24 ms·

Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

167 points by fireinsnow 6y ago

Rule35 6y ago
> “The only red lines are that we want to see a true reduction of working hours and no loss of salary or jobs.” And there it is. (The proposal is the government pays a fraction of this for a few years before sticking the companies with this.) It's basically just a minimum wage law but written the other way. This always sticks the bill with the only person actually paying to begin with, the business owner. If society thinks people should be paid more perhaps it should mandate paying more for the company's products to compensate for making them pay their employees more per hour.
- tsimionescu 6y ago
  The reality is that wages have never kept up with productivity increase. Companies are extracting more and more productivity out of their employees, which translates to ever increasing profits. But this is not an economical law. It's absolutely possible to sacrifice ever increases in growth for more worker time.
  - choeger 6y ago
    Not everywhere. There are many professions that do not take part in the growth of productivity. Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients. The same holds for employees at points of sales, they only take part indirectly by selling more higher-priced goods. So a shop owner that wants to stay open sees a 20% reduction in attendance by their employees. This is going to cost some people real money.
    - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
      > Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients Strongly disagree, productivity increase is everywhere, surgery recovery times have been drastically decreased in the past decades, and recovery protocols accelerated across the board. Just because doctors have a limit throughput of how many patients per day they can see, it doesn't mean that hospitals and clinics aren't increasing their productivity as a whole. If you are seing less of the same patients per week then your productivity has increased, as simple as that. The key point GP is highlight is that productivity has basically decoupled from salaries since the 1970's, i.e. we are all collectively producing more value whilst collectively getting payed less in proportion to the value generated.
      - vidarh 6y ago
        As a concrete example of doctors practices increasing their productivity: Video consultation preceded with automated triage to push more people to consultations with nurses, pharmacists etc. instead of going via a doctor first. The triage itself reduces the number of doctors consultations by removing a step in the process whenever the triage is successful. Several companies does this (disclaimer: My employer is an investor in one of them).
      - astrange 6y ago
        > The key point GP is highlight is that productivity has basically decoupled from salaries since the 1970's, i.e. we are all collectively producing more value whilst collectively getting payed less in proportion to the value generated. This thread is about Spain (which certainly has a lot of economic problems along with the rest of the EU), but wasn't that research mainly about the US? My impression is some but not all of the cause is because "productivity" numbers are very confused because of how much exponentially more efficient computers have gotten. If you measure in 1970s computers, someone building a PC in 2020 has a million times more productivity.
    - astrange 6y ago
      Employees manning cash registers often also have other tasks they can do instead of operating the register for you - for instance fast food workers also make the food, and clothes workers stand there looking fashionable and tell you how good you look. These are often things we'd all rather they be doing, in fact. Which is why McDonald's is still popular in Australia when the national minimum wage is ~20USD/hour and they have automated ordering stations.
    - wwupt 6y ago
      On the question of MDs, here (in Europe, YMMV) we have doctors who have either have their own practice, and therefore work as little or as much as they want, or are part of hospital staff which is under its own separate legal regimen for work time (with more work hours than the average person, usually). In either case, I think they are not likely to be affected directly by changes to the "typical" work week.
  - dd_roger 6y ago
    The argument about increased productivity is a fallacy. Only the primary and secondary sectors have a long track record of increased productivity, in services on the other hands -which represent an ever growing share of the working population in western countries- productivity has been stagnating for multiple decades (in some industries it's actually receding, thankfully compensated by the few industries that have good growth).
    - Barrin92 6y ago
      not sure why this is downvoted. This is known as Baumol's cost disease. Policemen, school teachers, or painters today are no more (or barely more) productive than they were 50 or 100 years ago, yet their salaries have multiplied. This is so because when salaries in productive industries start to rise every other sector also has to raise wages to attract any worker at all, which in turn raises prices. It's also why coffee is more expensive in Silicon Valley than in Podunk Idaho. It's not because baristas in California are more productive, it's because the region is richer and you can't buy your freshly brewed latte from China or India.
- darkwater 6y ago
  FYI communist Spain /s has a already minimum wage law and also an universal income one.
  - Mauricebranagh 6y ago
    "communist Spain" I assume you are being ironic here
- arcturus17 6y ago
  Some economists in Spain say that starting from this premise, and trying to apply it universally for the economy may have disastrous results. The problem here is the effect on productivity. While there are some jobs where decreasing 20% of working hours while keeping productivity constant may be perfectly feasible, there are lots of jobs in Spain's precarious service-oriented economy where this is not possible. For example, take all jobs depending on tourism: how is a waiter going to produce the same in four days of work than in five? The same applies for Spain's public sector. Many public workers already have very good working conditions, but more importantly, the same effect described above also applies to them: it is not clear whether their working hours can be compressed without a significant loss of productivity. To be clear I'm not against the idea, as there may be some merit to it if applied reasonably and on a tactical level, as part of much greater economic reforms. But I fear this is not what will happen; rather, populist politicians will take it and run with it because it sounds good, without any regards for its real implications, and without addressing the much harder and endemic problems of the Spanish economy such as the eye-watering unemployment levels and the lack of opportunities for our youth.
  - teataster 6y ago
    > how is a waiter going to produce the same in four days of work than in five? By not being tired on the fifth, not taking wrong orders and not dropping glasses. Same as a software engineer would. I see your point tho, and it is very valid. I am just playing angels advocate here. But, iirc, earliest research on the topic was conducted in a hospital, which is a services business, same as a restaurant. Increases in production (I said production and not productivity) were found. Research is not solid.
    - yiyus 6y ago
      > By not being tired on the fifth, not taking wrong orders and not dropping glasses This is not an actual problem that needs a solution.
  - neilwilson 6y ago
    "The problem here is the effect on productivity." If you make labour 'reassuringly expensive', then the only way to maintain output is to invest in capital deepening. Which is the only place productivity comes from. Capitalists need to start doing some capitalism.
- neilwilson 6y ago
  " If society thinks people should be paid more perhaps it should mandate paying more for the company's products to compensate for making them pay their employees more per hour." If you pay people more, then you can. Basic Henry Ford.
