World’s largest four-day work week trial finds few are going back

What do you expect by "without constantly pointing this out"? There is no need, if you don't understand that part, then you research it. Here is my take on that issue:

For "manual"-like blue collar work, where the value is directly proportional to the hours put in, reducing work hours is just and simply like it always has been done repeatedly in history: everybody works a bit less. There is no shortage of workers in capitalism, since be design there is always a 5-25% (!) of unemployment. So the company pays more.

Some companies will inevitably cry that they can't sustain their business and will close. Let them close, just like any other company that only sustains itself by exploiting workers.

I repeat, this has been done historically many many times, for less time and more salary. Since the industrial revolution pushing workers to death, without legal bounds for max work hours or minimum salaries.

For "creative"-like white collar work, e.g. software development, the value output should be roughly the same with less hours worked. It could be a little less, but others say that the value is actually higher, since resting more prevents burnout. Whatever, but some companies (workers) have been able to test it out right now. Nobody is saying that it can be applied with the same strategy to blue-collar work, but it does set a precedent and gets the ball rolling there too.

There's difference between employment and actually doing work. A lot of us keep busy with something and get paid for that even. But that doesn't mean that that something holds a lot of value.

We've just seen big silicon valley companies go through the process of shedding 10-20% of their work forces; more in some cases. Seemingly without consequence. Reason: most of those people are busy but not with something that is particularly valuable or productive.

Basically before the industrial revolution, you worked to scrape together a living. Most work was related to food production (farming). The idle were rounded up and put to work typically. The only people not working were the aristocracy. Then the industrial revolution happened and a lot of people started working in factories. Early on this was dangerous and a hard life. It's only with the socialist movements of people rebelling against that things like a five day work week became common. Saturday used to be a working day in most places. Also things like retirement and time off became a thing. And the 40 hour work week.

Basically as worker productivity increased (through automation), less and less people work in food production or anything else that is essential. Since the seventies, we've actually outsourced a lot of production to cheap labor countries. Most of us neither work in production nor food production anymore but in the service industry. Few of us actually even have the skills to produce anything.

The logical conclusion of AI, automation is not idleness. But just busying ourselves with increasingly more frivolous and less essential things for increasingly less time. We'll need to do something with our time. But the value of that is a very loose notion. Having more time to spend basically means there is more money on spending time on each other. Arts, artisanal foods, whatever seems fun/interesting/entertaining.

Ok so let's look at this from the economical side of things

A, let's say, assembly worker has a maximum production output. In a perfect system, their workload is uniform, and so is their production output. So a 20% increase in work would yield 20% increase in output, and vise versa.

That is obviously not true for a wide range of work that involves thinking - like creative work, many white collar jobs, academia, etc. Your output may not be a linear function of time, and your workload is probably not uniformly distributed across your workday. If you provide value, employers will keep paying you - even though you might only do what seems like bullshit work to others. And it does not matter that you have periods where you do nothing, because in the end - you're producing something, and that's all that maters.

With that said, yes - less hours do simply not translate well into certain jobs, unless you start setting up specific shift rotations.

This is just one variable. What about sick leave? Is that a problem, and how to reduce it? If a 20% decrease in work yields a 60% improvement in sick leaves, that's another important metric to consider.

> BUT I disagree strongly with this idea that anyone who works more than 30 hours per week is just unproductive. That’s just factually false. With many jobs productivity scales close to linearly long past 30 hours.

Blue collar jobs do scale linearly. Many white collar jobs do not, though self-reportedly.

But linear or not in itself is not a problem. If it is linear for a certain job, then there simply must be more people employed. Which is always a good thing, since our system has a baseline unemployment almost by design. People in unemployment but wanting to work are miserable and usually exploited when they do find work. Some businesses won't be able to be profitable without exploiting their workers, but this has historically happened every time workers gained some rights.

This resonates with Sara Billeys advice for PhDs : https://sites.math.washington.edu/~billey/advice/timely.fash...

She recommends 20 hours of research a week. But there is a high bar to what qualifies an hour.

Maybe relevant for HN community is that they count programming as half time (ie 2 hours programming is 1 hour of work).

When mathematicians say they “work” it’s different than what normal people say is “work”.

An analogy is people who do a full proper pull-up versus people who “cheat” to pull themselves up, but both types of people are counting them as pull ups.