I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law?
I think that this can be achieved with a softer approach. Imagine that when you sign up for a job, you select how many days per week do you want to work, from 3 to 6, with proportionate wage scale. That you can select what hours do you want to work. That it's easy to change this arrangement while you're already working.
Now, why is this fantasy not a reality? Not because of laws; laws allow this. But:
1) These creative arrangements require non-standard agreements, and a lot of additional bureaucracy, because in a lot of countries, all the bureaucracy machinery allows it, but is really not optimized for use-cases like that.
This can be solved through careful policy work, removing necessary paperwork, streamlining processes, etc.
2) Economies of scale. Having a full-time 40h/week employee that gets X money as salary is cheaper than having 2 half-time 20h/week employees that get X/2 money because of management overhead, cost of their office spaces and other stuff like that.
This would be solved if 20h/week employees would understand this and get X/2-Y money. Also, a lot of these scale issues are being solved by modern world anyway, because we're learning to telecommute, work together in more effective ways, automate management tasks, etc.
3) Culture.
And I think this is the most important one. It's not in the laws, it's in the people's heads. We need to convince people that one person wants to dedicate work 60 hours per week, spend free time that's left on professional education and succeed in his career, and another is quite OK to work for 20 hours per week, get less promotions, learn less new stuff and earn less money, and spend all his free time with his kids. We need to stop labeling the first of these persons as "successful" and second one as a "failure": it's OK to be both of them. And they need to be able to work in the same office, on the same project, fully understanding difference in each other's views and being mutually acceptful.
I don't know how to do that, but it seems that this cultural change is already slowly happening. Still, advancing it would bring the real change much faster and more effectively than writing new laws.
The only way to change culture is through law. Look at seatbelt use: decades of public awareness campaigns did nothing, but once it became a legal requirement people switched.
In France working 35h/week is actually enforced by law. I personally think it's good for productivity (France is still considered a very productive country, more than Germany for instance) but this law remains regularly critiziced. Many want it removed or updated.
It's very hard to measure human productivity unfortunately. It's much easier to measure the cost of an employee working less hours for the same salary.
There's a very weird and irrational belief that more hours on the job means more productivity. Projects are often goal-based now.
But management hasn't entirely caught up with the idea that jobs are no longer about clock punching - and longer clock times can mean less real worker value.
This is partly about power dynamics in the workplace. In many corporations control of time and personal freedom are perks that are only available as you move up the hierarchy. Dysfunctional cultures are much more interested in explicit displays of limited freedom for the worker bees than in true increases in productivity.
Not entirely true (I'm French BTW). In a lot of companies if you're engineer or similar you're "cadre", and not subject to the 35h/week limitation: you have flexible work day hours. There's still a maximum limit, I think you must have at least 10h of rest a day but don't quote me on that one.
To compensate for the more than 35h/week work days you do have more vacation days call RTT for "Reduction du Temps de Travail" (Work Time Reduction). It's about 8 days per years, on top of regular vacations.
Not at all. For gay marriage or pot legalization, large shifts in public opinion have preceded changes to laws.
If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them.
The Moloch post is excellent, but it doesn't really apply here. Productivity isn't a zero sum game; unless you're in a dysfunctional stack ranking environment like Microsoft used to have, being more productive doesn't hurt your coworkers.
And for tech workers in particular, it's impossible to prevent you from working "off the clock" in your spare time. Yet people generally don't, probably because as others have noted just adding hours doesn't actually make you more productive.
I think the point of the Moloch reference wasn't that individuals would work longer hours, it's that companies that have people who work longer hours will be more successful.
Also laws are the way to prevent a race to the bottom. If it's legal to work longer hours people will, and everyone else will do so to compete with them.
Oh, is that why almost everyone earns minimum wage?
That's exactly why. Because minimum wage puts a floor on the 'bottom' that's being raced to. Otherwise, people would be earning considerably less than the current minimum wage, because the 'bottom' would be even lower.
The question was sarcastic (poor form, I know). More than 90% of workers earn above minimum wage, despite this supposedly inevitable race to the bottom.
> Every full-time job is 40 hours, which is the maximum allowed without having to pay overtime.
Categorically false. I'd wager 90%+ of the (American) readers here are exempt FTEs, meaning they are paid a salary which is based on calendar days/weeks/months/year, not hours worked.
