Is the Five-Day Work Week Dying? (msn.com) 137
"The traditional idea of going to the office five days a week or working 9 to 5 may be dying," reports the Washington Post:
Zoom, which many workplaces and workers relied on during the pandemic, is starting to allow its more than 6,000 workers to choose whether to work in the office, work remotely, or go hybrid, as in working remotely a certain number of days per week or month at their choosing. Bolt, a San Francisco-based e-commerce start-up boldly introduced a permanent four-day workweek for its nearly 600 employees. Workplace communications platform Slack is reimagining its office primarily as a gathering place for meetings and projects. And tech giants Amazon and Salesforce are allowing their employees to decide as a team when and where they should work, based on the projects at hand.
These approaches come as companies rethink workplace policies amid the fast spread of the omicron variant and the "Great Resignation," during which employers are finding it more difficult to retain talent. U.S. office occupancy dipped to about 28 percent during the third week of January, compared to 40 percent in November before the massive spread of the omicron variant, according to building security company Kastle Systems. Still, some employers see this as an opportunity to rethink the way employees have traditionally worked, opting for even more flexible and creative arrangements that are more likely to lure and retain workers....
Jennifer Christie [Bolt's chief people officer] said after piloting the policy last year, 91 percent of managers and 94 percent of employees wanted to continue. They also reported increased productivity and better work-life balance. Meanwhile, the start-up has been inundated with resumes and emails from people interested in working for the company, Christie said. "People want to be empowered and have autonomy to do work in a way that fits them," Christie said. "That's going to be where talent is attracted...."
The one thing the Kickstarter union workers agree on is the desire for the four-day workweek. "I'd be lying if I said I hadn't listened to some recruiters from places that already implemented a four-day workweek," said Dannel Jurado [a member of Kickstarter United, which is part of the Office and Professional Employees International Union].
These approaches come as companies rethink workplace policies amid the fast spread of the omicron variant and the "Great Resignation," during which employers are finding it more difficult to retain talent. U.S. office occupancy dipped to about 28 percent during the third week of January, compared to 40 percent in November before the massive spread of the omicron variant, according to building security company Kastle Systems. Still, some employers see this as an opportunity to rethink the way employees have traditionally worked, opting for even more flexible and creative arrangements that are more likely to lure and retain workers....
Jennifer Christie [Bolt's chief people officer] said after piloting the policy last year, 91 percent of managers and 94 percent of employees wanted to continue. They also reported increased productivity and better work-life balance. Meanwhile, the start-up has been inundated with resumes and emails from people interested in working for the company, Christie said. "People want to be empowered and have autonomy to do work in a way that fits them," Christie said. "That's going to be where talent is attracted...."
The one thing the Kickstarter union workers agree on is the desire for the four-day workweek. "I'd be lying if I said I hadn't listened to some recruiters from places that already implemented a four-day workweek," said Dannel Jurado [a member of Kickstarter United, which is part of the Office and Professional Employees International Union].
Let's hope so... (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea of working 9-5 came from the days when you needed daylight to work. Similarly the idea of working in a fixed place came from traditional manual work where you needed to be in the location where your product/materials were.
Modern technology has eliminated both of these requirements for a large proportion of jobs, and yet huge amounts of time and money are wasted clinging to the old ways instead of taking advantage of new technology.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines [Re:Let's hope so... (Score:2, Insightful)
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Let's hope that when it dies it isn't replaced by the 7 day work week.
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In emergencies, very very rare, once or twice a decade; and sometimes before a big deadline. I am not IT support and I don't work for a game company.
Go Green! (and not the Packers) (Score:3)
Physical commuting is also a large source of green-house gasses. The "green lobby" should pressure orgs toward more telework.
I do agree that physical meetings are needed for collaboration and team building, but that's usually roughly 1/5 of office time in observation. Have "meeting days" where everyone on a given project comes in. But, the rest can be telework.
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Beyond commuting. We have buildings that we need to keep Warm in the winter and cool during the summer 24/7 Our Office and our homes. So we are heating/cooling/lighting double the amount than what we need to do.
However I doubt there is going to be any government push toward this, because it will affect a large sectors of our economy, Restaurants who cater towards workers for breakfast and lunch time, Gas stations and convent stores which rely people stopping by with their commute to pick up the odd thing.
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Re:Let's hope so... (Score:4, Interesting)
The structure of the work week was largely a product of synchronous communication. This is also why downtowns arose, especially before telephoned were widespread, and documents had to be transferred quickly. A law firm has to had to have an army to type up documents and get them to the courthouse.
