UK Four-Day Week Pilot Begins: Employees Get 100% of the Pay For 80% of the Time (independent.co.uk) 185
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Independent: The biggest ever four-day working week pilot is set to begin in the UK, with over 70 companies and 3,300 workers ready to take part. The trial will result in no loss of pay for employees, based on the principle of the 100:80:100 model. Employees will receive 100 percent of the pay for 80 percent of the time in exchange for a commitment to maintaining 100 percent productivity.
An impressive list of companies are taking part in the trial from a wide range of sectors including banking, care, online retail, IT software training, housing, animation studios, hospitality and many more. The pilot is running for six months and is being organized by 4 Day Week Global in partnership with leading think tank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign and researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College. [...] Researchers will work with each participating organization to measure the impact on productivity in the business and the wellbeing of its workers, as well as the impact on the environment and gender equality. Government-backed four-day week trials are also due to begin later this year in Spain and Scotland.
An impressive list of companies are taking part in the trial from a wide range of sectors including banking, care, online retail, IT software training, housing, animation studios, hospitality and many more. The pilot is running for six months and is being organized by 4 Day Week Global in partnership with leading think tank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign and researchers at Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College. [...] Researchers will work with each participating organization to measure the impact on productivity in the business and the wellbeing of its workers, as well as the impact on the environment and gender equality. Government-backed four-day week trials are also due to begin later this year in Spain and Scotland.
so Scotland is not part of the UK now with this? (Score:2)
so Scotland is not part of the UK now with this?
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Well, Scotland has some devolved powers and quite many different laws and such, so no wonder that any such thing would be trialed only under one legal framework.
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Not a tory, I just live in the real word, not the fantasy one the SNP inhabit.
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Real Tories support the SNP and Sinn Fein and their independence plans because this removes 70+ seats from parliament that will never vote for them. Call it "extreme gerrymandering".
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Certainly some parts of all the parties put party ahead of country.
Re:so Scotland is not part of the UK now with this (Score:5, Interesting)
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Who do you think pays for the military ports that sturgeon wants gone if scotland became independent?
As for employment - more than 20% of the scottish workforce is employed in the public sector. Ie they don't make money for the country, compared to 16% for england.
Productivity is so subjective (Score:5, Insightful)
Medieval peasants (Score:5, Interesting)
https://allthatsinteresting.co... [allthatsinteresting.com]
Medieval peasants had more leisure time than most working adults in modern-day western countries.
Re:Medieval peasants (Score:5, Insightful)
And hunter-gatherers had far more leisure time than that. (And continue to have, for those few cultures that still survive)
The story of civilization is the story of the common folk working dramatically more hours in exchange for moderate increases in food security, and the creation of a ruling class that skimmed a generally-increasing share of the total wealth.
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Your statement is pure conjecture with zero evidence. Plus is a lot of leisure time a bad thing? I’d retire tomorrow if my finances were good enough.
Re: Medieval peasants (Score:2)
Lol at "moderate increases". People we now classify as loving "in poverty" have objectively safer, longer, cleaner, healthier, richer in information and entertainment, in almost every respect much better life than aristocracy even in 18th century and every king and tribal chief since the beginning of civilization.
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Re:Medieval peasants (Score:5, Informative)
They worked 20-40 hours a week [psychologytoday.com].
It's a lot more pleasant though because it's self-directed, rather than being a work-slave to your boss.
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But do internet connections, streaming TV and Slashdot actually make people happy?
I appreciate many things about modern civilization, such as improved public health infrastructure and medical technology. But there are also many things that make us less happy. It's a tradeoff and I think we tend to over-estimate the benefits and under-estimate the costs.
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So? You can live like that today if you like .. as 20% of the world's population still lives btw. Don't expect electricity, a cell phone, a computer, an automobile, a nice bed, modern medicine (decent life expectancy at birth), and television?
For a certain definition of leisure (Score:2)
If it means wondering where your next bowl of low calorie vegetables is going to come from while sitting in a cold damp hut and hoping no one steals any of your crop or animals if you're rich enough to own any.
