13 ms·

A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

• sn0w_crash 4y ago
  If you’re working 20% less than your competitor, you will fall behind. There’s no amount of mental gymnastics one can do to reconcile that fact. And if true, then the market should resolve this.
  • toma_caliente 4y ago
    I worked a 4 day work week at one point. My counterargument to this is that most people aren't productive as they think they are. I feel like most people only actually work half the time they say they do. When I was working 4 days I got more done. This isn't speculation. My hours were tracked and my billable hours went up. My deadlines remained the same but I had less "fuck around" time.
    • mojzu 4y ago
      I agree, I also think the original point doesn't take into account burnout and employee retention. Even if the premise that people were doing 80% of the work were true, how does that stack up against how long they're willing to do the job for/how much it costs to replace them. I've seen companies refuse raises, only to go on to spend multiple times what the raise would have cost recruiting and training a new employee
  • nestorD 4y ago
    That is thinking that all workdays are days working. I tend to believe that, given less workdays, you can benefit from increased focus during work and in the longer run.
  • axg11 4y ago
    What if, at a societal level, we just end up employing more people on fewer days? Wouldn’t that be a good thing?
    • gumby 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
  • bpodgursky 4y ago
    - The impact is dampened because most hard roles aren't going to work 80% time. Sales, customer support, executives, and the important engineers will just work 5 days a week anyway, so you end up with like 4% less actual work being done, so it takes a while for this impact to be clear. - There are other strategic differences which can easily swing a company +/- 10%, so looking at just two examples might not give clear guidance on the overall effect. - You would be shocked how many mental gymnastics one can do. Never underestimate how far they can go.
  • swatcoder 4y ago
    You seem to be conflating “working 20% fewer hours” with “producing 20% less value” While there are surely some jobs for which that holds, for many jobs fewer hours amounts to a more compact and efficient worklife. Many people can attest to that from personal experience as both a worker and employer. No mental gymnastics involved.
  • blamazon 4y ago
    Why should I not simply work 24 hours a day, every day of the year? This way no one can out compete me.
    • khazhoux 4y ago
      You're forgetting to account for sleep time, time to eat, and at least one bathroom break a day.
      • blamazon 4y ago
        Yes, I was sarcastically pointing out that working oneself to death is not a competitive advantage.
        • khazhoux 4y ago
          Yes, and I was sarcastically replying to you in earnest ;-) But I think you're making a slippery-slope argument. We're not actually talking about increasing the workweek, but whether to shorten it. In fact, there is simply no denying that there is a non-zero correlation between productivity and # hours worked, so finding the right balance is key.
  • userbinator 4y ago
    In this age of rampant globalism, one really has to wonder who advocates for such things; remember that "competitor" doesn't just mean another company in the same country.
  • strken 4y ago
    If your output scales linearly with your input, and you're working less than your competitor, you will fall behind. If the gradient of your input-to-output curve becomes negative and stays negative, and you're working less than your competitor, then your competitor will fall behind if they're working sufficiently far past the point of negative returns. I'm pretty sure the gradient of all input-to-output curves becomes negative at some point, and don't see any reason why that point should be exactly 40 hours a week. It could be more and it could be less, and probably depends on a whole bunch of other factors, but exactly 40 hours spread evenly across 5 days seems oddly specific.
    • notahacker 4y ago
      > I'm pretty sure the gradient of all input-to-output curves becomes negative at some point, and don't see any reason why that point should be exactly 40 hours a week Tbf, it's the 4 day workweek advocates explicitly making the claim that everyone's output curves become negative on the fifth day such that 32hr output ~= 40 hrs output. Legal restrictions on working hours weren't put in place with the assumption that firms no longer being able to demand 80 hours from their employees couldn't possibly lose any output as a result. That was done because governments decided 80 hour weeks were unreasonable.
      • strken 4y ago
        Anybody advocating a specific n-day workweek, whether n is 4, 5, 6, or anything else, is probably going to claim their system has advantages related to productivity. The argument can be more complicated than just "the company will be more productive." Examples are "society will be overall more productive" (because the free time will be used productively), or "people should be allowed to work more hours if they want" (because even if people are on average less productive working past 40 hours a week, some might be able to cope). I think it's wrong to claim anyone advocating a 4-day workweek must necessarily believe a company will have higher productivity.