Comunication is now increasingly asynchronous. Business is a 24 hour worldwide activity. Most documents are boiler plate and fill in the blank, perfect for automation. There are few jobs that are not effected by information automation. At the courthouse I would see one person whose job, it appeared to be, to stand in line nd submit new car sales forms. Great work if you can get it.
In fact, I when we get to the 30 hour work week, it will be a jobs program. There is simply not enough work for the available humans, no in developed countries the human are not willing to do simple work for low pay. In some ways is would be great if we could pay someone to manually sweep the street or deliver tea or drive us around for $10 a day as they do in other places. But we canâ(TM)t.
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The worst is people who prefer to make excuses because they're too fucking ignorant and/or lazy and/or smug to communicate clearly and effectively.
ProTip (1): I'm in no way obliged to perform error-correction on your behalf.
ProTip (2): If I can't understand you, I'll simply ignore you, and the part of your job that depends on me doing mine.
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I would have said nice FP, but apparently not, since it didn't lead to much discussion in this branch. My taste is still off?
But I'll throw in a link to my latest version of the old future-of-work joke "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your free time." https://wt.social/post/the-fut... [wt.social]
Re: Let's hope so... (Score:2)
Re: Let's hope so... (Score:2)
Less loyalty from the company and bosses too. Less benefits, less help.
Sure companys pffer to pay for training but then make you work 10-12 hour says 5 days a week and get away with it.
Seriously 9-5 with 30 minute lunch. Then companies stopped paying for lunch so you worked 8:30-5 but why not just work from 8-5 and we will give you 2 15 minutes unpaid breaks. But wait you cant actually take those breaks.
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I like what one slashdotter mentioned. Salaries really were for the owners and top level executives back in the day and everyone was hourly. I would like to see non shareholders take hourly jobs so unless you were the owner you had to pay 1.5 payrates. I guarantee you that you would see more jobs, higher pay, less divorces, and people having lives again.
Where I work the people who got the raises work 5:30am to 5:30pm and did the least amount of work. But there were always there and directors and VPs ignored
Re: Let's hope so... (Score:3)
Re: Let's hope so... (Score:2)
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With so much business going online, many companies are going to have to move over to seven day working just to match customer demand. So maybe we should be looking at what kind of shift rota works best instead of bemoaning the death of the five day week.
I'm thinking something like:
4 x 10 hour days starting at 7am
4 days off
4 x 10 hour days starting at noon
4 days off
That would be equivalent of 35 hours a week and cover most of the waking hours when c
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It's not just needing daylight to work, but mostly needing to be awake to work. Most people are awake during the day, which is why most jobs are during daylight hours and the nightshift is far less common.
For me, I'm a techie, but not some e-commerce or website dev. I need stuff to do my job, it cannot be done solely with a laptop on a sofa. Some of it can be, but quite a lot is impossible that way. Maybe if we get better robots and remote controls to a lab then it improves, but at the rate it improves
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Gee I don't know about you but would it be too blasphemic and radical to state that I would like to have a life outside of work! There won't be a 4 day work week. Employers would love 12 to 16 hour days plus a few hours on the weekend and 5 PTO days a year if they could get away with it.
In the 1700's this was normal. People worked 6 days a week 12 hour work days in the factory or more on the farm during the summer. Church was also an all day affair (it was illegal not to go to church back then in most count
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We do need to be careful on what the new work pattern will be though.
4 days a week 8-6 where it would be popular for some companies to have 3 days a week 10-4 part time shifts (part time/reduced benefits) To encourage people to have two jobs instead of one, where said companies will often get talented workers, for Part Time Rates (full time benefits cost a lot). Just like how in the 1970's we transitioned to a duel income family, from a single income family. I could see families working 4 jobs, just to kee
Does income die along with it? (Score:1)
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Nope. I guess you did not read the blatantly obvious part about "increased productivity". This is increased _overall_ productivity, not per hour.
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This is increased _overall_ productivity, not per hour.
Productivity is the value produced per worker per unit of time.
So saying "not per hour" makes no sense.
TFA says that productivity increased. It does not say that production increased, which would be much more significant.
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This is increased _overall_ productivity, not per hour.
Productivity is the value produced per worker per unit of time.
So saying "not per hour" makes no sense.
TFA says that productivity increased. It does not say that production increased, which would be much more significant.
Exactly. And I'm pretty certain that overall production did not increase, because they'd be shouting that out.
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Productivity is the value produced per worker per unit of time.