  - Rule35 6y ago
    If people pay you more, then you can. Ford's money came from products and they have to be priced to cover his higher salaries. That helped his workforce but made cars more expensive for everyone else. It also only worked because he had a huge first-mover advantage and wasn't facing price-pressure from competition. His grand plan could have bankrupted him in a week if the market hadn't been right for it.
    - neilwilson 6y ago
      "Ford's money came from products and they have to be priced to cover his higher salaries." When you drive additional volume you get cheaper output due to economies of scale effects. There isn't a fixed amount of stuff, any more than there is a fixed amount of money to make that stuff. Sales depend upon people having the money to buy things. Wages are the major component of profit. And quantity expanding firms will always outcompete and destroy price expanding firms.
- astrange 6y ago
  > This always sticks the bill with the only person actually paying to begin with, the business owner. If society thinks people should be paid more perhaps it should mandate paying more for the company's products to compensate for making them pay their employees more per hour. You just said the business owner is the "only person paying" and then contradicted yourself by saying "people" pay more. Everyone pays for things because the economy is a cycle. Intervening in the economy (eg with minimum wages and just giving people money) can improve the health of the economy by increasing money velocity; economists don't think it's strictly bad to do this anymore*. It can lead to inflation but that's fine, most developed economies don't have enough of it. * https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-15-minimum-wage-is-pretty-safe https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-15-minimum-wage-is-pre...
  - Rule35 6y ago
    > economists don't think it's strictly bad to do this anymore* Those same educated voices also tend to support UBI and other ... less than fully considered social engineering ideas. When it comes to government mandates I'm cautious, especially because you can't usefully go back. Even if they're a PhD they're in a field where you cannot test your ideas. If you want to pay a worker more, actually do that. Walk up to a barrista and offer them a monthly cheque to make up the difference between their wage and your proposed minimum. Your vote that Starbucks must pay more usually isn't accompanied with a certain minimum purchase guarantee that they can use to actually fund this. > You just said the business owner is the "only person paying" and then contradicted yourself by saying "people" pay more. Everyone pays for things because the economy is a cycle. Not usefully in that sense. I'm the only one paying my rent. You're not doing anything towards it. Even if you shop at my employer and indirectly pay my salary, you aren't putting money towards my rent. I'm the one who makes the food/fun/shelter tradeoff. If there's a slack month or unexpected expenses, I suffer. If you actually paid the store an extra 15% line-item specifically to use to pay their employees then I would accept that.
ggm 6y ago
Four 8 hour days. Australia the norm is 7.5 for a working week of 37.5hrs. This proposal would mean 32 hours of work. I think a real 4 day working week would be closer to 28 hours or less: it should mean employers get somebody else for the fifth day or three three days left in the week: closer to jobshare, no overtime, people work less but the work is shared around.
dirktheman 6y ago
I've been working 4 days since 2006, when our first child was born. I don't see myself going back to working 5 days a week, even when the youngest one is older. I get to spend more time with our children, and when they're in school (I'm off on Wednesday) I have the entire day to myself. It's totally worth the pay cut! Fun fact: 50% of employed people here in The Netherlands are working parttime in some form.
- herbst 6y ago
  Same here. IMO only one day already heavily improves life quality. Its not 50% in switzerland, but common enough that most jobs would accept.
- Rule35 6y ago
  In fact, 4 10s aren't much harder than 4 8s - for me travel time was dominant as I had to physically go run a lab. So I actually kept my salary while getting permanent three-day weekends. And I justified it by being able to get setup and cleaned up outside of normal work hours which was true and glorious.
  - Sander_Marechal 6y ago
    I do 4x9. I like it, but with travel times the days can be quite long. When I have kids I want to go back to 4x8 so I can be home earlier.
    - dirktheman 6y ago
      I did 4x9 also for a while, also with a long (1h15) commute. Was OK for a year, but I was glad that my next job was 4x8 again, with 1 day WFH. So 3 days in the office, 1 day from home. Perfect!
  - buran77 6y ago
    This is true but in many companies they won't give you the 4 10s option. The reason is that the company can cut 20% pay but realistically set the same targets (where possible). So the expectations don't realistically drop by 20%, just the time you have to reach them and the pay. Depending on how much you were payed to begin with you may find this a reasonable compromise.
ladyanita22 6y ago
Oh, beautiful Spain, playing experiments with an unemployment rate of 16.13%... I love how my country hugs the poverty closer and closer each year that passes by.
- ladyanita22 6y ago
  Of course you will downvote me, but as an inhabitant of such country, the truth is, this is the result of the socialist and incompetent government that is in power due to the even more incompetent opposition. It's been long since we were the leaders of employment creation in the eurozone, back when Rajoy was in power.
  - A12-B 6y ago
    It is a modest trial of a four day work week. You are so far from disaster. This can only be a good thing, if it doesn't work they stop doing it, but probably it will work because people are more productive when they have time to breath.
    - mercacona 6y ago
      Spaniards don’t appreciate research, we only nod when solutions sprout out of the blue. In fact, less work hours will be a complication for many -as they are used to justify the work done by sitting for extra-hours at their desk. It’s sad, but it’s also my daily routine.
  - severino 6y ago
    > Of course you will downvote me... Maybe they're downvoting you because they are also Spanish, they know who Rajoy is and what he did, and what effects a pandemic produces on your economy regardless of the party in the government.
    - arcturus17 6y ago
      > regardless of the party in the government I certainly do not miss Rajoy, but I whole-heartedly believe that a social-communist government is possibly the worst alternative to get us out of this hole. We need jobs, a lot of them, not only in the public sector, and I think that our current government is tremendously ill-equipped for this task. Has anyone noticed how members of the government rarely, if ever, talk about job creation anymore? Politicians will lie about anything, but they don't even dare lie about this - they simply avoid these murky waters altogether. My theory is they know full-well that the only path to growth and private sector job creation is by taking measures (that moderates like Minister of the Economy Nadia Calviño possibly support) like modifying labor laws and lowering taxes which sound right-wing and therefore sit especially poorly with the communist wing of the government. The only alternative to that is, as some communists like Iglesias or Garzón are consistently pointing out, to nationalize a bunch of industries (they've talked about examples ranging from banks to media companies) and turn to a centralized economy. I hope I'm wrong but I clearly do not see how the situation will improve under the current circumstances.
eric4smith 6y ago
