Six-month Trial of a Four-day Working Week To Be Launched in the UK (standard.co.uk) 60
More than 30 companies will take part in a trial of a four-day working week to "herald in a bold new way of working in 2022," researchers say. From a report: The global pandemic has impacted how long and where people work with Working From Home guidance giving an opportunity to experiment with normal work life. The six-month trial will attempt to measure whether workers can operate at 100 per cent productivity for 80 per cent of the time. Employees will be paid for the same amount as if they were working five days a week.The pilot is being led by 4 Day Week Global in partnership with the think tank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign and researchers at Oxford University, Boston College, and Cambridge University.
Nice perk (Score:5, Insightful)
4 day weeks are going to become the big new perk that people look for when considering employers. Anyone who wants the best staff will have to offer it.
This is good, it's about time we re-thought work. Reducing working hours worked well in France, even though it was only half a day a week.
Re:Nice perk (Score:4)
When we were all put on 80% Apr 2020-Nov 2020 and we took Friday's off, I found I was a lot more relaxed in life. It was great. Working with the offshore teams on 100% hours was an issue though. My hours/day did creep up considerably, but that's a problem with working from home. Going back to the office full time in October this year fixed that and improved both my work/lift balance and my per hour productivity.
Some other companies are talking about four day weeks without reducing hours. I can't see how that works for many, including myself. My wife's a teacher and consequently has little flexibility in her hours: we'd struggle with picking up our young son from school and spending time with him, and/or I'd have to go back to work after dinner to complete my work day and see even less of my wife. That sounds shit.
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My daughter already works a 4-day week, but still works at least 40 hours a week. She has one short day, which is basically 8 hours of work - if she is able to take time off for lunch - and one very long day, where she's there from about 7:30 am until after 7:30 pm. Pay is not based on hours, but on the work she does.
I'm paid by the project at this point. Seems like a similar setup. Part from home, part on-site. I don't keep track of hours, but there is indeed one very long day.
It's pretty much being a professional. The concept of a fixed schedule is great for non or semi professionals. But when you are there to get a job done, you are there to get it done.
Anyhow, if your daughter understands the situation, and doesn't get caught up in the old concept of hating your work and employer by default, she should do well f
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When we were all put on 80% Apr 2020-Nov 2020 and we took Friday's off, I found I was a lot more relaxed in life. It was great. Working with the offshore teams on 100% hours was an issue though. My hours/day did creep up considerably, but that's a problem with working from home. Going back to the office full time in October this year fixed that and improved both my work/lift balance and my per hour productivity.
Some other companies are talking about four day weeks without reducing hours. I can't see how that works for many, including myself. My wife's a teacher and consequently has little flexibility in her hours: we'd struggle with picking up our young son from school and spending time with him, and/or I'd have to go back to work after dinner to complete my work day and see even less of my wife. That sounds shit.
The 4 day 10 hour a day work week is pretty old. I worked for a place way back in the 70's. It was sort of okay. We had three shifts, and the third shift ended up being a nightmare because it doesn't adjust to any circadian rhythm at all. Get off work at 7 A.M. can't go to sleep until maybe noon, then get up and go to work. Then I spent the extra day just catching up on sleep - and keep in mind I was young at the time, and more resiliant.
If I were to hazard a guess, the biggest pushers for this 4 day wee
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I had that overnight shift as well. Sun-Wed with 3 days off. It doesn't quite work that way since one my first "day off" I am working 6 hours to finish the previous days shift. But the worse part was losing a day off trying to switch to a day schedule to be with my family.
That said, when I had a 4X10 day schedule, I loved it.
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4 day weeks are going to become the big new perk that people look for when considering employers. Anyone who wants the best staff will have to offer it.
This is good, it's about time we re-thought work. Reducing working hours worked well in France, even though it was only half a day a week.
In IT it's not unusual for a business to run 24/7, especially as a service provider. They either do rotating shifts or have a permanent weekend crew. Rotating shifts suck, two permanent 4 day crews would work Well (I.E. M-T and F-M).