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So do homeless people.
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So do homeless people.
They prefer to be called hunter gatherers you bigott!
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Gosh, have you ever even asked them?
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Are you factoring in their shorter lifespan than modern workers?
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Many (most) jobs are about putting in the hours and being physically present. Nurse. Police officer. Hairdresser. Barista. Farmer. Shop assistant. Truck driver. Garbage collector.
Are we going to hire 25% more of them?
Re:Productivity is so subjective (Score:5, Interesting)
What are you smoking?
With the exceptions of police officer, and possibly barista at places that aren't busy enough to justify more than one employee, all of those jobs are highly concerned with productivity. Workers don't just sit around taking up space, they have a job to do. The slower they work, the more workers it takes to get the all the work done on time.
Numerous studies have shown that working more than forty hours per week actually reduces your weekly productivity for virtually all jobs, as burnout gradually reduces your hourly productivity. You just can't stay "on" for such long periods of time on a regular basis - either you adopt a more leisurely pace to ration your energy, or exhaustion does it for you. Far fewer studies have been done on working less than 40 hours, but evidence so far seems to suggest that maximum weekly productivity probably comes when working somewhere around 20-30 hours per week.
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I think you two are in agreement actually. Those jobs consist of being in the right place and doing whatever needs to be done at that time. You can't serve the coffees you'd serve on Friday on Thursday. You can't drive the distance you would've driven in five days in only four,at least not legally. Etc.
This is mostly about office workers who are spending most of their time unproductively and would thus easily be able to do the same total amount of work in fewer days. Some exceptions apply obviously.
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If there was an excess of labor I'd say a national program to encourage 32 hour work weeks with a livable wage. :Less would get done per worker, yes, but that worker wouldn't be so burned out and they may have less sick days and less mistakes. It wouldn't compensate fully, no, but the government could arrange taxes to encourage 30 hours instead of 40 in order to keep the population itself more healthy. That said, there is a labor shortage, so I'm not sure it would work, maybe it would.
Re:Productivity is so subjective (Score:5, Interesting)
The point is - many studies have shown that someone regularly working 60 hours a week will actually get less total work done per week than they would if they were only working 40.
The hourly productivity loss from exhaustion/boredom/lack of leisure time to recover from working such long hours on a regular basis actually outweighs all the extra hours you put in.
And there's no reason to believe that 40 hours is the sweet spot for getting the maximum work done per week either - several studies suggest that someone working 30 hours will tend to get at least as much total work done per week.
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>You can't serve the coffees you'd serve on Friday on Thursday.
Nope - but if you've got five baristas working at a time you can probably reduce that to 4, and they'll be able to work faster to sell the same number of coffees since they'll be less exhausted thanks to the extra leisure time.
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The problem is that most politicians and even economists think of productivity as the amount produced within a year. You and I agree that it should be measured per unit of time worked, but they don't. So by their logic, any time not working is wasted. They'd rather have you working twice as much if it only increases your output by 10%.
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You're missing the point though - the total amount produced per year actually increases as the number of hours worked decreases. At least when you go from 50 or 60 hours to 40, and there's reason to believe that trend continues down to at least 35 hours, and possibly as low as 20 (though that may depend on the job)
Our cultural fixation on equating working more hours with getting more done is actually false
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Well, many studies have shown that you can do the same job (more and/or better actually) in 40 hours than you can in 60.
Assuming you're working those hours every week.
You can obviously squeeze a lot more work into those extra hours every now and then, but working long hours on a regular basis is draining, and reduces your productivity more than the extra hours can increase it.
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There are certain jobs that this will work with and others that it won't. If you need someone to be available 24/7, like at the front desk of a hotel, then 100:80 is impossible. OTOH, if you are an animator and your weekly goal is 7,200 frames of rendered animation, then you could show you can finish it in 80 hours. Other jobs? Bank teller - no. Bank auditor - perhaps. Service industry workers - difficult. Piecemeal workers - perhaps.
