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To add to the point about the 8hr day/40 hour work week, it came from a serious labor movement in North America in the mid 1800s. Which brings up an interestin

To add to the point about the 8hr day/40 hour work week, it came from a serious labor movement in North America in the mid 1800s. Which brings up an interesting reality of our time, that a push to bring about sane changes is coming from companies and not the workers (which could sadly be caused by the fact that workers have been utterly wing clipped in our hyper competitive economy to ask for anything at all). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day ^^ That came about in America because average people were fighting for it. Our new changes in remote work or short work week is oddly coming from ... god knows where. What incentive does the company have here? Someone has to follow the money to find the truth if companies are the catalysts for these initiatives. I have a hunch that if a company is behind the movement, the end goal is to simply cut the reliance on labor and cut staff or freeze hiring.

Jedd 6y ago
Your hunch may be right, but I'm optimistic because a) I don't believe it's a concerted initiative, and b) at least some of the toe-dipping seems to be happening for genuinely 'this is better for all of us' sentiments. This potentially wishful thinking may end up being proven wrong, but ultimately what we all have going on now simply isn't tenable over the next 10+ years, so any and all kinds of experiments are probably a good thing.
toyg 6y ago
> the end goal is to simply cut the reliance on labor and cut staff or freeze hiring. One possible explanation is to reduce labor costs while still keeping around key workers (and their irreplaceable institutional knowledge) most of the time. For example, there is little point in keeping an old and experienced technician on full pay 5 days a week, when you know he's mostly overseeing others and fixing the occasional issue; might as well put him on 4 days, saving a day's wages (or moving the equivalent of his net wages to tax-efficient pension funds), and sell it to him as a quality-of-life improvement. Overall productivity is probably the same, but costs have gone down and morale up, as s/he moves towards retirement. Or take a smart developer. Instead of haggling over 20% time, unofficial side projects, conference talks etc, sell him an extra off-day that is paid as a half-day. Amateur athletes? HR people? etc etc... I mean, modern offices have people dedicated almost exclusively to organizing silly group activities; there is plenty of spare time that can be cut, to everyone's benefit. I would sign tomorrow.
- runawaybottle 6y ago
  But companies would only push for this at scale (as in saving a days worth of wages across the company is noticeably profitable in comparison to output from the workers). Identifying this as a net positive towards profit leads to the harrowing conclusion that, at scale, they don’t need as many people. Not taking away anything from your point, just pondering the implications of shifts like this in the economy. Edit: I also want to add that many people in the service economy literally fight for extra shifts. The only hopeful outcome from these types of moves from companies is if they genuinely maintain salary and headcount amongst white collar workers. We have watched the blue collar economy get fleeced over and over and it’s important we remain vigilant against companies bearing perceived niceties. The incentives just don’t align.
  - toyg 6y ago
    > the harrowing conclusion that, at scale, they don’t need as many people. That might be true at the same time as the realization that they are increasingly struggling with loss of knowledge on employee turnover, since they rely on complex systems more and more. > I also want to add that many people in the service economy literally fight for extra shifts. Anything shift-based already works under custom rules most of the time. Where trade-unions are a thing, for example, they often reduce working times "in solidarity" to avoid layoffs, it's been the case for decades. Or they do week-on-week-off etc etc. I don't expect those areas to significantly reduce their hours across the board, at least not until it's normalized in white-collar sectors first. > The incentives just don’t align. I am as suspicious of the owning classes as the next guy, but it's not unusual to see the most enlightened industrialists trying to find a better balance for all parties in the equation. See for example XIX-century mill-owners building entire towns out of their own pockets, including schools and community centres, because it benefited them in the long run as much as the workers in the immediate. I am not particularly suspicious of intentions here, but rather skeptical that it can work piecemeal. France tried something like that in the '90s but got weak-kneed when it came to enforcement, which means it didn't work in practice and got watered down into irrelevance very quickly (I don't know if it was eventually scrapped entirely).

Jedd 6y ago

Your hunch may be right, but I'm optimistic because a) I don't believe it's a concerted initiative, and b) at least some of the toe-dipping seems to be happening for genuinely 'this is better for all of us' sentiments. This potentially wishful thinking may end up being proven wrong, but ultimately what we all have going on now simply isn't tenable over the next 10+ years, so any and all kinds of experiments are probably a good thing.

toyg 6y ago

> the end goal is to simply cut the reliance on labor and cut staff or freeze hiring. One possible explanation is to reduce labor costs while still keeping around key workers (and their irreplaceable institutional knowledge) most of the time. For example, there is little point in keeping an old and experienced technician on full pay 5 days a week, when you know he's mostly overseeing others and fixing the occasional issue; might as well put him on 4 days, saving a day's wages (or moving the equivalent of his net wages to tax-efficient pension funds), and sell it to him as a quality-of-life improvement. Overall productivity is probably the same, but costs have gone down and morale up, as s/he moves towards retirement. Or take a smart developer. Instead of haggling over 20% time, unofficial side projects, conference talks etc, sell him an extra off-day that is paid as a half-day. Amateur athletes? HR people? etc etc... I mean, modern offices have people dedicated almost exclusively to organizing silly group activities; there is plenty of spare time that can be cut, to everyone's benefit. I would sign tomorrow.

runawaybottle 6y ago
But companies would only push for this at scale (as in saving a days worth of wages across the company is noticeably profitable in comparison to output from the workers). Identifying this as a net positive towards profit leads to the harrowing conclusion that, at scale, they don’t need as many people. Not taking away anything from your point, just pondering the implications of shifts like this in the economy. Edit: I also want to add that many people in the service economy literally fight for extra shifts. The only hopeful outcome from these types of moves from companies is if they genuinely maintain salary and headcount amongst white collar workers. We have watched the blue collar economy get fleeced over and over and it’s important we remain vigilant against companies bearing perceived niceties. The incentives just don’t align.
- toyg 6y ago
  > the harrowing conclusion that, at scale, they don’t need as many people. That might be true at the same time as the realization that they are increasingly struggling with loss of knowledge on employee turnover, since they rely on complex systems more and more. > I also want to add that many people in the service economy literally fight for extra shifts. Anything shift-based already works under custom rules most of the time. Where trade-unions are a thing, for example, they often reduce working times "in solidarity" to avoid layoffs, it's been the case for decades. Or they do week-on-week-off etc etc. I don't expect those areas to significantly reduce their hours across the board, at least not until it's normalized in white-collar sectors first. > The incentives just don’t align. I am as suspicious of the owning classes as the next guy, but it's not unusual to see the most enlightened industrialists trying to find a better balance for all parties in the equation. See for example XIX-century mill-owners building entire towns out of their own pockets, including schools and community centres, because it benefited them in the long run as much as the workers in the immediate. I am not particularly suspicious of intentions here, but rather skeptical that it can work piecemeal. France tried something like that in the '90s but got weak-kneed when it came to enforcement, which means it didn't work in practice and got watered down into irrelevance very quickly (I don't know if it was eventually scrapped entirely).