I work 32 hours per week. Rather, I work 4 days a week. This means I have 50% more free time than I used to. I fill that free time with dates with my wife while my kids are at school, or hiking, or just goofing at home doing whatever I feel like. One day a week is MINE. I cannot understate just how much this has improved my mental health and quality of life. Not to mention, when holidays fall on certain days of the week, I get 4 day weekends which is like a mini vacation. 48 hours is not enough time to fully decompress and feel human again.
I am never going back to 5 days a week, if I can help it.
Still, these numbers all seem arbitrary. More flexible opt-in work arrangements would be nice. My wife is a nurse and she can work "per diem" which is just amazing. She opts-in and chooses her schedule. I think society as a whole would be a bit healthier if that flexibility was extended to more of the population.
I don't think the push-back here is against a 4 day work week, but the idea that wages increase or stay the same as you reduce down to 4 days. I known several people who work 4 days for 80% equivalent. They seem like you who seek a more balanced, family & personal focused lifestyle. This is awesome and I agree with you that flexibility can be a huge competitive differentiator for companies that doesn't need to cost them a lot more money. It's kinda crazy that more don't seek out creative approaches like this.
In my region, where the number of hours worked annually is 1800+ as per OECD, it's quite simply difficult. Employers expect full time availablity and would rather not have anyone fill that role than allow for this.
My friend managed to do it by boiling that frog via taking Friday afternoons off. Everyone was happy with that arrangement, so he started taking entire Fridays off. Then he switched to Mondays.
Meanwhile my SO got a hard "no" on any amount of reduction. She's looking for a part time job, but it's not something employers normally advertise.
It would have to be less than 80% for 4 days due to insurance, administrative, and possibly office space costs. You also know as well that people seeking out these kinds of arrangements will be holding down two jobs instead of one, which cuts down on reliability for both employers.
Of course I like the idea of having more options in the workplace but sometimes the down sides are too obvious to get worked up over it. Be thankful we can work five 8 hour days (or less). We could have the 9 to 9, 6 day a week culture that exists in some places.
When AI people point to new jobs created like the industrial revolution, they are pointing to 9 to 9, 6 days a week of the 1880s industrial revolution era. The people of that era were told reducing to 5, 8 hour days was impossible, the economics wouldn't work, etc. We only arrived at our current number after the workers literally revolted, with much violence on both sides on the way to 'the perfect number' we have today that 'makes the most' sense and that totally can't be changed.
My jobs could never spare for me to take time off, I was too valuable to the company. Yet they also survived and were able to replace me once I left. 'impossible' is mainly 'inconvenient' in company speak.
I'm not saying you should put up with an intolerable vacation situation or anything else. But the simple fact of the matter is that people who work less get less done and therefore should make less. The people calling for higher salaries and much less time spent working are fooling themselves, at best.
The 9/9/6 culture is common in poorer countries and also in very highly paid professions, such as in finance. It's not some 1800s ethos, but something that a lot of people everywhere suffer with today. Some of them don't even view it as suffering. I personally wouldn't like that, but it depends on your stage in life and also your particular interest in the job.
Yes, it's a culture where the people can above can enforce it (poorer countries, people being paid so much that don't feel they can leave the job). Exactly as it was in the 1800s. Same exact 1800s ethos.
We didn't start working with 5 8 hour days from the begging. 5 8 hour days isn't some magical number. It was fought hard for, with business screaming it couldn't be done. With people killed over it. The people that fought and died for that weren't fooling themselves even though many told them they were.
I worked crazy hours when I was young. I'm not some slacker. But saying we somehow settled upon the perfect combination the very first time labor won concessions from business, and also that the human condition can never improve from where it is, it a ridiculous position.
>But saying we somehow settled upon the perfect combination the very first time labor won concessions from business, and also that the human condition can never improve from where it is, it a ridiculous position.
Good thing I never said that. What I said was, if you work less then you should get paid less. On a related note, there's also nothing about any particular job that guarantees a living wage. There are many jobs that can provably not bring in enough profit to justify paying a living wage.
If you demand a 32 hour work week for the same pay as 40 now, while people abroad can work overtime 50-60 hours for a quarter to a tenth of your salary, you're essentially claiming that an hour of your time is 20x more valuable than theirs. You can demand all you want but you ultimately can't make anyone employ you.
