> Utah abandoned the experiment in 2011 after residents complained they were unable to access services on Fridays.
This is part of the problem I think. I've worked 4-day weeks in the past and one of the best things about it is you have a free day during the week to do all the things you normally can't get to. Go to the doctor, visit other business or government offices that are normally only open while you're at work.
Of course if everyone does a 4-day week, then you lose that benefit. Then you have to cram all those errands into the 4 days, during which you now also have more work to do.
Instead of "everybody take Friday off". It might make more sense to stagger days off so everyone has a chance to have a day off while things they need are open.
In India in many cities, shops take their weekly offs staggered locality by locality. So if you need to say buy groceries or medicines on a day your local locality's shops are off, you just go to the next one. Also, most shops stay open till 9pm or later.
When we travel in Europe, we find it incomprehensible that businesses are so customer unfriendly - everyone shuts shop by 5pm and very few are open over the weekend.
Well service roles get screwed no matter what. Irrelevant of standard work weeks. Restaurants/hospitals/retail are already open all week regardless. What people are arguing is all the white collar jobs that feed back into the service jobs.
I personally think the issue is that we have defined Saturday and Sunday as the weekend. I worked retail, and I loved having Saturday as my "Friday", and Sunday and Monday as my weekend, because services had normal hours on Monday, and I could relax on Sunday. The downside at the time was that my schedule often didn't overlap with that of my friends, such as those who worked as servers in restaurants.
I find three day weekends to be much more relaxing than the standard weekend. It means I can spend time with my friends on one day, do chores on another day, and spend the remaining day relaxing. As long as I still have a day I can spend with my friends, I'd be okay with a different schedule than M-F or M-R.
There is a barrier to a shorter workweek I don't see touched on often, and maybe it's just me. I'm hesitant to work less because I'm afraid that people would find out that I'm just not that necessary around the office, and that the work I do isn't important as I think it is. Realistically, I think such a realization would be more damaging to my personal pride than anything else. I think I base too much of my self-worth on how replaceable I am to my organization. It's a bit ridiculous to seek validation from an organization, but it is one reason why I'd be hesitant to have a day off while other people are working.
While increasing productivity will definitely allow people to find work that allows them either less time or more flexibility, there is always that issue of want.
Ten years from now, let say you can find a job where you can work 32 hours a week (or 40, but 8 from home -- slacking a little on that), but let's say you don't earn enough to afford that new iPhone. You can only afford the previous years model. You can't quite have the new curved behemoth TVs that everybody has, nor can you take a vacation any time soon, but you can to take a mini one every weekend.
Is this going to be okay for you? I would argue, many people might be able to do this now. I think that desire to consume is pretty strong. I definitely have it.
These decisions all come with tradeoffs. If your neighbor decides to work 48 hours, taking the 8 your decided to forego, and he can afford these nice little things, are you then going to be calling it unfair that he he's paid more than you? Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it?
Following this line of thought, why aren't people currently working 7 days a week? People who work 56hrs will earn more than those working 48, and even more than those that just work 40hrs.
One answer might just be norms. If only 10% of people work 56hrs, then you don't earn so little that you can't afford "that expensive thing that everybody has". What everybody has is based on norms and averages.
A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours.
> A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours.
> A question is then how we went from working 7 days a week, to 6 days a week and Sundays in church, to 5 days a week. How did people start to work less and live with the reality of earning less in comparison to those staying with the old working hours.
With blood. The socialist revolutions were in big part based on fighting for the workers abused in the freshly industrialized world.
It's ironic if you see how fast people today want to get rid of all the safeguards that got us the quality of life we enjoy today, all in the name of cheaper products and "I will be an entrepreneur too!" mindset.
While socialists do tend to be violent psychopaths - particularly in that era [1] - it's far from clear that such behavior is necessary.
You can witness the same transition happening in India completely peacefully. Many middle class jobs are transitioning to 5 day weeks as part of capitalist competition to gain/retain workers. Nerdy software engineers - more or less the opposite of violent socialist revolutionaries - are some of the first to gain these benefits.
I remember hearing recently the philosophy of an older (read: 70+) black civil rights activist criticizing Black Lives Matter. He said that back in the day, they had a 4 step process. 1) Have an ideology, i.e. figure out exactly what you want. 2) Ask for it nicely, and reduce levels of niceness in the requests gradually. 3) Peacefully protest. 4) Revolution.
It seems like the socialist revolutions might have jumped to step (4) unnecessarily.
[1] Just read some of Jack London's socialist fiction. One of his short stories is about socialist revolutionaries murdering innocent people and dropping their bodies on the doorsteps of peaceful capitalists.
I'd suggest reading old socialist literature, Jack London being one of my favorites. Then observe the real life behavior of many socialists in that era.
First, i think you mean unions, not socialism. Non-socialist countries also have had 5 day weeks. Also even though unions have increased worker rights in history, pure capitalism has also been doing that as well. Look at silicon valley, where empoyee perks, extra PTO and such have not been fought for but are provided.
