5 ms·

Unionizing is not enough. 4/day workweek needs to be universally standardized across the OECD/world for it to stick, because whether we like it or not, countrie

Unionizing is not enough. 4/day workweek needs to be universally standardized across the OECD/world for it to stick, because whether we like it or not, countries and economies are in competition with each other. And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week, then all the jobs and industry will move to the former as the latter will not be competitive anymore. The 4 day workweek seems to currently work without loosing productivity in wealthy service based economies like Amsterdam, the City of London, etc where a lot of "work" is just Blue Chip companies with theatrics and endless meetings while riding the gravy train of other peoples' productivity from across the globe who don't have access to a 4 day week doing all the heavy lifting(basically economic neo-colonialism), but this obviously can't scale across economies that actually depend on actually designing and making the stuff the wealthy economies speculate on.

bombcar 3y ago
It would be decently hard to find an argument against the 4 day workweek that would not ALSO apply to the 5 day workweek (compared to 6) - perhaps the only real one is "it's what everyone does".
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  But then why work 4 day/week and not 3, when 4 days/week becomes the new normal that burns people out? And then why not work 2 days instead of 3? And so on. How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
  - ssklash 3y ago
    Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible? Infinite growth in a finite world just makes us all work harder than necessary, and instead of using productivity and efficiency gains to benefit people/workers, they just go to pad some company's stock price.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible? It's my goal indeed, but not the goal of my country, the economy and the businesses in it who provide the jobs I work for and also lobby for the labor laws my EU country has. Of course doing no work at all while getting paid loads would be the dream, but I wasn't talking about dreams, I was talking about reality. And the reality is way different than what you dream of. How do we make less working days a reality for everyone, instead of just ~60 companies form the UK?
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Too bad the "government goal of X% employment (whatever that is)" couldn't be met by tuning the workweek up and down instead of futzing with interest percentages.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        So why haven't they done it? Seems like a good way to get votes. "If you vote for me you'll only work 4 days/week."
        cellu 3y ago
        Labour tried in the UK and nobody voted for them lol
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    Because at a certain point it will be impossible to argue that "Knowledge workers can get as much done in X-1 days as in X days" because it's trivially untrue. The problem is that the brain is a muscle and gets really really tired solving knowledge problems all day because it is optimized to avoid doing that at as much as possible because it is energy intensive and the ancient human who solved everything perfectly rationally died of starvation while the one that relied on imperfect heuristics and belief got to eat. Solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 40 hours a week will take a toll on your brain that solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 1 hour a week empirically cannot. >How do we decide which model is the sustainable one? Through the exact science you say you "don't buy" because you seem to believe companies operating in a flawed market are better at finding ground truth than literal science.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >Through the exact science you say you "don't buy" because you seem to believe companies operating in a flawed market are better at finding ground truth than literal science. I'm saying companies believe in science that leads to profit, as the market can stay irrational longer than companies can stay solvent. Same how science showed switching to EUV lithography is better than sticking to DUV and then all companies adopted that, if science would also show workers working 32h per week results in more profit for them than 40h, then they would all switch in a heart beat to capture all that money left on the table by their competitors still stuck in their ancient 40h workweek. But that hasn't happened.
      - bombcar 3y ago
        Companies (currently) compete by offering more money - if the pool of applicants dried up enough, perhaps they'd begin competing by offering more time. The problem is if they pay you $x per year, they don't care how many hours you work, as long as the job gets done. So something that makes their life a bit more annoying (no replies on Friday) but makes your life amazingly better won't get done.
        FirmwareBurner 3y ago
toomuchtodo 3y ago
I agree! But workers can organize today while moving forward improvement with each election result (which will take time; for example, 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die every year, 4M young folks age into voting ability at 18 in the US). Luckily, the entire world is getting old fast [1] [2] [3], which means there is a shrinking population of total workers; makes it more difficult to have workers compete against each other race to the bottom style. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/ageing-global-population/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/ageing-global-populat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_China [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8505790/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8505790/
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore less demands for goods and sdervices? People keep saying how the declining demographics will mean the workers have more leverage but when will that come? As currently I'm struggling to find a job and a recruiter who rejected me just told me they have huge supply of "strong candidates" and they don't need to compromise anymore on offering WFH or accepting only English speaking candidates. Maybe by the time I retire I can see that leverage?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    > Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore less demands for goods and sdervices? Longer convo for another thread, but TLDR yes, "structural decline." Trajectory is a function of how fast folks age out of the working population (retire or death), because cohorts coming up behind them keep shrinking. EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      >EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile. For what?