This isn't much different from other industries what have defined w
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What you're overlooking is that *nobody* works 24/7 - they work shifts so that everyone together provides 24/7 availability. And unless the job amounts to a whole lot of sitting around doing nothing with occasional "interruptions" that require actual work, increased productivity can make up for shorter hours.
Bank tellers are an excellent example - they're not just napping all day, they have a queue of customers to serve. And higher productivity means they handle more customers per hour, which means the ba
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It depends how much of the customer service time is actually related to the productivity of the teller rather than other factors which the teller can't control. The few times i've been to the bank recently, a lot of time was wasted because customers reached the counter without being prepared, and then had to spend time searching through their pockets/bags to find their bank cards or account information etc.
People are inherently inefficient. One of my pet hates is people who approach the ticket gates in a tr
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Someone sitting at the front desk of a hotel will usually not be working for 100% of the time they are at work. There will be significant periods of time when the receptionist is just sitting there waiting for a query from a guest.
Reducing working hours is about making more efficient use of the remaining hours, so it's not going to work for a job that is inherently inefficient.
The flip side is also that employers are greedy. They will see that people can get their workload done in 80% of the time, and then
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There have been studies done of this. It turns out that employers are well aware that employees aren't as productive as they could be, and many, possibly most, of them are superfluous. They don't care. Why not? Because the number of people you boss around is an all-important metric.
Re: Productivity is so subjective (Score:2)
Re: Productivity is so subjective (Score:5, Funny)
If you could get the same functionality in 10 lines or 1000, which would you choose?
The answer is 1 line - I code in perl.
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The line also has to be readable. ;)
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I think it is clear that reducing the work hours of lawyers, politicians, account executives, hairdressers, insurance salesmen, and human resources staff, cannot possibly fail to raise the productivity of society.
How is it that with all this productivity-raising technology, we now require two incomes in a household for even a basic middle-class lifestyle that was previously achieved by one? It is simple inflation - more money means higher costs for limited resources such as housing. If the husband and wi
Re:Productivity is so subjective (Score:4, Interesting)
It is called the two income trap and there is a fair bit written on it. Basically, with two incomes people could move to areas with better schools for their children and this created more competition for those areas which causes prices to rise until they now used up two incomes instead of one. That same idea applies to basically any other good which has scarcity.
This same kind of thing also applies to skills. For instance if all parents teach their kids a second language to get into college if you don't do that you kid will be as a disadvantage but if you do it the child is just the same as any other. This requires putting in more and more effort to make sure your kid has all the skills that others do plus additional ones.
There is really no way to win this kind of situation. If we started to have 3 income households as the most common type then we would still have the same kind of situation we have now.
Re: Productivity is so subjective (Score:2)
> we now require two incomes in a household for even a basic middle-class lifestyle
Depends on where you live. For example, in most small-medium cities in the US a family can have a very nice middle class lifestyle on one semi-decent salary. On the other hand if you want to live in Manhattan you can live like a bum even with two incomes.
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My other half is working in some office related admin position.
She is officially supposed to work office hours, 5 days a week.
Our running joke, since work from home started, is that she is working / on call 24/7, simply cos she is flooded with work.
Funny thing, her employers ask her not to work late or over the weekend, whenever they notice. But she has so much work to do, there is no chance to cope with everything unless she literally spends about 10 -12 hours a day on weekdays and another 5-10 hours total
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Jesus christ just don't work the extra time. Especially if the managers tell her that as well. That's literally not the job.
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You're making a huge assumption here that they're going to try to judge increased worker productivity based on the individual worker. That would be as ridiculous as you lay out.
I think it's infinitely more likely that they'll look at overall company performance to determine if this works or not. If a company turns out the same amount of product with a 4 day work week as they do with a 5 then the program is a success. Of course there can be other confounding factors that need to be accounted for even with th
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We're not working in factory assembly lines. Even workers in assembly lines, take someone who was soldering components on a board, cannot be measured just based on throughput. You have to track failed solder joints many many years past product shipment, something no company would ever do.
