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Working fewer hours would make us more productive

theguardian.com

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Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#121

Post by icebraining »

viewer5 wrote: post #118
icebraining wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also laws are the way to prevent a race to the bottom. If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them. Oh, is that why almost everyone earns minimum wage?

That's exactly why. Because minimum wage puts a floor on the 'bottom' that's being raced to. Otherwise, people would be earning considerably less than the current minimum wage, because the 'bottom' would be even lower.

The question was sarcastic (poor form, I know). More than 90% of workers earn above minimum wage, despite this supposedly inevitable race to the bottom.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#122

Post by sheepmullet »

executesorder66 wrote: post #47
throwaway7767 wrote: post #30

I changed my working arrangement to 80% recently, so now I work four 8-hour day weeks. I wholeheartedly recommend it if you can make it work. I have wednesday off, so the week is divided into two-day stretches. Not sure if I'm any more productive (maybe), but I'm a lot happier. I suspect some coworkers are going to follow my lead, now that the precedent has been set.

How did you manage to arrange that? I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that.

> I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that.

Get a 25% raise, and then 6 months to 1 year later drop down to an 80% workload and take the corresponding 20% cut in pay.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#123

Post by btbuildem »

douche wrote: post #65
executesorder66 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you manage to arrange that? I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that.

The better deal would be working four ten-hour days. Particularly if you have a long commute, this is wildly better than five eights. Eight hours isn't really enough time to get anything done, particularly during business hours.

How is that working less?

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#124

Post by lmm »

golergka wrote: post #115
jhall1468 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every full-time job is 40 hours, which is the maximum allowed without having to pay overtime. I think it's fair to assume companies will do anything for increased productivity. That has nothing to do with wages.

Full-time means nothing more than 40-hour week. Your logic is self-referential.

Very few jobs offer 35- or 30-hour weeks (which would still be called full-time). There are part-time jobs that have much shorter hours, or often no contractual hours, but they're a different thing.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#125

Post by logfromblammo »

sdfin wrote: post #87
rodionos wrote: post #76

I signed up for a gym that apparently went on an initiative to improve its employee culture. The gym is really nice, not as good as Equinox in Palo Alto, but close enough. So one of the initiatives was to close the gym during holiday seasons so that staff could enjoy vacations schedules just like everyone else. Lo and behold, they closed the gym between December 20 and January 5th. Just when I was planning to catch u…

Working fewer hours != A world that's functioning 80% of time

If you need your business to be open for the same amount of time, reducing maximum hours to 3/4 means increasing worker count to 4/3.

Judging by the abysmal labor participation rate and unemployment stats in the US, this is easily done. Per-worker overhead costs would force an increase in the labor budget for most companies, though.

As many businesses have been ruthlessly slashing that budget category for a while, that is likely to prompt a lot of bitching and moaning from company management--even from businesses that depend on consumers being able to afford their products.

It's just a scheduling problem. If a business elects to be open longer than 6 hours per weekday, it will need to have some workers work at different times than others. But I do recall visiting the government license office once on my lunch break, only to discover that most of the workers there were also out to lunch, and took more time out of the middle of the day than I wanted to.

So, anecdotally, whether or not the world functions when you need it to function depends more on how much the business cares about serving its customers than the number of hours its workers are on-site every day.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#126

Post by justncase80 »

I recently read an interesting book called Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy. It was written in 1887 but could have been written yesterday.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Looking_Backward

It was basically about a guy who accidentally travels forward in time (sort of like idiocracy) except he finds himself in an American Socialist Utopia. It was a really good book in general but there was one idea in particular that the author had, which seems pertinent here.

Essentially in this utopia everyone gets the same pay check and the opportunity to work. Instead of getting paid more money for a demanding job you get "paid" in less hours. Meaning, all jobs start out at, say 40 hours per week. A job that doesn't get any applicants would decrease the number of hours it demands and correspondingly, the number of open positions would increase. Eventually an unappealing job would decline to a number of hours where someone would be willing to do it.

For example, that coal mining job that nobody wants to do? Well it pays the same as every other job but you only need to do it for 4 hours a week. You can work more of course if you want but you get the same paycheck. The rest of that time you can do whatever you want, spend time with your family or do art or whatever.

Also, in For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs by Robert A. Heinlein there are some very interesting ideas about American social economics, including a social credit system. Which I believe is a pretty old fashioned idea that we have almost completely forgot about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Us,_The_Living:_A_Comedy_o...

This constant back and forth about work hours and minimum wage and the inexorable pull towards wage slavery makes me think its time to explore some completely lateral options.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#127

Post by logfromblammo »

pc86 wrote: post #96
joshuacc wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have done this before, but arranged my days off to be alternating Mondays and Fridays so that every two weeks I'd get a four day weekend. My bosses were very generous with my schedule. :-)

Honestly this seems like the ideal scenario. Full pay, likely no argument from superiors about the amount of work you'd accomplish, and the ability to take long weekend trips without wasting a day or two of PTO. I only see a few possible downsides: - Someone expecting you to be in the office and you're not, particularly if they're not familiar with your schedule. - For developers the same issues with 60+ work weeks o…

Working 3 10-hour days during a week and 6 5-hour days during a week seems equally doable, but I think I would get more complex, brainy problems solved with the latter, and more simpleminded grunt work done with the former.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#128

Post by orangecat »

lmm wrote: post #22
golergka wrote: post #7

I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law? I think that this can be achieved with a softer approach. Imagine that when you sign up for a job, you select how many days per week do you want to work, from 3 to 6, with proportionate wage scale. That you can select what hours do you want to work. That it's easy to change this arrangement while you're…

The only way to change culture is through law. Look at seatbelt use: decades of public awareness campaigns did nothing, but once it became a legal requirement people switched. Also laws are the way to prevent a race to the bottom. If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them. Compare OHSA, see http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ .

The only way to change culture is through law.

Not at all. For gay marriage or pot legalization, large shifts in public opinion have preceded changes to laws.

If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them.

The Moloch post is excellent, but it doesn't really apply here. Productivity isn't a zero sum game; unless you're in a dysfunctional stack ranking environment like Microsoft used to have, being more productive doesn't hurt your coworkers.

And for tech workers in particular, it's impossible to prevent you from working "off the clock" in your spare time. Yet people generally don't, probably because as others have noted just adding hours doesn't actually make you more productive.

Re: Working fewer hours would make us more productive

#130

Post by conradfr »

douche wrote: post #65
executesorder66 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you manage to arrange that? I can't imagine going to my boss and proposing I spend 20% less time working for the same amount of pay, and getting approval for that.

The better deal would be working four ten-hour days. Particularly if you have a long commute, this is wildly better than five eights. Eight hours isn't really enough time to get anything done, particularly during business hours.

Anecdotal evidence, I used to to that as a CSR at PayPal years ago. After a "normal" day of height hours of calls or emails you had two more hours of emails.

My brain was fried and I was glad when the policy was canceled.

I loved the extra day though (which was Monday or Wednesday) and as a software engineer I would love to pull it off, to rest or work on my own thing, but I would gladly take a pay cut than work 10 hours a day constantly.

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