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I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that's missing something obvious - the 4 day w

• legulere 5y ago
  People are still going to work more efficient when they work 32 instead of 40 hours in many jobs as fatigue sets in at some point.
  • kortilla 5y ago
    No, there are jobs where you do rote things on demand or at particular intervals with no fatigue at 40 hours per week. Examples from my own employment experience: - front desk clerk at a hotel - fuel pump operator Both of these are pretty dull work that doesn’t exhaust you at all at the 40 hour work week. Most of the time is spent idle and the time spent working doesn’t require much going on upstairs.
    • fy20 5y ago
      Most of these customer facing jobs will be abandoned or optimised away in the next few decades. Front desk work could be done away with mostly by electronic systems (most of the time when I "check in" it's just picking up a ready made room card as I checked in online). You could even centralise the "talking to a human" part in a call center operating a number of hotels, who delegate to staff on the premises (house keeping, maintenance, room service, etc). Of course luxury hotels will still have humans. Fuel pump operator hasn't been a job in most Western countries for decades, as you just pump fuel yourself (and often even pay at the pump). Is "EV charger operator" a job?
      • SilverRed 5y ago
        As far as I can see. These front desk jobs exist as theft/crime deterrent and to handle edge cases. Sure you could fully automate fuel stations but who is going to call the police when kids start spray painting the windows unless you have someone sitting at a desk watching cctv all day. And who is going to deal with customers who are trying to report something is wrong with a pump. These jobs have already been automated to the point that one person can handle a large store/hotel.
        • hypertele-Xii 5y ago
          > but who is going to call the police when kids start spray painting the windows unless you have someone sitting at a desk watching cctv all day. A neural network trained to classify spray-painting kids?
          • toomanybeersies 5y ago
            The deterrent effect is less because clerks are more effective than cameras at detecting crime, and more because people don't like committing crimes when there are other people nearby. Obviously that's not an absolute statement, especially considering that armed robbery is a thing. But in general humans are better crime deterrents than security cameras or robots. In a lot of cases, that's the sole reason for employing security guards, since the only thing they're actually allowed to do when they encounter crimes in progress is ring the police.
    • namdnay 5y ago
      These jobs are disappearing as part of the constant search for productivity increases. A front desk clerk will now spend their “down” time doing admin work for example
      • noisy_boy 5y ago
        Since we are on the topic of Japan and hotel front desk, this video shows an example day of a Japanese hotel staff who does a whole bunch of multi-tasking: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZsdm0RZ18k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZsdm0RZ18k
    • raxxorrax 5y ago
      Idling at work is one of the most exhausting "occupations".
    • legulere 5y ago
      I agree that not all jobs are like that, but the comment I was replying to was talking about retail workers, factory workers and people who fill in the holes in roads, which do suffer from fatigue.
    • ddnb 5y ago
      I have done a job that was 80% dull work. I can guarantee you I have never been more exhausted when I came home from work. Don't ask me how it works, but doing 'nothing' can be extremely tiring. And this was a desk job.
  • raxxorrax 5y ago
    Sometime I don't get enough sleep when I start at 8am. It makes the result of work so much worse when you aren't rested. Sure, I could make sure to go to bed earlier, but life happens and honestly I don't live for work.
  • hulitu 5y ago
    No because they will change the number of days not of working hours.
• e12e 5y ago
  Tine's Heimdal factory in Norway did do 30 hour work week for a while - with good results in efficiency (and employee happiness). It was unfortunately scrapped due to cost concerns (workers kept same pay as for 37.5h work week). Its not clear if the change back to "normal" week was entirely rational - there were other suggestions to make the cited target of 80M NOK/year savings.
• franciscop 5y ago
  I fully agree with your comment overall, but as someone who lives in Japan I'd like to point out that specifically "people who fill in the holes in roads" is a running joke in Japan since small street constructions always seem way over-staffed. It's amazing because they do finish a lot faster than in western countries, but you can definitely remove 20% of the people in street-level construction and would see little difference. An example: they hire 2 people on every sidewalk just to tell people to continue walking the way they are walking and make sure they don't fall into a pit while looking at their phones[1]. From what I've learned, this specific job is normally filled by people who have already retired but don't have enough to live, so they are paid peanuts (I believe they might also be paid a bit extra by gvmt to go back to work, but I'm not sure I understood this point properly). They have started to be replaced by "robots" though [2]. Edit: in general everything in Japan seems overstaffed compared to the western counterparts, not just road construction. I believe this is how they can maintain very low levels of unemployment here, but I don't yet know how the incentives work to make it possible. [1] The guys with the blue shirt, notice one on each side https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HBJ2K1/japanese-people-in-construction-site-working-and-repair-surface-of-HBJ2K1.jpg https://c8.alamy.com/comp/HBJ2K1/japanese-people-in-construc... [2] https://japangasm.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/rwintro-swing04_900.jpg https://japangasm.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/rwintro-swing0...
  • bobthepanda 5y ago
    Japan on paper is the wealthiest (non-microstate) Asian country GDP per capita, but if you compare by PPP it's actually not great because of meh economic productivity/import tariffs, and slips behind South Korea and Taiwan.