    - sokoloff 3y ago
red_admiral 3y ago
We went from "six days thou shalt labour" to the 5-day week for a number of reasons. Unions were one reason, Henry Ford was another [1][2]. His original argument was that if we give workers an extra day of leisure time, there'll be more demand for leisure products to consume - like, you know, Model T cars. Then, Ford noticed that his new 5-day workers were so much more productive per hour than before, that it more than made up the difference for the extra hours not worked. So I'd have two criticisms of your "X-20%" figure. The first is that just because individual workers are only in 4 days a week, doesn't have to mean the factory only operates 4 days a week; indeed a lot of steel factories do some kind of shift work anyway because firing up a furnace from cold is hugely inefficient. Sure, that means more heads total and so more HR expenses than if everyone worked 5 days, but I don't think it adds up to the 20% you quoted. Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get this way might be enough to more than offset the losses, and even increase your profits. [1] https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/stories/history-five-day-work-week https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/stories/history-five-da... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/american-workweek-history-explained https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/american-... (But note, the claim that moving to a 5-day week was a pay cut needs some context. The 5-day week started in 1926. But in 1914, Ford already doubled his workers' wages from $2.50/day (which was already not bad by the standards of the time) to $5/day, almost unheard of at the time - though initially with strings attached [3] which were later removed. So working 5 days a week at Ford's factory could well have still brought in more net pay a week than 6 days a week at a competitor in 1926. [3] https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5-per-day-wage-this-day-in-history https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5...
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get this way might be enough to more than offset the losses, and even increase your profits. Henry Ford's revenue boost firstly came from his improvements to automation and innovative highly optimized production line assembly processes, not because le let his workers work 5 days a week instead of 6. It was those innovations that allowed him to reduce the numbers of worker hours needed while get same productivity levels or higher, not vice versa as they didn't just magically come from working his workers less but from innovations to production lines efficiency. Workers working less was a consequence of that, not the cause.
CraigJPerry 3y ago
>> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another X -20% because they work only 4 days per week The number of widgets produced and the price asked for them is not a function of workdays. You’d need to control for quality of widget produced - and since buyers are human that may mean perceived quality rather than some absolute assessment of quality. You’d need to control for location & distance to market/customer for each widget produced. You’d need to control for efficiency of production process. You’d need to control for… you get the point. The only possible way your idea could stand would be if all else was held equal - and that’s simply not possible outside of horse shit models. Models can be useful, but not like this. This is a BS way to think about an economic model.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >You’d need to control for… you get the point. Exactly. And most companies and factories in the west have already optimized for all these factors to get maximum output on a 5 day work week. Moving to a 4 day workweek would be an automatic production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness compared top those still on 5. What you're talking about, companies who can lower working hours without loosing productivity and competitiveness are very few and far between, usually world champions who have a captive market to themselves like Nvidia, ASML, Airbus, high end service jobs, etc, but that's only a microscopic share of the total amount of players on the market. The rest are firing on all cylinders trying to overtake or catch up to those established market players, and if you ever worked at a startup, it usually means longer hours, not fewer. >This is a BS way to think about an economic model. What's the better way? If all companies could get the same levels of productivity form 4 days a weeks from 5 why haven't they done that already?
  - CraigJPerry 3y ago
    >> have already optimized for all these factors Factories and companies start and die all the time. The idea that some steady state equilibrium exists is only in these BS models. >> production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness Apple is less competitive because it makes less iPhones than Samsung? >> What's the better way? Stop pretending models predict reality perfectly.
jedberg 3y ago
> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week, When was the last time you saw a widget factory running 8 hours a day 5 days a week? Factories already run 24/7/365. They hire enough workers for their own economics to make sense (either enough so they all work no more than 40 a week or they just pay a bunch of overtime). If a 4 day workweek became standard it would just mean hiring more people or giving more overtime, since it's not the people that need to be optimized in that equation. But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week. But then why hasn't it become the norm already and even in some cases, like in Asia, people are forced to stay in the office way more hours than 40? If I take that research and show it to my boss saying I should work 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay, he'll most likely laugh in my face and tell me to go back to work. Clearly the vast majority of companies don't believe the same research, otherwise we'd be working 32 hours/week a long time ago.
  - jedberg 3y ago
    For the same reason companies are forcing return to office -- control. They like to see their people working, it makes them feel like better managers.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      I don't buy this. I think my manager would also like to work just 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay. So weh do we stop blaming them?
      - bobthepanda 3y ago

bombcar 3y ago

It would be decently hard to find an argument against the 4 day workweek that would not ALSO apply to the 5 day workweek (compared to 6) - perhaps the only real one is "it's what everyone does".