The "unit of time" doesn't have to be an hour, you know?
Use a week or month instead. That captures breaks and everything else then. Productivity when using the weekly/monthly measurement still went up.
Workers being paid by the hour is an artifact of industrialization. It used to be that most workers were effectively salary or paid daily.
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Use a week or month instead.
Labor productivity is defined as the units of output per unit of labor input, which means paid hours of work.
If you use "week or month," then you are measuring production not productivity.
It is the same as the difference between measuring "speed" and "distance".
Your Chevy isn't faster than your neighbor's Porshe just because the odometer has a higher reading at the end of the month.
Productivity when using the weekly/monthly measurement still went up.
That is "production", not "productivity", and TFA does NOT say that it went up.
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If you use "week or month," then you are measuring production not productivity.
Incorrect. To put it another way, just because kWh uses an hour instead of a Joule's second, doesn't mean that kWh measures wattage instead of energy.
Or, more to the point, once you take your "production" value and divide it by a month, you're right back to productivity, because productivity is indeed production divided by time.
I just don't get why you think that has to be "hours" and cannot be 'day, week, or year' as appropriate for the measurement.
It is the same as the difference between measuring "speed" and "distance".
Let's see, which is a measurement of speed, and which a d
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"Unit of time" could be "week."
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Accountants and economists use the Wall Street formula which is money coming in / money coming out to measure productivity. Not how much work a worker gets done per hour.
I think if we went back to when everyone but the shareholders and top executives were hourly the problem would fix itself quickly as no one would want to pay 1.5 payrates over 40 hours.
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Of course it makes sense. This is productivity per wall-clock time, not per time spent working.
That metric is for the people who wish to spend as little time as possible working.
Why is it always people with no clue how measurements work that criticize measurements? Oh, right, because they have no clue.
Riddle me this:
note I'm using numbers that don't take a lot of math to figure out. You have a hundred people working 40 hours per week to produce bongs.
It takes 1 hour to produce and pack each bong for sale.
So you have 4000 person/hours of labor, producing 4000 bongs. You sell all you make. The stoners are happy.
So now the employees demand a 30 hour work week for the same pay. You grant them the 30 hour work week with
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What you don't understand is that many companies doing this are seeing output continue at 4000 bongs per week.
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What you don't understand is that many companies doing this are seeing output continue at 4000 bongs per week.
I'm pretty certain that your claim of a 20-25 percent increase in efficiency has citations?
That is the sort of number that tells us that something was very, very wrong before they cut hours.
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Sure.
https://www.bbc.com/news/busin... [bbc.com]
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/0... [cnbc.com]
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
That is the sort of number that tells us that something was very, very wrong before they cut hours.
Or that a lot of management decisions are made based on inertia, and that the 40 hour work week was always arbitrary, and never the optimal work schedule for knowledge work.
Re:Does income die along with it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure.
This was for service workers, and I'll note that the reduction in hours was from 40 to 35 or 36 hours. Very very difficult to quantify productivity among service workers.
Not that I want to cast doubt on the project, but a reduction of 4 hours in the workweek apparently causes every single aspect of these workers lives to improve. Less stress at home, Fathers now get involved in their children's lives, less actual work to do! All of this for 4 less hours a week It's a miracle!
https://autonomy.work/wp-conte... [autonomy.work]
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/0... [cnbc.com]
No quantification so far. I like this from the article "The idea is not to necessarily take on more work hours but to work more efficiently. During their work hours, employees are laser-focused, Breslow said."
"work more efficiently" is a widely used buzzword term for less people, less breaks, leaning the workforce.
"https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/05/the-4-day-workweek-becomes-permanent-for-tech-company-bolt.html">https://www.cnbc.com/2022/01/0...
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
That is the sort of number that tells us that something was very, very wrong before they cut hours.
Or that a lot of management decisions are made based on inertia, and that the 40 hour work week was always arbitrary, and never the optimal work schedule for knowledge work.
https://www.theguardian.com/te... [theguardian.com]
Now this is interesting. A 40 percent increase in productivity. Like the article says, that's pretty stunning, and the cool part for microsoft is that they can now get rid of people, and save a lot of money. A 40 percent increase in productivity for a 20 percent cut in hours? Outstanding
Looking a bit further, https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04... [npr.org] This had a bit more I could get info from - sure would like to see the actual metrics.
FTA:" All of the employees who took Fridays off were given special paid leave, the company says." Was the "special paid leave" factored into the equation?