They were provided because labour demand outpaced supply. It's not the case for tech jobs in many North American markets, and certainly not the case for many other white collar jobs; even good paying ones.
When supply begins to overshadow demand, whether due to immigration, more people getting CS degrees or whatever, you'll see a lot of those perks stripped away, and wages will stagnate or fall (relatively speaking).
jnordwick's excellent point is that demand can grow without any obvious bound. That has an impact on both ends of the labor market. Sure, people will be willing to work more to acquire the things they want, but that demand itself generates a need for jobs and leverage for labor. Somebody needs to design and manufacture the next iPhone or fancy TV. Somebody else needs to refurbish and maintain that lovely seaside Airbnb for jnordwick's next vacation.
This can be a self-reinforcing cycle, and it's how the economic pie can grow even as everyone on the whole takes more.
Demand can't outpace supply forever. It can grow forever, but anything that's lucrative will eventually be sought out, and the price will come down. Labour included. Also, someone will always be willing to undercut others, which is why the arbitrage condition is basically a law of economics, and always leads to a price equilibrium.
I agree completely with what you say, which if i understand correctly, is exactly what I said. It was demand from market forces that increased the wages of software engineers, not a union fighting for those perks.
Well, quite a few people in the first world are working 7 days a week or some other structure of 70+ hour weeks; and many of them earn a multiple of the median wage while doing so, so they definitely would be able to survive just fine in a different, lower paid job with less hours but they still choose to do what they do.
Is private consumption stagnating due to less people wanting to consume or due to less income? Another way to say that consumption is stagnating is to say that savings is going up. Is savings going up in Europe? From what I read a while back, this is not the case.
I would argue that is mostly because on the macro level the private sector is paying off their accumulated debt, hence less spending. That's pretty much the definition of a deflationary spiral. I don't think this shows any sort of cultural shift.
> "While increasing productivity will definitely allow people to find work that allows them either less time or more flexibility..."
If only it worked that way. In practice, for the last 3+ decades most productivity gains have merely increased profit margins and the wealth of those in the top quintile, they haven't had a significant positive impact on most of those who have actually been more productive.
> Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it?
Yes - if only because I believe most people can't operate well for more than ~28 hours/week. I don't want to be diagnosed by a doctor who has to work more than that. I wouldn't want my case argued by a lawyer who has to work more than that. I wouldn't want my food prepared by a cook who has to work more than that. Etc.
Laws and caps are how we got to 40 hours/week (35 in France). Let's keep them going.
You can see proof of the endless drive in everyone. The cleaner, the CEO, the entrepreneur, the billionaire - all generally aspiring for more. There is always a TV or outfit or holiday or experience or car or watch that costs slightly more than the one you currently covet.
So it would need to be a very strong societal norm otherwise people will naturally gravitate towards the option that makes them more.
I think it should be government leading the way. Expand AmeriCorps (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmeriCorps) and equivalents around the world, but with more than cost-of-living allowance - both setting the agenda for society but also helping cover for jobs lost to automation. Modest pay for 3-4 days/week of work. The sort of jobs that can give people meaning to life, don't require 4+ years of tertiary-level education, etc.
I think the key is that if you worked more, you would be less productive. So if it turns out that your employer feels the same way, they wouldn't hire you for 40 hours anyway as they would be getting less value for their money.
My hope is that wages stay the same even though you work less, because your value input into the company is the same or better. That would be the dream at least.
I am not accounting for moonlighting or side gigs at all though.
Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.
So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, “professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers” tripled, growing “from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.” In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be).
But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world’s population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning not even so much of the “service” sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza deliverymen) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.
You can't debate nutters. "professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers" are clearly not bullshit jobs. They are precisely how products and resources are allocated, produced, and sold. That entire bottom paragraph from finance to health services are vastly important in an advanced economy. He seems to want us to go back to being farmers. What a quack.
Calling David Graeber a quack is to miss the mark entirely. He's an accomplished author and anthropologist with a critically acclaimed book on the history of debt and economic systems.
He calls those jobs bullshit jobs because he has a (historically informed) vision of an economy that works better without them. He rags on people who write marketing copy, for example, because their job is basically to sell something you otherwise wouldn't buy. It could be argued that, in a more efficient economy, people wouldn't be selling things people don't want to buy. Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit.
It's true that he thinks very differently from you, but that doesn't make him a quack.
> Similarly, he sees managers as a way to compel people to do work they wouldn't otherwise do, and thus sees those jobs as bullshit.
See a quack. Most of us in the real world know that managers, no matter how much we despise them or even if we are of the many that thing most manager suck, we know their job is to organize those underneath then. A number of these manager-less companies in the last year have had to introduce managers because they actually do server a purpose: managing!
He was a prof of Antropology at Yale before leaving. He is most famous for being a Wobblie, anarchist activist, and one of the heads of the Occupy Wallstreet group (I still have memories of walking by them every day and had no problem having a slice while watching the entertainment).
The irony of that statement is that Mr Graeber probably did many managerial types of jobs in his life (like being a manager over grad students, and managing part of OWS), without it strictly being called a manager.