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
But then why work 4 day/week and not 3, when 4 days/week becomes the new normal that burns people out? And then why not work 2 days instead of 3? And so on. How do we decide which model is the sustainable one?
- ssklash 3y ago
  Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible? Infinite growth in a finite world just makes us all work harder than necessary, and instead of using productivity and efficiency gains to benefit people/workers, they just go to pad some company's stock price.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Shouldn't the goal be to work as little as possible? It's my goal indeed, but not the goal of my country, the economy and the businesses in it who provide the jobs I work for and also lobby for the labor laws my EU country has. Of course doing no work at all while getting paid loads would be the dream, but I wasn't talking about dreams, I was talking about reality. And the reality is way different than what you dream of. How do we make less working days a reality for everyone, instead of just ~60 companies form the UK?
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Too bad the "government goal of X% employment (whatever that is)" couldn't be met by tuning the workweek up and down instead of futzing with interest percentages.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
        So why haven't they done it? Seems like a good way to get votes. "If you vote for me you'll only work 4 days/week."
        cellu 3y ago
        Labour tried in the UK and nobody voted for them lol
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Because at a certain point it will be impossible to argue that "Knowledge workers can get as much done in X-1 days as in X days" because it's trivially untrue. The problem is that the brain is a muscle and gets really really tired solving knowledge problems all day because it is optimized to avoid doing that at as much as possible because it is energy intensive and the ancient human who solved everything perfectly rationally died of starvation while the one that relied on imperfect heuristics and belief got to eat. Solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 40 hours a week will take a toll on your brain that solving super hard Sudoku puzzles 1 hour a week empirically cannot. >How do we decide which model is the sustainable one? Through the exact science you say you "don't buy" because you seem to believe companies operating in a flawed market are better at finding ground truth than literal science.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >Through the exact science you say you "don't buy" because you seem to believe companies operating in a flawed market are better at finding ground truth than literal science. I'm saying companies believe in science that leads to profit, as the market can stay irrational longer than companies can stay solvent. Same how science showed switching to EUV lithography is better than sticking to DUV and then all companies adopted that, if science would also show workers working 32h per week results in more profit for them than 40h, then they would all switch in a heart beat to capture all that money left on the table by their competitors still stuck in their ancient 40h workweek. But that hasn't happened.
    - bombcar 3y ago
      Companies (currently) compete by offering more money - if the pool of applicants dried up enough, perhaps they'd begin competing by offering more time. The problem is if they pay you $x per year, they don't care how many hours you work, as long as the job gets done. So something that makes their life a bit more annoying (no replies on Friday) but makes your life amazingly better won't get done.
      - FirmwareBurner 3y ago

toomuchtodo 3y ago

I agree! But workers can organize today while moving forward improvement with each election result (which will take time; for example, 1.8M voters over the age of 55 die every year, 4M young folks age into voting ability at 18 in the US). Luckily, the entire world is getting old fast [1] [2] [3], which means there is a shrinking population of total workers; makes it more difficult to have workers compete against each other race to the bottom style. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/ageing-global-population/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/02/ageing-global-populat... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_China [3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8505790/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8505790/

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore less demands for goods and sdervices? People keep saying how the declining demographics will mean the workers have more leverage but when will that come? As currently I'm struggling to find a job and a recruiter who rejected me just told me they have huge supply of "strong candidates" and they don't need to compromise anymore on offering WFH or accepting only English speaking candidates. Maybe by the time I retire I can see that leverage?
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  > Won't less workers also mean less consumers therefore less demands for goods and sdervices? Longer convo for another thread, but TLDR yes, "structural decline." Trajectory is a function of how fast folks age out of the working population (retire or death), because cohorts coming up behind them keep shrinking. EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >EDIT: Put some contact info in your profile. For what?
  - sokoloff 3y ago