Very few jobs offer 35- or 30-hour weeks (which would still be called full-time). There are part-time jobs that have much shorter hours, or often no contractual hours, but they're a different thing.
Changing the law is not the only thing that would need to be done.
You would also need an executive order to change the way that federal contracts are handled. Currently, huge numbers of salaried professionals employed by contractor companies have to punch the clock as though they were wage-earners in order for the company to get paid for their work.
If you don't log X hours during a given week, your salary for that week may be docked by N/X. If you log more than X, you are not necessarily paid any more for overtime. The contractor-employer could set X to be 40, or 45, or 50--whatever it wants.
If an executive order said that no individual could work more than 30 hours total in any calendar week on any combination of federal contracts, unless that person is paid an additional 10% of their normal weekly salary for each hour in excess of 30 (aka triple-time OT), while the company still gets paid the same rate, then lo, nearly everyone in the military-industrial complex would suddenly have a 30-hour work week.
As it is now, the contracting arrangements dance around the fuzzy edges of labor law, to the detriment of the workers and to the benefit of their employers, and possibly also to the benefit of several additional layers of middlemen. Changing the law is meaningless if you can't enforce it.
Education just changes the rules of the game when it comes to working time. In the US, once you have your college degree, you morph from an hourly employee where overtime is paid, to an 'exempt employee' where extra hours are unpaid.
Over the years, the federal government has added more jobs to the exempt employee list. This means we get things like fast food store managers making $26K/yr putting in 60 hour weeks. There has been a push to change the minimum salary to $50K/yr for exempt employees, but employers have successfully delayed the implementation of this till late 2016.
Ideally, the US needs to rewrite the Fair Labour Standards Act to be more in line with the EU working time directive which limits the working time to an average of 48 hours over a period of several weeks. This allows overtime to be used in bursts, but not chronically.
I'm confused. That proves his point. Every state at a secondary enforcement seat belt law before 1998. Every state aside from Maine and South Dakota (both of which had relatively high seat belt usage before the law) saw an increase in seat belt usage post-law.
I think you might be confused by the 1998 number. That year came after the after law percentage. Meaning that enforcement immediately after the law also worked.
No, the law only brought the 17% of change. The law change is binary and sudden, but the change in culture brought all the rest, gradually, year after year, before law and after.
You are making assumptions based on zero evidence. The change is binary, enforcement is over time. You are assuming the change from 48% to 65% (which is also a 17% increase) can be explained sans law, but there's zero evidence that's the case.
In the interest of not citing 12+ year old studies relying on 17+ year old data, 2013 usage was 87% and since 1995 there have only been two years of decreasing average usage[0], '05-'06 (82-81%) and '10-'11 (85-84%).
To truly see any trend, we would need to look at not just before the law, but many years before the law.
This is one of those sneaky tricks advocates for government intervention use (or fall victim to). To prove the efficacy of OSHA, for example, proponents will show a chart of workplace fatalities or accidents where there are a few or only one data points before the law and then show some spectacular trend that follows after the law was passed. In reality when you go back many more years it is clear the law had little to do with the trend as workplace safety had been increasing for years prior to the law.
Your comment (point 2 especially) reflects the current widespread notion (among employers at least, it seems) that one hour of work is one hour of work, always. I think the main point of the article is exactly to counter that.
> "Productivity – output per working hour – improves with shorter hours."
And why should the employer get all the benefit from this? I think a lot of people would love to work fewer hours, be more productive those hours, if they could retain the same salary.
I would love to, at least, but can't afford reduced pay.
I'm "paid for" 40 hours a week. However since I'm awesome, it takes me only 20-30 hours a week to accomplish more than the output of the younger software developers. Work from home, come in late, come in early, work late, leave early. Doesn't matter, it balances out.
The more I work from home, the greater productivity gains I have over everyone else that remains at the office. It's satisfying.
And I get paid more than them by at least 40%. Go figure.
So sauronlord's reply contributes nothing as an answer to my question about golergka's statement which was: "Thankfully, we don't analytically decide who takes the benefits — labor market is working pretty well at figuring this out."
I'm genuinely curious to know how we would know whether the labor market is working well at figuring this out or not.
