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Should Friday be the New Saturday? (nber.org) 44

Abstract of a paper published on National Bureau of Economic Research: This paper investigates self-reported wedges between how much people work and how much they want to work, at their current wage. More than two-thirds of full-time workers in German survey data are overworked -- actual hours exceed desired hours. We combine this evidence with a simple model of labor supply to assess the welfare consequences of tighter weekly hours limits via willingness-to-pay calculations. According to counterfactuals, the optimal length of the workweek in Germany is 37 hours. Introducing such a cap would raise welfare by .8-1.6% of GDP. The gains from a shortened workweek are largest for workers who are married, female, white collar, middle aged, and high income. An extended analysis integrates a non-constant wage-hours relationship, falling capital returns, and a shrinking tax base.

Should Friday be the New Saturday?

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  • Yes!!! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dskoll ( 99328 ) on Monday March 17, 2025 @11:29AM (#65239795) Homepage

    I am retired now, but for the last year of my working life, I cut back to 4 days per week at 80% of my salary. It made a tremendously positive difference to my quality of life. I recommend it to everyone if you can make it work financially.

    I'm not sure how or why we settled on the magic number of 5 days per week. There doesn't seem to be any particularly compelling reason for it.

    • by twms2h ( 473383 )

      I'm not sure how or why we settled on the magic number of 5 days per week. There doesn't seem to be any particularly compelling reason for it.

      Actually, at least in Germany, the legal limit is 48 hours/week on 6 days. But you could simply work 40h/week on 4 days.

    • I think it was largely that at one time we had 6 days a week (thanks religion!), and unions fought to give us an additional day and kinda gave up after that.

      But four days seems to work for everyone according to the research. So, of course, does WFH, but the bosses are busy burning that one down, so I wouldn't put any faith in us going for four days just because it makes sense and businesses as well as employees would benefit from it.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by groobly ( 6155920 )

      They settled on 5 days a week because they thought that life would be nicer that way instead of 6 days a week. 6 days a week was decided on because even god had to rest on the 7th day.

    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      I'm not sure how or why we settled on the magic number of 5 days per week. There doesn't seem to be any particularly compelling reason for it.

      Most research I remember reading (and could find in a quick Google search) shows worker productivity goes up fairly linearly until you reach 45-55 hours per week. So there was a compelling reason for governments to limit the work-week to 40 hours, but not continue to drop below that. Even countries that work far less than the US tend to do this with more vacation time, not with a shorter work-week.

      If we drop to a 25-35 hour work-week it probably won't be for the same reasons we moved to a 40-hour week a cen

    • Letâ€(TM)s work zero days per week! I guess productivity will sky rocket when you divide by zero!
    • I did as well, but I put the extra free day in the middle of the week.
      It was much nicer to have that break and I was actually looking forward to find out what I missed.

  • by Surak_Prime ( 160061 ) on Monday March 17, 2025 @11:52AM (#65239857)

    I'm mostly fine with this, except making Thursdays the last day of the work week would make them even more complicated, and I, for one, have never been able to quite get the hang of Thursdays. ;)

  • As automation continues to become more advanced, the only way we can continue to have an economy where most people obtain their income primarily through labor is to reduce the amount of labor each worker does. Options such as a 6-hour work-day and 4-hour work-week (or some combination of both) are inevitable. I would be surprised if the hours in the average work week hasn't dropped by at least 20% in the next 20 years.

    • by skam240 ( 789197 )

      It's not at all inevitable. US worker productivity has doubled since WW2 (the 40 hour work week was established in the 30's for reference) and we're still working the same old hours, meanwhile the middle class continues to shrink as it has since the 70's. We're already WELL overdo in benefitting from increased worker productivity.

      Getting to 4 days a week will be at least as much of a struggle as getting to 5 was and is not at all inevitable.

      • by ranton ( 36917 )

        It's not at all inevitable. US worker productivity has doubled since WW2 (the 40 hour work week was established in the 30's for reference) and we're still working the same old hours

        A continuation of the productivity gains over the past 100 years isn't what I was referring to. I was referring to the possibility that automation could get good enough that a huge percentage of people become unemployable in today's economy. Vast productivity increases led to the economy going from 30% white-collar jobs in 1925 to 65% today. If AI gets to the point where most white-collar jobs are not needed, there won't be enough blue-collar jobs to go around.

        The Program for the International Assessment of

      • I mean, sort of. Households sure seem to have more STUFF than ever before. While the struggle below the poverty line is still very real, the definition of what above-poverty looks like as a lifestyle is very, very different.
    • It's inevitable that they should make sense, but it's not inevitable that they will happen.

      If what appears to be planned plays out, the workers will have to work MORE and everyone else will be either left to die in a ditch, imprisoned and enslaved, deported to someplace where they will probably die, or just outright murdered by the state.

  • SFSMTWT from now on.

  • I have worked 4 10s for the past few years and I love it. Not sure I could work any other schedule now. Fortunately I'm in my 60s so this gig will probably be my final.
  • It would allow IT, for once, to do maintenance during the week. I would like to do updates on Fridays and reclaim weekends. Must be nice to have a job that only lasts 40 hours per week or only happens on certain days.

  • Why not? If Thursday is better than Friday, then surely Wednesday is even better!

  • Start early to get off early.
  • Onr thing about working remotely is that bug reports and status start rolling in on Sunday. And then my boss starts Slacking me for updates.

  • on sprint weekends:

    Thursday free practice 1 and 2
    Friday FP3 then race qualifying
    Saturday sprint qualy in morning then the sprint in the afternoon
    Sunday race

    since theres going to be a lot of other changes for the 2026 season why not?

    • I would swap sprint stuff on Friday and FP3 and Q1-3 on Saturday. Other than that I like this a lot. Not a big fan of the sprint thing. But this way the team would have an extra day to repair the car if they get wrecked in the sprint race.

      I for one hope they get rid of the sprint thing in 2026.
  • Due to the way flex hours are typically handled in Germany, you can have up to 160h of flex, which then typically has to be cleared by the year's end. I have a lot of German colleagues who basically work "overtime" throughout the year on purpose to then get extra days off during the holiday period at the end of the year when they have to recude the amount of flex hours they have.

    I hope this practice has not affected the survey results, although if enough people do it, it will affect also people who would pr

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