Meeting times were cut in half. Not that I'm likely to complain about that, but right there's a huge part of productivity gain. I've ad a number of weeks that I was in meetings almost the entire week.
They also capped meeting attendance at 5 people - the increase in productivity would be pretty obvious there.
Chat was urged instead of email or meetings. Probably the best use ever of chat.
They subsidized vacations - paid employees around 900 dollars in addition to vacation pay when they took vacation. Was that counted? Dunno.
Noted that during the trial, employees took 25 percent less time off. That would be an increase in productivity right there.
So in trying to come up with an analysis without seeing the actual numbers via the metrics used, what I do see is a mistaken use of multiple variants. to draw a simplistic and not quite accurate conclusion.
To conclude that the simple act of reducing the workweek to 4 days - a 20 percent reduction in time at work, was responsible for a 40 percent increase in productivity - is simply wrong, even if we accept their productivity metrics. It ignores what are probably the best and smartest productivity enhancements for a modern workplace.
Because the study actually homed right in on some real productivity killers. Too many people at too long of meetings. Email inefficiency.
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That is the sort of number that tells us that something was very, very wrong before they cut hours.
Yes. They pretended to work and you pretended to pay them. Give them a better work-life balance, and they will reward you by working harder.
First rule of management - treat your employees well and they will go the extra mile for you when you need it. Treat them like shit and they will fuck you around every chance they get.
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That is the sort of number that tells us that something was very, very wrong before they cut hours.
Yes. They pretended to work and you pretended to pay them. Give them a better work-life balance, and they will reward you by working harder. First rule of management - treat your employees well and they will go the extra mile for you when you need it. Treat them like shit and they will fuck you around every chance they get.
I don't know if you got the chance to read my investigation - as far as I could get since the original studies are unobtainium.
But that 40 percent number ended up as a multi variant change, not merely shortening hours. Meetings - one of the biggest productivity killers - were mandated at 30 minutes length, and capped at 5 employees. Chat was "urged" instead of email. As well, employees were actually subsidized for vacation. And employees took off 25 percent less time.
I know there were weeks where I use
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That is not actually an increase in "efficiency". What it is is an increase of productivity per hour spent working, but that is a value that both is meaningless without context and that does not scale linearly. Incidentally, productivity per worker remains constant and so does cost per unit produced. Well cost per unit produced actually goes down because you need fewer machines and less space.
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What it is is an increase of productivity per hour spent working, but that is a value that both is meaningless without context and that does not scale linearly.
On that we agree - these studies give absolutely no idea of what they define as productivity. Might be defined as walking around and spitting in trashcans for all we know.
And the Microsoft one was obviously throwing a bunch of unrelated items like huge meeting adjustments and paying people 900 dollars extra for going on vacation, then claiming 40 percent increase in productivity without giving a hint of their metrics.
What is needed is a clearly defined metric of what they mean by productivity, and a c
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What you don't understand is that many companies doing this are seeing output continue at 4000 bongs per week.
Doesn't that mean they were overpaying their labor force before?
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I would say it means they were overworking them to no benefit. This result doesn't mean people could have been more productive if they had wanted to, it means those last 10 hours a week were not useful.
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Doesn't that mean they were overpaying their labor force before?
Correct. Millions of businesses around the globe, for centuries, simply never even thought of cutting hours and watching production and profits soar. The possibility was sitting right in from of them the whole time, and they missed it.
They just needed Mr. Nasch and his zero citations to tell them what they were doing so very wrong.
Do you believe that?
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Doesn't that mean they were overpaying their labor force before?
Correct. Millions of businesses around the globe, for centuries, simply never even thought of cutting hours and watching production and profits soar. The possibility was sitting right in from of them the whole time, and they missed it.
Profits do not soar. They stay the same or increase moderately due to lower cost. The benefits are in more stability and resilience of the workforce and better options to hire talented people.
Other than that, yes, millions of businesses have been stupid for decades because they just did things the "correct" way without ever adjusting to changed circumstances like far more mental work.
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What don't I understand?
The definition for "productivity". Have a start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
But before you go to that page, realize that you are human and flawed and that smart people never cease to learn and to find out where they were wrong. Unless and until you realize that, there is no point looking up actual facts, as you will just stay too much in love with your preconceptions and your self-image as nearly perfect to actually learn something.
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What don't I understand?
The definition for "productivity". Have a start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
FTA - Productivity is the efficiency of production of goods or services expressed by some measure. Absolutely and without doubt
I merely gave an extremely simple version of one of those metrics. There are others. Wonder why they didn't release what their metric was?