  • kqr 5y ago
    Sometimes I think what passes for appropriately staffed in the West is actually understaffed. What's called optimal staffing in the West is just at capacity, which is a nice way of saying "with no spare capacity." Of course, with Japan being the land of just-in-time, one could argue that spare capacity is bad -- but that's an oversimplification. Necessary spare capacity is good. What's bad is not being able to address the reasons the spare capacity is needed. Maybe when it comes to humans doing road work there's no way around the need for spare capacity?
• emidln 5y ago
  Another way of looking at it is efficiency hasn't changed and need stays constant, you need 20% more people to do the same work. This is an interesting way of affecting mass employment.
• ineedasername 5y ago
  Our country is wealthy enough That's really going to depend on the business. Plenty of businesses-- specifically ones with a lot of customer-facing staff-- would not be able to sustain labor cost increases up to 20%. To take an easy example where I already know the #'s in the US, labor costs at a fast-food restaurant are around 25% of costs. Net profit margins range from 5% up to around 20%, but that top end is for McDonalds, the rest are on that lower end. Increasing labor costs by 20% means a 5% increase in absolute operating costs. Sure, McDonalds may still run at 15%, but other places that increase for many others would erase profitability. Even with a McDonalds, those franchises don't go for less than $1million each, often a lot more, and 20% profit on them seems to be about $150,000/year. So an owner is already looking at 7+ years to recoup their investment, and that's before accounting for any additional capex costs McDonalds may require when they roll out mandatory renovations. Certainly there are many more businesses than fast food, so the above equation won't hold for every thing. But any low margin business with moderate customer-facing labor costs won't be able to manage this without raising prices, and then we're just shifting the money around to different piles. In fact as a result of those increased prices, the lower paid workers, while they may be able to work less hours and may work for a business that didn't cut their pay, they're still paying the price for that decision in their overall increase in cost of living.
  • ajmadesc 5y ago
    Yeah but why not just have literal slaves and not require that people have health insurance. The reductive "race to the bottom" can go both directions
    • ineedasername 5y ago
      I'm honestly not sure what you mean by this comment. I used a real world example of businesses with high customer-facing labor costs relative to their net profit margins. If you're getting into the everyone-deserves-a-living-wage side of things, that's a different conversation, one I tend to agree with, but is much more complex than the current discussion about whether current business could manage this if they operate with low margins and moderate customer-facing labor costs.
• brigandish 5y ago
  > The Japanese government isn't saying "Let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work!" Maybe, but if you've worked in Japan, or even just living here, you know about the long, pointless meetings, desk warming and busy work. Thus, it's highly possible the government is saying "let's get rid of pointless meetings and busy work". Things are that top-down here that often companies won't do anything unless the government has said something (and it's likely that it was the big companies that control the politicians that told them to say it). There are plenty of examples of this kind of thing, one is when the government had to do the same to force companies to let/get employees to use their holiday entitlements. Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here - the moment you accept that you understand so much more about the culture, in much the same way you won't understand Buddhism if you use a mental model constructed out of your understanding of Christianity.
  • qwerty456127 5y ago
    > Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here Then what is?
    • vict00ms 5y ago
      I'm 4th generation Japanese-American, and in no way whatsoever qualified to answer your question, but I'll gladly do it nonetheless: they prioritize the collective over the individual.
      • brigandish 5y ago
        This is entirely correct, it seems you are displaying the kind of humility that would make your ancestors proud!
  • toyg 5y ago
    > Western principles such as truth, innocence and self-reliance aren't foundational here ... nor in the West, to be fair. Lies and cheats are commonplace in any Western workplace. I think you are over-generalizing. Self-reliance is big in Japan too, even while egoism is not - it's drilled into people basically from birth, with things like students cleaning their own schools. Innocence is always politely expected until openly questioned, at which point it turns almost automatically into guilt; but it doesn't mean it's not "foundational" - in fact, it's much more entrenched, it's just that the act of questioning it carries so much more weight on all sides (an unfair accusation, if determined, would be extremely shameful) that nobody wants to go there until absolutely necessary. They just play the game with a slightly different set of practical rules.
• raxxorrax 5y ago
  Completely true. Working has become a race to the bottom. For substanance, we should today be able to work three days for that matter. Volunteers for more are fine too. Problem is, that all economies must find common ground, or you will indeed get behind.
• Chyzwar 5y ago
  It is more like: our people are overworking themselves to death and taking holidays is not socially acceptable. Let's force everyone to work less, and hopefully they will have time to make more babies.
• myspy 5y ago
  Grinding everyone done in a 40 hour work week is a bigger problem though. And it's not like you work highly efficiently in a 40 hour work week. Or if management did enforce that all 40 hours are busy time, the people burn out. I've worked a factory job and have seen it there, I work in white collar now and it's the same. If you say 40 hours you'll only get around 30 because workers have to bounce between working and getting down a little or else they burn out.
