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Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

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Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#431

Post by varjag »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #401
varjag wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not just that. The minute we got off the plane in Tokyo we were met by a greeter pointing people to the escalator. Not that you could miss it, that was the only exit. In the city you could see people guarding potholes. Bus stations (not particularly busy) would have a couple men at each station that would help arrange the passenger luggage: something usually helped by the driver in the West. Once we took a ni…

Why is it unsustainable? The money they take home gets spent thus supporting other people.

The overhead of employing properly compensated people instead of signage and traffic cones is fairly high, while the work they do is not necessary in any meaningful sense. Which is moot anyway as apparently these folks are paid a pittance.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#432

Post by handrous »

gjhh244 wrote: post #370
varjag wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not just that. The minute we got off the plane in Tokyo we were met by a greeter pointing people to the escalator. Not that you could miss it, that was the only exit. In the city you could see people guarding potholes. Bus stations (not particularly busy) would have a couple men at each station that would help arrange the passenger luggage: something usually helped by the driver in the West. Once we took a ni…

The alternative is to pay people for doing nothing, like many EU countries do. In the end it's not cheaper.

The US provides EU-level social safety net benefits (healthcare, housing) to the lower classes—via employment in the military, which is in part a stealth jobs program that both major political parties support paying for.

We provide a jobs program for white-collar folks through our excessively-large and exceptionally expensive healthcare system. We pay for whole categories of jobs that don't need to exist and are only adding costs. A double-digit percentage of our healthcare costs are a white-collar jobs program paying people to do nothing useful whatsoever, and we spend a lot on healthcare so even 10% makes it a fairly big program.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#433

Post by varjag »

tristor wrote: post #430
varjag wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called welfare, which has an advantage of not masking unemployment. (but to be fair am unsure if people doing traffic cone jobs in Japan are considered employed) Anyhow my point is it has little to do with system redundancy.

Welfare / UBI ignores that one of the realities of the human condition is that we are social creatures that have a desire for purpose and utility to those around us, and having that purposes in a society that recognizes us helps give us dignity and a place in society. It's not important that all jobs are high value, it is important that we as a society have a way to create and recognize purpose for individuals to sup…

Standing there in place of a traffic cone is not much of a dignity IMO, but it certainly could be cultural.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#434

Post by lumost »

onion2k wrote: post #213

I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that's missing something obvious - the 4 day week would apply to everyone. In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers…

This is also a curious method for opening more employment and reducing potential income inequality. If a factory needs to produce X things, and each worker produces Y things per hour you will always need X/Y working hours. If workers reduce working hours by 20% then you'll need to hire 20% more workers or improve Y (productivity) by 20%.

If the majority of the economy follows a linear production curve in hours worked, then this opens many jobs. Not a bad deal for a mature economy like JP, but will be interesting to see what un-forseen dynamics emerge.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#435

Post by Noos »

nirui wrote: post #374
onion2k wrote: post #213

I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that's missing something obvious - the 4 day week would apply to everyone. In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers…

> Retail workers, factory workers, people who fill in the holes in roads, telephone support people, etc aren't contending with pointless meetings and busy work though. They can't do 40 hours of work in 32 hours by removing some of the hours they're not really working. What they do doesn't compress like that. It depends. In China, the tech companies are testing AI telephone support. My banks uses it, JD.com uses it, C…

That doesn't change the principle though; the actual workers need to do 40 hours or even more; it just means there are less of them.

And really, people need to be wary with automation. What people don't realize is that relying on it utterly paralyzes you when it goes down, because its a higher order fault than most staff need to handle.

If the AI telephone support breaks during an update, you've just sidelined your entire operation. If you only have a few checkout employees, and your POS service needs to connect to the internet, and it goes down, you have virtually no one to reply to it.

By reducing headcount you really run the risk of what were tolerant faults becoming critical. My own job has been running on a skeleton crew, and thank god one of us hasn't become sick or left yet. Eventually relying on automation and minimum staffing may bite you hard. A lot of retail stores would be up the creek if the store manager up and quit or was sick for multiple weeks.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#436

Post by s1artibartfast »

MattGaiser wrote: post #60

Tangential, but how many of us need a dedicated work time period at all? I have a 15 minute standup every day, an hour long 1 on 1 once every two weeks, and the occasional meeting where I am genuinely needed and maybe 3 hours talking to another developer. I would love to convert my job into a purely objectives driven thing with the only requirement being that I am online/in the office for those specific 5 or so hours…

On the other hand, I have 4-5 hours of meetings a day, often in scarce overlap hours between timezones. Having to take 10 different random schedules into account would be hell.

Sure, people could just work flexibly to accommodate the necessary meetings, but I'm my experience, that just leads to people being on call for 10-12 hours a day with no regular schedule.

In every company I have been part of, workers who didn't need dedicated work times simply didn't keep them. It is only becomes an issue if it doesn't work.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#437

Post by handrous »

tristor wrote: post #430
varjag wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's called welfare, which has an advantage of not masking unemployment. (but to be fair am unsure if people doing traffic cone jobs in Japan are considered employed) Anyhow my point is it has little to do with system redundancy.

Welfare / UBI ignores that one of the realities of the human condition is that we are social creatures that have a desire for purpose and utility to those around us, and having that purposes in a society that recognizes us helps give us dignity and a place in society. It's not important that all jobs are high value, it is important that we as a society have a way to create and recognize purpose for individuals to sup…

This is why I support forcing the idle rich to work retail or construction. Otherwise their mental well-being will be at risk.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#438

Post by Iv »

franciscop wrote: post #235
onion2k wrote: post #213

I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that's missing something obvious - the 4 day week would apply to everyone. In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers…

I fully agree with your comment overall, but as someone who lives in Japan I'd like to point out that specifically "people who fill in the holes in roads" is a running joke in Japan since small street constructions always seem way over-staffed. It's amazing because they do finish a lot faster than in western countries, but you can definitely remove 20% of the people in street-level construction and would see little d…

Living in Japan also, the rumor I heard was that these additional workers actually work as a shadow force for political parties during elections.

To circumvent strict donation laws, the idea is that these people will be "lended" as administrative staff and door-knockers during elections, in exchange of juicy contracts.

And let's be real, that linked in [2] does not point to a job that requires automation, a blinking panel is enough. Often I have seen the sad spectacle of one mannequin handling a signal on the end and a human on the other end. It is totally a bullshit job.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#440

Post by mywittyname »

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #356
adamlett wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it oversimplifying it to suggest that all “the market” rewards is low prices? Doesn’t the market also sometimes reward quality and timeliness?

Companies like Action, IKEA and Amazon thrive on low prices and efficiency.

Manufacturing and construction are pretty different segments. When manufacturing, it's very easy to optimize for cost because you know exactly how much material is required and how much time, probably to the second, it takes to process such material into the final form. Even shipping prices are pretty well known and can be optimized for through effective packaging.

Construction isn't like that. Companies aren't cranking out a million buildings a day, so they can't remove every ounce of unnecessary materials; they don't control the environment, making delays a fact of life; they don't control all of the companies and people involved; etc. There's just so much unknown when it comes to construction. Like software, it can be difficult to figure out how much padding to put into estimates. It's a good bit easier when it comes to things like roads, but companies still need to contend with unexpected delays a lot.

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