        • notahacker 4y ago
          > I think it's wrong to claim anyone advocating a 4-day workweek must necessarily believe a company will have higher productivity. The experiment being discussed here literally sets workers the target of achieving the same output as they previously managed in 5 days. Sure, some people prefer 4 day weeks and happily take a pay cut in return and some people want government intervention to give them a better deal, but - unlike the 5 day week - there is an explicit productivity claim by many 4 day week advocates being assessed here
  • systemvoltage 4y ago
    The beauty is that I want this experiment to run and see how it performs. The pessimism I have (based on last 10-15 years of decline and anti-capitalist motifs today) is that we're going to shy away from looking at the performance of this project anyways and prevent anyone from talking about it. 4-day workweeks will become the de-facto standard. By force. My prediction is that we will see shaming of companies that even try to go against the grain and institute 5-day work weeks. We're living in a hyper-emotional empathy-based irrational society that prevents people from even asking probing questions; prevents us from seeking truth by using tools of reason and logic. If you want a proof of this, just read old HN threads. People were so damn amazing at the time, everyone had a basic tenet of rationale. Not everything is falling, but the trend is worrying. I'd like to see 6-day work weeks as an experiment. I am not convinced that 20% less time is 20% less productivity. Far more important is whether people are motivated and happy.
    • pnut 4y ago
      Global policy makers are bracing for the economy no longer needing human labor at scale, it's coming within our lifetimes. Additionally, I'll go hungry before I give 50% of my scarce free time to my employer.
    • nosianu 4y ago
      > I'd like to see 6-day work weeks as an experiment. IMO this needs without a lot of additional context. Being from the GDR (East Germany), before studying and then working in IT I got to experience a variety of production jobs. From brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory, to various metal working and consumer equipment making jobs, both as part of regular education (yes, school kids went into production as part of the curriculum - and it was FUN and not "evil child work", and we only got as much as was reasonable at that early age and good training too), but later (after receiving a "Facharbeiter" - skilled worker title after three years of vocational training, combined with high-school, "Abitur", for me "mechatronics" in a large chemical fiber factory) also building factory electronics for VW as part-time job to finance my university life. Most of those jobs would produce more output with longer times. A conveyor belt job such as in the brewery, the chocolate factory, or any of the other production jobs would mean less products with just four days of work. HOWEVER, the big difference is what I did later. The IT stuff, the office and computer work, had quickly diminishing returns. When I worked at a large well-known and successful US software company I saw most people browsing the web, playing office golf, or just not being there, and the company HQ parking lot never filled up before 9 am and emptied again by 4 pm - that was late 1990s, with not that many working from home. Similar in almost all other IT related activities I participated in, which were a lot, in both Germany and in the US, in many companies (since my job almost always was at other companies then the one I was employed by, and I later worked as freelancer too). Production work is manual and often not all that stressful. I could turn off my brain or at the very least not think too much while doing it. Sure, when using a lathe you have to pay some attention, but it's not nearly as stressful as planning and designing software, what I do now. I could easily do the lath job all day, I can't do the software design for more than ca. four hours without the resulting code quality getting significantly worse. . When the discussion does not mention the context to me it's a sign that it's going off the rails and that people are talking past one another. Some jobs are okay and useful to do 5 days a week, but others are not. The generalization of talking about ALL work at once makes for a very bad quality of the discussion IMHO.
  • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    Not everyone chooses that his life be dedicated to keeping up with or beating the competition.
    • Claude_Shannon 4y ago
      But then they should be not surprised when they find themselves unable to find a well-paying job.
      • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
        You do not have to “beat the competition” to get a wel-paying job. If that were the case, there would be very few people with well-paying jobs.
  • whateveracct 4y ago
    hmm I work barely 2-3 days/week total for years now and yet I still win out come interview & performance review time
    • linebug 4y ago
      Dell's also doing it. I really liked the one exec's comments, that opening up opportunities to people who are no longer interested in working until "they drop" or have other obligations means they get better technical skills from candidates. And that she acknowlegdes you can't just keep squeezing the lemon of your existing workers: "Working harder won't pay off, because the pond is empty..." "https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/11/4day_workweek/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/11/4day_workweek/
    • janandonly 4y ago
      I've worked for 3 days per week for about 16 years now. I have so much more energy and emotional stability in my job that I feel I do not contribute less, but more.