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Broadcast TV in the UK used to work on a fortnightly rotation split between two shifts. The two common patterns were AP Shift which ran Mon, Wed, Sat, Sun, Tue, Thu, Fri and ITN Shift which I think was Mon, Tue, Wed, Sat, Sun, Thu, Fri. 7 days instead of 8, and 12 hour shifts on the days you were working which meant the total hours were the same as the Mon-Fri office workers.
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Rotating shifts suck
Been there, done that, and I concur 100 percent.
But will the 5th day be off? (Score:2)
It's fine if it's made contractually binding that inter-employee communications are verboten on the 5th day... not some weasely nonsense about 'except for emergencies' unless those are explicitly defined as non-commercial situations like the office building burning down.
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It's fine if it's made contractually binding that inter-employee communications are verboten on the 5th day... not some weasely nonsense about 'except for emergencies' unless those are explicitly defined as non-commercial situations like the office building burning down.
Exactly. This is at the base of the problem. I've always been the most productive employee in my position wherever I've worked. As a professional, my task is to get the work finished at a predetermined time, and at an excellent level. My task is not to be working for a specific number of hours a week.
If they made a mandatory no more than 32 hour a week of labor, I'll just go to a different place where I'm not limited by a clock. In my recent and present employ, I'm surrounded by people who are profession
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4 day weeks are going to become the big new perk that people look for when considering employers. Anyone who wants the best staff will have to offer it.
This is good, it's about time we re-thought work. Reducing working hours worked well in France, even though it was only half a day a week.
I like the 4 day work week concept. I'll continue to work as I always have, and will be all the more productive.
It's kind of funny - of the people I know, those who really like the 4 day work week love the idea because they'll work less, not be the best workers.
What you figure - 3 days? 2 days? Seems that we could get better and better employees by limiting the workweek to one day.
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Where do you work, that you only put in 40 hours? Most of us would love to get BACK DOWN to just 40 hours, let alone 32!
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About bloody time (Score:4, Interesting)
The only reason we aren't working 3 days a week right now is inequality - we could work 3 days a week and have the same standard of living, we just wouldn't have megayacht-borne space royalty stashing away obscene amounts of wealth for no discernible reason. We've already run into a situation where people's time is a major bottleneck of economic activity, with Fortinte's main competitor being Netflix as an example. Giving people more leisure time would alleviate this and spur demand for more jobs.
US needs something like NHS (Score:2, Offtopic)
US needs something like NHS
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The only reason we aren't working 3 days a week right now is inequality - we could work 3 days a week and have the same standard of living,
I don't know about your job. If I worked three days a week instead of five, I'd get less done. My employer would be nuts to pay me the same. So no, I wouldn't have the same standard of living.
Other jobs would have similar issues. If I'm working on a production line, my output will vary pretty directly based on the number of hours worked. Same if I'm a doctor seeing patients. Value produced is going to vary pretty directly with hours worked, and standard of living varies directly with value produced.
I'll be
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My employer would be nuts to pay me the same.
I think GameboyRMH meant that a lot of tax ends up in the pockets of the wealthy. So your boss would pay the same, but just more to you and less to the tax authorities. And yes, you would contribute less to overproduction.
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My employer would be nuts to pay me the same.
I think GameboyRMH meant that a lot of tax ends up in the pockets of the wealthy. So your boss would pay the same, but just more to you and less to the tax authorities. And yes, you would contribute less to overproduction.
Let me see if I get the thinking.
Today, I work N hours/week. I get produce $X in value and get paid some portion of that, $Y, per week. The remainder, $X-$Y, goes to company overhead (e.g. executive salaries), investors, taxes, and many other thing.
Is the assertion that if I work fewer hours per week, and we cut corporate overhead, I could produce less than $X and still get paid $Y, right?
Cutting overhead like that doesn't seem plausible. If we could do that, I could also continue to work N hours per week,
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The only reason we aren't working 3 days a week right now is inequality - we could work 3 days a week and have the same standard of living,
I don't know about your job. If I worked three days a week instead of five, I'd get less done.
