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Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

theatlantic.com

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Re: Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

#101

Post by netcan »

I'm a little torn. On one hand, I have an aversion to things like this being done in law. It seems wrong to limit people and it makes sense to me that some people would prefer to work 40 hour weeks or 50 hours every other week. I'm not extremist in these regard or a libertarian by most definitions but I do see an inherent bad in coercion like this. It seems to outlaw so many potentially win-win arrangements.

OTOH, I think the dynamic in labour economies is such that it doesn't seem to correctly value employee "surplus." I do think that empirically it's hard to ignore the fact that regulation of labour markets has had successes, some of them very important. I think most employees would be worse off without labour laws.

Labour economies (maybe norms is a better word) seem to be much more influenced by "cultural" forces than "economic" ones. If this market was functioning in a healthy way, I would expect to see much more variation in arrangements and less standardization within companies. I believe there's an explanation to be found in Ronald Coase's "The Nature of The Firm" (1937 Economics paper), but I don't have a mature enough idea to be able to boil it down to an HN comment.

Laissez Faire vs labour laws aside, I think that the notion that the number of hours we work today should be lower than 20 years ago is reasonable.

In an increasing number of jobs more hours doesn't mean more work gets done. For a shopkeeper, dermatologist or factory worker, output per hour is fairly fixed (and transparent). More hours = more work. For a graphic designer, policy analyst, medical researcher or social media manager the relationship is fuzzier. Productivity varies a lot and shorter days can boost productivity. At the same time, worker productivity is opaque and a 'last person at his desk' culture often develops with employees trying to demonstrate their commitment. We are shedding the first kind of job and adding the second.

Re: Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

#102

Post by rwallace »

netcan wrote: post #101

I'm a little torn. On one hand, I have an aversion to things like this being done in law. It seems wrong to limit people and it makes sense to me that some people would prefer to work 40 hour weeks or 50 hours every other week. I'm not extremist in these regard or a libertarian by most definitions but I do see an inherent bad in coercion like this. It seems to outlaw so many potentially win-win arrangements. OTOH, I…

As a moderate libertarian, I share your aversion to things like this being done in law. I default to the assumption that the free market is the right way to solve problems, and I accept the need for government intervention only when compelled to do so by an overwhelming weight of evidence.

This is an area where I now accept the need for government intervention because I am compelled to do so by an overwhelming weight of evidence. We now know that the optimum working week for economic output, let alone quality of life, is substantially less than forty hours. We also know that it cannot be left to individual employees to negotiate with their employers. In a perfect world perhaps it could, but in the real world it cannot. It's one of those problems that just has to be solved by collective rather than individual action.

Re: Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

#104

Post by kumbasha »

phaemon wrote: post #51
mseebach wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to put this very politely, but you're making a fool out of yourself now. Lump of Labour fallacy isn't crazy voodoo economics, it's incredibly well established. Read the Wikipedia article, then look through some of the references. Your concerns are amply addressed.

No he isn't. I suspect he's starting to correctly identify that Economics has about as much scientific validity as Astrology: they both have the trappings of science, but frankly, they're both full of unverifiable and unfalsifiable nonsense. I suspect the only reason most people accept it is that they learned it at school so it must be true.

My friend, if you do not consult the mystical Tomes of Economycs on Wikipedia, then the ghostly Vapours will consume you with the aspyct of Mercury.

Re: Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

#105

Post by up_and_up »

themgt wrote: post #12

I'm much more productive with 10 hour work days. Get in the zone, write a shit-ton of code, and then get back to reality. Three or four 10-hour days sound a lot nicer than 5 6-hours.

Agreed, 3-4 day work weeks sounds better all around.

Less commute time, more time to pursue hobbies and take trips.

I bet 4 * 9 hours days would have a negligible impact on worker productivity and reduce costs like heating, cooling, lighting, since offices would be closed an extra day.