Since there are in fact many companies who are held to incredibly high standards for lot/serial control down to individual component level on boards, there are likely companies who track failures as a teaching/training benefit as well.
When you're forced to track that level of detail for the customer anyway, might as well create reports that identify problem areas to maximize efficiency and minimize failure rate.
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The trial will result in no loss of pay for employees, based on the principle of the 100:80:100 model. Employees will receive 100 percent of the pay for 80 percent of the time in exchange for a commitment to maintaining 100 percent productivity.
So a worker that used to work 8 hours/day, Monday - Friday will now work, say, 8 hours/day, Monday - Thursday? OK, got it.
An impressive list of companies are taking part in the trial from a wide range of sectors including banking, care, online retail, IT software training, housing, animation studios, hospitality and many more.
Wait a minute - let's look at the participating sectors:
Banking - how can a bank teller/manager or really any branch employee provide 5 days of in-bank availability in 4 days?
Care - (I take this to mean healthcare, assisted living workers) How can a nurse, doctor, aide, etc provide 5 days of patient care in 4 days? It will require the hospital to hire 25% more support staff to provide th
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> Are lines of code one of them?
Hopefully that obsolete metric [folklore.org] can die in a fire.
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One more day for women to cook, clean the house and take care of the kids /s
Wednesday off (Score:2)
If I had Wednesday off, I'd likely be at least 20% more productive
It's the generation that grows up expecting it as normal I'm not so sure about.
Re:Wednesday off (Score:5, Funny)
I told my boss that once. He not only gave me Wednesday off but also Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday too.
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I told my boss that once. He not only gave me Wednesday off but also Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday too.
Nice! The whole week off, on full pay!
Sweet!!
Obligatory (Score:2)
Marge: "The plant called and said if you don't come in tomorrow, don't bother showing up on Monday."
Homer: "Woohoo! Four day weekend!"
Tax (Score:2)
So basically this is a tax. That's why we need to switch to robot workers and UBI as soon as possible. Any factory that users human workers is at risk because of human workers. Humans are not meant to function with each other. Humans always fight each other and fling accusations either fabricated or true. It's only a matter of time before your workers sue you or each other or do something bad.
The only solution is to tax companies and use that tax to pay UBI. Companies would prefer to pay a tax. Basically it
lowering full time is part of automation / UBI (Score:5, Interesting)
lowering full time is part of automation / UBI.
Yes automation will lead to the need for UBI. But automation will not kill all jobs and can lead to say the work load of 6 people being replaced by 1-2 people.
Now do want to have 1 person pulling an 50-60 hour week? or say 2 doing an 30?
also automation unchecked can fail in new and odd ways so you need to keep some people around for repairs / to be there to hit the stop button / etc.
robot can also harass you with errors and other stuff that people can easily fix.
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I've used Windows Me (Millenium Edition), I am sure that frustration from computer errors are milder than the harassments and discriminations humans are known for.
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That one person is going to create jobs and improve their community, but they won't be very interested in hiring people who don't want to work more than 30 hours.
But then I also think that the only thing UBI is a "solution" for is too little inflation and poverty. Things which I'd rather have less of than more.
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Sod that. I only work 35 and that's bad enough. I work to live, not the other way round. If your employee needs to work 60 hours, something has gone badly wrong
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I want one eager and energetic person who actively wants to work 50-60 hours
You don't want a human being, you want a robot. Humans are not designed to work 60-hour weeks for extended periods of time.
but they won't be very interested in hiring people who don't want to work more than 30 hours.
Nobody WANTS to work 60 hours a week. Yes, there are exceptions to every rule.
But then I also think that the only thing UBI is a "solution" for is too little inflation and poverty.
And you are certainly welcome to your opinion.
Re:Tax (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it a tax, or is it sharing some of the productivity gains over the last 4 decades with the workers providing them, as opposed to the CEOs presiding over them?
I guess it depends how you look at it.