I don't think it's fair to say that Graeber claims that all managerial work is pointless.
Here's a relevant part of the essay in question:
> In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever met a corporate lawyer who didn’t think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely. Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.
It's not a scientific study, but he's talking about people who themselves believe their own job to be basically pointless.
I've had such jobs myself, so I sympathize with the idea.
> I've had such jobs myself, so I sympathize with the idea.
Indeed. I am a programmer and I can sympathize too! So far all my jobs but one were of the utterly bullshit kind. That's the reason I decided to steer clear of the web world in the future - it seems to me that this part of our industry is made almost entirely out of bullshit, and is mostly about ad delivery, ad infrastructure and SaaS pseudo-products that operate on shitty business models.
Pouring tons of hours of one's life into one project after another with goals you're apathetic about at best and which are probably doomed to failure before they even start definitely makes dev work feel rather nihilistic at times. The percentage of the time I've worked as a dev that has created real, lasting value for anyone is depressingly small. Yet my career is going fairly well. It's hard to complain about that since the money's still coming in, but that's not very satisfying, certainly.
All big companies are larger than "some tribalism number". All big companies eventually devolve into fighting tribes. Forcing procedures to make other departments look bad, automating or faking results to make our department look good, etc. Obviously that's BS work which contributes nothing to society.
Meanwhile on the other side I've worked for companies as small as three people where we were basically a team of equal contractors with no management required (non-IT outsourced labor, more or less, long story)
I would wager that only a very small number of people in between in size provide any value that couldn't be replaced by say, a mailing list and a small shell script or two. I've worked for some good managers. Of course half were below the median by definition and they mostly produced BS work.
The grad student analogy is inaccurate, that's more of a mentorship or apprenticeship model.
>The irony of that statement is that Mr Graeber probably did many managerial types of jobs in his life
What's ironic about it? Where does he argue the merits of managing grad students?
>He was a prof of Antropology at Yale before leaving. He is most famous for being a Wobblie, anarchist activist, and one of the heads of the Occupy Wallstreet group
What are you "most famous for" so we can determine if we can dismiss your opinions on the basis of those achievements.
>had no problem having a slice while watching the entertainment
Yeah, I'm gonna have to disagree with you, and side with the guy calling him a nutter, on this one.
He sounds like a left-wing Donald Trump in that Striker Mag article. He's frighteningly quick to make sweeping generalizations based on anecdotes - e.g. all corporate lawyers think corporate law is pointless, let's get rid of them.
He seems to have a very limited, simplistic understanding of the world - capital owners have brainwashed an army of paper-pushing white collar drones (the ones who work in "bullshit jobs") in order to systematically devalue the noble people who do "real" work, like teachers and car mechanics.
There is no consideration of the interpersonal and organizational dynamics at a small scale that actually drive the creation of low-value-add jobs and worker discontent. There is no consideration of the fact that corporate law firms are actually successful worker-owned collectives. There is no understanding of the labor market dynamics behind how teaching, nursing and administrative labor is bought and sold.
To be fair, that article is the only thing of his that I've read. Maybe his other stuff is better - more insightful, more action-oriented?
In that Striker piece though he seems more interested in ranting against the demon of capitalism than doing anything to improve people's lives. Ironically, he seems more like a hustler pumping out marketing copy to convince people to buy his books (isn't writing ad copy one of those "bullshit jobs"?) than he does a thoughtful academic.
It's too bad, because there are probably a lot of social and political changes that he and I would both like to see happen - for one, I'm a huge fan of a reduced work week.
On the contrary: we have, and for some time have had, an economy capable of providing for all the needs and likely at least most of the wants of every human now living, without requiring 40-hour (or longer!) work weeks from most of them, and the number of required actual workers declines with every passing year.
Yet we have an inherited notion that it is deeply sinful to survive without working hard for it, and equally sinful for many to prosper while few labor. As a result we must endlessly invent placeholder positions for people to fill (all of those second assistant deputy administrative oversight whatever jobs that let people show up and pretend to be useful), lest they have no "work" to do anymore and thus no claim to a share of the production capacity.
We could just as easily switch to some sort of rota for performing the necessary work, and have everyone provided for with a minimum of required labor, but this is seen as an affront to the religiously-held beliefs of people who haven't adjusted to what we're actually capable of nowadays.
> Yet we have an inherited notion that it is deeply sinful to survive without working hard for it, and equally sinful for many to prosper while few labor. As a result we must endlessly invent placeholder positions for people to fill (all of those second assistant deputy administrative oversight whatever jobs that let people show up and pretend to be useful), lest they have no "work" to do anymore and thus no claim to a share of the production capacity.
I agree that the US has a widespread cultural belief in the virtue of work and the sinfulness of laziness.
That said, I don't think it's quite as simple, or as centrally planned, as you're making it out to be.
