y ago
  9/80 means you work 9 days over a two week period, 9 hours per day, with 8 hours 1 day.

jnordwick 10y ago

> As anthropologist David Graeber recently has contended, many of us work jobs that, at least partially, seem pointless. Indeed, economists long have been aware of the redundant hours contained in many working days Wait! Are these the same Keynesian economists that say doing pointless work, literally digging holes and filling the up again, can improve the economy?

jnordwick 10y ago

While increasing productivity will definitely allow people to find work that allows them either less time or more flexibility, there is always that issue of want. Ten years from now, let say you can find a job where you can work 32 hours a week (or 40, but 8 from home -- slacking a little on that), but let's say you don't earn enough to afford that new iPhone. You can only afford the previous years model. You can't quite have the new curved behemoth TVs that everybody has, nor can you take a vacation any time soon, but you can to take a mini one every weekend. Is this going to be okay for you? I would argue, many people might be able to do this now. I think that desire to consume is pretty strong. I definitely have it. These decisions all come with tradeoffs. If your neighbor decides to work 48 hours, taking the 8 your decided to forego, and he can afford these nice little things, are you then going to be calling it unfair that he he's paid more than you? Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it?

RodericDay 10y ago
http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ http://strikemag.org/bullshit-jobs/ Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers. So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be). But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones. These are what I propose to call “bullshit jobs.”

notliketherest 10y ago

Every time someone makes the comment "oh if America was just like Europe and had X number of days off and relaxed attitudes towards work and a strong work life balance etc", I feel obliged to point out that there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Europe and B) Don't mind the 5 day work week and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone. Not to mention the abysmal state many European countries and economies have found themselves in. While they were taking their siesta, the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world.

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Ygg2 10y ago
Isn't America 108th of 140 countries by happiness index.
- burkaman 10y ago
  US is 13th on the UN's World Happiness Report: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report I don't know how many of these lists there are, but 108th would be a little hard to believe. The UN puts Palestine at 108.
  - Ygg2 10y ago
    Here are my sources. I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would choose Trump as its Presidential candidate. Truth is probably somewhere in the middle. http://happyplanetindex.org/countries/united-states-of-america http://happyplanetindex.org/countries/united-states-of-ameri...
    - burkaman 10y ago
      Well these rankings would be a lot easier if it was just a boolean happy or unhappy. Phillipines is 20th. "I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would choose Duterte as its President." Brazil is 23rd. "I kinda find it hard to believe a happy country would impeach its President". Palestine is 22nd. I was gonna write a sentence of that form for each one but it seems a little unnecessary. Pakistan is 36th. Haiti is 57th. Iraq is 67th. Egypt is 86th. America does at least barely squeak by Afghanistan and Syria at 110th and 113th. There certainly is no objective way to measure happiness and the UN method does seem flawed, but come on.

quantumhobbit 10y ago

Keynes famously predicted we'd be working much less by now due to increased productivity, but that hasn't happened yet and probably never will for the same reason we still have to work five days a week.

fma 10y ago
If it weren't for unions we'd all still be working Saturdays. But we all know unions are only for the good for nothing & the lazy. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/09/viral-image/does-8-hour-day-and-40-hour-come-henry-ford-or-lab/ http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep/...
- hueving 10y ago
  If it weren't for unions, we'd still have a competitive manufacturing industry that would be allowed to reward competence rather than seniority. Unions stagnated decades ago and have achieved little more than strangling many of the industries they are involved in.
  - vacri 10y ago
    > a competitive manufacturing industry that would be allowed to reward competence rather than seniority. Because that's how it was for labourers before unions? Yes, life with unions sucks. But life without unions sucks even more.
  - rdm42116 10y ago
    Is there any real evidence of this that's not from conservative talk radio? It's amazing how workers, who got fired by the hundreds of thousands, voluntarily gave up pensions only to lose their jobs, dealt with numerous health issues and cancers working in horrible conditions, even in modern times, and still get blamed.
  - eon1 10y ago
    Yeah.. and if it weren't for unions most of us would've been working from the age of 7 or so in a country with no safety regulations. Imagine how competitive those businesses would be though, oh boy! Sorry if the unions in your particular area/industry don't live up to your expectations, but unions have done far more good than bad, and it's been over a lot longer than decades.

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marmot777 10y ago

I went back and read this again and the effect of these sort of changes compounded over time could actually save the world. It wasn't just a click bait headline. :-)

pbarlik 10y ago

Increase in productivity and all the remote work tools now available are supposed to gives us option to work less, but it is not that easy when we bring our work everywhere thanks to smartphones. Even when working part-time you end up checking your e-mail or Slack. It would be great to push changes like the ones proposed in article, but there is nobody out there who will want to advocate for them - corporations? government? unions? ourselves? (when the consumerism argument seems to please everyone):/