Unless and until you realize that, there is no point looking up actual facts, as you will just stay too much in love with your preconceptions and your self-image as nearly perfect to actually learn something.
Gone personal, eh? Noted.
Me thinking I'm nearly perfect? Hell no. I make mistakes for a living. I'm flawed as all hell and an arrogant asshole to boot. Whatever though. For some weird reason my peeps love me. Guess I'm their asshole.
But
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The fundamental basis is that improving worker productivity increases standard of living.
Unless the work has become so productive that workers become redundant.
Worker productivity can be increased by investing in capital, e.g. more efficient machines or in this instance, the argument being made here is that by reducing total hours a worked, an worker is more productive.
The metric that productivity is based on hours worked, with the fewer hours representing increased productivity - seems that the most productive outcome for the worker is being out of work because automation has created a system where there is no need for them.
Presumably, if the bong manufacturer didn't work it's people to death they'd be able to pack 4000 bongs with 25 percent fewer workers. Well, you can make the claim if they're not being worked to death, then you should make them worker harder so they can pack 5000 bongs.
Ah - you tip your hand. Your assumption that death is caused by the manufacturer, is hyperbole at it's best.
I've worked at a number of places, and not at any of them felt the
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Why is it always people with no clue how measurements work that criticize measurements? Oh, right, because they have no clue.
Commenters on slashdot (and everywhere really) frequently provide off the cuff analyses just based on "common sense" and intuition and very surface level understandings of the matter at hand.
The problem there is it is frequently the case that solutions to complex matters are counter-intuitive.
Add in some outlier anecdotes, dunning-krueger and the general tendency to want to "win the internet" and of course you get a lot of nonsense noise.
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Yes, that pretty much sums it up.
In the case at hand, productivity, yes, it is typically (but not always) a relative measure. But it is not a measure that must be taken relative to "time worked". A brief look at the Wikipedia page already makes this clear. These people think they are so smart they do not have to look things up when something does not fit their preconceptions. Instead they assume they are right without making sure. That is an instant fail and means these people are not interested in the fact
Re: Does income die along with it? (Score:2)
Re:Does income die along with it? (Score:4, Insightful)
Your village needs 50 loaves of bread per day. You can make that in 16 hours, so you pretty much do nothing but bake all day, every day.
If you can double your productivity, now you can bake eight hours a day and that frees up eight more hours you can use to make cupcakes, compose symphonies, or sip pina coladas on the beach. More productivity, more wealth for the same amount of work, higher average standard of living.
This goes to the extreme when you invent machines that do all the work. But people worry about those machines taking their jobs. Why do you want a job anyway? Because it's currently our main way of distributing wealth: you do work, your employer gets wealth, and gives enough of it back to you to keep you doing work.
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Productivity math is pretty simple, it's just a multiplier for labour. Wealth distribution is more complicated mostly because it's so political. Productivity is tracked pretty well since it's so fundamental. For example: https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/g... [oecd.org]
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It's cute that in your example the proles owned the machines.
13% of Americans work in manufacturing. For the other 87%, there are no "machines".
My means of production is my laptop. I own it, not my employer.
The Marxist trichotomy of "land, labor, and capital" makes little sense in a modern economy.
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This depends on how a reduction in work takes place. Likely it will start out as a recruitment and retention tool, so companies are not likely to be draconic. Perhaps it starts out with a 10% reduction in market rate for a 20% reduction in hours. The companies which lead their industries are likely to be the ones who pay attention to the research that workers are nearly as productive in 32 hours as they are in 40 hours.
Even if the industry overcorrects and salaries are reduced too far, eventually competitio
Re: Does income die along with it? (Score:2)
It is about time (Score:5, Interesting)
The 5 day work-week is a relic from industrial production. For manual work that does not need any thinking, 5 days times 8 hours is about the optimum. Have people work more and productivity drops due to fatigue and errors and accidents that result from it. (No, do not dispute that, the numbers are both old and solid.) For mental work, peak productivity is at around 6h per day for 5 days and 4 days at 8h seem to be pretty close to this. (No, again, this is based on solid numbers. If you claim this does not apply to you, you are just virtue-signalling and demonstrating you have no clue.) Now, for creative work, these numbers are likely even lower.
Any employer that actually cares about productivity should have done this a long time ago. But too many are stuck in paying people for their time and not for what they produce and hence they are getting less and paying more for it (for example, they need more office-space). This is very stupid and very non-capitalist. It represents the "slave holder" mind-set, where employees are basically compensated for the time they lose their freedom and not for the value they provide, because that would require seeing employees as valuable.
