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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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
"Many" is fine. The earlier comment implied every single one believed every single job would be more more productive at 32 hours than 40, which seems like a misrepresentation.
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.
> 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.
I also wanted to add that those two things are separate for the purpose of this discussion:
- How people feel (after shorter or longer work periods)
- How productive people are.
From my experience, while doing a more mundane "conveyor belt" type of job I sure would like to have shorter work days too, I'm still able to churn out pretty much consistent quality to the end. That is different from (very design oriented, vs. standard not-much-brain-needed) code writing, where quality of what I produce suffers dramatically and I have to redo everything the next day(s) or get a lot of hard to maintain and/or debug code.
Of course, people may burn out more quickly or have negative health outcomes later, but that still is a different discussion than the one about productivity.
Not to mention, you can't map out "work" as one monolithic activity. Machine learning to delivering pizza.
I also don't think you should conflate society as a whole with an empathy-based irrational class of highly compensated knowledge workers.
If you take pizza delivery for example this is really just an argument about the number of hours per week for mandatory overtime as practically all non-knowledge work is best measured in hours of labor.
Lowering this to 32 hours for pizza delivery is rewarding economies of scale that can better absorb higher labor cost. Rewarding Pizza Hut at the expense of the locally owned pizza place that goes out of business.
Pretty much in line with economist Joseph Schumpeter 100 year old prediction about the end of capitalism in that that our capitalist system will be so successful that it will create a class of people with so much leisure time that this class has nothing much to do other than to try to improve the system and in turn destroys it.
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.
- 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.
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.
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 if true, then the market should resolve this.