Is this the largest test/rollout of a 4 day work week ever?
Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
101–110 of 367 posts
Re: Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
#102That sounds....huge. I know many working couples where one would probably take that in a heartbeat. You lose some money, but gain more family time and sanity. Having Friday to finish chores and being able to enjoy the weekend unstressed is huge, not to mention clocking out early each day to be able to pick up your kid and not have to get back to work or whatever.
The issue is in corporate jobs (including tech) Friday is a very relaxed day. If you are working a shorter week than everyone else, you end up doing the same amount of work in less time for less money.
Re: Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea behind OASDI (Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance), more commonly known as Social Security, is not that you retire a millionaire. It's the US government saying "since we are a wealthy nation, we will not let you spend your elderly years destitute." That's it. That's literally all it is. It was meant to keep grandpa from being a burden on his family when he was too old to work, which in the 1930s mea…
==Since then the American public has seen it as a nice little bonus they get for living past 65 and has started stealing from younger generations in the form of sovereign debt in order to maintain that instead of treating it like the insurance policy it actually is.== Social Security has it's own funding stream, a tax on wages earned. It does not add to the deficit or increase borrowing. If the funding dries up, the…
But there's only so many dollars you can pull from a wage earned. A dollar pulled for OASDI is a dollar that can't be pulled for anything else, and the person earning said dollar will express dissatisfaction at the ballot box if you try to make up for that by taking another dollar.
A retirement bonus (which is what OASDI is for millions of retired Americans) costs more than a retirement insurance plan, because one gets drawn from by everyone, while the other can simply be denied if it isn't strictly necessary for the person trying to collect the benefit.
A more expensive program requires more tax revenue to administer, revenue that could be used on anything else. Since we haven't had a real national discussion about federal taxes in 30+ years in the US, we now take the spending that would be funded with the tax revenues that could be freed up by a less-expensive implementation of retirement insurance - one that's treated as actual insurance - and instead fund it with deficit spending.
Re: Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it more terrible? You certainly had more organic social connections and family support. Physically tougher than a modern white collar job? Sure. Better than commuting and working for some shitty boss though!
We take so much for granted. Living in a world without electricity, medicine, food scarcity, lack of safety net. Family didn't offer as much support as it appears. Average kids are working farms rich children are sent away to be raised. The social bonds of the modern world still exist in the same places as the past. It starts with the church.. so if you crave the social connections you can still go to church to find…
You almost had a coherent point until the last sentence. I'll take my social bonds without the side-order of dogma, thanks.
Re: Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
#105I wish these stories would say if the hours are changing or not. 32 hours, 4 days a week seems better to me. But if all you do is take 40 hours and make it 10 hour days I’m not that much happier.
One year a company did mandatory 'half-day Fridays' during the summer where the company closed after a half day on Friday. But in order to do that we had to work 9 hour days Monday - Thursday. That extra hour those four days felt torturous, so it meant four days of feeling awful just so I could leave a few hours early on a day in which most people (and myself) already weren't working too hard anyway. I hated it. This…
I had a job that offered your choice of 4x10 or 5x8.
Many people took the 4x10 but then discovered they couldn't handle 10 hour days every day. Like you said, the last 1-2 hours were so unproductive they might as well have been not working.
So some people didn't even try to work those last 2 hours. They'd sit at their desks and watch things or play games, pretending to work when anyone came in. Kind of ruined it for everyone.
Re: Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fascinating. Is the loyalty reciprocated?
If the subordinates have to lie about taking time off, and intentionally accept lower pay for the benefit of their superiors - then no, it's definitely not reciprocated. I'd argue the subordinates are straight up being abused in this case.
I'm not saying you are wrong here, but I think it is important to ground all of these old:young dynamics in culture. 'Subordinate', to me, is a very western lens and looks past the crucial point that the Japanese view power structures with far more optimism than we do.
Japan clearly has its own problems, but honour and duty play a significant part in their culture and, admirably, contributes to the creation of a high-trust society.
Re: Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have had friends and family that work 4x10s or even 3x12s and they all vastly prefer the trade-off of more hours per work day for fewer days.
I’d still likely take the option, I just think it’s unnecessary. Productivity is ridiculously up since the 8 hour day was established, even since just two decades ago. Tasks expand to take up the available time, even if usefulness doesn’t. I suspect you’d see little loss in cutting down to 32/hr/week, and I suspect it would be more than made up for by the gains of giving people that extra day. So it may be a net posi…
That's the unfortunate bit about salaries.
If you took a 4x per week job, you'd usually get a 20% pay reduction; however, many jobs could be compressed to 4 days without any loss in productivity.
Re: Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
#108That sounds....huge. I know many working couples where one would probably take that in a heartbeat. You lose some money, but gain more family time and sanity. Having Friday to finish chores and being able to enjoy the weekend unstressed is huge, not to mention clocking out early each day to be able to pick up your kid and not have to get back to work or whatever.
The issue is in corporate jobs (including tech) Friday is a very relaxed day. If you are working a shorter week than everyone else, you end up doing the same amount of work in less time for less money.
I did this a few years ago at a company I was a partner in. We had a busy season where folks did overtime. The expectation for salaried employees was a 4-day, 35 hour week, but during that 3-4 week period, it may surge more.
35 hour weeks used to be pretty common in a lot of businesses before the overtime rules were watered down.
Re: Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
#109I feel like it's been a long time fretting over falling birth rates and this is the first time I've seen anyone float the idea that making life better for people might make them a bit more inclined to make more people.
It's actually that life is too good for childless people, especially when they're wealthier. Take a DINK couple with high paying jobs, say an engineer and an attorney. Without kids they can have a nice house or condo, regularly take great vacations, and still be saving enough to have the option of retiring in their 40s or 50s. But with kids, that mostly goes out the window. The societal expectation is that you should spend basically all your disposable time and income on your children, which means expensive daycare, travel sports (gotta start working on the college applications in grade school), and private schools (or "good" "public" schools gated by living in a super-expensive area). And even if you can avoid all that, colleges are very good at figuring out how much money you have and declaring that to be the tuition.
As a high-earning childless person myself, I'll freely acknowledge that I should have been paying significantly higher taxes in order to benefit my counterparts who did have kids. Although it would be a challenge to do that redistribution in a way that doesn't just get captured by daycare and college.
Re: Tokyo is set to introduce a four-day workweek for government employees
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had an interesting discussion with my nephew about this post. He angers me with the way he talks about stuff, but I consider it an exercise in mental fortitude. Allow me to share his absolutely crazy and unreasonable thoughts on this: "Nobody really wants more people except certain religious sects, and that is only because it allows them to use sexuality to control people. Most modern capitalists would favor automa…
He's not totally wrong, just replace "Religious organizations" with "Governments" and "tax-free status" with "solders and workers"
Also old people. They need younger people to support them, like grow their food, fix their houses, etc. But given that I plan on growing old, as I hope you do too, we should make sure the generations after us are capable of taking care of us.