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A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

nytimes.com

101–110 of 165 posts

Re: A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

#101
post #27

If you’re working 20% less than your competitor, you will fall behind. There’s no amount of mental gymnastics one can do to reconcile that fact. And if true, then the market should resolve this.

If your output scales linearly with your input, and you're working less than your competitor, you will fall behind. If the gradient of your input-to-output curve becomes negative and stays negative, and you're working less than your competitor, then your competitor will fall behind if they're working sufficiently far past the point of negative returns. I'm pretty sure the gradient of all input-to-output curves become…

> I'm pretty sure the gradient of all input-to-output curves becomes negative at some point, and don't see any reason why that point should be exactly 40 hours a week

Tbf, it's the 4 day workweek advocates explicitly making the claim that everyone's output curves become negative on the fifth day such that 32hr output ~= 40 hrs output.

Legal restrictions on working hours weren't put in place with the assumption that firms no longer being able to demand 80 hours from their employees couldn't possibly lose any output as a result. That was done because governments decided 80 hour weeks were unreasonable.

Re: A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

#102
post #3

Some time last year I stopped working Mondays. I’m a contractor and I know my boss well, so I just said that I didn’t want to work Mondays any more. The difference is remarkable. You go from spending three quarters of your days at work to just over half. The weekend is actually relaxing. You can do chores, relax, and really unwind before the work week starts again. We use Mondays to work on our side projects. You can…

I personally find my weekends a bit exhausting because of my 5 year old, and get to relax at just doing my professional job on Monday when he is back to school. I fear that 3 day weekends every week (since we shouldn’t leave day care workers and teachers out of this) would be the end of me. I’m sure my perspective will change after we are out of the needy kid stage, but even before my son was born, I liked working (I…

It's possible to have daycare/school workers working 4 day weeks but still have daycare/school be open 5 days a week

Re: A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

#103

I love a three-day weekend as much as the next guy, but I don't understand how people are pushing for shorter workweeks, and even for universal basic income, meanwhile all the Starbucks near me close at 7pm because they're short-staffed. And restaurants and grocery stores and everywhere you look, there's still a labor shortage.

There's not a labor shortage there's a wage shortage, because wages are not and have not been keeping up with inflation for most jobs since at least 2008 if not earlier

Re: A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of people, me included, (males and/or high performance in particular) care more about things than people and will find extremely tiring to talk to people or take care or their kids. Coding doesn't tire me, dealing with kids does. There are people who have the opposite experience and people who feel ok with both. This idea that parents should uniquely and equally be caretaker for their kids is absolutely agains…

It seems to me like you actually don't want to be a parent?

To me it seems he doesn't like spending time with toddlers. It's a big jump from here to conclude that he doesn't want to be a parent. Toddlerhood is just a temporary state.

Re: A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

#105
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see a lot of people go for Monday or Friday when going down to 4 days a week. There's definitely some advantages to that, however as an alternative suggestion I prefer Wednesdays off. I find even in the best jobs, there's a general level of stress that builds up at work over consecutive days. There's a great feeling being a bit stressed on Tuesday and thinking "ah it's ok I've got tomorrow off". It's like that "Fri…

Shops in the UK used to have a half day on Wednesdays.

I know some GP practices that still do this (quite astounding given the current issues in the NHS).

Re: A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

#106

Also a lot of jobs have enough flex hours and vacation that it's close enough to 4 days/week anyway. The downside of shorter workweeks is it may cause a loss of productivity at the endpoints of the week. For example, there is often a marked slowdown on the Thursdays and Mondays before and after 3-day weekends. So you are not just losing an extra day but more like 1.5 days due to slowdowns and loss of productivity.

Friday afternoon and Monday morning are already pretty ineffective - the length of the weekend might not impact the existence of those bookend periods. I suspect it gets worse around public holidays because that's a break from routine.

Break from routine, plus presumably a tendency on long weekends for people do things that impact their energy for days after, like travel or excessive drinking.

If every weekend was a three day weekend I don't imagine you'd see so much of this.

Re: A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

#107

If you’re working 20% less than your competitor, you will fall behind. There’s no amount of mental gymnastics one can do to reconcile that fact. And if true, then the market should resolve this.

hmm I work barely 2-3 days/week total for years now and yet I still win out come interview & performance review time

I've worked for 3 days per week for about 16 years now.

I have so much more energy and emotional stability in my job that I feel I do not contribute less, but more.

Re: A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

#108

If you’re working 20% less than your competitor, you will fall behind. There’s no amount of mental gymnastics one can do to reconcile that fact. And if true, then the market should resolve this.

The beauty is that I want this experiment to run and see how it performs. The pessimism I have (based on last 10-15 years of decline and anti-capitalist motifs today) is that we're going to shy away from looking at the performance of this project anyways and prevent anyone from talking about it. 4-day workweeks will become the de-facto standard. By force. My prediction is that we will see shaming of companies that ev…

> I'd like to see 6-day work weeks as an experiment.

IMO this needs without a lot of additional context.

Being from the GDR (East Germany), before studying and then working in IT I got to experience a variety of production jobs. From brewery, sausage factory, chocolate factory, to various metal working and consumer equipment making jobs, both as part of regular education (yes, school kids went into production as part of the curriculum - and it was FUN and not "evil child work", and we only got as much as was reasonable at that early age and good training too), but later (after receiving a "Facharbeiter" - skilled worker title after three years of vocational training, combined with high-school, "Abitur", for me "mechatronics" in a large chemical fiber factory) also building factory electronics for VW as part-time job to finance my university life.

Most of those jobs would produce more output with longer times. A conveyor belt job such as in the brewery, the chocolate factory, or any of the other production jobs would mean less products with just four days of work.

HOWEVER, the big difference is what I did later. The IT stuff, the office and computer work, had quickly diminishing returns. When I worked at a large well-known and successful US software company I saw most people browsing the web, playing office golf, or just not being there, and the company HQ parking lot never filled up before 9 am and emptied again by 4 pm - that was late 1990s, with not that many working from home. Similar in almost all other IT related activities I participated in, which were a lot, in both Germany and in the US, in many companies (since my job almost always was at other companies then the one I was employed by, and I later worked as freelancer too).

Production work is manual and often not all that stressful. I could turn off my brain or at the very least not think too much while doing it. Sure, when using a lathe you have to pay some attention, but it's not nearly as stressful as planning and designing software, what I do now. I could easily do the lath job all day, I can't do the software design for more than ca. four hours without the resulting code quality getting significantly worse.

.

When the discussion does not mention the context to me it's a sign that it's going off the rails and that people are talking past one another.

Some jobs are okay and useful to do 5 days a week, but others are not. The generalization of talking about ALL work at once makes for a very bad quality of the discussion IMHO.

Re: A six-month program in Britain will assess the effects of a shorter workweek

#109
post #3

Some time last year I stopped working Mondays. I’m a contractor and I know my boss well, so I just said that I didn’t want to work Mondays any more. The difference is remarkable. You go from spending three quarters of your days at work to just over half. The weekend is actually relaxing. You can do chores, relax, and really unwind before the work week starts again. We use Mondays to work on our side projects. You can…

I've been doing the same for quite some time now. Friday is my day off. It really is amazing for work/life balance. Another amazing thing is that you can spend time with your family doing fun activities but there are no queues. Everyone else is at work! You will have to up your day-rate though.

Yes! We call it ‘opposite day’ and laugh at all the normies who have to go to the [busy place] on a Saturday like everyone else. ;-)
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