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A worker is not owed anything more than their agreed payment amount, just as an employer isn't entitled to more than the agreed work from a worker. In other words, if you sell me a painting for one thousand dollars and I in turn sell that for one million dollars, I owe you nothing. Just like if I couldn't sell the painting I can't go crying to you saying you sold me a crappy painting. It's not my fault you sold it to me for the thousand dollars, just like you'd give me nothing if I couldn't sell the painti
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Is it a tax, or is it sharing some of the productivity gains
It is neither.
Obviously, it is not a tax. That makes no sense.
It is not sharing productivity either, since both the wages and production stay the same (at least in theory).
No, it's sharing productivity (Score:2)
It is not sharing productivity either, since both the wages and production stay the same (at least in theory).
Sure it is. If a worker is doing 40 hours of work in 32 hours then they are being more efficient. If they are still paid for 40 hours though and only working 32 then they are directly benefitting from the increased productivity. One day off 52 weeks a year certainly has a monetary value one can apply here based on the wages of the given employee.
Of course this is assuming that most people would actually get just as much work done in 32 hours as they do in 40. That's what makes this study exciting though!
Re: Tax (Score:2)
Instead of taxing companies, you could (partially) fund it by abolishing the personal tax exemption many countries have on the first chunk of income and capital gains.
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You must have worked for some shit companies to have such a pessimistic outlook on humans in the work place.
In a well run work place with happy employees lawsuits arent much to worry over.
proof is in the pudding (Score:3)
Re:proof is in the pudding (Score:4, Insightful)
These schemes are always announced as, "We will do X, and it's gonna be great!!!"
Never is it, "We DID X, and it worked."
Announce with fanfare and fireworks and then shelve a year later in silence.
Re:proof is in the pudding (Score:5, Informative)
You mean like these people?
https://www.sciencealert.com/t... [sciencealert.com]
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They did do it. This is the second phase, trying it on a larger scale with a wider variety of companies.
I see Panasonic in Japan is moving to a 4 day week too. Businesses are finally starting to realize that there are clear benefits.
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Like 5/2 is some golden number and society will collapse if we deviate.
21st century or 20th century (Score:2)
Speaking for the US, and mostly for office workers, there are a tranche of folks that believe the average work situation developed in the early 20th century is the pinnacle of efficiency. 40 hour work week, part-time work= no benefits. Overtime for hourly, etc.
But if the ongoing WFH experiment from Covid is an example I think the 4 day work week will start taking off in about 5-10 years. That the work model formed in the 1930's (?) isn't a great match for 21st century work. Just like WFH, basically peop
The price of a haircut? (Score:2)
Would hairdressers take a 20% pay cut, or would the price of a haircut go up 25%? Either way, society is poorer.
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If you can only enrich yourself through the over work and under pay of others then yes, you should be poorer.
And after they analyze the results (Score:5, Insightful)
The conversation will be "If you can to 100% of the work in 80% of the time, clearly you can do 125% of the work in 100% of the time, you slacker. Now get you ass to work and earn your paycheck or your replacement will."
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Part of the requirement for joining the scheme is acknowledging that the increased hourly productivity rate is due to better work/life balance.
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That's going to happen anyway regardless of anything.
Re:And after they analyze the results (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a large body of research that already demonstrates that it doesn't work like that and that peak productivity per hour worked occurs on the lower end of the 30h/week. At 40h productivity per hour is already going down.
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It a trial (Score:2)
There have been many trials at individual businesses, some worked some failed. For example a Swedish Hospital tried it and found that they employees loved it, but they were doing 80% of the work they used to, and hospital had to hire more doctors and nurses to treat all the patients who turned up. It was abandoned. French tried putting everyone including doctors and nurses on a fixed 35 hour week, and found the same thing. In many service industries where productivity is hard to measure and people are worki
Experiment not needed. We already know it's better (Score:2)
Not just productivity per hour, but total productivity.
Also, costs will decrease, and employees will be happier.
No doubt the same will happen here.
And no doubt they will go back to a 5-day work week after the experiment is over, because that is more goodness than they can handle.
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Many tests report lost productivity in 4-day work weeks, especially if those 4 days are not extended to 10 hours. Where are you finding "all these experiments"?