When a company hires a lot of people into vague roles that don't really add much value it more often than not seems to be driven by ego and power struggles among existing employees. For example, a VP who is anxious about seeming important and also eager for a promotion might hire a big team of lower level managers whose work adds dubious value because overseeing a team of 100, including several layers of management, is often seen as more impressive (and a better qualification for senior leadership) than overseeing a team of 10 - even if that small team is super efficient and gets just as much work done. And while the efficient 10-person team leader is probably a better manager and better-suited for executive leadership overall, there is some logic behind promoting the person who built out an unnecessarily large team. Leading a larger group of people with lots of layers is a distinct skill, and one that is pretty hard to practice. The person with the big team at least has done it before. Hiring a lot of useless roles is kind of like dressing for the job you want, on the company's dime.
In any case, I think these kinds of personal and organizational dynamics are a much bigger driver of fluffy, low-value-add jobs than any kind of feeling of cultural obligation to provide employment to middle managers.
Not if the barriers to entry are high. I worked (as a coder) in Ericsson in the late 90s, and very few of my peers were doing anything much at all. Similar in a web agency during the dotcom boom (which the agency survived, in fact it's still one of the dominant ones in my home market)
Call it nutty all you want, it's far more insightful than your original suggestion that the reason we work such long hours is because of an endless appetite for luxuries and trivialities. As Graeber points out, it may sound good and just to you, but it's actually quite unfounded.
> Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter.
Marketing did the choice for us. And instead of using all the available communication tools, like FB Messanger, WhatsApp for our benefit, we post cats and meals.
Being a freelancer makes it a very conscious choice. Right now I'm only working 20 hours per week, and I'm about to go full-time on a project for the next few months.
Well, it's very different, because I like to take a lot of long breaks, and have a lot of free time for side projects. For me it's less about TVs and vacations, and more about being able to retire early. Hopefully from an exit, or passive income.
> are you then going to be calling it unfair that he he's paid more than you? Are you going to be calling for an weekly hour cap to prevent it?
What a strawman--you make up jealousy and legal bans when no one has suggested any of those. Using that logic, are you going to call those who work less than you (because they value their quality time more than the shiny new toys) slackers? Are you going to prevent them from getting promoted because they don't work as much as you? This type of argumentation just does not lead to a constructive debate, imo.
Not quite a strawman. It was a rhetorical question in an attempt to make people think about how they would respond to the costs and benefits of voluntary work reduction if only they did it and not other peers.
Also, I have seen this line of argumentation. In a thread less than a week ago, somebody said how he found it unfair that I or others might work 60+ hours and he only work 40 and that pay scales should and job promotion abilities should be equal so he didn't have to give up his life to compete against those of use that had a different set of priorities (my terminology -- his was a little less forgiving). People choosing 32 hours a week would be upset to get passed up by those choosing 48+ hours. It's natural.
This reminds me of the old line about peacocks. In every way other than sexual attraction, those enormous and garish tail feathers are detrimental to survival (energy, concealment, agility...). If every peacock agreed to simply scale down their tails, so that the pecking order remained unchanged, the results would benefit everyone.
That's Prisoner's Dilemma [1]. Similar to ban on advertising of cigarettes is said to be beneficial to Tobacco companies. I couldn't find definite quantitative research on this claim. On Wikipedia in economics section [2] this claim has [citation needed] tags assigned to it.
Working time regulations is about preventing companies from using their excessive bargaining power on a tense job market in order to get the most desperate workers accept anything. You can be against it (I'm not), but it's another topic from part-timers vs full-timers.
Regarding wages, it's normal that you make more (ceteris paribus) if you work more. As for promotions, I guess it depends on the kind of role involved; many managerial roles are known for requiring pretty long hours, so this might not be compatible with 32-hour week for a start. But you should be able to move up from, say, junior to senior dev if you got the skills, whatever your working hours. Everything is not possible obviously, but when it is, mere working hours is a pretty lacking metric for merits and promotion--as the article points out.
Well, yes, that's how we got the Working Time Directive and the 40-hour work week. He's right in that economic fortunes are lumped together. Imagine a guy on a motorbike chained to a guy on foot: the biker complains about his speed being restricted, but speeding up is going to be very bad for the health of the pedestrian.
I think the general automation over time will help improve our overall productivity which may help us spend more time with our families and kids. I would not be surprised if Tim Ferris's 4 hour work week becomes a reality.
I think a three day weekend should be a societal goal we strive for, as productivity per worker goes up. Let's use our extra wealth to give people some more leisure time. Besides there's a good chance people will probably get the same amount of work done with four days as five.
I agree wholeheartedly, but I wanted to provide an alternative choice of language that I think better describes what we must do:
Rather than:
"Let's use our extra wealth to give people some more leisure time."
We could say:
"Let's use our extra wealth to take more leisure time for ourselves."
My life goal is to help end the necessity of human work for our survival, and I think it's critically important that we understand that this will only happen if we take the time. John Maynard Keynes famously predicted in 1930 that as productivity rose, working hours would drop and at some point we would all be working 15 hour work weeks. That didn't happen though, and it seems in a huge part related to the fact that, as productivity rose business owners turned that in to profit for themselves rather than sharing the profits with workers.