It seems that we're slowly heading to a place where salaries are going to be much lower, because of less working hours and loss of the kinds of jobs that paid a good living wage. Or those same jobs will just pay a lower salary. It could be good or bad. The good part is, less buying. Less shopping. Smaller homes. Lower needs. etc. The bad part, all of that part of the economy that was depending those incomes is going to have to transition to something else. Maybe it could lead to more people moving to lower cost countries... OR... more people living like how people live in Bangkok, Beijing or Bali. Either way, the end the middle class as we know it in America is quickly coming to an end.
- airhead969 6y ago
  There are more people because of population trends. Simultaneously, there are fewer jobs due to automation. Wages will continue to decline with an oversupply of labor.
  - astrange 6y ago
    Automation does not reduce jobs. It is impossible to run out of jobs, because 1. demand is infinite 2. jobs are based on "comparative advantage", and people have comparative advantage with automation because they're the same species as their customers. Also, this isn't even happening. It's mostly an artifact because productivity of e.g. computer manufacturing looks super efficient if you measure each 2020 computer as containing a million 1970s computers. > Wages will continue to decline with an oversupply of labor. This is called the "lump of labor" fallacy. Increasing the number of people increases both supply and demand, and therefore improves the economy, and therefore may raise wages. (Economists don't simply use supply and demand for the labor market anyway, they consider things like monopsony and search models.)
- andi999 6y ago
  It doesnt have to be. Overall productivity is increasing (or at least has been for the last decades). So only the product of work hours times productivity determines if salaries get much lower or not. (Of course if from one day to the next you work only 50% then your claim is true)
airhead969 6y ago
By contrast, the FAANG workweek is 8-14 hours, 5-7 days a week with the possibility of being on-call for emergencies and contacted after hours. Working 72 hr/week while making $200k/yr is only $53/hour. To get to $80/hour would require a salary of $300k. $100/hr is $375k. Oh, and taxes because not an owner of capitalist assets.
- silverpepsi 6y ago
  I worked in one... engineers didn't work quite that much but about 60 hrs a week. Saturday a full day is standard all year around. The peculiar thing was that right next to our cubicles there was a level 1 phone tech support team. Those guys worked exactly 40 hour weeks. Or team of test engineers were paid $600/month. The tech support guys only $400. I would often ask the engineers if they were cool with the fact that they made the same pay as a phone guy but had to work much harder. At first they were all puzzled, then I'd point out their hourly wage. They all would respond that it didn't matter, it was about social status. Even some of the ladies working in designer bag stores made better pay than them, but didn't have the statis in their view. It kind of blew myind, status means nothing to me, but I am considered eccentric. Anyway, thankfully my base pay was higher than both groups due to nationality.
- krapht 6y ago
  My friends who work at Google do not have such a workweek. Aren't you exaggerating a bit? At the very least, don't pass it off as universal.
- Rule35 6y ago
  My friends who work those hours make well over double what I do from their bonuses. They work these hours because they do datacentre builds and these cost the company a fortune for every day. Doing anything to shorten them is worthwhile and it encourages the type of people who'd work in the oil fields. There's no way a FAANG could hold onto staff requiring 72h/w without paying huge bonuses.
- benhurmarcel 6y ago
  Spanish workers earn closer to 6 $/hour.
borjah 6y ago
I wish it would be the beginning of something but I doubt it will. Businessmen in Spain sees the worker as another machine in the factory and a lot of them work actively to fired the workers that try to unionize. I talk from experience having worked in 2 some what small (50 to 150 workers), family-owned companies, where in one, the union representative was the son of the owner and in the other there wasn't any union because 2 years before I entered, the person who tried to create a union office in the company was fired and reported to the police with false pretences. You have exceptions of course but the vast majority are very very conservative with ideas between right wing or extreme right wing. My opinion is that the wealth, like in any place, is very very bad balanced. Studies are viewed as useless, because they won't give you a good job or because there are some part of society that sees them as something not cool. We don't have a solid STEM-based industry like for example Germany or France. Also, We are highly dependant from tourism, being tourism the largest sector in our GDP (in some regions is the 25% )and we don't re-invesment that wealth in R&D, which is arround 1,25%. Plus political instability from various populism movements is the perfect mix for a country stuck in time. Without any project of future.
- teataster 6y ago
  My feeling is: spanish business is a somewhat feudal system. I do not believe that business owners are trying to maximize the efficacy of their resources. If it were so, this kind of proposals would be accepted by the business community, given research on the topic. I believe this proposal is a tremendous opportunity. I believe business want to control people. As such, one less day is less control. In exchange for Business controlling your life you get different degrees of financial security. Feudalism. This attitude is reinforced by tradition and misconception. And both employees and employers are at fault. Gee, I am at fault! I haven't worked a 40 hour week in my entire working life. On my defense I would say that I have sent juniors and interns home... But still. I have also said that research on the topic is not solid, but of this proposal were to be properly implemented could help solve that issue. Politicians doing a proper policy implementation is a different can of worms. I was hoping that some progressive business would actually start doing 4 hour weeks, rather than a top down approach.
  - 6y ago
n_cusan 6y ago
Growing up in Spain, I am currently living back here after living over 14 years in Germany and spending most of my working life there. I am half Spanish and half German and have a good perspective on both mentalities in general. In my opinion the problem in Spain is definitely the mindset towards work and the way it is perceived. Here work seems to always be some tedious chore that keeps you away from social live. I do not know many people who truly enjoy their job. A couple of years ago my girlfriend came from Spain to live with me in Germany and got a job. After the first day she came home at 10:00 pm (work ended at 6:00 pm). I was worried that they were making her work to hard the first day, but when she came home she told me she just stayed late doing nothing for the new boss seeing her put in the effort... That really really reminded me why I left Spain to work in Germany. I just do not get that kind of attitude, when I confronted her about it she told me that this behavior was expected in all the places she worked at. Leaving early (or even on time), even if you are effective and have done you work is frowned upon by both coworkers and managers. Paradoxically people might even consider you lazy. So I am really expectant to see how this experiment turns out and if it achieves a change in mentality or if it is just a way to spend tax money and make some “friends of friends” rich as politicians like to do in Spain by subsidizing companies that once the state money runs out go back to normal.
- tumetab1 6y ago
  At least Portugal it's not like that /sarcasm :D I'm keeping on eye on the experiment because of that, maybe this is a better way to increase productivity in cultures like these.
- FullMetalBitch 6y ago
  Plenty of assholes bosses in Spain, in my experience I have been very honest from the beginning I had sick people I have to take care of and sometimes I have to leave early or I can't just go to work I was always willing to work remote that day when the job allowed it. The worst part of working in Spain is the work is usually from 9 to 14 and from 15 to 18 or variations of that, instead of 8 hours straight.