jnordwick 10y ago
Don't do it. There are plenty of people who become unavailable after work hours (when they are not supposed to be on call). Every YC article that comes up about the topic there are plenty that will tell you how. In the end it comes down to people making a decision. They are willing to take their work home with them essentially, either literally or via phone, because they value that job enough to compete with the others who are willing to do the same. There are plenty of slightly less demanding jobs or even fields that will give you that ability, but that drive for the little more financially comfortable life is quite powerful. Too many people act like they are powerless when in reality they have the power to start looking into jobs or careers.
- pbarlik 10y ago
  It is good point. In general the only people who can change the workplace are the employees who put the pressure on the employer or like you say make career choices that better reflect work/life balance we seek. This is best visible in tech where we are used to perks that we already consider basic, another discussion is whether those perks are actually a way to make us work more. On a personal note I remember working in advertising and being on my Blackberry 24/7. Was it necessary? I don't think so, but neither my ad agency nor myself had an effective productivity system in place. Workplaces has changed so much in the last 5 years, that we may want to consider teaching people how to work less, remotely and avoid re-work at any cost. My proposal would be putting that as obligatory course in every college. Sort of like d.school Design Your Life, and instead Design Your Work.

pif 10y ago

> In its first 10 months, the move saved the state at least $1.8 million in energy costs. What is such a statement supposed to mean? What was the total energy cost in those months? Did they shave a 1% or a 20%?

pif 10y ago

> Utah abandoned the experiment in 2011 after residents complained they were unable to access services on Fridays. The idea of a three-day weekend looks nice, but it should be applied to people, not services! Services should be still open Monday to Friday, just with 80% of the people working in.

ljf 10y ago
Yes I was wondering why they didn't either cycle the extra day, or have 100% Tue-Wed-Thurs then 50% Mon&Fri - using hot desking so that much of the office space can be shut down. Other advantages are that 2 working parents who each had an opposing day 'off' would only need child care for 3 days instead of 5, resulting in lower costs and more family team. I know that would be great for me!

tonyedgecombe 10y ago

You can save the world by gradually shifting taxes to fossil fuels, let the market sort everything else out.

cousin_it 10y ago

Yes, it's virtuous to sacrifice each other's economic freedom (though not political freedom) to increase average happiness.

vatsal 10y ago

I recently read an interesting take on the same topic by Carlos Slim Helu. He actually advocates a 3 day work week for certain industries. Telmex is already offering this option to some of it's employees. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/mexico-s-richest-man-wants-a-three-day-workweek http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-04/mexico-s-r...

squozzer 10y ago

So now the question becomes -- which day should become the third day? I vote for Friday. It's the Muslim worship day - and snuggles nicely against the Jewish and Christian worship days. It would give "Thank God It's Friday" an extra dimension of meaning. Most people are halfway home mentally anyway. Monday also has some claims, but think of all of the songs that would have to be re-written to make Tuesday the new "most hated." I Don't Like Tuesdays (tell me why.) Rainy Days and Tuesdays Always Get Me Down. Blue Tuesday. That's all I got to say about that.

wishinghand 10y ago
It absolutely needs to be a day that people can choose themselves, so that not too many services will be unavailable on this new off day.

imgabe 10y ago

> Utah abandoned the experiment in 2011 after residents complained they were unable to access services on Fridays. This is part of the problem I think. I've worked 4-day weeks in the past and one of the best things about it is you have a free day during the week to do all the things you normally can't get to. Go to the doctor, visit other business or government offices that are normally only open while you're at work. Of course if everyone does a 4-day week, then you lose that benefit. Then you have to cram all those errands into the 4 days, during which you now also have more work to do. Instead of "everybody take Friday off". It might make more sense to stagger days off so everyone has a chance to have a day off while things they need are open.

overcast 10y ago
Well service roles get screwed no matter what. Irrelevant of standard work weeks. Restaurants/hospitals/retail are already open all week regardless. What people are arguing is all the white collar jobs that feed back into the service jobs.
- Declanomous 10y ago
  I personally think the issue is that we have defined Saturday and Sunday as the weekend. I worked retail, and I loved having Saturday as my "Friday", and Sunday and Monday as my weekend, because services had normal hours on Monday, and I could relax on Sunday. The downside at the time was that my schedule often didn't overlap with that of my friends, such as those who worked as servers in restaurants. I find three day weekends to be much more relaxing than the standard weekend. It means I can spend time with my friends on one day, do chores on another day, and spend the remaining day relaxing. As long as I still have a day I can spend with my friends, I'd be okay with a different schedule than M-F or M-R. There is a barrier to a shorter workweek I don't see touched on often, and maybe it's just me. I'm hesitant to work less because I'm afraid that people would find out that I'm just not that necessary around the office, and that the work I do isn't important as I think it is. Realistically, I think such a realization would be more damaging to my personal pride than anything else. I think I base too much of my self-worth on how replaceable I am to my organization. It's a bit ridiculous to seek validation from an organization, but it is one reason why I'd be hesitant to have a day off while other people are working.

test6554 10y ago

This sounds like something you can potentially achieve today just by negotiating with your employer. 20% less work for 20% less pay. It affects only you and the world keeps on turning.

justin_vanw 10y ago

Why not a 5 day week? 5/7 == 71.4% of days are work days 3/5 == 60% of days are work days So we would lose 11% of working days, but you would get a weekend after every 3 work days. I think the main objection would come from various religions which have hard-coded a 7 day week, but if they picked one holy day out of 5, that is even more visits to the designated building of that religion every year, so it seems like they could get on board with that.