So suggesting business owners "give" us that time seems unlikely, and I think we need to take it for ourselves. We can do that by becoming business owners ourselves, either by joining a cooperative[1] or by starting our own business, or we can do that by earning a high enough salary that working 4/5 as much would still pay the bills, and then negotiating hard with prospective employers until you find one that needs you enough to accept a 32 hour a week schedule.
Anyway, I'm completely agreeing with you, I've just spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about this and I think the language of suggesting we "give" this to workers critically misses out on the workers' agency and ability to take what they want for themselves.
Certainly, achieving this will not be easy and there are many problems, but I think it's a goal so worth achieving that we ought to work hard to figure that out.
> as productivity rose business owners turned that in to profit for themselves rather than sharing the profits with workers.
You hit the nail. This is exactly the reason why the 15 hour workweek did't arrive. And unless systemic changes happen it is also the reason why a market requires regulation.
OK I'm lost on "We could say: "Let's use our extra wealth to take more leisure time for ourselves."" and how you square that with the gap between median wage and median housing cost. What extra wealth are you talking about?
I suppose if you say everyone who wants a bit bit more leisure time should leave cities for cheaper places it works out monetarily, but then people have to move.
I think I explicitly answered your question in my comment - it involves taking more wealth for ourselves by refusing to work for bosses who take it all from us, or by becoming so valuable to those bosses that you command a high enough salary to take more time for yourself.
The median income is low because a small fraction of people take a large fraction of the wealth. But workers could leave wage jobs and become co-owners in a cooperative business, where wealth gains would be shared by all.
Where are all of these co-ops then? If people in in-demand fields struggle to find places with good work life balance, it seems that owners don't find it beneficial to themselves to adopt such a model or more would have done so, no? Almost a chicken and egg problem.
The problem is, most Americans don't know what to do with leisure time. It actually causes them distress. We need to figure out how to get people engaged in other pursuits before we disengage them from work.
There is definitely a grain of truth to that statement. After 40+ hours of work every week, when a day or two hits with nothing to do, it can be difficult to know what to do with yourself. The mindset of needing to be constantly working starts to become embedded.
IMO it's tough to do anything with yourself on the weekends with only two days off. There's not enough time to start to do things of consequence, as the two days are mostly spent recovering from the previous 5.
5 days of work. Get up, get self ready, get kids ready, get kids to school, work, get home, feed kids, get kids to bed. Too mentally tired to do anything now, and if it's not summer then the Sun's either down or going down. Hope you didn't need to mow the damn lawn again, or your evening's really shot.
Day 6, spend actually quality time with kids (finally!), begin to recover from the work week.
Day 7, starting to feel like a real human again, maybe do just a little stuff for one's self, get the house in order after 6 days of chaos, do other necessary stuff that was deferred during the work week.
Is this really true ? Most of the distress I've seen in my friends is due to bills and student debt, when they have leisure time, their legitimate worries consume them.
Let everybody decide their own amount of leisure to work levels. We don't need a nation-wide policy to push for some standardized level. Depending on age, career advancement, family responsibilities, and a number of other factors that can be a very different calculation for people. Some people might be more willing to trade future leisure for current work more than others.
How do you propose we get to that sort of environment without some laws to push it? I mean, theoretically folks can do that now, but not realistically. A great number of people can't afford to take time off after having a baby, take unpaid vacations, work 32 hours instead of 40. Many employers wouldn't allow such things.
Policy is how we get to the point there is choice. A short workweek, vacation time, and policies that allow for family or self-care means one can choose overtime: Choose a second job: Choose to work a seasonal job during their vacation. Choose to take time off of their job to take care of family obligations, choose to stay home from work when sick.
Sure, theoretically you can choose some of these things, but you might not be able to afford housing or food or ensure you still have a job if your 2 children get sick a few times in a year. Some folks won't hire someone that isn't willing to put in the time, etc.
The whole point is that you have to have an environment where you have that sort of choice. And I can't see us getting there without legislation.
Perhaps. Our current two-day weekend doesn't prevent people from working weekends either. But most jobs stick to a 5 days/week norm. Hard to do less than that unless the norm changes.
> Let's use our extra wealth to give people some more leisure time.
I agree wholeheartedly, though unfortunately increased productivity is just being used to increase profit margins.
I didn't want to sit around and "wait for it to happen" so I just started doing this myself - taking tons of unpaid leave every year, and even completely quitting so my average days worked in the last ~10 years is something below 50%. I'm much happier for it.
It's arguable that people are actually choosing fewer hours by working part time.
Part time work has shot up as a percentage of all work. In Australia it has gone from 1/10 to 1/4 of work from 1966 to 2007. Most other countries are similar. AU numbers in the link.
Before people point out that people would actually like to work more it's worth quoting the link that this goes both ways:
"Since the early 1990s, 20-25 per cent of female part time workers and 30-35 per cent of male part time workers have indicated a preference to work more hours. At the same time, there is evidence to suggest that two full time workers want to move to part time work for every part time worker who wants to move to full time work."
