4 ms·

Is there a law that says I can't pay you a full time's salary for 20 hours a week instead of 40?

by sak5sk 7y ago

bluGill 7y ago
The law of competition. Assuming that your employees are less productive overall on a 20 hour week, the competition paying get a 40 hour week gets more done for their money and thus are cheaper for their customers. There are a lot of assumptions in there. Getting everybody to work 168 hour weeks (24x7) seems like it should be even better, but it turns out that as you get close to that workload your employees are less productive. Fatigue will ensure your useful productivity is less than someone working somewhat lesser hours who is allowed to sleep. (I'm going to assume you require your people eat at their desk, otherwise starvation will kill them) You also lose because if there is even a rumor that other companies allow their people who have a life they will quit, and replacing people cost productivity. We can take the opposite extreme: you work 1 hour per week. At this point your productivity is very low because you can never get "in the zone", and in fact your entire hour at work is spend just trying to remember what you do. Someplace in the middle is the sweet spot. 20 hour weeks may be worth it - perhaps you can pay your people half as much and still give them as much income as they want, and still get the productivity you need to compete. Perhaps you can justify paying as much for 20 hours as your competitors pay for 40 hours because you employees enjoy that extra time and so they don't quit - you get better productivity because you don't have to teach them new things. Each company needs to figure it out. in general society has settled on 40 hour weeks as a good number. There is no legal law making it best, but considering the compromises it isn't a bad number.
- ghaff 7y ago
  And people are used to what they're used to. Would a lot of people prefer to work 4 days a week all other things being equal? Sure. But a lot fewer would be interested in earning 80% (or maybe less when the cost of benefits are taken into account) of their salary especially given that their partner/friends/kids/etc. would probably not have that time off. And working 5 days a week most weeks just seems pretty normal. As you say, Western society seems to have settled on that as a fairly reasonable number with the main variation in how much vacation people get on top of that.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  >in general society has settled on 40 hour weeks as a good number. There is no legal law making it best, but considering the compromises it isn't a bad number. It might be a bad number going forward, considering the widening income/wealth divides.

Is there a law that says I can't pay you a full time's salary for 20 hours a week instead of 40?

by sak5sk 7y ago

Is there a law that says I can't pay you a full time's salary for 20 hours a week instead of 40?

The law of competition. Assuming that your employees are less productive overall on a 20 hour week, the competition paying get a 40 hour week gets more done for their money and thus are cheaper for their customers. There are a lot of assumptions in there. Getting everybody to work 168 hour weeks (24x7) seems like it should be even better, but it turns out that as you get close to that workload your employees are less productive. Fatigue will ensure your useful productivity is less than someone working somewhat lesser hours who is allowed to sleep. (I'm going to assume you require your people eat at their desk, otherwise starvation will kill them) You also lose because if there is even a rumor that other companies allow their people who have a life they will quit, and replacing people cost productivity. We can take the opposite extreme: you work 1 hour per week. At this point your productivity is very low because you can never get "in the zone", and in fact your entire hour at work is spend just trying to remember what you do. Someplace in the middle is the sweet spot. 20 hour weeks may be worth it - perhaps you can pay your people half as much and still give them as much income as they want, and still get the productivity you need to compete. Perhaps you can justify paying as much for 20 hours as your competitors pay for 40 hours because you employees enjoy that extra time and so they don't quit - you get better productivity because you don't have to teach them new things. Each company needs to figure it out. in general society has settled on 40 hour weeks as a good number. There is no legal law making it best, but considering the compromises it isn't a bad number.

ghaff 7y ago
And people are used to what they're used to. Would a lot of people prefer to work 4 days a week all other things being equal? Sure. But a lot fewer would be interested in earning 80% (or maybe less when the cost of benefits are taken into account) of their salary especially given that their partner/friends/kids/etc. would probably not have that time off. And working 5 days a week most weeks just seems pretty normal. As you say, Western society seems to have settled on that as a fairly reasonable number with the main variation in how much vacation people get on top of that.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
>in general society has settled on 40 hour weeks as a good number. There is no legal law making it best, but considering the compromises it isn't a bad number. It might be a bad number going forward, considering the widening income/wealth divides.