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Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

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Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#271

Post by raxxorrax »

kortilla wrote: post #240
legulere wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are still going to work more efficient when they work 32 instead of 40 hours in many jobs as fatigue sets in at some point.

No, there are jobs where you do rote things on demand or at particular intervals with no fatigue at 40 hours per week. Examples from my own employment experience: - front desk clerk at a hotel - fuel pump operator Both of these are pretty dull work that doesn’t exhaust you at all at the 40 hour work week. Most of the time is spent idle and the time spent working doesn’t require much going on upstairs.

Idling at work is one of the most exhausting "occupations".

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#272

Post by franciscop »

kqr wrote: post #247
franciscop wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fully agree with your comment overall, but as someone who lives in Japan I'd like to point out that specifically "people who fill in the holes in roads" is a running joke in Japan since small street constructions always seem way over-staffed. It's amazing because they do finish a lot faster than in western countries, but you can definitely remove 20% of the people in street-level construction and would see little d…

Sometimes I think what passes for appropriately staffed in the West is actually understaffed. What's called optimal staffing in the West is just at capacity, which is a nice way of saying "with no spare capacity." Of course, with Japan being the land of just-in-time, one could argue that spare capacity is bad -- but that's an oversimplification. Necessary spare capacity is good. What's bad is not being able to addres…

It's what the market demands in the end of the day and why I don't understand Japan too much (yet). If a company hires 4 people just for road signaling, and another 0, I'd hire the second one since it's going to be cheaper.

That's why I believe these market forces push to at-capacity, because if someone has spare capacity or a lot of profit another company is going to come in at a lower margin and win the market. Yes this leads to breaking at some situations that happen once every 20 years, but otherwise you die from competition so that's what we are stuck with.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#273

Post by aix1 »

failwhaleshark wrote: post #110
mstuyt wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An insurance company I did some work for had a bell go off for your two coffee breaks and lunchtime. You spent half of your lunchtime waiting for elevators.

Whaaaat? What year, country, and/or location was this? Call center?

I saw something similar in Tokyo. It was at a telco office. A bell would ring (at 1pm IIRC) and an entire skyscraper's worth of office workers would get up and try to get to street level. Every day.

I was visiting a Western company that was renting a small space in the same building. Their routine was to never get caught up in the great migration (in either direction).

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#275

Post by deepsun »

ineedasername wrote: post #256
onion2k wrote: post #213

I think a lot of the replies in the thread so far have focused on tech (understandably, this is HN after all) but that's missing something obvious - the 4 day week would apply to everyone. In tech it's very likely someone going from 5 days to 4 days could still achieve the same amount of actual work. As other commenters have said, many tech workers don't do productive work all the time they're present. Retail workers…

Our country is wealthy enough That's really going to depend on the business. Plenty of businesses-- specifically ones with a lot of customer-facing staff-- would not be able to sustain labor cost increases up to 20%. To take an easy example where I already know the #'s in the US, labor costs at a fast-food restaurant are around 25% of costs. Net profit margins range from 5% up to around 20%, but that top end is for M…

Low margins are indication of saturated supply. If _everyone_ raise their prices, consumers would likely eat that, in my opinion, because people who really count food money usually don't go to restaurants anyway.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#276

Post by jstummbillig »

egman_ekki wrote: post #239
jstummbillig wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The crux here is, of course, that one week of your time is a lot more valuable than 5k to your employer if they pay you 3.7k per week, and probably a lot more than you would be willing to part with or find reasonable (think 20k+ a week) It's a pretty infuriating setup. From the employers perspective, the amount of money you lose by having someone not work is so obscene, so quickly, that you have to fight your monkey…

Even if their time was 5 times as valuable to the company as their pay, it seems very unfair to pay someone 3.7k per week, but require 20k from them if they want to take a week off? That basically means that if you took 3 months sabbatical, and worked the rest of the year, you would actually pay your employer 100k for working those 9 months...

A system, where other people make more off your work than you do has pretty intrinsic problems.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#277

Post by noisy_boy »

namdnay wrote: post #266
kortilla wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there are jobs where you do rote things on demand or at particular intervals with no fatigue at 40 hours per week. Examples from my own employment experience: - front desk clerk at a hotel - fuel pump operator Both of these are pretty dull work that doesn’t exhaust you at all at the 40 hour work week. Most of the time is spent idle and the time spent working doesn’t require much going on upstairs.

These jobs are disappearing as part of the constant search for productivity increases. A front desk clerk will now spend their “down” time doing admin work for example

Since we are on the topic of Japan and hotel front desk, this video shows an example day of a Japanese hotel staff who does a whole bunch of multi-tasking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZsdm0RZ18k

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#278

Post by SilverRed »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #132
cableshaft wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's with this obsession to 'get back to where we were before'? Where we were before was broken, and the pandemic helped reveal that. Poor work/life balance, income inequality, industries built on JIT processes which fail spectacularly when the unexpected happens (see lumber, shipping containers, semiconductors, etc), an unfortunate wake-up call that even with entire industries shut down and almost no flights and c…

Green Tech isn't the savior we need. Flat out there needs to be a consumption revolution worldwide. Even if say we were all driving electric cars, on top of the energy required for normal everyday life now, you're also adding powering those cars. The necessary "reliable" green energy generation for that to happen is nothing short of trillions of dollars (when I say reliable, I mean exactly as you use it today). Yes I…

I think what gets people so stuck on this problem is that nothing solves it. Everything is only x% of the problem, everyone is only a tiny contributor. We need to solve everything and all the percents add up to solving it.

Green energy is not the end of the solution but it is part of it. It's also quite a big part of it.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#279

Post by crossroadsguy »

I read hopeful and idealistic (I’ve the same wish and hope, by the way) comments on HN and contrast it by thinking of CEOs and CTOs not even giving this news another second; laughing at it would mean it affected them in unimaginable ways.

Most of these “leaders”, especially in “startups”, have very short term goals - exit, acquisition, insane funding and valuations etc.

It’s not that they don’t think about employees burning out or lack of their well-being. They count on it. They know exactly what’s happening and they know that that 2 year old burning out (literally falling ill mentally and physically) after 7 month of hell, but wrote y number of functioning APIs, was a great success!

And that’s just software.

Re: Japan's government plans to encourage 4-day workweek, but experts split

#280

Post by rvba »

ekianjo wrote: post #40

Why does the government need to be involved if employers actually get better productivity in the first place? Let employers experiment by themselves and see what works best. Another typical example of top-to-bottom leadership in Japan.

Then you end up with 996 system that is good for employers but not for employees or society.
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