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A great deal depends on the nature of the work. A great deal of physical work takes physical time and effort. Work that requires thought and insight also takes time, but can have _some_ efficiency gains from less tired workers. One of the difficulties of the shorter work week is that managers often feel free to keep the same amount of weekly time for progress reports and planning meetings, generating more bureaucracy but interfering with project completion.
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I could see that over a short period of time. People will be excited to have the extra day off and cut out any fluff time in their daily routines. The problem is long term, that fluff time -- chatting with a co-worker, grabbing a snack, taking a short walk, etc -- is what keeps them relaxed day to day. The 20% productivity will not last long term. There could be an argument that the 32 hour week might boost hourly productivity ~5%, but there would still be a ~15% loss. 40 hour pay for 32 hours won't pa
Wrong (Score:2)
It depends on the job. A truck driver can't drive as many miles in 80% of the time if he always drives at max legal speed anyway no matter how much you wish it. Ditto for construction and other manual jobs. Perhaps for office workers who spend a lot of time idling away the hours on the web (yes, like I'm doing right now) it might be true, not this isn't a general fact.
The thing is, Bob, it's not that I'm lazy, it's th (Score:2)
I could get a week's real work done in about 15 minutes. The rest of the time is pointless paperwork and meetings.
So? (Score:2)
OH! 80 PERCENT? No kidding . . .
Great experiment (Score:2)
inflation (Score:2)
Let's see if this still seems like a good deal in a couple of years. It probably pegs their wages for a while too. So in fact they will be expecting >80% of the productivity for 100% of last year's wages with no increases likely for a year or two because "look we slashed your hours". Odds are that each of the four days gets a little longer too, in the name of "productivity"
Pretty soon the hourly rate is below what it would have been if adjusted for inflation due to dozens of small "optimizations" from mi
Re:80% for a promise of 100% commitment (Score:4, Interesting)
Does anyone really believe there will be same output with workers putting in 80% of the time?
For most jobs, productivity is notoriously hard to measure.
How do you measure the productivity of a programmer? Lines of code? Number of Git commits? Number of bugs squashed? None of those work.
So regardless of the actual results, some people will claim victory.
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Sure, but measuring the productivity of a company as a whole is significantly easier (albeit still tricky). Are they still turning out as much product at the same cost as they did when they had 40 hours work weeks? If yes or very close to yes then that makes a strong case for a 4 day work week.
Yes there are other variables that might effect a company's productivity which is why I mentioned it as still tricky but gauging a company's productivity is significantly easier than judging an individual's and will l
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Depending on the job, this can actually mean a similar level of productivity with at least twice the commitment.
I'm in security. A field notorious for the same qualities that firefighting has. Either it's boring as fuck or hell on earth. If you're doing a pentest, chances are that you're at some point waiting for something. Input from the client, output from a scan, a machine getting ready, a service being updated. Now, what you do is you bridge those hours and days by trying to squeeze something else in. I
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It actually works very well for pentesting, providing you set the expectations of the customer and are disciplined enough to manage the work.
Instead of saying "we'll complete the test in 2 days", you say 5 but expend the same effort spread over 5 days instead of condensed into 2 and use the other time to work on other things.
This has a LOT of benefits, you can run things like scans at a low speed (if your short of time you have to run them more aggressively which increases the risk of missing things or caus
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What happens when your 5th day and your customer's 5th do not overlap?
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Does anyone really believe there will be same output with workers putting in 80% of the time?
You've immediately fallen into the trap of thinking that productivity scales linearly and monotonically with time. In some cases, people can get more done in a few short focussed bursts than they can in an extended slog. Even for production line work, with more rest time you might find you can move the line faster the rest of the time and recover the difference.
It's worth doing the experiment.
Re:lazy (Score:5, Insightful)
CEOs already don't work 4 days, let alone 5, what do they have to do with all of this?
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Because equal outcomes will never happen unless you punish the high performers by dragging them down to the lowest common denominator.
The most you can ever do is ensure equal opportunities, but if some people grasp the opportunities better than others that's on them not the system.