Exactly, this one get's it
Once again, gets it. The concept of having a company that employs people at 32 hours a week, will have to employ more people than one that does the same work, yet has employees working 40 hours a week. You can bet that the people who work 20 percent less won't want to be paid 20 percent less.
But even if they were, the math is pretty simple. If the 32 hour a week company is to maintain the same output, more people will have to be hired, causing their product to be more expensiv
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In general, the wealthy get their money by owning businesses, shares in businesses etc. and paying workers less than the value of their labour. Making returns from capital. (Also stuff like owning many houses and renting them out.) So making the rich less rich would mean they were extracting fewer returns from their capital, and reducing the difference between what they pay workers and how much that labour is worth. So labour of a lesser value would attract the same wage.
The big question being how to make t
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In general, the wealthy get their money by owning businesses, shares in businesses etc. and paying workers less than the value of their labour.
That's a deep observation and not at all bad. It's also the case in all trades. Each party thinks they give up something of low value to get something of high value. The employee is giving up their time knowing they're trading it for a wage, not a percent of the value they're going to produce. And they agree to this because what they're being paid is with more (to the employee) than their time was. If this wasn't the case, the employee wouldn't show up at the job: they'd rather be unemployed and have their
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The only reason we aren't working 3 days a week right now is inequality - we could work 3 days a week and have the same standard of living,
I don't know about your job. If I worked three days a week instead of five, I'd get less done. My employer would be nuts to pay me the same. So no, I wouldn't have the same standard of living.
If you look at this graph [weforum.org] of productivity vs compensation from the Economic Policy Institute and published by the World Economic Forum, you can see that while worker productivity since 1950 is up 3.5x, wages have barely doubled. And if you Look since the mid 70s, wages basically have remained flat while productivity continued to soar. This is right around the time that neo liberalism took over as the dominant political framework and our leaders set about dismantling the New Deal.
We should be able to suppo
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If you look at this graph [weforum.org] of productivity vs compensation from the Economic Policy Institute and published by the World Economic Forum, you can see that while worker productivity since 1950 is up 3.5x, wages have barely doubled.
There are lies, damn lies, and statistics. Be careful.
I only scanned the page. It's reporting on wages. To be fair, you need to include non-wage compensation, specifically health insurance benefits. There are other intangibles like workplace safety which close the gap. My understanding is when you start including these factors, the gap closes considerably (but I can't cite numbers).
We should be able to support ourselves at a comfortable middle class level doing about half the work our grandparents had to. Instead, we've been continuously cheated of the value of our labor while the owner class pocketed the difference and the government foreclosed on the American Dream.
Again, there's more going on. Absolutely, the nature of work changed to favor white collar work compared to eras past and that'
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I realize you're trolling but they should actually get shorter working hours just the same for all the same reasons. Companies can hire more drivers to work 3 days a week if they find themselves short.
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You mean the same companies who have been saying for decades they can't find enough people to fill positions? The same companies who right now are whining they can't fill positions even when raising wages?
I remember back in the Bush recession (the first Bush) how, despite high unemployment, companies kept saying they couldn't find people to fill jobs. If you can't find people to fill jobs when there is a recessio
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If there's really a terrible shortage of workers then let some immigrate from the 3rd world. I'm serious.
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They took our jobs! [youtube.com]
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In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes suggested that advances in technology would mean that most people would be working 15 hours a week within a century. This did not happen. It appears that most people would prefer to work more and earn more, rather than earn less and have more leisure time. Some people work far more than is good for them. Employers are only too willing to exploit this, and encourage a competitive work harder ethic.
Forget the super-rich and their mega-yachts. It is the middle class s
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Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who end up working all hours and barely getting by, because of this culture.
If the money wasn't going to the super-rich and their mega-yachts, where we can see it has gone, then there would be no such people. We'd have plenty of middle-class free-timers and wealthy workaholics.
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Actually, the issue is that the higher paying jobs, generally don't scale down.
It's easy to find a part time $20/hr job. It's really hard to find a part time $150/hr job. The reason is, I think, because you're paid for what you know (some area of business, or technology) and if you're practicing part time (especially extremely part time, like 15hrs/week), you aren't going to be as sharp and current in what's going on.