Because I know how it compares to planned economy, which was doing it completely awfully in comparison. And in general, by every measure labour markets which have enough volume to regulate themselves fair far better than labour markets that are small or subjected to monopoly from either side.
> I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law?
We tried asking nicely; employers were abusive arseholes. This is why we can't have nice things.
Without law we see huge rich multinationals forcing people to stay at work but "clocking off" (and thus not getting paid) when things are quiet; or asking for very long hours without sensible overtime.
> I agree that shorter hours are likely to be beneficial, but why are people trying to achieve this by passing a law?
> I think that this can be achieved with a softer approach
That's a bit of a "trickle down economics" argument. Depending on corporations and owners to offer an option is never going to be as effective as passing a requirement.
As long as you only care about "effectiveness" of the conversion to smaller working hours — yes. But my point is that we should care about creating an environment where people are actually free to choose how much are they supposed to work.
In other words, you argue of how effective we can be in achieving our goal, while I suggest redefining the goal itself.
We should reduce full time employment to 30 hours.
You'd probably end up with nearly equal productivity for office staff, and you'd generate more jobs for shift based work, as you would need 30% more workers to cover a 5-day period.
This was one of the drivers of the 40-hour workweek -- previously, 12 hour days + saturday work were considered the norm.
> We need to stop labeling the first of these persons as "successful" and second one as a "failure"
It's not about judging employees from a moral standpoint, but getting the most skill and involvement going into your project/company. So, one of the questions would be: does 20h/wk + 20h/wk = 40h/wk skills+involvement, ie. is it linear? Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place?
> So, one of the questions would be: does 20h/wk + 20h/wk = 40h/wk skills+involvement, ie. is it linear? Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place?
It would seem to me that 2 people working 20h/wk offers some significant advantages over one person working 40h/wk.
Firstly, it allows for fail-over; when one person is unable to work (due to holiday or illness, for example) the other might be able to handle 40h/wk for a short period to cover. If one person leaves the company suddenly, it allows for continuity of knowledge while a third person is hired and trained.
Secondly, it allows for variable output; two people can "burst" up to 80h/wk in response to workload, whereas one person would find that very stressful.
Thirdly, multiple people bring multiple points of view, increasing the chances of serendipitous ideas and solutions, and increasing the potential benefit of using people's special skills or experience. Basically, the company is renting two brains for the price of one.
There are some downsides too: The management overhead is higher (equipment, legal, payroll, etc...) and things that were simple when done by a single person are now more complex since there needs to be coordination between multiple people.
To use an incredibly bad analogy: It's like moving from a monolithic "big iron" server to a pair or farm of smaller ones. There are many advantages, but it means it's now a distributed system with all the problems that can bring.
The problems aren't insoluble and don't limit 20h/wk employees to low-importance tasks: Many open source and volunteer projects function perfectly well with many, small, variable inputs from their contributors, many of which will be high-importance.
> To use an incredibly bad analogy: It's like moving from a monolithic "big iron" server to a pair or farm of smaller ones. There are many advantages, but it means it's now a distributed system with all the problems that can bring.
The thing is that, as you noted yourself, the analogy doesn't hold, for people are not AWS servers waiting for charge or failovers. If they chose to work 20h/wk, it's presumably to spend their time for other pursuits, eg. family, and they often won't be able to or won't agree to work more when their employer need it, perhaps unless it is planned well in advance (eg. Black Friday period).
> Basically, the company is renting two brains for the price of one.
Or, as I questioned, you might got two partly focused and perhaps less skilled people thinking about your problem, instead of someone more skilled totally focusing on it. As was brought in another comment, if you got two freelancers, then yeah, you could pick two brains, but if you have two family guys, not so much.
I think the analogy holds for the case of employees not having the capacity to give extra hours due to other commitments. However, I totally agree that people aren't AWS servers, and the reason I felt the analogy was bad was that such a mechanistic view doesn't leave room for the multitude of positive, human ways of working around such problems. For example: if an employer asks a 20h/wk employee to work extra hours, then there can be a negotiation around whether the extra hours can be done at home, flexibly in the evenings, or for a higher hourly rate. In other words, people can compromise and negotiate a settlement which is beneficial for all.