red_admiral 3y ago

We went from "six days thou shalt labour" to the 5-day week for a number of reasons. Unions were one reason, Henry Ford was another [1][2]. His original argument was that if we give workers an extra day of leisure time, there'll be more demand for leisure products to consume - like, you know, Model T cars. Then, Ford noticed that his new 5-day workers were so much more productive per hour than before, that it more than made up the difference for the extra hours not worked. So I'd have two criticisms of your "X-20%" figure. The first is that just because individual workers are only in 4 days a week, doesn't have to mean the factory only operates 4 days a week; indeed a lot of steel factories do some kind of shift work anyway because firing up a furnace from cold is hugely inefficient. Sure, that means more heads total and so more HR expenses than if everyone worked 5 days, but I don't think it adds up to the 20% you quoted. Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get this way might be enough to more than offset the losses, and even increase your profits. [1] https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/stories/history-five-day-work-week https://www.morningbrew.com/sidekick/stories/history-five-da... [2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/american-workweek-history-explained https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/american-... (But note, the claim that moving to a 5-day week was a pay cut needs some context. The 5-day week started in 1926. But in 1914, Ford already doubled his workers' wages from $2.50/day (which was already not bad by the standards of the time) to $5/day, almost unheard of at the time - though initially with strings attached [3] which were later removed. So working 5 days a week at Ford's factory could well have still brought in more net pay a week than 6 days a week at a competitor in 1926. [3] https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5-per-day-wage-this-day-in-history https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/henry-ford-implements-5...

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Secondly, as in Ford's case, the extra productivity you get this way might be enough to more than offset the losses, and even increase your profits. Henry Ford's revenue boost firstly came from his improvements to automation and innovative highly optimized production line assembly processes, not because le let his workers work 5 days a week instead of 6. It was those innovations that allowed him to reduce the numbers of worker hours needed while get same productivity levels or higher, not vice versa as they didn't just magically come from working his workers less but from innovations to production lines efficiency. Workers working less was a consequence of that, not the cause.

CraigJPerry 3y ago

>> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another X -20% because they work only 4 days per week The number of widgets produced and the price asked for them is not a function of workdays. You’d need to control for quality of widget produced - and since buyers are human that may mean perceived quality rather than some absolute assessment of quality. You’d need to control for location & distance to market/customer for each widget produced. You’d need to control for efficiency of production process. You’d need to control for… you get the point. The only possible way your idea could stand would be if all else was held equal - and that’s simply not possible outside of horse shit models. Models can be useful, but not like this. This is a BS way to think about an economic model.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>You’d need to control for… you get the point. Exactly. And most companies and factories in the west have already optimized for all these factors to get maximum output on a 5 day work week. Moving to a 4 day workweek would be an automatic production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness compared top those still on 5. What you're talking about, companies who can lower working hours without loosing productivity and competitiveness are very few and far between, usually world champions who have a captive market to themselves like Nvidia, ASML, Airbus, high end service jobs, etc, but that's only a microscopic share of the total amount of players on the market. The rest are firing on all cylinders trying to overtake or catch up to those established market players, and if you ever worked at a startup, it usually means longer hours, not fewer. >This is a BS way to think about an economic model. What's the better way? If all companies could get the same levels of productivity form 4 days a weeks from 5 why haven't they done that already?
- CraigJPerry 3y ago
  >> have already optimized for all these factors Factories and companies start and die all the time. The idea that some steady state equilibrium exists is only in these BS models. >> production loss and therefore a loss on economic competitiveness Apple is less competitive because it makes less iPhones than Samsung? >> What's the better way? Stop pretending models predict reality perfectly.

jedberg 3y ago

> And if one factory can churn out X steel widgets and another one only X -20% because they work only 4 days per week, When was the last time you saw a widget factory running 8 hours a day 5 days a week? Factories already run 24/7/365. They hire enough workers for their own economics to make sense (either enough so they all work no more than 40 a week or they just pay a bunch of overtime). If a 4 day workweek became standard it would just mean hiring more people or giving more overtime, since it's not the people that need to be optimized in that equation. But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>But for knowledge work it makes a ton of sense. It's been repeatedly shown that knowledge workers are equally if not more productive at 32 hours a week vs 40 hours a week. But then why hasn't it become the norm already and even in some cases, like in Asia, people are forced to stay in the office way more hours than 40? If I take that research and show it to my boss saying I should work 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay, he'll most likely laugh in my face and tell me to go back to work. Clearly the vast majority of companies don't believe the same research, otherwise we'd be working 32 hours/week a long time ago.
- jedberg 3y ago
  For the same reason companies are forcing return to office -- control. They like to see their people working, it makes them feel like better managers.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    I don't buy this. I think my manager would also like to work just 32 hours/week instead of 40 for the same pay. So weh do we stop blaming them?
    - bobthepanda 3y ago