  • beejiu 4y ago
    Businesses are also competing in the talent market.
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    Your logic is much too simple, or we'd be working 7 days a week. Figure out how to answer that quandary before talking about 4 vs. 5.
• jen729w 4y ago
  Some time last year I stopped working Mondays. I’m a contractor and I know my boss well, so I just said that I didn’t want to work Mondays any more. The difference is remarkable. You go from spending three quarters of your days at work to just over half. The weekend is actually relaxing. You can do chores, relax, and really unwind before the work week starts again. We use Mondays to work on our side projects. You can actually focus on that stuff rather than it feeling like an after-thought. I don’t think I get any less done. Sometimes, but not always (or even often), I’ll work longer days. Sometimes I’ll get up really early and start at 07:00, but that’s mostly because I want to. I’m never going back. Five days a week feels barbaric now. And if the younger kids (I’m 45) want to work harder and get ahead, well, let ‘em.
  • mettamage 4y ago
    > but that’s mostly because I want to. Yea, this is key. I either work 4 and sometimes I work 5, the 5th one is free for the company. It's simply because I want to.
  • pcthrowaway 4y ago
    How many hours do you normally complete on Tuesday through Friday? I have a hard time getting 8 billable hours in a day, let alone 10
    • jen729w 4y ago
      Yeah it’s usually around 8. I primarily WFH which helps, although the office is only a 10 minute walk away. Getting up just that bit earlier and being at the keyboard by 08:00 is the key.
  • seanmcdirmid 4y ago
    I personally find my weekends a bit exhausting because of my 5 year old, and get to relax at just doing my professional job on Monday when he is back to school. I fear that 3 day weekends every week (since we shouldn’t leave day care workers and teachers out of this) would be the end of me. I’m sure my perspective will change after we are out of the needy kid stage, but even before my son was born, I liked working (I would spend Saturday mornings at work, obviously impossible now) and would carefully select jobs that I would like doing. In addition to, or besides, perhaps we could focus on creating and encouraging fulfilling jobs (to satisfy a wide variety of tastes) vs just cutting back days or hours worked?
• donatj 4y ago
  While I could certainly get the same amount of work done in 4 stressful days I'm currently getting done in a leisurely 5, I'd rather have the latter. I'd honestly probably rather work 6 even more leisurely days, it's not like I'm not just messing around on the computer anyway.
  • TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    …and it is people like you who will spoil it for the rest of us because we will be measured against the status quo.
  • brokenmachine 4y ago
    Some of us have a life and interests outside work.
    • donatj 4y ago
      That sounds like a recipe for disappointment.
      • bobsmooth 4y ago
        What a soul-crushing outlook on life. I work a 3 day week and I've never been happier.
      • PhillyG 4y ago
        You alright Eeyore?
  • rapind 4y ago
    I usually work 7 days a week, but very casually. Basically work takes a back seat to most other things (hanging out with my kids, gym, etc.). I get to hang out with my kids a solid amount every single day (not just weekends), which I love. It's totally worth giving up large blocks of non-work (weekends) for me. It all just depends on what works for you, your employer / client(s), and even then it varies over time. Some time soon my kids may not want to hang out with me as much, and I'll tweak my schedule. It feels sort of like being retired, but I'm still putting in close to a full work week of hours (and those are productive hours generally).
• paulpauper 4y ago
  Also a lot of jobs have enough flex hours and vacation that it's close enough to 4 days/week anyway. The downside of shorter workweeks is it may cause a loss of productivity at the endpoints of the week. For example, there is often a marked slowdown on the Thursdays and Mondays before and after 3-day weekends. So you are not just losing an extra day but more like 1.5 days due to slowdowns and loss of productivity.
  • hamandcheese 4y ago
    By this logic, we all have a 2.5 day weekend now. Which is probably true for many of us, at least from time to time.
  • entropy47 4y ago
    Friday afternoon and Monday morning are already pretty ineffective - the length of the weekend might not impact the existence of those bookend periods. I suspect it gets worse around public holidays because that's a break from routine.
