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Construction should be a 4 day work week. I remember my father telling me about a push to a 4 day work week in the 80's at local 6 in San Francisco. For some

Construction should be a 4 day work week. I remember my father telling me about a push to a 4 day work week in the 80's at local 6 in San Francisco. For some reason, the union officials didn't want it. Looking back the contractors probally nixed it?) I remember how sad my father was over that. He was getting older, and wanted a job easier on his body, and he thought the 4 day work week would be enough time to start a side business. I did electrical for awhile, and mirrored his thinking. I used to think 10 hr days were not a problem. (Union construction. Mon-union construction is way harder work.)

quartesixte 5y ago
Manual Labor will incredibly benefit from shorter work weeks. More rest = fresher bodies = less mistakes. There is a definite drop off point where a technician/mechanic/welder isn’t working at even 80% normal capacity, and that’s where mistakes begin to happen. And unlike software, mistakes can be costly to undo or perhaps even impossible. The flipside of course is that their hourly wages must go up to match the decrease in hours worked. And overtime pay is a big motivator for many skilled manual labor jobs.
- swader999 5y ago
  Treeplanting up north in Canada for a decade in the nineties. You get paid piecework (how much you plant) and there are only a fixed number of trees for the whole contract. The idea is to get the millions of trees in the ground as fast as possible and get out. We tried 3-1, 4-1, 5,6 and so on. Even worked 14 day shift once. The '1' being the day off. The most productive cadence over a season was 5-1 with 9 hour days. 4-1 at ten hour days was a close second. We would switch to 4-1 when drives got longer. It felt like a sport more than a manual labor job. Your trying everything you can to maximize your tally.
  - rvba 5y ago
    Was this tested for quality somehow? Also after time wouldnt there be inprovement due to experience? (Or is it cancelled out by injury?)
    - swader999 5y ago
      You have checkers from the forest service (gov), the forestry company that cut the timber and your own treeplanting company. They use stats and gps and survey every block by throwing 3.99m plots randomly about. Inside that circle they need to find 7 or 8 trees all well planted. You need a certain percent to be expected to live, high ninties of percent, or your piece rate per tree gets reduced. They check for lean, depth, spacing, microsite selection, root placement and other things. Quality is constantly a worry and I would get checked at least a couple of times a day. Two or three years after it is checked again and will be scheduled for fill planting if it doesn't have good enough density. You improve your speed a lot at first. 100 trees your first day, 1000 by the end of your tenth day. Meanwhile vets are putting in four thousand on the same ground at 12 cents a tree. Definitely pay your dues and a company won't pay you minimum wage top ups for very long. It takes about five or six seasons to reach your peak in terms of knowledge and skill. Some would argue longer. There's efficiency of movement, controlling your emotions and mental aspects, reading the ground and spacing in triangles instead of straight lines. Not many planters get to triangles. There's also different ground to learn. Trenches in Alberta vs steep snarpy old growth blocks on the coast are completely different worlds. Coastal planting is hard to get hired for, mostly older lifers, interior you'd find many students on crews. Everyone gets minor injuries and sore nagging pains that steadily get worse. It's often just a matter of how many days you last before you quit. Seasons can last from twenty to a hundred days, probably fifty is the most common. Being in good shape or even a little pudgy at the start helps but it's more a matter of pain tolerance and being able to set those thoughts aside and tune it out until you are numb to it. I came back to the truck one time with a three inch piece of stick jammed an inch in my shin. My pants were ripped, leg all bloody, didn't even notice it. Like coding there's 10x planters too. They are called high ballers. Typically they are more fit but they still come in all shapes and sizes and male and female too. A top planter can make almost twenty grand CAD in a month, reliably 10-15k. It's a great summer job, you meet genuine people, you learn a lot about yourself. It can fund a lot of travel or other adventure the rest of the year if you play it right. And there's others that would say it was the worst x weeks of their life.
- crucialfelix 5y ago
  Even in Software I see a lot of rushed, deadline driven work resulting in bitrot. Code bases become unusable because everyone is forced to keep shipping and they get exhausted. They are incentived to make a mess.
kwdc 5y ago
My experience wasn't in the trades, but I've worked 10-12 hour days with short weeks and had good results. 4 day weeks do work if you can arrange them. Especially for developers frequently in the flow state where interruptions just cost money. Then you put the long meetings at the start and/or end of the work week.
lr4444lr 5y ago
"for some reason"? Their wages are hours-based. Of course they wouldn't want it.
cosmodisk 5y ago
I worked in construction for some years. Your father was right. There's absurd amount of efficiency to be gained in construction without a need to sacrifice productivity. Optimised supply chain, better utilisation of human resource, improved communication between subcontractors can make up for more than a day.
kilroy123 5y ago
I know and have know many people with trades jobs that do 4 10 hour shifts. This isn't that uncommon. Even I had a job like this back in college. However, it is 4 10 hour shits and not a more reasonable 4-8 hours.