'..over the last thirty years there has been an increase in involuntary part time employment.'
'There has been no sustained or substantial decrease in the level of involuntary part time employment among women since it increased during the recession of the early 1990s.'
'involuntary part time employment increased strongly during the economic recessions in the early 1980s and 1990s, as well as the economic slowdown in 2001.'
Your paper was published in June 2008, before the '08 Crisis.
Choosing to work Part-Time is a privilege. Companies use Part Time work to avoid paying benefits, leave, etc. Keeping employees in a sort of limbo to save costs.
I would suspect that part-time work has shot up because traditional full-time roles have evaporated in many sectors, so people are trying to make ends meet by hustling several part-time gigs at once, or in short succession.
> Utah abandoned the experiment in 2011 after residents complained they were unable to access services on Fridays.
The idea of a three-day weekend looks nice, but it should be applied to people, not services! Services should be still open Monday to Friday, just with 80% of the people working in.
Yes I was wondering why they didn't either cycle the extra day, or have 100% Tue-Wed-Thurs then 50% Mon&Fri - using hot desking so that much of the office space can be shut down.
Other advantages are that 2 working parents who each had an opposing day 'off' would only need child care for 3 days instead of 5, resulting in lower costs and more family team. I know that would be great for me!
So now the question becomes -- which day should become the third day?
I vote for Friday. It's the Muslim worship day - and snuggles nicely against the Jewish and Christian worship days. It would give "Thank God It's Friday" an extra dimension of meaning. Most people are halfway home mentally anyway.
Monday also has some claims, but think of all of the songs that would have to be re-written to make Tuesday the new "most hated." I Don't Like Tuesdays (tell me why.) Rainy Days and Tuesdays Always Get Me Down. Blue Tuesday.
Increase in productivity and all the remote work tools now available are supposed to gives us option to work less, but it is not that easy when we bring our work everywhere thanks to smartphones. Even when working part-time you end up checking your e-mail or Slack. It would be great to push changes like the ones proposed in article, but there is nobody out there who will want to advocate for them - corporations? government? unions? ourselves? (when the consumerism argument seems to please everyone):/
Don't do it. There are plenty of people who become unavailable after work hours (when they are not supposed to be on call). Every YC article that comes up about the topic there are plenty that will tell you how.
In the end it comes down to people making a decision. They are willing to take their work home with them essentially, either literally or via phone, because they value that job enough to compete with the others who are willing to do the same.
There are plenty of slightly less demanding jobs or even fields that will give you that ability, but that drive for the little more financially comfortable life is quite powerful. Too many people act like they are powerless when in reality they have the power to start looking into jobs or careers.
It is good point. In general the only people who can change the workplace are the employees who put the pressure on the employer or like you say make career choices that better reflect work/life balance we seek.
This is best visible in tech where we are used to perks that we already consider basic, another discussion is whether those perks are actually a way to make us work more.
On a personal note I remember working in advertising and being on my Blackberry 24/7. Was it necessary? I don't think so, but neither my ad agency nor myself had an effective productivity system in place. Workplaces has changed so much in the last 5 years, that we may want to consider teaching people how to work less, remotely and avoid re-work at any cost. My proposal would be putting that as obligatory course in every college. Sort of like d.school Design Your Life, and instead Design Your Work.
I recently read an interesting take on the same topic by Carlos Slim Helu. He actually advocates a 3 day work week for certain industries. Telmex is already offering this option to some of it's employees.
> As anthropologist David Graeber recently has contended, many of us work jobs that, at least partially, seem pointless. Indeed, economists long have been aware of the redundant hours contained in many working days
Wait! Are these the same Keynesian economists that say doing pointless work, literally digging holes and filling the up again, can improve the economy?
So we would lose 11% of working days, but you would get a weekend after every 3 work days.
I think the main objection would come from various religions which have hard-coded a 7 day week, but if they picked one holy day out of 5, that is even more visits to the designated building of that religion every year, so it seems like they could get on board with that.
What does 9/80 mean? 9h/day minimum, and 80h/week?
That 'd be straight out illegal in Germany, for example (8h/d maximum on long-term average, 48h/week max on long-term average). If any accidents happen with this excessive overtimes, the employer is fully liable for any damages claims.
What the US desperately lacks is a federal workers' protection laws.
“The 9/80 work week… occurs over a 2-week period as follows: employees work seven 9-hour days in a 2-week period, one 8-hour day and then receive one “free” day off every other week.”
I'm fairly sure it means that you work 80 hours over 9 days (instead of 10), which can actually be pretty nice, because its fairly rare for professionals to actually work 9-5. To me it seems to codify an existing trend, and provide a benefit that acknowledges the reality of work. personally I don't think this represents a lack of workers rights, but an improvement by offering a more flexible schedule.
Keynes famously predicted we'd be working much less by now due to increased productivity, but that hasn't happened yet and probably never will for the same reason we still have to work five days a week.
Is there any real evidence of this that's not from conservative talk radio?
