141–150 of 253 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, it's not speculation to compare Britain to Denmark, which have comparable living standards, levels of technology, &c but different attitudes to the working week. No-one in Denmark/Germany is a slacker, btw. They're just really productive when they're actually at work.
Minor quibble, but the Dutch live in The Netherlands. The inhabitants of Denmark are called Danes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 true. What about education?
Over the years, the federal government has added more jobs to the exempt employee list. This means we get things like fast food store managers making $26K/yr putting in 60 hour weeks. There has been a push to change the minimum salary to $50K/yr for exempt employees, but employers have successfully delayed the implementation of this till late 2016.
Ideally, the US needs to rewrite the Fair Labour Standards Act to be more in line with the EU working time directive which limits the working time to an average of 48 hours over a period of several weeks. This allows overtime to be used in bursts, but not chronically.
I worked at 50% capacity for some years. It was just great until I chose to want more money for the time being and returned to 70% capacity. That was just great, too, until I realized that I was as productive as a full-time guy without the full-time pay so I eventually went back full-time but trying to keep my output roughly on the same level as I had been getting good reviews all the time. However, last year I got t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/ .
> Look at seatbelt use: decades of public awareness campaigns did nothing, but once it became a legal requirement people switched. That's not true. http://web.stanford.edu/~leinav/pubs/RESTAT2003.pdf Page 835. Total average of seatbelt usage, before law: 31%, after law: 48%, in 1998: 65%.
This is one of those sneaky tricks advocates for government intervention use (or fall victim to). To prove the efficacy of OSHA, for example, proponents will show a chart of workplace fatalities or accidents where there are a few or only one data points before the law and then show some spectacular trend that follows after the law was passed. In reality when you go back many more years it is clear the law had little to do with the trend as workplace safety had been increasing for years prior to the law.
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 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 lever that is used in society today is desperation as opposed to higher pay per hr in the "Looking Backward" case. The sanitation worker doesn't enjoy their work and no amount of lower hours may compel them to be scarred by the experience. On the other hand desperation and hunger forces them to take what ever job they could salvage. Most of them would would get used to it while some would work their way out.
That working fewer hours ==> increased productivity is also a mathematical tautology. Productivity being a function of output and hours, with output generally being somewhat sticky as hours change.
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.
I did the same for several years at my last job (although with Friday off so I had long weekends). It was great and I'd encourage anyone to try it if they can. I definitely felt like it made me more productive per hour worked. A shorter week added a little bit of time pressure that helped me stay focused, and I'd often finish something in four days that might otherwise have stretched to five. Total output was probabl…
I worked at 50% capacity for some years. It was just great until I chose to want more money for the time being and returned to 70% capacity. That was just great, too, until I realized that I was as productive as a full-time guy without the full-time pay so I eventually went back full-time but trying to keep my output roughly on the same level as I had been getting good reviews all the time. However, last year I got t…