    • DoughnutHole 4y ago
      Break from routine, plus presumably a tendency on long weekends for people do things that impact their energy for days after, like travel or excessive drinking. If every weekend was a three day weekend I don't imagine you'd see so much of this.
  • chrismatheson 4y ago
    Not that I disagree with what your saying, for me however there is a difference between feeling like your "skiving" and having real time off. I may duck out a bit sooner than 5pm on a Friday afternoon, but its not the same as taking Friday and going for a walk somewhere with no reception sort of thing.
• dukeofdoom 4y ago
  Shrinkflation? Working people can't afford to drive to work 5 times a week.
  • outside1234 4y ago
    Is anyone actually doing that again?
    • dukeofdoom 4y ago
      Not sure about Britain. But In Canada you can buy a bag of air mislabeled as a bag of chips for $6. Sized have decreased, while food prices have gone up. Even the state sponsored channel CBC is doing stories on Canadians going Hungary. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0llGY9CDrnw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0llGY9CDrnw
  • dazc 4y ago
    Roads seem plenty busy at weekends though?
• egourlao 4y ago
  Besides the benefits or drawbacks of the 4-day workweek on its merits, it's worth remembering that behind the headlines such as "$COUNTRY tests $SOCIAL_CHANGE", it's usually some entity in $COUNTRY on a mission rather than an organization that's representative of the opinions of its population. Same thing has been happening with Scandinavian countries too – there's always a rotating cast of Sweden, Finland and Norway making such headlines. Usually, though, it's a smaller organization or a government agency that wouldn't have the power or influence to turn this pilot into transformative social change.
  • sofixa 4y ago
    Minor nitpick - Finland is not a part of Scandinavia, which is a cultural/historical/linguistic concept, and is generally understood to mean Denmark, Sweden, Norway. If you want to include Finland, which is quite different linguistically historically, and to a lesser extent culturally , the correct term is Nordics. As for the main point in your comment, yes and no. In Finland for instance, the UBI pilot was an official government pilot, thus it could be turned into official policy.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • blocked_again 4y ago
    Have you heard of minority rule? https://atlasgeographica.com/the-minority-rule-explained/ https://atlasgeographica.com/the-minority-rule-explained/
• indigodaddy 4y ago
  There is very little actual information about the British plan in that article.
• codelord 4y ago
  I wonder what the perspective of other people who run businesses or manage teams are on this subject? I have managed teams at top tech companies in bay area in the past (although switched back to an engineering position recently). Regardless of the company, I have always wondered why everyone around me is working so slowly. Things that a good engineer should be able to do in a day gets done in a month or more. When working as an engineer people always commented that I'm very efficient. But honestly I think the reason is a lot of people just barely put 10 hours a week in the current 5 days a week routine. Lots of times I feel like you could just let 60-70% of people go at companies I've worked at and literally nothing changes. My experience has been that a handful of high output individuals at each company are responsible for 90% of things that gets done. So I wonder what happens if we reduce this even more? Probably nothing, because high output individuals usually have intrinsic motivations and will continue putting more hours than is required.