It's amazing how workers, who got fired by the hundreds of thousands, voluntarily gave up pensions only to lose their jobs, dealt with numerous health issues and cancers working in horrible conditions, even in modern times, and still get blamed.
Yeah.. and if it weren't for unions most of us would've been working from the age of 7 or so in a country with no safety regulations. Imagine how competitive those businesses would be though, oh boy! Sorry if the unions in your particular area/industry don't live up to your expectations, but unions have done far more good than bad, and it's been over a lot longer than decades.
Probably because any gain we're getting from productivity is being equally erased by inflation. Imagine if gas cost $.35, like it did in the mid 60s. You'd only need to work a few days to have enough gas for the entire year.
That's not how inflation works. Gains in productivity (e.g. better technology) aren't wiped out by changes in the nominal value of currency.
Rather, gains in productivity could be countered by increases in the standard of living. But, since the first world standard of living has been "good enough" since the 1950s, the increases in productivity have instead fed the ever-increasing wealth divide in first world nations.
This sounds like something you can potentially achieve today just by negotiating with your employer. 20% less work for 20% less pay. It affects only you and the world keeps on turning.
I went back and read this again and the effect of these sort of changes compounded over time could actually save the world. It wasn't just a click bait headline. :-)
Wouldn't an extra day working from home each week give pretty much the same benefits, while keeping productivity the same?
Nice middle ground, I think. I think for businesses that require customers to be around... restaurants, taxis, coffee shops... losing a day would be pretty brutal.
Likely see less coffee shops, for example, as they would struggle to make rent. Probably more chain coffee shops, as a result. I see a lot of consequences like this to adding another weekend day.
Yes - many 'services' might still be 7 day, just cycling additional time off amongst the workers. That relies on owners happily sharing their profits, which is unlikely to happen outside of co-ops.
Actually, I think those businesses would have a better go at adjusting.
A lot of stores, coffee shops, and the like are almost completely staffed with part time workers that only work 3-4 days a week anyway, though they might have to have slightly more hourly management. Taxi drivers are often independent contractors.
The bigger issue I would be things like nursing homes, hospitals, and other such things because suddenly you'd need more CNAs and nurses and doctors on staff. It would really need to be planned in a way that gets nursing programs (for example) expanded and folks enrolled in such programs. The businesses would benefit overall, however - Somewhere in sweden they experiemented with 6 hour nursing shifts not so long ago. They found less stress, better care, and less absenteeism among the nursing staff. Short term loss that some planning can help with for what seems like long-term gain.
Every time someone makes the comment "oh if America was just like Europe and had X number of days off and relaxed attitudes towards work and a strong work life balance etc", I feel obliged to point out that there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Europe and B) Don't mind the 5 day work week and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone. Not to mention the abysmal state many European countries and economies have found themselves in. While they were taking their siesta, the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world.
I think you're mostly right, trying to apply European solutions to American problems is not necessarily a good idea, just like trying to apply American solutions to European problems is not necessarily a very good idea.
The nationalist slur at the end of your comment was totally unnecessary though.
> European solutions to American problems is not necessarily a good idea,
European here. Fully agree. What is largely overseen is that the meme of Europe being a largely regulated field where everything is so much different to the US, has (according to my perception) largely evaporated over the last 10-15 years. While the startup acumen is still more elaborated in the US due to more liberal working laws, people in Europe work a lot overtime unpaid, even more than in the US.
I'm reasonably certain you've mixed up stereotypes. The staunchest defenders of the free market are keeping busy retreating back to the Democratic Party because it serves their interests more than the Republican Party does. They did the reverse in the 80s (hence "neoconservative") for the same reasons.
Oh that's a good point, I had just autocapitalized "Free Market™" (and tacked on that ™ symbol) in my brain reading the comment. I forgot that the words have actual meaning too. Yeah probably those guys are mostly holding their nose and backing Gary Johnson. :)
"Nationalist slur" Oh please, take a look at Spain's economy and tell me that their 2 hour siesta (it means nap in English btw) is doing anything to help their happiness or quality of life. My point is you work hard to maintain your happiness and it's not given to you freely by some government policy.
Any links to studies suggesting Spain's economy is related to their siesta?
For another irrelevant comment about productivity: Try walking into any office in China right after lunch and find any worker not asleep at their desk. And their economy is pretty booming.
1) United States is ranked 13th on the World Happiness Report, behind 12 countries all more regulated than the US. [1]
2) Americans might work hard, but they work less than both Mexico, Russia, Greece, etc. [2]
At least in the US the base level of wealth (poor) is higher than half the countries on earth. True that the higher levels (the 120 people that own half of America) are way out of balance.
The comment about taking siestas was saying the US is the largest economy because people in other countries were lazy. Did you really think that it was the other half of that sentence being objected to?
To add some perspective though, because the US is the largest economy, the notion of working harder to achieve similar results to the US is quite the aspiration for the developing countries. Not to mention geeks like me (and probably others here) who are endlessly fascinated by how much easier it is to go from idea to prototype to production to profit in the US compared to just about every other country on the planet.