Re: Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

#107

Post by BoardsOfCanada »

netcan wrote: post #101

I'm a little torn. On one hand, I have an aversion to things like this being done in law. It seems wrong to limit people and it makes sense to me that some people would prefer to work 40 hour weeks or 50 hours every other week. I'm not extremist in these regard or a libertarian by most definitions but I do see an inherent bad in coercion like this. It seems to outlaw so many potentially win-win arrangements. OTOH, I…

As a Swedish employer myself I'm not worried that I will have this forced on me. (Not that I think that a 6 hour working day would be bad)

Sweden actually doesn't regulate many of these things in law, for example there is no law for minimum wage unlike most other countries. Instead the government has traditionally let unions and employers' organizations hash it out.

Re: Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

#108

Post by [deleted] »

_zen wrote: post #39
tegeek wrote: post #11

I live & work in Stockholm, Sweden. I start work at 8:00 & leave at sharp 15:00 to pick my son from day care. And these are the most beautiful days of my life. I play with my son every day, I'm doing hobby projects, preparing for summer marathon, read HN & CS papers on cutting edge & getting full 8 hrs sleep. Now tell me how can I do that all with working like donkeys? Human side of life is much more than living in a…

Yea, but are you changing the world like Silicon Valley start-ups are? /sarcasm

[deleted]

Re: Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

#109

Post by _delirium »

oxymoron wrote: post #22
belorn wrote: post #7

> It's unclear how, or if, a lunch break will factor into the scheme. It's a common misconception that eight-hour work day means 9-17 everywhere. In Sweden, the common work day is from 8-17, meaning 8 hours paid time and 1 hour non-paid lunch hour. To my understanding, it's more or less required by law. So if you look on how many hours we will be "at work", we will go from working one hour more than Americans to one…

It's true that most people work 9-17 in Sweden, but it isn't legally mandated. A lot of the details about when and how we work is decided through collective bargaining between businesses and unions. This system has very deep historical roots, and is something that the social democrats (that dominated swedish politics for a long time) and the unions are very proud of. Because of this Sweden doesn't have a minimum wage…

Denmark also has that system, but part of it is law in addition to tradition. It's essentially impossible to be a large employer and refuse to negotiate with a union— all large workplaces have labor agreements in place. So there isn't the whole American system of "unionization drives" where unions try to "unionize" a workplace and companies try to keep it "non-unionized"; working conditions are negotiated between the employer and a union by default, except in some small shops. In cases where no one union represents the employees (at my workplace, employees belong to several different unions, and some belong to none), one union is appointed to be the main negotiator.

The union system is also much more highly coordinated, though part of that is indeed traditional rather than in law. Rather than every union having to negotiate its own conditions, some conditions are agreed at the central level, in framework agreements reached between the Confederation of Danish Employers (DA) and the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO). The minimum wage is one of those: effectively all Danish workplaces have a minimum wage of 109 DKK/hr, the amount agreed to in the last framework negotiation.

Re: Sweden: The New Laboratory for a Six-Hour Work Day

#110

Post by _delirium »

dantheman wrote: post #24
danbruc wrote: post #21

Something similar seems a good idea to me, too. Example. Germany has 42 million employees and 3 million unemployeds. Reduce working hours from 40 to 37 hours per week - with reduction in salary, but probably not the full 7.5 % - and hire one new employee for every 13 employees. And there you go - no more unemployment and more leisure time for everybody. Saved unemployment benefits can be used to counter salary reduct…

There are tons of problems with these types of schemes, the primary one being that there is management overhead and people aren't substitutable. The more people doing the same task, the more work will need to be coordinated and thus overall output would probably decrease.

People have been trying to demonstrate effects of Denmark's 1992 change from 40-hour workweeks to 37-hour workweeks, but afaict nobody's come up with much that's solid, whether showing a negative impact on output, a positive impact on employment, or much of anything else except the mere fact that hours worked per week went down. There are a lot of before-the-fact theoretical papers, from the late '80s and early '90s, but post-1992 nobody seems to have succeeded in validating them. That doesn't mean there was no economic effect, but at the very least it doesn't seem to have been a particularly large one.
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