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Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

bloomberg.com

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Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#81

Post by dimman »

bogomipz wrote: post #45
mhurron wrote: post #11

They're abandoning it because of an obvious requirement? Did someone not realize that in a 24 hour operation that consists of physical activities, cutting hours would require more people to carry the same workload?

Yeah this sentence was a bit of an anticlimax: "Preliminary results concluded that it achieved all of these aims, but the city had to employ an extra 17 staff, costing 12m kroner (£1.4m), Bloomberg reported." Am I missing something because that seems painfully obvious without even having to to undertake the experiment no? That being said I absolutely love that the Swedish government was willing to entertain such an i…

For those not familiar with the swedish currency: I don't know how they calculated but 12 million SEK is more like 1.07 million GBP.

Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#82

Post by poooogles »

crististm wrote: post #69
jahaja wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You are right that this consequence could've been seen from miles away. Which is why this is very close to just propaganda against a 6h work day.

I'm commenting on rebootthesystem comment which is flagged and dead. I don't understand why - he makes a perfectly valid and coherent point.

The language used in his comment has no place on Hacker News [1].

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#83

Post by wott »

vesinisa wrote: post #4

I am under the impression that 6-hour days are widely adopted in France. Anyone know more of it?

Nobody works 6 hours/day. Most contracts will be 35h (7 hours/day) to 39h per week.

In engineering/programming/etc. you either have such a contract or often unlimited hours contract (so the only limit by law is something like 72h/week, IIRC), and, in practice, you generally do about 45 hours/week. It doesn't matter if you have an unlimited hours contract or a nice strict 35h contracts: you'll work 45 hours anyway and your 10 extra hours per week will not be paid. And when I say they are not paid, I don't mean they are just not paid more than the regular ones, I mean they are not paid at all.

Only in large traditional companies, the extra hours are counted and either paid or exchanged for extra vacation. But large companies have now outsourced most of the work to subcontractors, which use unlimited contracts or simply do not give a fuck about respecting the laws and are small enough so that there is no union. And anyway, go and try to unionise engineers/computer scientists...

Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#84

Post by rogerdpack »

Declanomous wrote: post #6
plandis wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Amazons program was something like come to work from 10:00 to 14:00 Mon-Fri. The problem with this is that I think it's a lot easier to be pressured to stay longer over the course of a week than if you only worked 3 days a week.

This is why I like Google's version, where you can work on personal projects. You are still around if people need you, but you can work on other things as well rather than burning out trying to work on one thing for 40+ hours a week.

I heard once anecdotally that google side projects are sometimes "supposed to be work related" so not quite as free as you'd imagine, FWIW...or perhaps they're not dunno never worked there.

Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#85

Post by rogerdpack »

giarc wrote: post #60
stinos wrote: post #14

the costs outweigh the benefits Well, if you put a low enough price on people's happiness, health, and quality of work, then yes I guess. Anyway: I hope the people involved in the pilot and happily doing 6 hours shifts now, won't take it too hard if the pilot should be stopped and they're back to 8 hour shifts.

The trial was for 68 employees and cost $1.7 million USD (they had to hire additional staff). Imagine you took that $1.7m and spent it on those 68 employees. $25,000/employee would go a long way to increasing happiness with perks etc.

Yes I suppose the real question is would those employees "elect" for a 6 hour day with a 25% pay cut, or not...that would give you something of a feeling for whether the benefits out weight cost, as it were...

Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#86

Post by giarc »

rogerdpack wrote: post #85
giarc wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trial was for 68 employees and cost $1.7 million USD (they had to hire additional staff). Imagine you took that $1.7m and spent it on those 68 employees. $25,000/employee would go a long way to increasing happiness with perks etc.

Yes I suppose the real question is would those employees "elect" for a 6 hour day with a 25% pay cut, or not...that would give you something of a feeling for whether the benefits out weight cost, as it were...

As mentioned elsewhere in this message, it depends on the job really. Nursing staff in a nursing home might benefit more from shorter shifts. Someone that is sitting at a desk taking phone calls or entering data might benefit from a bit longer of a day.

I'm more in the latter camp and my colleagues and I have been talking about doing 4x 9.5 hour days and just rotating who gets Friday's off vs the rest of the week. I could easily come a bit earlier, leave a bit later and get tons of benefits from 3 day weekends.

Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#87

Post by cs02rm0 »

bramblerose wrote: post #40
Bartweiss wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the idea is that costs ballooned more than expected. That shouldn't be shocking either - each shift change requires people to scrub in, pass on information from the previous shift, and so on - but it's a deeper question than adding new staff to cover the missing hours.

The numbers suggest this is not the case. They needed 17 extra employees for 68 existing staff members. Naively, one would expect that for 68 x 8 = 544 man hours per week, one would need 544/6 = 91 (rounded up) employees. Yet 68+17 = 85, which is six employees less !

I'd be interested in how long they've had 68 employees for; was it 68 two years prior to the trial, or even 51?

I wonder if there's a balance somewhere here too. Perhaps have employees work 7 hours at a slightly reduced rate.

This trial alone is probably difficult to draw solid conclusions from, other than to say if these employees work less they produce less (albeit not proportionately it seems).

Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#88

Post by fetbaffe »

Problem for Göteborg is lack of money. Göteborgs economy is one of the worst in Sweden, about 50 billion SEK in debt. City took money from other areas to fund this pilot. This is always going to the problem in a well regulated budget like for a city. Therefore they ended it.

These kind of nursing jobs in public sector is low wage and high work load, no regulation on formal training, but usually some sort of grammar school education. 97% who works with it are women.

What the public employer want to do here is to use the number of work hours, instead of high salary, to attract young people. Thats the long term scheme.

Wages in public sector in Sweden is falling behind private sector more and more. You can get more paid to clean someones apartment than a newly educated registered nurse with proper training from a university gets when signing up for work in the public sector.

Lots of young Swedes go to Norway and work there instead and get much better pay.

Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#89

Post by jahaja »

CaptSpify wrote: post #68
jahaja wrote: post #38

The main reason this _very_ small scale experiment seems to be scrapped early is not because of costs, but politics. Right-wing politicians have seemingly wanted to end it as soon as possible for quite some time now - and obviously voted against the proposal from the start as well. And at this time and age, employee satisfaction and health benefits doesn't hold up against screams about costs.

Source on that?

Only in Swedish unfortunately: http://www.gp.se/nyheter/g%C3%B6teborg/sextimmarsprojektet-s...

It seems like the experiment was concluded as planned in the end but they still tried to end it early.

Re: Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week

#90

Post by marzell »

fetbaffe wrote: post #77

This pilot was actually not 6-hour workday, but 30 hour workweek. Yes, it is true that the politicians that decided it called it for 6-hour workday, but in reality is was 30 hour workweek and nothing else, because of how the facility works with scheduling and so on (regulations etc). Nurses worked between 5 to 7 hours on day shifts resulting in a 30 hour workweek. Night shifts was 6 to 8 hours. I think it is importan…

Seeing as how even the PDF you link says in the first sentence "6-hour workday" ("6 timmars arbetsdag"), I can see why there is some confusion about the specific details.
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