The commenter could have just said that the 25% extra hours worked each week compounded into a much larger economy and omitted 'siesta'.
> how much easier it is to go from idea to prototype to production to profit in the US compared to just about every other country on the planet
Is that true? I honestly don't know, but my intuition is that it's true for a certain subset of projects and not others. Even if it is true, is the origin of that truth "working harder"? I sincerely doubt that. If I had to guess, the availability of capital is the leading cause. And that capital came from somewhere, but it wasn't all hard work.
This study (looking at the "Entrepreneurship & Opportunity" column) for 2015 shows Sweden at #1 and the US at #11:
http://www.prosperity.com/#!/ranking
> Is that true? I honestly don't know, but my intuition is that it's true for a certain subset of projects and not others.
Good point. I cannot offer you proof, although if you polled people who have lived in multiple countries, including the US, you would probably find a majority of them agree.
Also, at the very cutting edge of technology, I think even small things can kill ideas, and the US probably does the least damage to the idea while it is taken from germination to profit. Maybe it is that small subset which has a cascading effect on the rest (e.g. Google, whose extraordinary financial success in search certainly cascaded into many things which touch people's lives directly).
Interestingly, I have made this comment at what is sleeping hours in the US but is more closer to work hours in many other places around the world. And till now this is the only comment which has raised this question despite HN's global audience - not that I am not glad you asked the question, I am just saying that it is not meeting with a ton of resistance (yet). On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if my point is completely refuted with a mountain of evidence in the next few hours :-)
> Even if it is true, is the origin of that truth "working harder"? I sincerely doubt that.
My point is that everything is a sort of multiplicative factor when it comes to the size of the economy, and a nation where people are working nearly 25% more time than other nations (or at least the ones being compared here) can be a pretty significant boosting factor, especially when it is combined with the availability of resources and the productivity associated with what is called "human capital".
> If I had to guess, the availability of capital is the leading cause. And that capital came from somewhere, but it wasn't all hard work.
Not to say that the US has never made mistakes, I think they have at various times abused the power of their economic and military strength for mobilizing capital to their advantage (to put it really mildly). I don't know how to account for its effect.
The US has a larger population than any individual EU state. Comparing GDP per capita is fairer and puts the US between 9th and 13th worldwide, behind a few european countries.
To be fair, wealth from natural resource extraction should be discounted for the purposes of the current discussion. This would remove Qatar, Brunei, Kuwait, Norway, and the UAE from the top of the list.
But then again, it would also lower the US quite a bit, so I guess the comparison is difficult. Besides, "the EU" does not exist when it comes to work/leisure regulation and attitude.
The others on the list, which do not have oil, are inflated, because they have foreigners working there, who increase the GDP but do not count to the population. Essentially a part of Switzerland's and a big part of Luxembourg's GDP per capita belongs to Germany.
USA is much larger than any European state, but if we're looking at a whole union, EU has a larger economy than USA. Despite paid vacations, siestas and stuff.
The US was kind of like starting a game of Civilization on Chieftain difficulty with industial tech level, with oceans on two sides, natural resources abound, peaceful ally to the north and weaker country to the south.
Every time someone makes the comment "oh if China was just like Western countries and had X etc", I feel obliged to point out that there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Western countries and B) Don't mind Y and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone. Not to mention the abysmal state many Western countries and economies have found themselves in. While they were taking their Z, China was busy being the second largest economy in the world and soon to be the largest.(Source: Chinese) /s
> the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world
The article is about energy consumption and how to save the worlds natural resources. What has your comment to do with that?
It is having more money worth damaging our planet, risking famine for millions, risking natural habitats?
Maximizing relative economy value is not a goal in itself. The goal is the citizens happiness and health. They are talking about saving the world and you answer back talking about money.
> there's a large majority of people in this country who A) Do not like being told we should be more like Europe and B) Don't mind the 5 day work week and have just as much joy and happiness as anyone.
Citation needed. From what I've seen the US underperforms on e.g. happiness surveys (certainly in an overall statistical sense - it's possible there are individual exceptions).
> While they were taking their siesta, the USA was busy being the largest economy in the world.
And what do you have to show for it? Has that large economy "trickled down" to the people in the street?
That link defines happiness as in how happy would an American hipster be with the local political situation if teleported there, not happy as in how likely is the average dude on the street to smile or laugh, or how likely is armed revolution.
For example Turkmenistan comes in near last, and it would be hell on earth for a coastal USA hipster who just wants to talk progressive politics in a coffee shop all day, but the natives kinda like it the way it is... happiness is not defined by most as a starbucks on every street corner, etc.
This is part of the problem I think. I've worked 4-day weeks in the past and one of the best things about it is you have a free day during the week to do all the things you normally can't get to. Go to the doctor, visit other business or government offices that are normally only open while you're at work.
Of course if everyone does a 4-day week, then you lose that benefit. Then you have to cram all those errands into the 4 days, during which you now also have more work to do.
Instead of "everybody take Friday off". It might make more sense to stagger days off so everyone has a chance to have a day off while things they need are open.