Who will lead the charge to a four-day work week?

The Netherlands is arguably one that heavily embraces the 4-day workweek. In this country, employees can request a shorter work week (4 days) for proportionality less wages (so eg for 4 days get 80% of wages).

More than 80% of working moms utilise this option and around 10% of dads. [1] Among my friends I have parents where both of them work 4 days, taking the 5th day off on separate days, and their kid goes to daycare 3 days a week.

Note that most government subsidies (for childcare) are set up to encourage working at least 32 hours per day.

[1] https://money.cnn.com/gallery/news/economy/2013/07/10/worlds...

4 hour work-week ain't happening.

1) Due to AI advancements, companies and business models are going to be disrupted. The last thing a firm wants is to work 4 day / week when competition can do 60 hour per week and leap frog them (including crushing them) at a crucial period. tl ; dr -- we are entering a crunch mode for many firms (vs stability where we can think of these luxuries)

2) US is already facing labor shortage in many critical fields esp human services. A 4-day work week faces massive inflationary pressures. Again, when we enter deflation we can think of 4-day work week. A classic example would have been 2008/09 when unemployment touched 10%

3) AI will make people who work 70 hour per week even more productive. So in knowledge work roles, firms may opt to have one 70 hr extreme workaholic vs 2 32 hour people

I know sensitive topic to HNers who downvote just because they don't like the message

The article is about a 4 day work week, which is commonly 32 or 40 hours depending on context.

Not sure why you had to make this about AI.

> 4 hour work-week ain't happening.

Four hour or four day? Both are terms that have been tossed around, though this is discussing four day (which you then discuss as 32h weeks later).

> AI will make people who work 70 hour per week even more productive. So in knowledge work roles, firms may opt to have one 70 hr extreme workaholic vs 2 32 hour people

Have you ever had to debug code from people at the wrong end of a 60-70 hour week? For a while, I had a coworker who tended to to this sort of thing, and I eventually started looking at the relevant commit messages. If they were incoherent, expect the code to be "not even wrong" grade interesting - you basically had to re-write it to get it do what it was supposed to. The sort of people who enjoy 70h grinds also seem to not particularly enjoy writing tests.

What do you do for work? Where are you in your career?