• mschuster91 5y ago
  > In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that. Indeed, but going to 4 day weeks will require employers to hire more people then to fulfill the same work. It's absurd that even with all the gains in productivity we're still stuck since decades at the 5x8=40 week. Time to redistribute the producitvity profits towards the workers.
• dragonwriter 5y ago
  > In tech it’s very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don’t do productive work all the time they’re present. While someone working a reduced schedule in an office where other people are working a full schedule may be able to set a schedule that misses some of the things they consider nonproductive (and may actually be more productive/hour for doing so), I don’t think that actually is likely to scale to the whole office switching schedules. If the people in authority that think that the meetings you feel are nonproductive are essential are still in the same positions of authority, they’ll still have the same meetings at least the same share of working hours, though there is a substantial risk that some of them will instead take the same number of hours per calendar week, regardless of the reduction in working hours.
• greyman 5y ago
  What I find fascinating is why government should have such an authority to be able to mandate this.
  • garden_hermit 5y ago
    "encourage"
    • greyman 5y ago
      That's the title says, but we see similar initiatives in EU as well, and it would basically mean that the employee can choose that he wants to work only 4 days. Of course, even now anyone can also have 4 days workweek, if employer agrees to it. But in this case it is something mandatory.
      • kube-system 5y ago
        From the article: > The government included the promotion of an optional four-day workweek in its annual economic policy guideline finalized Friday But even if it wasn’t optional, the idea of mandatory labor laws is hardly groundbreaking anyway. The US has many regulations regarding working hours.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • toomanybeersies 5y ago
    Why shouldn't a government have the authority to mandate the working conditions for its citizens?
• nirui 5y ago
  > Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that. It depends. In China, the tech companies are testing AI telephone support. My banks uses it, JD.com uses it, China UNICOM use it. If you dial to those companies, an AI will take the call and guide you through the process, no human interaction needed. Not only that, some AI will even call you to schedule appointments etc. Another example is the supermarkets. Almost all supermarket in our city has deployed self-checkout stations, and some of them even laid off almost all but 1 or 2 of their checkout workers. I assume this trend will eventually expand to other labor types, so the workload of those workers will be lighten as result. (But of course, we can keep the load the same, but laid off unnecessary people instead, which is more likely if the government don't intervene)
  • Noos 5y ago
    That doesn't change the principle though; the actual workers need to do 40 hours or even more; it just means there are less of them. And really, people need to be wary with automation. What people don't realize is that relying on it utterly paralyzes you when it goes down, because its a higher order fault than most staff need to handle. If the AI telephone support breaks during an update, you've just sidelined your entire operation. If you only have a few checkout employees, and your POS service needs to connect to the internet, and it goes down, you have virtually no one to reply to it. By reducing headcount you really run the risk of what were tolerant faults becoming critical. My own job has been running on a skeleton crew, and thank god one of us hasn't become sick or left yet. Eventually relying on automation and minimum staffing may bite you hard. A lot of retail stores would be up the creek if the store manager up and quit or was sick for multiple weeks.
    • nirui 5y ago
      If we choose the "Good route", then companies can hire the same amount of people and those people can provide good service to the others while the majority of the service is handled by automated systems. For example, a road worker can now focus on fixing the part of the road which is more likely to be damaged, while the rest of the road is serviced by machines automatically. 4 hours later, the worker finished fixing the critical/difficult part of the road, then he/she go home to enjoy their life, the machine takes the rest of the routine to finish it off. But of course, more likely, we will go down the "Bad route". Workers will be fired, just like those in the supermarkets. And if machine fails, people will be re-routed to a "backup" -- a human or another machine, to be queued up for a even slower handling process. Few hours later, the machine is fixed, and the event is marked as one-time incident -- stability still above 99%, everything stay the same, except more workers will be fired due to redundant stability.
• gdubs 5y ago
  There was another thread on 4 day workweeks, and I’ll reiterate what I wrote there: people had the same concerns when society shifted to a 40 hour workweek and productive actually went up. Fewer injuries and illness, etc. 1: “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”
• Noos 5y ago
  I don't think it's true though. A lot of jobs you simply can't reduce the hours no matter how advanced you are without corresponding loss in service. There's also serious staffing issues in many blue collar jobs which simply won't be able to be filled by enforcing them to work less hours; there isn't a huge supply of people wanting to do menial labor to pop up to work part time and pick up the slack. Retail and factory work already has low wages and high turnover, forcing them to try and make up a 20% loss in staffing hours is probably not going to happen over just cutting operating hours and shifting to models designed to work with less staff; retail stores for example may just be open 20% less or be constantly understaffed and understocked. Or eventually a lot of them just close and the bigger ones absorb the surplus workers to keep full hours.
• lumost 5y ago
  This is also a curious method for opening more employment and reducing potential income inequality. If a factory needs to produce X things, and each worker produces Y things per hour you will always need X/Y working hours. If workers reduce working hours by 20% then you'll need to hire 20% more workers or improve Y (productivity) by 20%. If the majority of the economy follows a linear production curve in hours worked, then this opens many jobs. Not a bad deal for a mature economy like JP, but will be interesting to see what un-forseen dynamics emerge.
• dr-detroit 5y ago
  We post scarcity now.