  • rektide 4y ago
    > high output individuals usually have intrinsic motivations I agree a lot that intrinsic motivation is key, changes everything, and I think this is a widescale struggle. But while the motivation is intrinsic, the survival rate of intrinsic motivation is deeply governed by the organization. Many many decent-size and/or moderately-mature organizations create resistance, ongoingly tax motivation, sap our will & sense that we can influence things, can change things, can take control. Preserving your team's sense of agency is paramount, but almost always fucked over. The rest of the org (that isn't doing the actual labor) constantly worries, constantly wants to make sure things are going ok, frets & wants to do things when the waterfall product-roadmap isn't going as they hoped or expected. If things are happening off the roadmap, outside of the top-down plan, well, you betcha there's gonna be a lot of meetings & discussions. The company's extrinsic desires are what matters: you, the human resource, are there to crank out the expected work at a predictable rate. Got it? Good. Now stay intrinsically motivated & go tackle the work we've given you! Very few organizations give their employees real license to do good things, to tackle the work well & encompass broad wins. Doing obviously good & great things might impact the roadmap! Oh no! In short, there's too many "decision makers," too much management deciding, and too many people checking in & trying to help make sure everyone is spending their times wisely, that "there's not something we can do to speed this up". There's a lot of would-be highly productive people in most orgs, except the org itself is medium/low-performance, eats away & erodes at the sense of autonomy & mastery & purpose (not a huge Daniel Pink fan but this continues to be a good set of dimensions) that are integral to maintaining high output. Often in many orgs, there's an informal social agreement that some vaunted select people can just do whatever & we'll trust them, but everyone else gets the regular employee treatment. You have to slay the backlog for a couple quarters, non-stop, do only product work, and then you're off the hook. External factors confound confound confound the intrinsic motivation that we need desperately to keep fueled & stoked. There's so few people who can sympathize or go with us as we do good things, as we set ourselves & the product up for future success, beyond just getting the mundane features cranked out. There's constant skepticism about the 10x hacker, who gets great accolades & is celebrated in the org, but leaves behind them a wake of messy & terrible systems: this too speaks to the visible versus invisible pieces of our job, about what the extrinsic motivators look like and what intrinsically drives a hacker. Software is massive, & tending to this realm & keeping it technically healthy is largely invisible labor that the organization often lacks competence to see or assess. We're rated superficially, based off the tip of the iceberg that is visible, and come to feel we're living in our own shadows of greatness, unseen, hidden. Yes, the Hacker can continue to find good tasks, good work, to define their own success & enjoy chomping through tasks with abandon. But I see, so often, the distance & dissonance grows, and doing good deeds rarely seems to get easier over time in most orgs. I think there is huge potential in many many people to be high performing, to engage avidly & actively, but the organization & it's quest for certainty, it's drive for reliable consistent output- it's desire to understand while clearly never understanding- quell the ability to work well, to create high-performance.
• neonate 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/c3qp1 https://archive.ph/c3qp1
• coding123 4y ago
  One thing I would do with a 4 day work week is make more food. As a country we eat out too damn much. Every time I make falafels or pita bread (from scratch - as in soaking garbanzo beans) it's like the best tasting food ever. Just no time.
  • sexy_seedbox 4y ago
    Cook on Sundays and freeze your meals.
• srb24 4y ago
  Nice for employees but most succesful Hackers/entrepreneurs I know work 6-7 days a week. Availability is often key rather than actual total hours worked.
  • ng55QPSK 4y ago
    See it like this: They work 6-7 day because they are successful. At the same time they didn't manage to scale.
  • bobsmooth 4y ago
    Unless I have a big a chunk of equity I'm working for a paycheck, not the company. I know the sacrifices entrepreneurs make: no thank you. Unless you want communism where everyone has equity.
  • iso1631 4y ago
    I work 4 day weeks with Wednesday's off, but I'm flexible. If I need to do something on a Wednesday I'll have a different day off instead, if it all hits the fan at 9pm on saturday night, I'll fix it (or one of my colleagues will), If I need to do a 70 hour week then I will (with the appropriate time-and-a-half for the extra 30 hours worked)
• LightG 4y ago
  I would take hybrid-time over a shorter work week ... I'm honestly unsure why we're not keeping things flexible as each worker is different, their role and preferences are different, etc. I'll take a 4 day week and I could make it work - but why give up the flexibility we've learned over the last couple of years? I don't get it ... people talk a good game when it comes to Capitalism and capital allocation, but when it comes down it, pfft ... why not leave the capital allocation of time and location to the employee (with obvious guard rails and results expectation from the manager/boss). This feels like it all boils down to one thing ... very few people know what actual management is.
  • iso1631 4y ago
    Because for many roles the manager/boss has no idea how to measure results
• khazhoux 4y ago
  I love a three-day weekend as much as the next guy, but I don't understand how people are pushing for shorter workweeks, and even for universal basic income, meanwhile all the Starbucks near me close at 7pm because they're short-staffed. And restaurants and grocery stores and everywhere you look, there's still a labor shortage.
  • fsniper 4y ago
    It's easy, you adapt to not having your coffee after 7pm. (fixed typo of 8pm to 7pm)
    • 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
      yeah, what's wrong with starbucks closing at 7pm...
  • shawabawa3 4y ago
    There's not a labor shortage there's a wage shortage, because wages are not and have not been keeping up with inflation for most jobs since at least 2008 if not earlier
  • ramblerman 4y ago
    It's a bit disingenuous to conflate working less or part-time with universal basic income. The first can be done by choice for some people, and doesn't always imply government subsidy. Also why pick 4 days as being closer to UBI, when you could make the same argument about 5 days vs 6.