It's a shame, as I'd love to move to a 2 day a week job later in my career, but it's hard
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If the money wasn't going to the super-rich and their mega-yachts, where we can see it has gone, then there would be no such people. We'd have plenty of middle-class free-timers and wealthy workaholics.
The US yacht market is estimated at about $19billion. That's enough to give every man, woman and child in the country a check for nearly fifty-eight dollars. Now, if you confiscated the wealth of all the billionaires in the US (about $5trillion), you could give everyone over $150,000. I guess you could have plenty of middle-class free-timers for a year or maybe two, then it's back to the grindstone.
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Of course, because straight-up confiscating their wealth is only getting the tip of the iceberg. The way this wealth is accumulated is extremely inefficient in that it causes massive economic damage to hoard a comparatively small amount of wealth.
The real gains would be in reallocating that money into people's wages, which instead of being largely taken out of play will be quickly spent, spurring massive economic demand, and will cause a small amount of inflation, which is good because inflation slowly deva
Re: About bloody time (Score:2)
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> a select group of robot-owners end up being the only humans left on earth
Don't be such a Debbie-Downer, they'll always need fresh hamsters around for their sex islands and live gladiator fights to the death.
Why would robots needs sex islands? (Score:2)
Why would the robots want to have human robot owners?
In the upcoming robot world, the robots will be competing with each other, just like they and we do. And the fittest will survive. Hard to see how keeping human robot owners around would make them fitter.
Re: Why would robots needs sex islands? (Score:2)
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Only if we program/train them to.
Actually no. And that is an important point.
Some robots will be fitter than others for whatever reasons. They will be the ones that survive. It is Natural Selection that gave us our moral values, and it will be Natural Selection that gives robots their goals and values.
See the podcast on
https://computersthink.com/ [computersthink.com]
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Seriously though, expect a flurry of articles in the papers about how awful working only 4 days will be and how we absolutely must get back to the office 5, no 6 days a week.
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Seriously though, expect a flurry of articles in the papers about how awful working only 4 days will be and how we absolutely must get back to the office 5, no 6 days a week.
There are some practicalities that are inherent in moving from a 40 hour work week to a 32 hour work week.
Productivity is one. Professional work is another. Pretty simple math.
If a person's work is buttonholed, sure. Start work at a preprogrammed time, and no other. Take 15 minute breaks starting at 10 A.M. and the other at 3 P.M. Lunch starting exactly at 12:00 and do not return to work at 1:00 P.M. The leave when the second hand shows 5:00 P.M.
But if there is something that needs produced, and tak
Re: Rebellion Reduction (Score:2)
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Widgets? That's what we use machines & robots to make. If widgets require craftsmanship, then you're back to quality control issues for tired workers that bring productivity down to the same as a 4 day week.
I simplified the example for the sake of simple calculation. If you wish to plug in another example, you can. Make it programmers if you like . Does not change the fact that if you lop off 20 percent of the workweek, you'll lose productivity.
If 40 hours of work a week exhausts you to the point of making fatigue mistakes, there might be a real physical problem. Get that checked out. I seem to have more energy than today's young people, and I'm in my mid-60's.
need some kind of UBI cheaper then prisons / riots (Score:2)
need some kind of UBI cheaper then prisons / riots when people are homeless and have nothing to lose an nice warm jail / prison may be the thing to shoot for and Walmart / other stores may not armed guards
Re: Rebellion Reduction (Score:2)
Woot (Score:2)
The 1970s called (Score:2)
Great idea in principle (Score:2)
How about reduce to 40 hours! (Score:2)
I don't know any developers who work only 40 hours. Most have to work 45-50 at least. How about let's scale back to 40, before attempting 32!
Re: How about reduce to 40 hours! (Score:2)
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This is true! If developers write fewer lines of code code because they have less time to do it, then there will be fewer lines of buggy code written!
No brainer from the bottom line (Score:2)
More work for contractors? (Score:1)
Maybe more work for contractors who want to work every day of the week to make up for the shortfall?