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Belgium approves four-day week

euronews.com

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Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#31

Post by aaomidi »

krickkrack wrote: post #21
jd115 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.

Wow... So like magic? Why aren't all successful businesses already doing this if they can get more productivity for less time?

The more interesting thing is that, if working 50 hour work weeks was the norm - how would the capitalist class take it to us suggesting its 40 hours?

40 hours isn't some magical "right" number. It was something that was decided before computers, Internet, global fast communication, etc etc etc.

I think its beyond late for us to reconsider those hours and decrease them.

To answer your question directly: Why would they change what's been "working" for them for decades? The only way we can see big companies change this is if a startup gets really successful and just has this as the norm. That'd create market pressure for change.

Where that market pressure doesn't exist, regulations can play the same role.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#33

Post by ben_w »

krickkrack wrote: post #21
jd115 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.

Wow... So like magic? Why aren't all successful businesses already doing this if they can get more productivity for less time?

The “why” is groupthink, at least if the proponents’ claims are correct.

For the “how”, from l what I’ve been hearing, actual productivity follows a curve analogous to the Laffer curve for taxes, where 40 hours weeks is only the most effective weekly rate for manufacturing jobs in particular, while it’s probably more like 20-30 for intellectually focused work.

I have no idea what the “best” might be for e.g. baristas or bank tellers, where it’s important to have someone physically present even if there’s no actual customer at any given moment.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#35

Post by ATsch »

aaomidi wrote: post #31
krickkrack wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow... So like magic? Why aren't all successful businesses already doing this if they can get more productivity for less time?

The more interesting thing is that, if working 50 hour work weeks was the norm - how would the capitalist class take it to us suggesting its 40 hours? 40 hours isn't some magical "right" number. It was something that was decided before computers, Internet, global fast communication, etc etc etc. I think its beyond late for us to reconsider those hours and decrease them. To answer your question directly: Why would the…

It wasn't even really decided. Like most current worker protections, it was arrived at through struggle between industralists and the then still powerful labor unions.

They won the 12 hour workday, then the 10 hour workday, then the 8 hour work day and that's when the unions were defanged.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#36

Post by bee_rider »

krickkrack wrote: post #21
jd115 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.

Wow... So like magic? Why aren't all successful businesses already doing this if they can get more productivity for less time?

If the value of employees scaled linearly with time, and you can employ people profitably, why wouldn't you employ an infinite number of people and make an infinite amount of money?

Clearly some tasks are more like an endless thing that can be mined at, while others are more like you are paying for the availability of some expert. Since people do a combination of both types, the proper compensation for 80% of time should be somewhere between 80% and 100%, depending on the weight.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#37

Post by aaomidi »

ATsch wrote: post #35
aaomidi wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more interesting thing is that, if working 50 hour work weeks was the norm - how would the capitalist class take it to us suggesting its 40 hours? 40 hours isn't some magical "right" number. It was something that was decided before computers, Internet, global fast communication, etc etc etc. I think its beyond late for us to reconsider those hours and decrease them. To answer your question directly: Why would the…

It wasn't even really decided. Like most current worker protections, it was arrived at through struggle between industralists and the then still powerful labor unions. They won the 12 hour workday, then the 10 hour workday, then the 8 hour work day and that's when the unions were defanged.

Yep! Exactly.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#38

Post by krickkrack »

thesuitonym wrote: post #28
IshKebab wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing". That's not remotely true. There's a real stigma about part-time work and most employers would just say NEXT! if you said "please can I work 4 days a week for 80% pay?".

Yes, but the person you're replying to is talking to an employer who wishes they could hire someone to work 80% time for 80% pay, but somehow isn't able to do that (Hint: It's because they don't really want to)

Employees can and do work part-time. What a silly 'diss' lol.

Re: Belgium approves four-day week

#40

Post by hatchnyc »

RamblingCTO wrote: post #5
hatchnyc wrote: post #3

It seems that with these types of changes, I mean with more and more of the workforce working on schedules that don’t overlap, it is going to become more and more important for business software to run autonomously without anyone there to babysit it, but it seems to me we have been moving in precisely the opposite direction for some time now. Specifically “doing agile” seems to encourage this, I always see lots of su…

How on earth is this related to "agile" software/product development? > I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster That's bad management and has nothing to do with agile. Reserve time for bug fixes (or have fire fighting capabilities) and refactoring, include time for tech tickets. ALWAYS. Plan workload jointly with developers, talk to them regularly. It's…

Right, nobody who has a bad experience with agile is doing it right. I am very familiar with this line of argument.

Fact remains though that back when everything was waterfall (proudly) and we shipped physical media to clients, when a bug often meant flying a support engineer out to the customer’s office, software was generally delivered more completed and vetted, and the QA group wasn’t allowed to report to the same org as developers because it was considered a conflict of interest. Now some software companies don’t even have a QA organization, we are inventing new organizational and technical structures to ensure that the developers are perpetually on call to resolve issues, and there is definitely a school of thought that says delivery of a complete product is an anti-pattern because after all every feature is just an experiment that you are testing on your users. But whatever, two different times, two different needs, two different practices, and to my point now we seem to be entering a new post-COVID era where just as waterfall doesn’t scale to a continuous delivery paradigm, “you build it, you run it” as practiced today is going to struggle with an “always on” business which has no “after hours” due to more flexible working schedules.

Are there companies today that run true 24/7? Sure, plenty, but they tend to be larger and have the staff to cover this. A great deal of business software today is still very fragile operationally and has deployment, management, and maintenance tied to the 9-5, M-F business schedule. I think it is going to have to evolve.

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