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In the US, if you don't work, you don't get paid, so this sounds like a recipe for disaster for most workers here. Small to medium businesses would potentially

In the US, if you don't work, you don't get paid, so this sounds like a recipe for disaster for most workers here. Small to medium businesses would potentially be losing 42 days a year of production (52 days - 10 days std vacation time) and that would hurt the profits that they would need to increase wages to make up for that lost day per week just for the workers. Shareholders will still expect year-over-year increase in profits, which won't happen if you're paying people who aren't working. Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.

kennywinker 7y ago
1. There are very few jobs where doing them in a miserable state does not greatly reduce the quality and quantity of work you do. 2. Successful businesses are making their owners and shareholders lots of money. As an absolute worst-case scenario, every company takes a 1/5 hit to the profit they produce for their owners. 3. Point #2 means that a four-day work week would do a lot to rebalance the value of capital vs the value of labour. The balance has been tipped towards capital for far too long.
- madengr 7y ago
  That 1/5 hit is enough to turn a +10% return to -10%.
  - kennywinker 7y ago
    If your business model requires miserable employees, your business should not exist.
    - HatchedLake721 7y ago
      So running a business and requiring your employees to work 5 days, 35-40 hours a week like the rest of the western world (excluding 966 and other countries that work even more), suddenly my business should not exist because you believe everyone working there is now miserable because they have to show up at work 5 times a week instead of 4? Are you ok?
      - newen 7y ago
        If 6 day work weeks are common, you would be making the exact same bogus argument.
      - necovek 7y ago
        You conveniently choose to ignore the cited research that says that employees are "happier" when they work 4 day weeks. Or are you simply being pedantic and arguing the use of "miserable"? If human civilization is to go further, we need to recognize some of our generic assumptions. Work is a means to an end, most commonly a means to support oneself and one's family. It should support us in our basic needs (shelter, food, clothing), and allow us to put our creative and intelligent side to better use. Sure, some would spend all of their time playing PS4, but by opening up opportunities for everyone in the civilization, civilization as a whole should see progress. If you don't believe in benefits of the civilization and how it has advanced through history mostly through people with spare time (usually higher classes, but with spare time becoming more accessible, through everybody in the past ~100 years), I am sure you are fine with a bigger, stronger dude walking in and taking your car keys and driving off (that was the status-quo at a distant point in history).
        imgabe 7y ago
        Showing that people believe they would be happier with some alternative does not imply that they are miserable in the current state. One might be happy making $100k per year. Would they be happier making $1M / year? Yes, probably. That doesn't mean they aren't happy to begin with.
        necovek 7y ago
        Thank you for being pedantic in place of the OP :) I've acknowledged that there is a distinction between "happier" and "miserable" by claiming that in the terms of this discussion, it's "pedantic". I.e. the posters who first used "miserable" did not mean miserable in the real sense of the word: I understood it as use of extremes to draw a point. Just like you did not compare $100k and $101k which would mostly be irrelevant in regards to happiness (but if every employee got 1% raise, that might be close to 1% of your operating costs), but you used an example with an order of magnitude difference. I'd argue that the baseline is complacent workforce, so the argument could have been: do you really want your employees to be complacent?
    - dang 7y ago
      Please don't post unsubstantive comments that take a thread further into flamewar.
  - fwip 7y ago
    Only if labor is 100% of your costs.
  - bryanlarsen 7y ago
    If you do it unilaterally, yes. However, if your competitors are forced to make the same change at the same time, prices will adjust to compensate.
    - drivingmenuts 7y ago
      They’ll go up to make up for loss in profits.
    - jammygit 7y ago
      Forced to? Even if it forces small businesses out of business? I don’t think that forcing people to do things is ideal, personally.
      - kennywinker 7y ago