  - lnsru 6y ago
Temasik 6y ago
china and india is trialling 7days a week
smel 6y ago
I left my job and created a software consulting company two years ago just to be able to work 3/4 day per week it turns out to be more profitable than my previous jobs. I kept even a smaller salary.My company has enough funds to pay my salary for 4 years without working or revenue. The more this number is bigger the more I become happy. I'm trying also to build products to have more revenue streams (no success so far)
spyrefused 6y ago
Spain is a country where most of the people work in the service sector, I see this reduction complicated for this sector. And with the loss of competitiveness and industry in recent years, I think this measure would only be applicable to civil servants (For those who do not know, Spain is a special case, there are a lot of civil servants, well paid, and besides, it is almost impossible for them to lose their job unless... they assassinate their boss for example). And coming from where the proposal comes from, I would not be surprised if this were the case. They seem intent on destroying any private initiative...
te_chris 6y ago
We had to go to 0.8 FTE due to trimming costs when covid hit - along with furloughs etc (UK based). We're all back up to 1FTE pay now, but we're basically still working 0.8. Fridays are now "flexible". This means that you should check slack/email for fires, get your house in order for the next week, and, if there's something urgent you're working on (actually urgent, we haven't just reclassified all work as urgent) then you should probably be progressing it. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of the day. It's brilliant.
dalbasal 6y ago
"The Workweek" is, surprisingly, a really deep topic. Keynes' 15 hr work week prediction, for example, is a fascinating rabbit to travel down. The typical economics professors' "why it failed" explanations (at least circa 2005) are tellingly evasive. They preserve all Keynes' premises^ with a "what "happened" scenario that threads a tiny needle. IMO, regardless of which rabbit hole you follow, it turns out that workweek is a very culturally defined thing. It isn't very reactive to economic forces at all. People get rich. Societies get rich. Women join the workforce. Efficiency rises by N000%. Workweeks remain similar. Where quantity of work does change, it tends to be outside the workweek paradigm. Retirement became a big thing. Children don't work. Young adults do a lot of college. Women join the workforce, or don't. IE, we might work fewer years. Fewer people might work. Shortening workweeks rarely happens. IMO, empirically, workweeks seem to be mostly a social institution... not an "economic" one. IE, economic explanations have very little predictive power because "out-of-theory" stuff is more important. ^[1]advancements in efficiency, [2] substitution effects, [3] income effects.
- vidarh 6y ago
  When my grandparents entered the workforce in Norway, the working week was typically 54 hours. When my parents entered the workforce it was limited to no more than 45 hours, and a couple of years later it was down to 42.5 hours. By the time I was born it was 40 hours. Before I entered the workforce, it was down to 37.5 hours for most employees (it is legally limited to 40 hours, but 37.5 has been the norm since 1986). While you have a point that other factors like retirement age (and in recent years, a growing fear of an aging population) has certainly been part of the reason why it hasn't dropped as fast as some expected, in countries with a strong labour movement it certainly has dropped significantly, and even in countries with a weak labour movement it is still lower than it used to be.
  - dalbasal 6y ago
    I think you may be misunderestimating the original prediction.^ He predicted those drastic reduction in working hours within a generation or two, writing in 1930... It was supposed to happen by 1980. The prediction was widely head, and relied on two non controversial ideas: income effect and substitution effect. Higher hourly wages make working more worthwhile, so people work more; Higher overall wages allow people to trade work less opt for leisure. It also relied on efficiency and gdp growth predictions which did really come true. The orthodox reasoning for why the prediction failed is basically: We invented all this awesome new stuff. People prefer to work more, and buy more of this new stuff rather than work less. I don't believe this holds up, but it's what I was taught at uni. Anyway... my point is that looking at the history of employment, it doesn't seem like these "economic" (in the literal sense) explanations have any predictive power. Actual changes in working patterns seem to be governed by "outside factors." Women joined the workforce. Children exited the workforce. People go to uni more. Retirement became statistically more common. Laws change. Norms change. Culture changes. Those things do affect how much we work. Economic factors like efficiency don't. Norway is a small-sih country, and often an outlier, so IDK if it makes a good example. That said, I imagine that these changes in working hours were caused by rule changes: labour laws, union demands or somesuch. They aren't economic. My point is that the model of the economy and the model of a worker used by Keynes to make the prediction, and by most commenters on the topic since are clearly bad models.At the margin, it doesn't even make sense to most workers. We (most of us) don't choose our work hours. We don't work 8% less because 92% of the money is enough. That marginal choice doesn't even exist. We work a job, and job hours are defined by convention. Efficiency, GDP growth and such, over the last 91 years, haven't affected the number of hour we work. Work hasn't been static. It's just governed by other things. If you met Keynes in 1930, you would be right to say "No. How rich we get, how technologically advanced or how productive our industries are will have no effect on how much we work...." You would have been correct. Keynes, and every economist from austrians to marxists would have been wrong. Even today, after the prediction has long-failed empirically, economists have a hard time facing this. http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
dalbasal 6y ago
The immediate implications of reducing workweeks varies a lot by job type. Doing 8 hrs of work done in 5 is not possible for a dental nurse, waiter or an air traffic controller. Those jobs literally need asses in seats for N hours. The hour reduction game is almost 0-sum. Do less work. Hire more employees. Pay less. Charge more. This is a lot of jobs. For a software developer, hr executive, or user happiness advocate... reduced working hours is not necessarily 0-sum. What we think of, when we think of reduced work hours depends on which of these is our anchor.
redsummer 6y ago
'Spanish practices' in the UK means using bureaucracy to get as much out of the employer with as little effort as possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_practices
philmcp 6y ago
In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? It annoys me so much that I've just launched https://www.fourdayweek.io/ https://www.fourdayweek.io/ (shameless plug)
anm89 6y ago
I never quite understand things like this and suspect they are political dog and pony shows. Many people already work 4 and 3 and 2 and 1 day weeks. Many of these people's schedules would not be affected by these laws. The only point of these laws is to see what what happen if you enforced them systemically en masse. If you don't do that, you are exactly where you started which is a few people having this privilege but not everyone. And most of the potential rewards as well as potential consequences are only going to expose themself when the policy is enacted en masse. Like of course the few people you give the privilege to are going to happy. I don't really think that was up for debate. The question is is what effects will it have on the broader economy and running a trial with .05% of the population tells you nothing about that.