I also don't think it's necessarily true that two part-time people would be less skilled or less focussed on work. It's the very point of the original article that working fewer hours can increase the quality and focus of the work done during that shorter period.
I've worked with many talented and exceptional "family guys" (and family women) who were skilled and totally focussed during working hours. I haven't noticed a correlation between people's priorities outside working hours and ability to do good work.
> It's the very point of the original article that working fewer hours can increase the quality and focus of the work done during that shorter period.
To me, it depends on how you cut the hours, and to what extent. I'm all for working shorter days, eg. 6-8h, 4-5 days a week; however, the more you get close to half-time or below, the more difficult it becomes to stay fully focused and as motivated as a (more) full-time employee. This is admittedly less of a concern if the person uses their free-time on related projects (eg. writing open-source stuff).
> Wouldn't 20h/wk jobs be limited to inherently part-time, low importance tasks--which means you got to have plenty of funds to staff for them in the 1st place?
Interesting question. Not necessarily; as a lead developer, I just had an experience of a talented freelancer joining my project for 20 hours per week and helping with issues that we delegated to him so we can fit in the deadline. On one hand, _usually_, 9 women don't make 1 baby in 1 month; on the other hand, in this particular case the freelancer new the technology really well, and we delegated him with special issues that required less knowledge of our whole project and more knowledge of the tech itself.
So — yes, 20h/week limitation creates some problems, when you're working in the 40h/week team, but it's not the end of the world.
Freelancers often work part-time because they are more expensive, so they are not hired full-time, but they generally have many clients in the same week when they can. Moreover, they most often have some expertise in their field, which means they still devote quite a bit of time keeping up to date--they don't just spend their time with the kids. What they can do, though, is taking several months off, either between contracts or when it is ok with their long-time clients.
Anyway, that's a kind of special situation, essentially unrelated to the employee working 20h/wk to take care of their family.
This can be effective in jobs where there is a labor shortage but not a labor surplus.
Meaning, if you are applying for a job that 100 other people are also applying for, you don't get to make these kinds of demands. Whoever is hiring you will simply pass you over.
However if you happen to be working a position requiring skill with a labor shortage (they are having a hard time finding someone qualified to fill the position) then you definitely could be in a position to negotiate for these things.
I think this is why people would be inclined to making it law, there are a lot of jobs where the workers wouldn't have the leverage to affect this kind of change.
Laws are pretty important, actually. IIRC, in Slovenia, if you don't work 40 hour weeks, you'll have issues with retirement (e.g. you'll have to retire later, or your pension would be smaller (regardless of your salary)). I'm assuming there are similar issues with health/social insurance.
I think that this can be achieved with a softer approach. Imagine that when you sign up for a job, you select how many days per week do you want to work, from 3 to 6, with proportionate wage scale. That you can select what hours do you want to work. That it's easy to change this arrangement while you're already working.
Now, why is this fantasy not a reality? Not because of laws; laws allow this. But:
1) These creative arrangements require non-standard agreements, and a lot of additional bureaucracy, because in a lot of countries, all the bureaucracy machinery allows it, but is really not optimized for use-cases like that.
This can be solved through careful policy work, removing necessary paperwork, streamlining processes, etc.
2) Economies of scale. Having a full-time 40h/week employee that gets X money as salary is cheaper than having 2 half-time 20h/week employees that get X/2 money because of management overhead, cost of their office spaces and other stuff like that.
This would be solved if 20h/week employees would understand this and get X/2-Y money. Also, a lot of these scale issues are being solved by modern world anyway, because we're learning to telecommute, work together in more effective ways, automate management tasks, etc.
3) Culture.
And I think this is the most important one. It's not in the laws, it's in the people's heads. We need to convince people that one person wants to dedicate work 60 hours per week, spend free time that's left on professional education and succeed in his career, and another is quite OK to work for 20 hours per week, get less promotions, learn less new stuff and earn less money, and spend all his free time with his kids. We need to stop labeling the first of these persons as "successful" and second one as a "failure": it's OK to be both of them. And they need to be able to work in the same office, on the same project, fully understanding difference in each other's views and being mutually acceptful.
I don't know how to do that, but it seems that this cultural change is already slowly happening. Still, advancing it would bring the real change much faster and more effectively than writing new laws.