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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
>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.
I'm sure your manager does. They aren't the ones demanding 40 hours and return to office.
It's the C-suite that is doing it. The C-Suite got where they are because they are extroverts who excel at in person interactions. They can't use that skill unless you're there in front of them. They also came up in a world where everyone worked in an office 40 hours a week. And since they are in charge, they get to choose the rules of engagement, and are seemingly choosing to ignore productivity studies that show their decisions don't make sense.
Eventually they will be eclipsed by C-Suites that follow the science as they will get out-competed. But it will take decades.
>and are seemingly choosing to ignore productivity studies that show their decisions don't make sense.
I also don't buy this. Companies are all profit oriented and don't like leaving money on the table if research shows there is left over money on the table.
They can't monetize control but they can monetize money. If research would show they would make more profits using AWS instead of Azure(example pulled out of my ass for simplicity), they would immediately switch to it.
So if research would be universal and clear cut that working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40 hours, then at least a significant proportion of companies would be using this new way of work as leverage to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them at profits and market share, and then that would become the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since that's how competition in capitalism works.
"Any one of the three economic factors described above (real estate, retention and recruitment), by itself, could justify the alleged loss in productivity. When you consider all three, it is extremely hard to imagine any organization for which the losses resulting from a strict RTO policy would be offset by a possible increase in worker productivity. As a further consideration, a strict RTO policy will also disproportionally impact certain traditionally disadvantaged groups, leading to further decreases in organizational diversity.":
You said you didn’t believe C-suites were ignoring things that could make them more money. I showed you a bunch of cases where C-suites are hurting themselves by ignoring data.
Except the money they currently make, or not make, is directly related to the stock market's performance or lack thereof due to the zero interest days being over, not to that of WFH or RTO employees.
Well, I suspect that--based on what I've seen from talking to people--remote makes it easier to do no-meeting, maybe do some light cleanup Fridays. So there's some relationship probably.
Highly factualized comment. I believe the mental model in question is not yet flexible enough to update based on the data, and there is an expectation of logic from fancy emotional monkeys ("executive leadership") grounded in status, control, and work as identity.
> So if research would be universal and clear cut that working 32 hours outcompetes those companies working 40 hours, then at least a significant proportion of companies would be using this new way of work as leverage to outcompete their competitors working 40 and beat them at profits and market share, and then that would become the new norm as it's the proven winning strategy, since that's how competition in capitalism works.
Your reply seems to assume that companies are efficient. Which is not the case, and the larger the company, the lower internal s/n ratio and, arguably, the larger percent of wastage.
Also, "immediately" switching across cloud vendors is not even a pipe dream, it's an impossibility and the very act of switching is incredibly expensive both short and long term (unless your cloud usage is one VM or so). So there's no simplicity in that example, it's a counter-example.
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".
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?
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.
>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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
>Companies (currently) compete by offering more money - if the pool of applicants dried up enough, perhaps they'd begin competing by offering more time.
Because more money is what most candidates prioritize when job hopping, because when buying a house they can pay it with that money but can't pay it with more time off.
The only people who prioritize less hours for less money are
those who are already fortunate enough to have enough money but those can always choose to work less hours for proportionately less pay.
Like it or not, there are so many people in this rat race trying to build wealth that 40h and more money is preferable to 32h and less money. That's why the 40h sticks and the negotiation is done on money.
>Because more money is what most candidates prioritize when job hopping, because when buying a house they can pay it with that money but can't pay it with more time off.
Although you could argue that's already the case in a lot of Europe vs. parts of the US. Of course, it's an imperfect comparison because of the barriers to moving countries or even acquiring a remote job in a different country.
And money is money, it's a known quantity. Time is more ephemeral and for many "knowledge jobs" people work off the clock anyway; so having every Friday off may sound great but you may be (correctly) afraid it's going to turn into a half-day's work anyway.
And there are things you can do to turn money into time, it's possible but not as easy to go the other way around when you're salaried.
Conversion is difficult without e.g. working at at a company that lets you take a week or two or two of leave a year (or just looking the other way). You can have a side business but that's harder to turn into something that's actually financially competitive with a professional-level salary and isn't ethically questionable.
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.
>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.
> Ernst Abbe, the head of one of the greatest German factories, wrote many years ago that the shortening from nine to eight hours, that is, a cutting-down of more than 10 per cent, did not involve a reduction of the day’s product, but an increase, and that this increase did not result from any supplementary efforts by which the intensity of the work would be reinforced in an unhygienic way. This conviction of Abbe still seems to hold true after millions of experiments over the whole globe.
This was written 1913, about the time when Ford's automation was just getting going - the "many years ago" and the fact that Abbe died 1905, shows his studies were referring to a time before Ford's production lines and efficiency gains.
> That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be relearned each generation. In 1848, the English parliament passed the ten-hours law and total output per-worker, per-day increased. In the 1890s employers experimented widely with the eight hour day and repeatedly found that total output per-worker increased. In the first decades of the 20th century, Frederick W. Taylor, the originator of “scientific management” prescribed reduced work times and attained remarkable increases in per-worker output.
This too is from a pre-Ford time.
So I would reply that while Ford's innovations might have compounded any gains from shorter working hours, such gains have been found in many other places and times. indeed, the IGDA summarises their evidence by saying "five-day weeks of eight-hour days maximize long-term output in every industry that has been studied over the past century".
>> 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.
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?
Complicated. It’s rare for any interesting scenario not to be complicated.
>> how do you describe it
By aiming for honesty and accuracy but with enough humility to realise these absolutes are unachievable in most interesting cases. To make it more concrete in this particular case It means being careful to state assumptions is essential.
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.