167 points by fireinsnow 6y ago

> “The only red lines are that we want to see a true reduction of working hours and no loss of salary or jobs.” And there it is. (The proposal is the government pays a fraction of this for a few years before sticking the companies with this.) It's basically just a minimum wage law but written the other way. This always sticks the bill with the only person actually paying to begin with, the business owner. If society thinks people should be paid more perhaps it should mandate paying more for the company's products to compensate for making them pay their employees more per hour.

tsimionescu 6y ago
The reality is that wages have never kept up with productivity increase. Companies are extracting more and more productivity out of their employees, which translates to ever increasing profits. But this is not an economical law. It's absolutely possible to sacrifice ever increases in growth for more worker time.
- choeger 6y ago
  Not everywhere. There are many professions that do not take part in the growth of productivity. Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients. The same holds for employees at points of sales, they only take part indirectly by selling more higher-priced goods. So a shop owner that wants to stay open sees a 20% reduction in attendance by their employees. This is going to cost some people real money.
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    > Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients Strongly disagree, productivity increase is everywhere, surgery recovery times have been drastically decreased in the past decades, and recovery protocols accelerated across the board. Just because doctors have a limit throughput of how many patients per day they can see, it doesn't mean that hospitals and clinics aren't increasing their productivity as a whole. If you are seing less of the same patients per week then your productivity has increased, as simple as that. The key point GP is highlight is that productivity has basically decoupled from salaries since the 1970's, i.e. we are all collectively producing more value whilst collectively getting payed less in proportion to the value generated.
    - vidarh 6y ago
      As a concrete example of doctors practices increasing their productivity: Video consultation preceded with automated triage to push more people to consultations with nurses, pharmacists etc. instead of going via a doctor first. The triage itself reduces the number of doctors consultations by removing a step in the process whenever the triage is successful. Several companies does this (disclaimer: My employer is an investor in one of them).
    - astrange 6y ago
      > The key point GP is highlight is that productivity has basically decoupled from salaries since the 1970's, i.e. we are all collectively producing more value whilst collectively getting payed less in proportion to the value generated. This thread is about Spain (which certainly has a lot of economic problems along with the rest of the EU), but wasn't that research mainly about the US? My impression is some but not all of the cause is because "productivity" numbers are very confused because of how much exponentially more efficient computers have gotten. If you measure in 1970s computers, someone building a PC in 2020 has a million times more productivity.
  - astrange 6y ago
    Employees manning cash registers often also have other tasks they can do instead of operating the register for you - for instance fast food workers also make the food, and clothes workers stand there looking fashionable and tell you how good you look. These are often things we'd all rather they be doing, in fact. Which is why McDonald's is still popular in Australia when the national minimum wage is ~20USD/hour and they have automated ordering stations.
  - wwupt 6y ago
    On the question of MDs, here (in Europe, YMMV) we have doctors who have either have their own practice, and therefore work as little or as much as they want, or are part of hospital staff which is under its own separate legal regimen for work time (with more work hours than the average person, usually). In either case, I think they are not likely to be affected directly by changes to the "typical" work week.
- dd_roger 6y ago
  The argument about increased productivity is a fallacy. Only the primary and secondary sectors have a long track record of increased productivity, in services on the other hands -which represent an ever growing share of the working population in western countries- productivity has been stagnating for multiple decades (in some industries it's actually receding, thankfully compensated by the few industries that have good growth).
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    not sure why this is downvoted. This is known as Baumol's cost disease. Policemen, school teachers, or painters today are no more (or barely more) productive than they were 50 or 100 years ago, yet their salaries have multiplied. This is so because when salaries in productive industries start to rise every other sector also has to raise wages to attract any worker at all, which in turn raises prices. It's also why coffee is more expensive in Silicon Valley than in Podunk Idaho. It's not because baristas in California are more productive, it's because the region is richer and you can't buy your freshly brewed latte from China or India.
darkwater 6y ago
FYI communist Spain /s has a already minimum wage law and also an universal income one.
- Mauricebranagh 6y ago
  "communist Spain" I assume you are being ironic here
arcturus17 6y ago
Some economists in Spain say that starting from this premise, and trying to apply it universally for the economy may have disastrous results. The problem here is the effect on productivity. While there are some jobs where decreasing 20% of working hours while keeping productivity constant may be perfectly feasible, there are lots of jobs in Spain's precarious service-oriented economy where this is not possible. For example, take all jobs depending on tourism: how is a waiter going to produce the same in four days of work than in five? The same applies for Spain's public sector. Many public workers already have very good working conditions, but more importantly, the same effect described above also applies to them: it is not clear whether their working hours can be compressed without a significant loss of productivity. To be clear I'm not against the idea, as there may be some merit to it if applied reasonably and on a tactical level, as part of much greater economic reforms. But I fear this is not what will happen; rather, populist politicians will take it and run with it because it sounds good, without any regards for its real implications, and without addressing the much harder and endemic problems of the Spanish economy such as the eye-watering unemployment levels and the lack of opportunities for our youth.
- teataster 6y ago
  > how is a waiter going to produce the same in four days of work than in five? By not being tired on the fifth, not taking wrong orders and not dropping glasses. Same as a software engineer would. I see your point tho, and it is very valid. I am just playing angels advocate here. But, iirc, earliest research on the topic was conducted in a hospital, which is a services business, same as a restaurant. Increases in production (I said production and not productivity) were found. Research is not solid.
  - yiyus 6y ago
    > By not being tired on the fifth, not taking wrong orders and not dropping glasses This is not an actual problem that needs a solution.
- neilwilson 6y ago
  "The problem here is the effect on productivity." If you make labour 'reassuringly expensive', then the only way to maintain output is to invest in capital deepening. Which is the only place productivity comes from. Capitalists need to start doing some capitalism.
neilwilson 6y ago
" If society thinks people should be paid more perhaps it should mandate paying more for the company's products to compensate for making them pay their employees more per hour." If you pay people more, then you can. Basic Henry Ford.
- Rule35 6y ago
  If people pay you more, then you can. Ford's money came from products and they have to be priced to cover his higher salaries. That helped his workforce but made cars more expensive for everyone else. It also only worked because he had a huge first-mover advantage and wasn't facing price-pressure from competition. His grand plan could have bankrupted him in a week if the market hadn't been right for it.
  - neilwilson 6y ago
    "Ford's money came from products and they have to be priced to cover his higher salaries." When you drive additional volume you get cheaper output due to economies of scale effects. There isn't a fixed amount of stuff, any more than there is a fixed amount of money to make that stuff. Sales depend upon people having the money to buy things. Wages are the major component of profit. And quantity expanding firms will always outcompete and destroy price expanding firms.
astrange 6y ago
> This always sticks the bill with the only person actually paying to begin with, the business owner. If society thinks people should be paid more perhaps it should mandate paying more for the company's products to compensate for making them pay their employees more per hour. You just said the business owner is the "only person paying" and then contradicted yourself by saying "people" pay more. Everyone pays for things because the economy is a cycle. Intervening in the economy (eg with minimum wages and just giving people money) can improve the health of the economy by increasing money velocity; economists don't think it's strictly bad to do this anymore*. It can lead to inflation but that's fine, most developed economies don't have enough of it. * https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-15-minimum-wage-is-pretty-safe https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-15-minimum-wage-is-pre...
- Rule35 6y ago
  > economists don't think it's strictly bad to do this anymore* Those same educated voices also tend to support UBI and other ... less than fully considered social engineering ideas. When it comes to government mandates I'm cautious, especially because you can't usefully go back. Even if they're a PhD they're in a field where you cannot test your ideas. If you want to pay a worker more, actually do that. Walk up to a barrista and offer them a monthly cheque to make up the difference between their wage and your proposed minimum. Your vote that Starbucks must pay more usually isn't accompanied with a certain minimum purchase guarantee that they can use to actually fund this. > You just said the business owner is the "only person paying" and then contradicted yourself by saying "people" pay more. Everyone pays for things because the economy is a cycle. Not usefully in that sense. I'm the only one paying my rent. You're not doing anything towards it. Even if you shop at my employer and indirectly pay my salary, you aren't putting money towards my rent. I'm the one who makes the food/fun/shelter tradeoff. If there's a slack month or unexpected expenses, I suffer. If you actually paid the store an extra 15% line-item specifically to use to pay their employees then I would accept that.