Human productivity is not linear - I would not be surprised if 32 hours of work is roughly equivalent to 40 hours of work. In a similar vein, I would imagine 80 hours of work is actually less work than 40 hours, especially if repeated.
So why not cut it down to 1 day per week then? I agree with you in a way that there is a certain amount of diminishment in each additional unit of output, especially if you piss off the workers and make them half ass it. But I think we both know that your objections are ill-founded.
Because it's not linear but there's still an equation. It's not arbitrary. Meaning, 1 day of work is obviously less productive than 4. But 4 might not be less productive than 5.
It's also not about half-assing. If you work someone 80 hours a week, and they work as hard as they possibly can, they will still likely be less productive than if they just worked 40 hours. Because they start making mistakes, which they then have to fix, and make more mistakes while they fix those mistakes...
After a certain point, your productivity might be negative. Meaning, no employee at all might be more productive than an employee working 100 hours a week.
Who's to say that the least productive part would be cut or not? It might be that those useless meetings persist, and the actual work goes down. Certainly spreading the work out so much increases friction when it comes to collaboration. You'll often find yourself waiting at least like 4 days to get questions answered.
By "least productive 20%" I also meant the time during the week when your oomph is gone. IIRC most experiments on shortened workweeks show that motivation and productivity in general go up because workers are less stressed, better rested, happier, etc., and output does not take a big hit.
Of course it might be just an observation effect, but I think that is normally controlled for.
Same. I work 4 days a week, and most weeks I work 32 hours (some weeks I am excited about what I am doing and end up working later than I intended to once or twice). The flexibility is amazing. I have time for personal projects (some of them coding related, but also music or home improvement or really anything I want), I have time to lift every day, I read more than almost anyone I know.
Having that extra day off for Whatever I Want is invaluable, and there's nothing that anyone can offer me that would make me give this up.
Counterpoint: I do work 5 days a week 40 hours remotely. I wake up around 7 or 8. I never set my alarm clock. I hang out with my wife before finally getting up, I roll over, get ready for the day and walk to my home office.
I can walk downstairs to work out during the middle of the day, swim almost all year (Florida), go for a jog of whatever.
On a higher level, working remotely means we can do things like spending a full year flying around the country like we did until September 2023 or going forward spending a couple of months in Costa Rica, Panama during the winter while working.
4-5 days a week doesn’t impinge on my freedom like working in an office would. I “retired my wife” in 2020 when she was 46 8 years into our marriage so she could enjoy her hobbies and passion projects.
I “decompress” between the minute I close my computer and not think about work until the next day and walk to the living room.
> 48 hours is not enough time to fully decompress and feel human again.
When I’m in that situation, I’m not thinking that my weekends are too short, but that my job is too stressful. I either need to change jobs or find peace in my current job.
The free market could do that without unions. Doing so increases the cost of labor in the product as % of the total price.
You're super highly valued employee, your employer will be more than happy to buy your work in packages of 4 days instead of 5 if it suits him and you. Also if this is not suitable for one party of the deal (either employee or employer) both can go and freely trade/buy their labour.
However, generally advocates propose a blanket "mandatory 35 hours week", which have many negtive consequences:
- Why do you need to "enforce" that to other people who can't or wan't earn the same way and are more than happy to work overtime because they need to say earn more to pay medical bills or want to save to buy a house? Isn't that limiting the amount I as a person can sell my own work hours to the business?
- How can the business compete on the local market when other companies aren't forced to do work with the same cost base for the labour component in the final product?
- How can the business compete with the Mexican company across the border who can do it for even cheaper?
Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.
In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him. Societies are much wealthier now, but we shouldn't forget that starvation and poverty are the default state, not the other way around.
> Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.
At first, you seem like a sensible person, but then you seem to be completely ignorant as to what "moral" means.
You can't feed poor people with "morals", you need a productive tax base and good redestribution system to do that.
If you have a farm, you can't kill your chicken to feed the starving neighbour if your own chidren are starving. You need to keep the chicken alive because they will feed you and if they produce enough eggs you can help your neighbour too.
When you overtax your companies you make them uncompetitive and you have less tax to redistribute. It's just simple mathematics, no morals are needed to understand that. No tax = no social safety nets. Tax comes from profit. Profit comes from margin. Margin is destroyed by higher costs. If you increase the cost, you need to close the border so all the companies can share the same cost of labor. You'll squeeze more from the companies and make more social payments but less capital for the companies to invest and hire more people. So you're just making the stuff companies produce more expensive for all. (because you need to close the border to remove outside competition)
It's not rocket science. When societies got rich then they started having social nets, not before.
