Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 99 posts

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#41

Post by mrjj »

I prefer to think about USA as no-vacation-nation. Just because it's good to think that there a lot of guys working 24/7 and if you don't do so, you are retired.

You can't do the smart work more than 4 hours a day, right, maybe it's just beyond energy exchange capacity in our brain that support extra concentration.

But everyone have a lot of a dumb work, documentation, settling professional conflicts in mail, pinging standstill tasks, routine refactorings or other forms of small product polishing, whatever.

I'm not sure that the 4 of "smart work" is including all those 20% of work giving 80% of value, its sounds funny but sometimes you have too much energy to do very valuable routine.

If you have predisposition to depression (as i do) you can liberate your own time and just waste it to extension your depression experience. Wow it's really worth it.

Depression is just negation of any actions. When external factors is punching your arse its hard to negate. When not, welcome to slow way down.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#42

Post by spindritf »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #19
sp332 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that the current situation is really bad, but things seem to have stopped improving. Productivity keeps going up but wages don't.

http://anticap.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/fig2_prodhhincome... This is where the 4 hour work week went. Disclaimer: I am an ardent supporter of work hours being reduced as productivity rises.

I'm guessing those wages exclude benefits, because when you consider total compensation it actually reflects growth in productivity.

Total employee compensation as a share of national income was 66 percent of national income in 1970 and 64 percent in 2006. This measure of the labor compensation share has been remarkably stable since the 1970s. It rose from an average of 62 percent in the decade of the 1960s to 66 percent in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s and then declined to 65 percent in the decade of the 1990s where it has again been from 2000 until the most recent quarter.

http://www.nber.org/papers/w13953

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#43

Post by notahacker »

spindritf wrote: post #4

People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are working more than the poor[1] and labour participation rates are dropping[2]. In many ways this is a superior alternative. Children don't work. They used to. People spend a lot more time in school at the beginning of their life when it has the potential to have the bi…

Not only are the goods positional, but also much of the new work that's been created. The extra hours aren't replacing children on the farm or in the factories (the developing work takes on those jobs as a much lower cost). They're being created in professions like marketing, banking and civil law which exist to a large extent more to defend their employers' margins from competition than improve productive output. A corollary of this is that, purely theoretically, a four hour workweek might be achievable for the middle classes simply by trading those hours worked that have a negative impact on the economy as a whole for leisure. The problem is that nobody knows which half of their advertising budget is wasted (but there will be no shortage consultants willing to charge expensive hourly rates to offer an opinion), and everybody knows that even though their own exceptionally hard-working investment manager spent hours making the wrong bets against the economic downturn, somebody sat on the upside of that trade and everybody would suffer if there was no liquidity whatsoever.

Beyond positional goods, the other money-suckers are higher education and healthcare, which are both on the one hand arguably an extremely good thing for increasingly large amounts of economic surplus to be thrown at despite inevitably diminishing returns, and on the other hand utterly ridiculous in the US.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#45

Post by RivieraKid »

sp332 wrote: post #13

Universal basic income is the case that gives the rich, ruling class the maximum power over everyone else. Everyone gets dependent on government money, and it takes an act of Congress to increase the baseline pay.

I disagree, BI doesn't mean that people would be more (or less) dependent on government money. BI is about a different structure of income redistribution, the magnitude of income redistribution is a different problem. The BI could be $1 per year.

Although what many BI proponents actually want is to increase the magnitude of income redistribution, they want a system where you get livable money even if you don't work, no question asked.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#46

Post by enraged_camel »

adventured wrote: post #18
FD3SA wrote: post #6

Capitalism`s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The profit motive is so strong that it often ends up creating irrational scenarios such as the economic situation we have today. European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the ric…

When America was still Capitalistic, still had a functioning free market system, the results it produced in both education and healthcare put the European welfare state model to shame. If you go back 30, 40, 50 years America embarrassed most of Europe in both healthcare and education. For decades America had both the best healthcare system, and a very cost effective system. That reputation has only been lost in the l…

>>When America was still Capitalistic, still had a functioning free market system, the results it produced in both education and healthcare put the European welfare state model to shame. If you go back 30, 40, 50 years America embarrassed most of Europe in both healthcare and education. For decades America had both the best healthcare system, and a very cost effective system. That reputation has only been lost in the last 20 years.

Your narrative is flawed. The reason America was ahead of other countries many decades ago has nothing to do with it "still being capitalistic" or "still having a functioning free system." America was ahead because other Western nations were still recovering from WWII. Many of them got invaded, and those that did not get invaded still got a lot of their cities and economies destroyed. London for example was pummeled by more than one thousand V2 rockets, and Dresden was flattened with 3900 tons of high explosives and incendiaries, killing 25,000 people. America suffered nothing like that.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#47

Post by fennecfoxen »

Kiro wrote: post #40
sp332 wrote: post #13

Universal basic income is the case that gives the rich, ruling class the maximum power over everyone else. Everyone gets dependent on government money, and it takes an act of Congress to increase the baseline pay.

If everyone would receive X money then X would be the new 0.

... No. That's not how those numbers are related. Consider a case where I give every US citizen $500/mo, and a software engineer makes an additional $5000/mo. Then 11 unemployed persons have the same spending power as a software engineer, which is markedly different from 0...

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#48

Post by RankingMember »

This could be done, but it'd need to be some kind of modern take on the old labor movement. People want 4 hour workdays, but they don't believe it'll change. Set up a site to allow people to specify their employer and essentially "opt-in", expressing their support for a 4-hour workday, but make it anonymous insofar as you'll only see a number of people at your workplace that share the same sentiment. There'd need to be some unique key to confirm that each person can only opt-in once. Compare the opt-in number to the number of employees reported on a company's tax paperwork, have the site get popular (whole project in itself unless there's good grassroots support), and suddenly you've got a nice obvious display of support within various companies for the 4-hour workday. Making it harder to ignore the will of the masses (or at least verifying that such a will exists) is a good start, I think.

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#49

Post by [deleted] »

bmj wrote: post #39
privong wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First, the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it should reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get ahead by cheating. I don't see any other solution. This would not really be a solution. All it would result in is more people taking work home, because job evaluations would still be based on how mu…

Do you think there /is/ a solution to the problem? Or is this just one of the side effects of capitalism? I'm not trolling here...just curious. My own mind tends to go in the direction of the parent, but, I also see how enforcement would be next to impossible.

[deleted]

Re: Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

#50

Post by programminggeek »

Poor negotiation and group think stole the 4 hour workday.

I've seen companies where you can have 2 devs working on the same project, one making say $30,000-40,000 and one making like $60,000-70,000. They do the same work, but have wildly different valuations because of their ability to negotiate.

If people negotiated higher rates and fewer hours, that is entirely possible to achieve and eventually could be the norm, but most people don't negotiate for anything. They think an extra $2,000/yr. is a big win, but then turn around and work an extra 10 hours a week at a job they hate.

The value in unions was that they would negotiate harder than individuals will. They perhaps outlive their usefulness and aren't great as an entity that should last forever because demanding more money every year doesn't always work if the company isn't having a good year, but the point still stands that lack of negotiating power is a problem.

C levels executives make outsized amounts of money because of 2 things - the higher you get in an organization, the better you probably are at negotiating (otherwise you wouldn't make it to the top), and many have agents that negotiate on their behalf (just like pro athletes).

I'm not an expert at negotiation, but I do know that the people who know how to negotiate well can get wins that the average person can't comprehend. A lot of people could negotiate their way into a 4 hour workday if they tried, they just don't know how.

Post reply on HN