ggm 6y ago

Four 8 hour days. Australia the norm is 7.5 for a working week of 37.5hrs. This proposal would mean 32 hours of work. I think a real 4 day working week would be closer to 28 hours or less: it should mean employers get somebody else for the fifth day or three three days left in the week: closer to jobshare, no overtime, people work less but the work is shared around.

dirktheman 6y ago

I've been working 4 days since 2006, when our first child was born. I don't see myself going back to working 5 days a week, even when the youngest one is older. I get to spend more time with our children, and when they're in school (I'm off on Wednesday) I have the entire day to myself. It's totally worth the pay cut! Fun fact: 50% of employed people here in The Netherlands are working parttime in some form.

herbst 6y ago
Same here. IMO only one day already heavily improves life quality. Its not 50% in switzerland, but common enough that most jobs would accept.
Rule35 6y ago
In fact, 4 10s aren't much harder than 4 8s - for me travel time was dominant as I had to physically go run a lab. So I actually kept my salary while getting permanent three-day weekends. And I justified it by being able to get setup and cleaned up outside of normal work hours which was true and glorious.
- Sander_Marechal 6y ago
  I do 4x9. I like it, but with travel times the days can be quite long. When I have kids I want to go back to 4x8 so I can be home earlier.
  - dirktheman 6y ago
    I did 4x9 also for a while, also with a long (1h15) commute. Was OK for a year, but I was glad that my next job was 4x8 again, with 1 day WFH. So 3 days in the office, 1 day from home. Perfect!
- buran77 6y ago
  This is true but in many companies they won't give you the 4 10s option. The reason is that the company can cut 20% pay but realistically set the same targets (where possible). So the expectations don't realistically drop by 20%, just the time you have to reach them and the pay. Depending on how much you were payed to begin with you may find this a reasonable compromise.

ladyanita22 6y ago

Oh, beautiful Spain, playing experiments with an unemployment rate of 16.13%... I love how my country hugs the poverty closer and closer each year that passes by.

ladyanita22 6y ago
Of course you will downvote me, but as an inhabitant of such country, the truth is, this is the result of the socialist and incompetent government that is in power due to the even more incompetent opposition. It's been long since we were the leaders of employment creation in the eurozone, back when Rajoy was in power.
- A12-B 6y ago
  It is a modest trial of a four day work week. You are so far from disaster. This can only be a good thing, if it doesn't work they stop doing it, but probably it will work because people are more productive when they have time to breath.
  - mercacona 6y ago
    Spaniards don’t appreciate research, we only nod when solutions sprout out of the blue. In fact, less work hours will be a complication for many -as they are used to justify the work done by sitting for extra-hours at their desk. It’s sad, but it’s also my daily routine.
- severino 6y ago
  > Of course you will downvote me... Maybe they're downvoting you because they are also Spanish, they know who Rajoy is and what he did, and what effects a pandemic produces on your economy regardless of the party in the government.
  - arcturus17 6y ago
    > regardless of the party in the government I certainly do not miss Rajoy, but I whole-heartedly believe that a social-communist government is possibly the worst alternative to get us out of this hole. We need jobs, a lot of them, not only in the public sector, and I think that our current government is tremendously ill-equipped for this task. Has anyone noticed how members of the government rarely, if ever, talk about job creation anymore? Politicians will lie about anything, but they don't even dare lie about this - they simply avoid these murky waters altogether. My theory is they know full-well that the only path to growth and private sector job creation is by taking measures (that moderates like Minister of the Economy Nadia Calviño possibly support) like modifying labor laws and lowering taxes which sound right-wing and therefore sit especially poorly with the communist wing of the government. The only alternative to that is, as some communists like Iglesias or Garzón are consistently pointing out, to nationalize a bunch of industries (they've talked about examples ranging from banks to media companies) and turn to a centralized economy. I hope I'm wrong but I clearly do not see how the situation will improve under the current circumstances.

eric4smith 6y ago

It seems that we're slowly heading to a place where salaries are going to be much lower, because of less working hours and loss of the kinds of jobs that paid a good living wage. Or those same jobs will just pay a lower salary. It could be good or bad. The good part is, less buying. Less shopping. Smaller homes. Lower needs. etc. The bad part, all of that part of the economy that was depending those incomes is going to have to transition to something else. Maybe it could lead to more people moving to lower cost countries... OR... more people living like how people live in Bangkok, Beijing or Bali. Either way, the end the middle class as we know it in America is quickly coming to an end.