Where do you think the tax comes from? If there is no profit, there is no business and there is no tax base?
Taxes currently are for both the busness and the employees.
On the producer side:
- business pays tax on sales (or VAT)
- business pays tax on profit left
- business pays tax on each employee in the form of empolyers "contributions" (just another way to tax the work of the empolyees)
- persons pay income taxes and social contributions
- persons (owners) pay divident taxes
On the consumer side
- sales/VAT tax
- import duties on stuff you buy
- various local taxes on property, vehicles and etc
In EU many contries have on the producing side 35-39% and on consuming side around 20% VAT, e.g. the govenment takes about 50% of an average workers pay.
Who pays the worker? The business by making a profit.
A good explanation is both correct and tactful. I'm not sure your comment is either of those things.
I think the root cause is that you are trying to use the one word "profit" to mean different things. Admittedly the word profit is poorly defined (good financial reporting doesn't use it). For example:
> business pays tax on profit left
No. A company's profit is what is left after expenses and taxes (if you disagree with that then I'm unsure what to say). I am not an accountant so I'm not going to try and define earnings for you (gross, net, etcetera). Your sentence is just incorrect: maybe incorrect for the same underlying reason as why I wrote my original comment?
I could dissect many of your other points for being oversimplified or country specific (different juisdictions do things wildly differently). For example VAT/GST systems and US sales taxes have very little commonality (think where the money goes and what can be claimed).
> Who pays the worker? The business by making a profit.
Obviously incorrect, since a company can pay their workers and make a loss. Losses can go on for a long time (some people have different incentives than company dividends).
I think overall you are trying to say that businesses need profits (that's almost a tautology) and that governments need businesses. That makes sense.
Rationally you might think that people should therefore want profitable businesses. Unfortunately, voters and governments don't actually have to make economic sense over periods of many years.
I suggest doing some reading about labor movements, the Gilded Age, or about current issues - wealth inequality, housing costs, environmental impact, healthcare costs, enshittification.
The free market has failed miserably across multiple dimensions - even Trump has the government owning companies now (Intel). The “free market” has been a failed idea for a long time.
> In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him.
We have archeological evidence that contradicts this directly! What are you even talking about?
This isn’t a good way to structure a society, but your whole point about mixing morality with capitalism is perhaps the worst one.
If you can’t look at the damage to people (and the environment) under our current system and point out how it is broadly immoral, I would suggest taking a closer look at the very least.
I've read a lot and I have been in the buisness since I was 21 years old, almost homeless student in a big city that had to postpone my degree to survive so I've had years to think from the both sides of the "inequality" divide and I got a degree in economics.
You assume that if there is a price on it than there is a free market for it. It's not true at all...
Compare the freedom of the markets that are inefficient in your example:
- housing: one of the most regulated and non-transparent markets with zoning laws and NIMBYism blocking new supply to the market
- healthcare: even more regulated market for practitioners (licence to heal), medical supplies (licences for medicines) and a brocken system that incumbents can't enter (check cost+drugs Mark Cuban's post about how shitty the system is and how far away from normal free market)
- enivronmental impact: that's what the taxes are for and to have a good tax base you tax the polutants, but it's not "the market" it's "the people who consume" in any market free or not you'll get the resources used. In non-free markets you will just use more resources, because the encumbents will extract +400$ for 8Gb ram upgrade of your macbook pro or 10000 USD for a broken leg, that could've done much more if it wasn't inefficiently extorted.
- enshittification: this happens only in the "ecosystems" with no markets inside.
If you go to the freeer markets you'll see that the prices got down, not up. (check the price of computers, electronics and clothes for example).
There are some areas where the market is not the answer, but there humanity hasn't found a better way to optimize resources and ensure freedom unless the people have the ability to change their goods freely without restriction of the third party.
I am never going back to 5 days a week, if I can help it.
Still, these numbers all seem arbitrary. More flexible opt-in work arrangements would be nice. My wife is a nurse and she can work "per diem" which is just amazing. She opts-in and chooses her schedule. I think society as a whole would be a bit healthier if that flexibility was extended to more of the population.