        We already “force” people to do all kinds of things. We call them labour laws, safety regulations, minimum wages. These are all mostly good things.
- drivingmenuts 7y ago
  I'm sure no legal business ever set out to make their employees lives miserable (not being sarcastic there, either). But the point was that the loss of pay due to working only 4 days, vs 5 days, is not going to make any workers happy. Business paying 5 days of wages for 4 days of work is not going to make anyone happy, especially shareholders. You might make up some of the loss by cutting vacation time, but there's no extra room to make up 42 days of lost productivity. Prices will have to increase to make up for lost profits, but with less money for people to spend, this sounds like a recipe for economic disaster.
  - kennywinker 7y ago
    My argument is actually that you should not decrease pay but should decrease hours. I suspect you’d make up most or all of what you lost in hours by way of increased productivity. I also think “economic productivity” is just capital efficiency. And i don’t think that is a proxy for quality of life - something i care a lot more about.
- bluecalm 7y ago
  Not sure how you came up with 1/5 to the profits at most. If the labor costs increase by 20% it may well mean going from black to red got the company or the profits being reduced by 80% or whatever other number depending on the margins the company is operating on.
  - kennywinker 7y ago
    1/5 is 4 days a week instead of 5. If labour is 100% of your company’s costs, then yes you are facing a 20% increase in costs. 100% labour businesses are VERY rare. It is also very unlikely that cutting hours by 1/5 (while keeping wages stable) would result in a 1/5 loss in productivity. There is so much time wasted in the typical 9-5 workday because nobody can be productive for 8 hours straight. So if you have a business that’s near 100% labour costs, and the work is such that productivity is very nearly equal ti hours spent working, and your margins can’t take a 20% hit, then yes you are going out of business. There are whole classes of business that would work if 50 or 60 hour work weeks are legal to mandate - but we don’t care... why do we care about that thin slice of businesses that require a 40 hour work week? 32 hours or bust.
    - thedufer 7y ago
      I think the confusion is not where the figure 1/5 comes from, but rather why that is the change in profit. It looks like you meant revenue.
      - kennywinker 7y ago
        Right. I see how that was unclear. A 1/5 increase in labour costs is a much more precise way to frame it.
        bluecalm 7y ago
        It's more precise but the whole point is that cutting 20% of profits sounds like a reasonable price to pay but once you realize increasing labor cost by 20% may mean for example 80% cut in profits it's not so simple anymore.
- jammygit 7y ago
  A 1/5 hit in revenue might have a larger impact on profits. It would completely wipe out many businesses with small margins. Are we saying that those businesses should not exist? Edit: increased productivity needs to be a huge part of the argument here
  - kennywinker 7y ago
    First off, if you want that profit back, hire more people. Unlikely that labour is 100% of your costs. If it’s 10% of your costs you’d have to hire 1/5 more people, and costs would go up 1/5*0.1 = 2% If your business dies at a 2% loss of profits, i’m ok with that. But frankly i doubt you’d lose 1/5 of your worker productivity by cutting hours by 1/5 (assuming pay rates stay the same) - so that’s a worst-case scenario where productivity is directly tied to time-spent-working.
  - a3n 7y ago
    Think of the number of businesses that could exist if we had a sixth workday. Are we saying those businesses properly have never existed? What's magic or received about five days?
this_user 7y ago
Evidence suggests that having more time off increases productivity. And let's be honest, most people working 40+ hours/w are not working at 100% all the time. So one possibility is to slightly increase the working time (say by 1h) for each of the four days. That loses you half a day for work, but the increased productivity takes care of the balance. The caveat is that only works for businesses that are charging for output rather than time.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- listenallyall 7y ago
  "Evidence suggests" there must be a limit, after which more time off reduces productivity, yes? If your boss gives you 168 hours off per week, you won't be at maximum productivity. Instead of a generalized statement which can't possibly be true in all circumstances, perhaps your argument would have more merit if you could accurately identify the inflection point.