airhead969 6y ago
There are more people because of population trends. Simultaneously, there are fewer jobs due to automation. Wages will continue to decline with an oversupply of labor.
- astrange 6y ago
  Automation does not reduce jobs. It is impossible to run out of jobs, because 1. demand is infinite 2. jobs are based on "comparative advantage", and people have comparative advantage with automation because they're the same species as their customers. Also, this isn't even happening. It's mostly an artifact because productivity of e.g. computer manufacturing looks super efficient if you measure each 2020 computer as containing a million 1970s computers. > Wages will continue to decline with an oversupply of labor. This is called the "lump of labor" fallacy. Increasing the number of people increases both supply and demand, and therefore improves the economy, and therefore may raise wages. (Economists don't simply use supply and demand for the labor market anyway, they consider things like monopsony and search models.)
andi999 6y ago
It doesnt have to be. Overall productivity is increasing (or at least has been for the last decades). So only the product of work hours times productivity determines if salaries get much lower or not. (Of course if from one day to the next you work only 50% then your claim is true)

airhead969 6y ago

By contrast, the FAANG workweek is 8-14 hours, 5-7 days a week with the possibility of being on-call for emergencies and contacted after hours. Working 72 hr/week while making $200k/yr is only $53/hour. To get to $80/hour would require a salary of $300k. $100/hr is $375k. Oh, and taxes because not an owner of capitalist assets.

silverpepsi 6y ago
I worked in one... engineers didn't work quite that much but about 60 hrs a week. Saturday a full day is standard all year around. The peculiar thing was that right next to our cubicles there was a level 1 phone tech support team. Those guys worked exactly 40 hour weeks. Or team of test engineers were paid $600/month. The tech support guys only $400. I would often ask the engineers if they were cool with the fact that they made the same pay as a phone guy but had to work much harder. At first they were all puzzled, then I'd point out their hourly wage. They all would respond that it didn't matter, it was about social status. Even some of the ladies working in designer bag stores made better pay than them, but didn't have the statis in their view. It kind of blew myind, status means nothing to me, but I am considered eccentric. Anyway, thankfully my base pay was higher than both groups due to nationality.
krapht 6y ago
My friends who work at Google do not have such a workweek. Aren't you exaggerating a bit? At the very least, don't pass it off as universal.
Rule35 6y ago
My friends who work those hours make well over double what I do from their bonuses. They work these hours because they do datacentre builds and these cost the company a fortune for every day. Doing anything to shorten them is worthwhile and it encourages the type of people who'd work in the oil fields. There's no way a FAANG could hold onto staff requiring 72h/w without paying huge bonuses.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
Spanish workers earn closer to 6 $/hour.

borjah 6y ago

I wish it would be the beginning of something but I doubt it will. Businessmen in Spain sees the worker as another machine in the factory and a lot of them work actively to fired the workers that try to unionize. I talk from experience having worked in 2 some what small (50 to 150 workers), family-owned companies, where in one, the union representative was the son of the owner and in the other there wasn't any union because 2 years before I entered, the person who tried to create a union office in the company was fired and reported to the police with false pretences. You have exceptions of course but the vast majority are very very conservative with ideas between right wing or extreme right wing. My opinion is that the wealth, like in any place, is very very bad balanced. Studies are viewed as useless, because they won't give you a good job or because there are some part of society that sees them as something not cool. We don't have a solid STEM-based industry like for example Germany or France. Also, We are highly dependant from tourism, being tourism the largest sector in our GDP (in some regions is the 25% )and we don't re-invesment that wealth in R&D, which is arround 1,25%. Plus political instability from various populism movements is the perfect mix for a country stuck in time. Without any project of future.

teataster 6y ago
My feeling is: spanish business is a somewhat feudal system. I do not believe that business owners are trying to maximize the efficacy of their resources. If it were so, this kind of proposals would be accepted by the business community, given research on the topic. I believe this proposal is a tremendous opportunity. I believe business want to control people. As such, one less day is less control. In exchange for Business controlling your life you get different degrees of financial security. Feudalism. This attitude is reinforced by tradition and misconception. And both employees and employers are at fault. Gee, I am at fault! I haven't worked a 40 hour week in my entire working life. On my defense I would say that I have sent juniors and interns home... But still. I have also said that research on the topic is not solid, but of this proposal were to be properly implemented could help solve that issue. Politicians doing a proper policy implementation is a different can of worms. I was hoping that some progressive business would actually start doing 4 hour weeks, rather than a top down approach.
- 6y ago

n_cusan 6y ago

Growing up in Spain, I am currently living back here after living over 14 years in Germany and spending most of my working life there. I am half Spanish and half German and have a good perspective on both mentalities in general. In my opinion the problem in Spain is definitely the mindset towards work and the way it is perceived. Here work seems to always be some tedious chore that keeps you away from social live. I do not know many people who truly enjoy their job. A couple of years ago my girlfriend came from Spain to live with me in Germany and got a job. After the first day she came home at 10:00 pm (work ended at 6:00 pm). I was worried that they were making her work to hard the first day, but when she came home she told me she just stayed late doing nothing for the new boss seeing her put in the effort... That really really reminded me why I left Spain to work in Germany. I just do not get that kind of attitude, when I confronted her about it she told me that this behavior was expected in all the places she worked at. Leaving early (or even on time), even if you are effective and have done you work is frowned upon by both coworkers and managers. Paradoxically people might even consider you lazy. So I am really expectant to see how this experiment turns out and if it achieves a change in mentality or if it is just a way to spend tax money and make some “friends of friends” rich as politicians like to do in Spain by subsidizing companies that once the state money runs out go back to normal.

tumetab1 6y ago
At least Portugal it's not like that /sarcasm :D I'm keeping on eye on the experiment because of that, maybe this is a better way to increase productivity in cultures like these.
FullMetalBitch 6y ago
Plenty of assholes bosses in Spain, in my experience I have been very honest from the beginning I had sick people I have to take care of and sometimes I have to leave early or I can't just go to work I was always willing to work remote that day when the job allowed it. The worst part of working in Spain is the work is usually from 9 to 14 and from 15 to 18 or variations of that, instead of 8 hours straight.
- lnsru 6y ago