    • khazhoux 4y ago
      I don't think it's disingenuous at all. They both have in common the fairly-recent idea that it's time to work less: whether a shorter week for the same pay, or in the case of UBI you get money for no work at all. These two are not the same, but they're in the same space of recent re-examinations of the relationship between work and money.
  • dncornholio 4y ago
• brunooliv 4y ago
  It's not really specified in the article but is it still 40 hours per week?
  • pmg101 4y ago
    I believe the model is "100% pay for 80% of the hours and 100% of the output". This is usually accompanied by hand waving talk of "improving productivity" but I don't see how it will work realistically. If you were already spending 20% of your working hours scrolling Facebook (or HN) then you will do so on a four day week too (perhaps after an initial honeymoon period). The alternative approach where employees just spread their 40h of work over 4 days instead of 5 is interesting too, but in a different way. Is the loss of productivity caused by being tired by hour 10 each day offset by having 3 full days to rest? Or even, perhaps those long stretches with nothing to think about but work are MORE productive? A 10h day could be tough on home life (kids/spouse/evening leisure), but if WFH that could just be offset against hours now not spent commuting. Everyone's situation is different. Will be fascinating to see the outcomes of this study. For starters, "define productivity" for a software business!
• an9n 4y ago
  And what happens if you want to work longer? Some kind of lockdown?
• odiroot 4y ago
  Every time this comes up, I wish we talked more about shortening the workdays as opposed to having fewer of them. I don't mind working 5/7 days. I do mind long days and overtime.
  • jackdh 4y ago
    I'm the opposite. I'd much rather a 4x10 work week and have 3 days off.
• RickJWagner 4y ago
  I predict the true result (probably masked) will be reduced production, resulting in scarcity of goods, resulting in increased prices.
• _fat_santa 4y ago
  I've worked for a number of tech companies in the US and many of them could easily move to a 4 day workweek. Reason I say that is at every place, there was a culture of slacking off on a Friday. Not in an overt way but you could tell, meetings wouldn't be scheduled after 10AM on Friday, any meeting would be short and sweet. Any longer meetings would be pushed off to Monday. Slack is usually pretty quiet, and the green dots turn grey starting around 1PM. The bosses could do something about it, but they don't because they also don't want meetings and are just looking forward to the weekend themselves. The only time you would even hear from bosses is a reminder to submit your timesheet before leaving for the weekend.
  • rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
    This has been my experience as well, but during busier periods people do actually work full days on Fridays. It might only add up to a few weeks per year. This is much better than the alternative, though (working on weekends a few weeks a year).
• foolinaround 4y ago
  In knowledge based industries, what could as important as getting time off is to see if your colleagues have time off at the same time. If a colleague is working there is always this message that needs to be addressed that can't wait, and even otherwise, you come back from the weekend with an overflowing inbox
• newaccount2021 4y ago
• llimos 4y ago
  It was recently reported that Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, wanted to rein in wage growth. Encouraging part-time work is surely the best way to achieve that. Many people will be happy to accept shorter hours in place of a raise, which will have the desired effect of slowing down inflation without harming the workers.
• Tycho 4y ago
  Careers are about opportunity. Come into the office less, and you’ll come across fewer opportunities. As someone said, “eighty percent of success is just showing up.”
  • nickd2001 4y ago
    I'd argue the tech industry provides enough good opportunities that its worth going for better quality of life from WFH and 4 day weeks without worrying what one loses by not being in the office every day. The more people that do WFH or 4 days, the less anyone is hurt if not physically there every day, so this opportunity cost diminishes. So we should encourage our coworkers to do the same :). Also consider that you might perform more impressively in your work if you've had lower stress from WFH/4 days, and that could get noticed too by your boss.
• pllbnk 4y ago
  It's a joke how such a simple thing as reducing the maximum allowed working hours involves so much politics. There's nothing magical about 5-day/40-hour weeks. If it was reduced to 4-day/32-hour weeks, the employers can still manage their employees to work 5 days in overlapping shifts. I think it's as simple as holding a referendum and seeing what do people want.