Why not have some workers working M-Th, others T-F, and some other combination, and managers working all five days to coordinate? After all, they get paid the big bucks.
World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
111–120 of 368 posts
Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
#112I don't like the Four Day Work Week because most of the people who are allowed to experiment with it are working on bullshit. I'm not a big Graeber fan, but I emphatically agree with his idea that the majority of actual hours worked inside the continental US are largely useless make-work in order to justify the existence of a monied consumer class. Such a huge amount of the actual work that needs to be done so that w…
That is whataboutism. Yes, al that stuff is really bad and should be fixed on a global level - but meanwhile pushing for less work hours where possible does not take away from improving, on the contrary, it paves the way.
"Whataboutism" is a made-up word to decry analogies.
"You get ten years for dealing marijuana."
"Well what about that rich kid that did the same thing as me that got no prison time?"
"That's whataboutism!"
What I said is relevant. The idea of the four-day work week is predicated on the fact that most people participating in the experiment can reduce their working hours to four days with no real effect on society. The fact that people discuss the 4DWW without constantly pointing this out further obscures what exactly it is about "work" that's useful.
Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
#113> The rest were convinced by revenue gains, drops in turnover and lower levels of worker burnout that four is the new five when it comes to work days. This is not surprising. The 20% of time that's getting cut is probably the 20% that shouldn't have been done anyway. Telling workers they can cut the 20% of the crap they hated doing is obviously going to lead to better results.
Do you make the same interpretation when companies cut 20% of the workforce instead?
The fact that the two figures are 20% is scant reason to assume that these are or should be comparable situations. This shouldn't even require stating
Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
#114Good, you all work 4 days and I’ll work my standard 6x10 6 days, 10hrs a day. When people get fired presumably I’ll still be standing. When promotion time comes around, the person who does the most will get the promotion. When bonus time comes, I’ll have the most done. You can try to regulate day(s), but if there’s people willing to work more they’ll set the standard.
What a clear example of one of Paulo Freire's best insights: "When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor."
Go on with your career ladder game, not everyone in humanity praise that as much as you. On the contrary, lots will see you as either naive or moronic.
Your 6x10 work schedule is being spent on creating... A chatbot.
Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
#115I think it's worth considering that, in the US, the ultimate leap from 5 to 4 day work weeks would require a change in labor laws to mandate full-time status and overtime pay cutoff at 32 hours/week. Close to 60% of US workers are hourly. I can't predict all of the ramifications from that kind of change, but I have to imagine it would largely benefit workers. I wish we had a major political party that was at least wi…
> We all know this "40 hours" nonsense is just historical happenstance
It's not happenstance. It's something workers fought and sometimes died to win against an incumbent 6 or 7 day, 10 plus hour a day norm.
Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
#116Instead of 3 day weekends, why don't we go to a 6 day week? The only reason we have 7 days is because of the 7 classical planets.
When would God rest? It's crazy when you think about how much of society is aligned around the totally arbitrary idea of a 7-day week. It would be hard to switch because so many things are aligned to it.
The thing is it's completely non-existent in nature. Not to get too into the Naturalistic Fallacy, but we're biological organisms that evolved in nature and have acclimated through evolution to it the things that do exist.
That is we have a circadian rhythm, because for millions of years we couldn't see much at night, so we just went to sleep. And all sorts of animals including us start getting frisky in spring because it means resources are about to become abundant so it's a good time to copy ourselves. Even women's menstrual cycles are roughly equivalent to the lunar month.
But a 7 day period? Only exists in society because of - essentially - the bible.
In nature (on Earth) there are days, years, months, seasons, but that's really it. Even an hour is an arbitrary amount of time in a day (the length of which actually varies anyway!).
Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
#117> The rest were convinced by revenue gains, drops in turnover and lower levels of worker burnout that four is the new five when it comes to work days. This is not surprising. The 20% of time that's getting cut is probably the 20% that shouldn't have been done anyway. Telling workers they can cut the 20% of the crap they hated doing is obviously going to lead to better results.
Do you make the same interpretation when companies cut 20% of the workforce instead?
I prefer cuts where the benefits flow primarily to workers, rather than billionaires. Weird, I know.
Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
#118When was a mathematician, I worked as hard as I could until I was mentally exhausted. I actually calculated how much I worked per week over a period of two years. On actual "hard thinking", like working through logic, I spent about 7 hours. There was another 7 hours writing and clarifying topics, and another 6 hours or so on classes, seminars (sort of like meetings, but productive). That gives a total of 20 hours per…
> My conclusions after observing a ton of people in technical and nontechnical jobs is that beyond working 20-25 hours a week, having people do more is useless...
I'm not so sure about this. I was working in a remote "full-stack" (but really 90% front-end role) for 14 months from the start of January 2021 to the end of February 2022. I tracked my hours religiously the entire time I was employed there (not required, but just for my own sake). I had a spreadsheet containing the date, start/end times (rounded to the nearest quarter on an hour), task name, and notes.
When I left the company, my team lead thought I was one of the hardest working people he had ever worked with. He thought I had to be working 60-hour weeks to be doing what I was doing. I showed him the spreadsheet and calculated the average hours worked per week - came out somewhere between 38~39 hours.
My role wasn't a senior one so, for the most part, the vast majority hours were spent coding, but of course some was spent in meetings as well. But these were all real hours of real time spent working. It was all very doable and not useless time spent futzing around (I would also stop tracking my time for any break I took - no exceptions).
Granted, I think being the type of person that acclimates well to remote work made this all doable. I would not have been this productive in office.
Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
#119I think it's worth considering that, in the US, the ultimate leap from 5 to 4 day work weeks would require a change in labor laws to mandate full-time status and overtime pay cutoff at 32 hours/week. Close to 60% of US workers are hourly. I can't predict all of the ramifications from that kind of change, but I have to imagine it would largely benefit workers. I wish we had a major political party that was at least wi…
> We all know this "40 hours" nonsense is just historical happenstance It's not happenstance. It's something workers fought and sometimes died to win against an incumbent 6 or 7 day, 10 plus hour a day norm.
Right, but it’s not some magical optimal number.
It’s lets you have 3 shifts per day (3 x 8 = 24) for full coverage. That also fits with the idea that it gave you a balanced life. 8 hours at work, 8 hours asleep, 8 hours for the rest.
It was a convenient number below the old, much worse, standard.
People act like 40 hours is some kind of natural law that can’t be questioned.
It absolutely can be.
Re: World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back
#120I could see quite a few companies reaching for this over pay rises. Considering inflation right now, it may make sense to suggest a 4 day working week at their existing pay versus offering an inflation beating pay rise.
or I could see it as another tool in the toolbox for smaller private companies that simply cannot match the offers of the big FAANG tech companies with their sky high pay and oodles of RSUs. A private tech company can't match what Apple can do in financial compensation, but what they can offer is better quality of life. Previously that might have been something around benefits and vacation days, but four day work wee…
>simply cannot match the offers of the big FAANG tech companies with their sky high pay and oodles of RSUs.
But I bet they have no problem paying the CEO millions of dollars
Think of how much funding "smaller private companies" get from VCs nowadays. We're not talking about a startup in someones garage.