Temasik 6y ago

china and india is trialling 7days a week

smel 6y ago

I left my job and created a software consulting company two years ago just to be able to work 3/4 day per week it turns out to be more profitable than my previous jobs. I kept even a smaller salary.My company has enough funds to pay my salary for 4 years without working or revenue. The more this number is bigger the more I become happy. I'm trying also to build products to have more revenue streams (no success so far)

spyrefused 6y ago

Spain is a country where most of the people work in the service sector, I see this reduction complicated for this sector. And with the loss of competitiveness and industry in recent years, I think this measure would only be applicable to civil servants (For those who do not know, Spain is a special case, there are a lot of civil servants, well paid, and besides, it is almost impossible for them to lose their job unless... they assassinate their boss for example). And coming from where the proposal comes from, I would not be surprised if this were the case. They seem intent on destroying any private initiative...

te_chris 6y ago

We had to go to 0.8 FTE due to trimming costs when covid hit - along with furloughs etc (UK based). We're all back up to 1FTE pay now, but we're basically still working 0.8. Fridays are now "flexible". This means that you should check slack/email for fires, get your house in order for the next week, and, if there's something urgent you're working on (actually urgent, we haven't just reclassified all work as urgent) then you should probably be progressing it. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of the day. It's brilliant.

dalbasal 6y ago

"The Workweek" is, surprisingly, a really deep topic. Keynes' 15 hr work week prediction, for example, is a fascinating rabbit to travel down. The typical economics professors' "why it failed" explanations (at least circa 2005) are tellingly evasive. They preserve all Keynes' premises^ with a "what "happened" scenario that threads a tiny needle. IMO, regardless of which rabbit hole you follow, it turns out that workweek is a very culturally defined thing. It isn't very reactive to economic forces at all. People get rich. Societies get rich. Women join the workforce. Efficiency rises by N000%. Workweeks remain similar. Where quantity of work does change, it tends to be outside the workweek paradigm. Retirement became a big thing. Children don't work. Young adults do a lot of college. Women join the workforce, or don't. IE, we might work fewer years. Fewer people might work. Shortening workweeks rarely happens. IMO, empirically, workweeks seem to be mostly a social institution... not an "economic" one. IE, economic explanations have very little predictive power because "out-of-theory" stuff is more important. ^[1]advancements in efficiency, [2] substitution effects, [3] income effects.

vidarh 6y ago
When my grandparents entered the workforce in Norway, the working week was typically 54 hours. When my parents entered the workforce it was limited to no more than 45 hours, and a couple of years later it was down to 42.5 hours. By the time I was born it was 40 hours. Before I entered the workforce, it was down to 37.5 hours for most employees (it is legally limited to 40 hours, but 37.5 has been the norm since 1986). While you have a point that other factors like retirement age (and in recent years, a growing fear of an aging population) has certainly been part of the reason why it hasn't dropped as fast as some expected, in countries with a strong labour movement it certainly has dropped significantly, and even in countries with a weak labour movement it is still lower than it used to be.
- dalbasal 6y ago
  I think you may be misunderestimating the original prediction.^ He predicted those drastic reduction in working hours within a generation or two, writing in 1930... It was supposed to happen by 1980. The prediction was widely head, and relied on two non controversial ideas: income effect and substitution effect. Higher hourly wages make working more worthwhile, so people work more; Higher overall wages allow people to trade work less opt for leisure. It also relied on efficiency and gdp growth predictions which did really come true. The orthodox reasoning for why the prediction failed is basically: We invented all this awesome new stuff. People prefer to work more, and buy more of this new stuff rather than work less. I don't believe this holds up, but it's what I was taught at uni. Anyway... my point is that looking at the history of employment, it doesn't seem like these "economic" (in the literal sense) explanations have any predictive power. Actual changes in working patterns seem to be governed by "outside factors." Women joined the workforce. Children exited the workforce. People go to uni more. Retirement became statistically more common. Laws change. Norms change. Culture changes. Those things do affect how much we work. Economic factors like efficiency don't. Norway is a small-sih country, and often an outlier, so IDK if it makes a good example. That said, I imagine that these changes in working hours were caused by rule changes: labour laws, union demands or somesuch. They aren't economic. My point is that the model of the economy and the model of a worker used by Keynes to make the prediction, and by most commenters on the topic since are clearly bad models.At the margin, it doesn't even make sense to most workers. We (most of us) don't choose our work hours. We don't work 8% less because 92% of the money is enough. That marginal choice doesn't even exist. We work a job, and job hours are defined by convention. Efficiency, GDP growth and such, over the last 91 years, haven't affected the number of hour we work. Work hasn't been static. It's just governed by other things. If you met Keynes in 1930, you would be right to say "No. How rich we get, how technologically advanced or how productive our industries are will have no effect on how much we work...." You would have been correct. Keynes, and every economist from austrians to marxists would have been wrong. Even today, after the prediction has long-failed empirically, economists have a hard time facing this. http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf

dalbasal 6y ago

The immediate implications of reducing workweeks varies a lot by job type. Doing 8 hrs of work done in 5 is not possible for a dental nurse, waiter or an air traffic controller. Those jobs literally need asses in seats for N hours. The hour reduction game is almost 0-sum. Do less work. Hire more employees. Pay less. Charge more. This is a lot of jobs. For a software developer, hr executive, or user happiness advocate... reduced working hours is not necessarily 0-sum. What we think of, when we think of reduced work hours depends on which of these is our anchor.

redsummer 6y ago

'Spanish practices' in the UK means using bureaucracy to get as much out of the employer with as little effort as possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_practices https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_practices

philmcp 6y ago

In years to come we will look down on the 5 day working week in the same way we currently do with 15hr factory shifts during the industrial revolution. It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model? It annoys me so much that I've just launched https://www.fourdayweek.io/ https://www.fourdayweek.io/ (shameless plug)

anm89 6y ago

I never quite understand things like this and suspect they are political dog and pony shows. Many people already work 4 and 3 and 2 and 1 day weeks. Many of these people's schedules would not be affected by these laws. The only point of these laws is to see what what happen if you enforced them systemically en masse. If you don't do that, you are exactly where you started which is a few people having this privilege but not everyone. And most of the potential rewards as well as potential consequences are only going to expose themself when the policy is enacted en masse. Like of course the few people you give the privilege to are going to happy. I don't really think that was up for debate. The question is is what effects will it have on the broader economy and running a trial with .05% of the population tells you nothing about that.