quartesixte 5y ago

Manual Labor will incredibly benefit from shorter work weeks. More rest = fresher bodies = less mistakes. There is a definite drop off point where a technician/mechanic/welder isn’t working at even 80% normal capacity, and that’s where mistakes begin to happen. And unlike software, mistakes can be costly to undo or perhaps even impossible. The flipside of course is that their hourly wages must go up to match the decrease in hours worked. And overtime pay is a big motivator for many skilled manual labor jobs.

swader999 5y ago
Treeplanting up north in Canada for a decade in the nineties. You get paid piecework (how much you plant) and there are only a fixed number of trees for the whole contract. The idea is to get the millions of trees in the ground as fast as possible and get out. We tried 3-1, 4-1, 5,6 and so on. Even worked 14 day shift once. The '1' being the day off. The most productive cadence over a season was 5-1 with 9 hour days. 4-1 at ten hour days was a close second. We would switch to 4-1 when drives got longer. It felt like a sport more than a manual labor job. Your trying everything you can to maximize your tally.
- rvba 5y ago
  Was this tested for quality somehow? Also after time wouldnt there be inprovement due to experience? (Or is it cancelled out by injury?)
  - swader999 5y ago
    You have checkers from the forest service (gov), the forestry company that cut the timber and your own treeplanting company. They use stats and gps and survey every block by throwing 3.99m plots randomly about. Inside that circle they need to find 7 or 8 trees all well planted. You need a certain percent to be expected to live, high ninties of percent, or your piece rate per tree gets reduced. They check for lean, depth, spacing, microsite selection, root placement and other things. Quality is constantly a worry and I would get checked at least a couple of times a day. Two or three years after it is checked again and will be scheduled for fill planting if it doesn't have good enough density. You improve your speed a lot at first. 100 trees your first day, 1000 by the end of your tenth day. Meanwhile vets are putting in four thousand on the same ground at 12 cents a tree. Definitely pay your dues and a company won't pay you minimum wage top ups for very long. It takes about five or six seasons to reach your peak in terms of knowledge and skill. Some would argue longer. There's efficiency of movement, controlling your emotions and mental aspects, reading the ground and spacing in triangles instead of straight lines. Not many planters get to triangles. There's also different ground to learn. Trenches in Alberta vs steep snarpy old growth blocks on the coast are completely different worlds. Coastal planting is hard to get hired for, mostly older lifers, interior you'd find many students on crews. Everyone gets minor injuries and sore nagging pains that steadily get worse. It's often just a matter of how many days you last before you quit. Seasons can last from twenty to a hundred days, probably fifty is the most common. Being in good shape or even a little pudgy at the start helps but it's more a matter of pain tolerance and being able to set those thoughts aside and tune it out until you are numb to it. I came back to the truck one time with a three inch piece of stick jammed an inch in my shin. My pants were ripped, leg all bloody, didn't even notice it. Like coding there's 10x planters too. They are called high ballers. Typically they are more fit but they still come in all shapes and sizes and male and female too. A top planter can make almost twenty grand CAD in a month, reliably 10-15k. It's a great summer job, you meet genuine people, you learn a lot about yourself. It can fund a lot of travel or other adventure the rest of the year if you play it right. And there's others that would say it was the worst x weeks of their life.
crucialfelix 5y ago
Even in Software I see a lot of rushed, deadline driven work resulting in bitrot. Code bases become unusable because everyone is forced to keep shipping and they get exhausted. They are incentived to make a mess.

kwdc 5y ago

My experience wasn't in the trades, but I've worked 10-12 hour days with short weeks and had good results. 4 day weeks do work if you can arrange them. Especially for developers frequently in the flow state where interruptions just cost money. Then you put the long meetings at the start and/or end of the work week.

lr4444lr 5y ago

"for some reason"? Their wages are hours-based. Of course they wouldn't want it.

cosmodisk 5y ago

I worked in construction for some years. Your father was right. There's absurd amount of efficiency to be gained in construction without a need to sacrifice productivity. Optimised supply chain, better utilisation of human resource, improved communication between subcontractors can make up for more than a day.

kilroy123 5y ago

I know and have know many people with trades jobs that do 4 10 hour shifts. This isn't that uncommon. Even I had a job like this back in college. However, it is 4 10 hour shits and not a more reasonable 4-8 hours.