kennywinker 7y ago

1. There are very few jobs where doing them in a miserable state does not greatly reduce the quality and quantity of work you do. 2. Successful businesses are making their owners and shareholders lots of money. As an absolute worst-case scenario, every company takes a 1/5 hit to the profit they produce for their owners. 3. Point #2 means that a four-day work week would do a lot to rebalance the value of capital vs the value of labour. The balance has been tipped towards capital for far too long.

madengr 7y ago
That 1/5 hit is enough to turn a +10% return to -10%.
- kennywinker 7y ago
  If your business model requires miserable employees, your business should not exist.
  - HatchedLake721 7y ago
    So running a business and requiring your employees to work 5 days, 35-40 hours a week like the rest of the western world (excluding 966 and other countries that work even more), suddenly my business should not exist because you believe everyone working there is now miserable because they have to show up at work 5 times a week instead of 4? Are you ok?
    - newen 7y ago
      If 6 day work weeks are common, you would be making the exact same bogus argument.
    - necovek 7y ago
      You conveniently choose to ignore the cited research that says that employees are "happier" when they work 4 day weeks. Or are you simply being pedantic and arguing the use of "miserable"? If human civilization is to go further, we need to recognize some of our generic assumptions. Work is a means to an end, most commonly a means to support oneself and one's family. It should support us in our basic needs (shelter, food, clothing), and allow us to put our creative and intelligent side to better use. Sure, some would spend all of their time playing PS4, but by opening up opportunities for everyone in the civilization, civilization as a whole should see progress. If you don't believe in benefits of the civilization and how it has advanced through history mostly through people with spare time (usually higher classes, but with spare time becoming more accessible, through everybody in the past ~100 years), I am sure you are fine with a bigger, stronger dude walking in and taking your car keys and driving off (that was the status-quo at a distant point in history).
      - imgabe 7y ago
        Showing that people believe they would be happier with some alternative does not imply that they are miserable in the current state. One might be happy making $100k per year. Would they be happier making $1M / year? Yes, probably. That doesn't mean they aren't happy to begin with.
        necovek 7y ago
        Thank you for being pedantic in place of the OP :) I've acknowledged that there is a distinction between "happier" and "miserable" by claiming that in the terms of this discussion, it's "pedantic". I.e. the posters who first used "miserable" did not mean miserable in the real sense of the word: I understood it as use of extremes to draw a point. Just like you did not compare $100k and $101k which would mostly be irrelevant in regards to happiness (but if every employee got 1% raise, that might be close to 1% of your operating costs), but you used an example with an order of magnitude difference. I'd argue that the baseline is complacent workforce, so the argument could have been: do you really want your employees to be complacent?
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive comments that take a thread further into flamewar.
- fwip 7y ago
  Only if labor is 100% of your costs.
- bryanlarsen 7y ago
  If you do it unilaterally, yes. However, if your competitors are forced to make the same change at the same time, prices will adjust to compensate.
  - drivingmenuts 7y ago
    They’ll go up to make up for loss in profits.
  - jammygit 7y ago
    Forced to? Even if it forces small businesses out of business? I don’t think that forcing people to do things is ideal, personally.
    - kennywinker 7y ago
      We already “force” people to do all kinds of things. We call them labour laws, safety regulations, minimum wages. These are all mostly good things.
drivingmenuts 7y ago
I'm sure no legal business ever set out to make their employees lives miserable (not being sarcastic there, either). But the point was that the loss of pay due to working only 4 days, vs 5 days, is not going to make any workers happy. Business paying 5 days of wages for 4 days of work is not going to make anyone happy, especially shareholders. You might make up some of the loss by cutting vacation time, but there's no extra room to make up 42 days of lost productivity. Prices will have to increase to make up for lost profits, but with less money for people to spend, this sounds like a recipe for economic disaster.
- kennywinker 7y ago
  My argument is actually that you should not decrease pay but should decrease hours. I suspect you’d make up most or all of what you lost in hours by way of increased productivity. I also think “economic productivity” is just capital efficiency. And i don’t think that is a proxy for quality of life - something i care a lot more about.
bluecalm 7y ago
Not sure how you came up with 1/5 to the profits at most. If the labor costs increase by 20% it may well mean going from black to red got the company or the profits being reduced by 80% or whatever other number depending on the margins the company is operating on.
- kennywinker 7y ago
  1/5 is 4 days a week instead of 5. If labour is 100% of your company’s costs, then yes you are facing a 20% increase in costs. 100% labour businesses are VERY rare. It is also very unlikely that cutting hours by 1/5 (while keeping wages stable) would result in a 1/5 loss in productivity. There is so much time wasted in the typical 9-5 workday because nobody can be productive for 8 hours straight. So if you have a business that’s near 100% labour costs, and the work is such that productivity is very nearly equal ti hours spent working, and your margins can’t take a 20% hit, then yes you are going out of business. There are whole classes of business that would work if 50 or 60 hour work weeks are legal to mandate - but we don’t care... why do we care about that thin slice of businesses that require a 40 hour work week? 32 hours or bust.
  - thedufer 7y ago
    I think the confusion is not where the figure 1/5 comes from, but rather why that is the change in profit. It looks like you meant revenue.
    - kennywinker 7y ago
      Right. I see how that was unclear. A 1/5 increase in labour costs is a much more precise way to frame it.
      - bluecalm 7y ago
        It's more precise but the whole point is that cutting 20% of profits sounds like a reasonable price to pay but once you realize increasing labor cost by 20% may mean for example 80% cut in profits it's not so simple anymore.
jammygit 7y ago
A 1/5 hit in revenue might have a larger impact on profits. It would completely wipe out many businesses with small margins. Are we saying that those businesses should not exist? Edit: increased productivity needs to be a huge part of the argument here
- kennywinker 7y ago
  First off, if you want that profit back, hire more people. Unlikely that labour is 100% of your costs. If it’s 10% of your costs you’d have to hire 1/5 more people, and costs would go up 1/5*0.1 = 2% If your business dies at a 2% loss of profits, i’m ok with that. But frankly i doubt you’d lose 1/5 of your worker productivity by cutting hours by 1/5 (assuming pay rates stay the same) - so that’s a worst-case scenario where productivity is directly tied to time-spent-working.
- a3n 7y ago
  Think of the number of businesses that could exist if we had a sixth workday. Are we saying those businesses properly have never existed? What's magic or received about five days?

this_user 7y ago

Evidence suggests that having more time off increases productivity. And let's be honest, most people working 40+ hours/w are not working at 100% all the time. So one possibility is to slightly increase the working time (say by 1h) for each of the four days. That loses you half a day for work, but the increased productivity takes care of the balance. The caveat is that only works for businesses that are charging for output rather than time.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
listenallyall 7y ago
"Evidence suggests" there must be a limit, after which more time off reduces productivity, yes? If your boss gives you 168 hours off per week, you won't be at maximum productivity. Instead of a generalized statement which can't possibly be true in all circumstances, perhaps your argument would have more merit if you could accurately identify the inflection point.