Ask HN: Why don't we have 3 day weekends yet?

You could always ask them. That is unless you're not confident they know you work part time ;P

The difficulty of doing that is in a sense what prompted me to respond earlier. For most workers in industries where it is physically possible, it is very difficult to negotiate 80% employment or time flexibility or working from home. Even some skilled workers on HN seem to have trouble with it as they testify to in this very thread, and anglophone coders are the cream of the crop when it comes to negotiating power, so we can only imagine what it's like elsewhere.

The typical modern worker (with some exceptions) has to essentially request the privilege of trading the majority of their useful lifespan towards increasing the wealth of another person or face the prospect of the complete dissolution of their life. By contrast, most employers (though of course not all) who face mouse-jiggling type problems merely have to contend with the loss of some self-actualization and additional wealth as the worse case scenario.

If Oliver Twist sneaks in an extra bite of bread from the coal mill's supply during a 12 hour workday, he is being deceptive to his employer when fulfilling a contract willingly entered into. Of course, comparing an office worker to a Victorian child laborer is ridiculous on the face of it, but only in a quantitative sense. In a qualitative sense, the power balance and the context of the deception means that we can't consider it in a vacuum or in comparison to an ideal world. In other words, if the environment were civil, the worker would be easily able to enter into the mutually beneficial contracts you alluded to, and the need for mouse jiggling would disappear on its own except for all but the most boundary-pushing workers.

In Victorian times, the social norms justified child labor and asked workers to be thankful for their lot. Today, the conditions of workers has improved tremendously, but the norms are still designed (or rather, naturally emerged) towards extracting additional value in favor of the employer. The last 50 years have seen the bulk of productivity gains given to the owners rather than the workers, and wage theft is a huge concern all over the OECD. Hence the OP's Ask HN thread and the feeling of social dissonance regarding the work week.

Even though I do resent spending the majority of my useful lifespan "working", I don't feel like I'm being exploited. Rather, I mostly consider myself lucky and privileged to be able to work from the comfort of my home doing an activity that I mostly enjoy for a decent salary. Sure my company overlords make money from the deal, much more than I make, but they're not villians - they're just people that did better than I did and good for me that their quest for money gave me an opportunity to enrich myself.

The power imbalance and exploitation you refer to applies to people who aren't so lucky and have to do real labor. I don't that's who we're mainly talking about in this thread. Instead, it's the people that are already lucky and privileged that rationalize deception because they think they deserve even more.

I disagree with this. I believe I have a mutual agreement that benefits myself and my employer. If I felt like I could complete my job in 30 hours a week instead of 40, I could have a conversation with my employer and negotiation for a shorter work week. If that didn't work, I could find a part time or flex job.

> a hypothetical worker of the future could very well look at us now rejecting the 4 day workweek the same way we look at our predecessors justifying child labor and black lung

I agree that people will look back and think it absurd that we stuck to a 40 hour work week for so long. Progress should be making our lives easier and demanding less of us but that's not what's happing for most.

The way we make this better, in my opinion, is by being honest about it. If someone fakes it with a mouse jiggler to make it seem like they're working 40 hours when they're not, they're actually helping keep the 40 hour work week alive.

But still, we're talking about people lucky enough to have a fakable job, not people doing real work. None of this applies to the person working the drive thru that can barely make rent on a 40 hour work week and would be underwater if reduced to 30.