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Even here in the U.S. employers in just about every industry will pay you overtime to work beyond 40
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Surely they would have noticed by now all the human errors and fatigue make it not worth it, right?
It is the response to those errors that important here.
In work processes that are mostly manual steps, things like putting a pallet of material away in a warehouse, the response to mistakes has largely been for management to implement poka yoke improvements to prevent those mistakes in the future. A long while ago I worked in a factory where people offloaded liquids from rail cars into tanks. Those people routinely worked 70 hours a week. Putting the wrong chemical into a tank was bad, and rather than cu
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Mostly from studies the British did during WWII. They wanted to maximize production in arms factories. Keep in mind, those numbers are optimal when you're working under the threat of invasion by Nazis. The research is available online, but I don't have any links handy.
Employers are aware of it. It's actually considerably worse for most workers in a modern economy. Studies have suggested the average worker actually does three or four hours of work a day, despite being *at* work for much more than that. Reaso
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Nope. You going to AdHominem just shows you have nothing but like to do some demented virtue signalling.
Now in actual reality, this started somewhere here: https://www.history.com/this-d... [history.com]
If you think Ford wanted to do something good for his workers, think again. He just wanted maximum efficiency to earn more money.
And if you think Ford was a "typical champagne socialist" then you have more than a few screws loose.
Re:It is about time (Score:5, Informative)
5 days times 8 hours is about the optimum.
Citation needed.
(No, do not dispute that, the numbers are both old and solid.)
Citation needed.
For mental work, peak productivity is at around 6h per day for 5 days
Citation needed.
(No, again, this is based on solid numbers.
Citation needed.
Re:It is about time (Score:5, Insightful)
The Productivit of Working Hours [iza.org]
A Stanford study that shows there's a sharp decline in productivity after 50 hours worked in a week, and an even sharper decline after 55.
It's left as an exercise to the reader whether some people need to do their own work when they get home after a 40 hour work week has concluded.
You're not paying me enough to look up others for you. Stop being lazy.
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It's left as an exercise to the reader whether some people need to do their own work when they get home after a 40 hour work week has concluded.
With families largely shifting towards dual-income, so the wife isn't home to do most of the house-work, even if the house-work takes a lot less time on average, I'd say that what we might be seeing here is that the required "household work" has increased past 10 hours/week, because even with our automation, standards have risen, increasing the time required for various things.
Hell, forgot commutes! (Score:2)
Oh yeah, a 2nd factor to consider: Wouldn't commuting time count as work time, especially when you're driving yourself to work? What about getting ready for work? That's an easy way to add 5-10 hours to the work week.
Back in the old days, the factories would have housing right next to them for the workers, so it was only a short walk that would help you wake up and limber up for the day's tasks. Not stuffing yourself into a chair for 30 minutes to drive.
Citation [Re:It is about time] (Score:2)
One citation granted... The Productivit of Working Hours [iza.org]
Nice citation, but do pay attention to the following text: "A shortcoming of the data studied here is the small number of observations: for scholars who have become accustomed to research based upon thousands of data points, the research reviewed here may appear almost anecdotal. Perhaps it is."
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You're not paying me enough to look up others for you. Stop being lazy.
Why are you looking up anything at all? You didn't make the claim, gweihir did. The onus is on him to provide references for the claims he makes.
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You're not paying me enough to look up others for you. Stop being lazy.
Why are you looking up anything at all? You didn't make the claim, gweihir did. The onus is on him to provide references for the claims he makes.
Oh, pretty simple: I am not the only one with a clue as to how reality actually works. You "hero of work" virtue-signalling morons are a stuck deeply in the past.
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You "hero of work" virtue-signalling morons are a stuck deeply in the past.
Asking you to back your claims that the world has changed isn't virtue signaling. It's just the way the world works. If you're going to appeal to authority then you better actually have some authority. Are you a published expert on the history of work structure? No? Well then back your claim. If on the other hand you want to make a point about the history of posting garbage on Slashdot we'll happily defer to your authoritative expert opinion.
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Hahaha, fail. No, referring to well-known and well-published results
Well I'm sure you can provide those well known well published results then. You keep claiming they exist, but again the only thing we can count on your for reliably is your ability to post unsubstantiated shit.
Gweihir you carry zero respect here. No one buys what your selling. At this point you could say the sky is blue and it would cause most of this forum to question everything they know as it's more likely that fundamental physics changed overnight than it is you posting anything that makes any fucking s
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our factory runs 7 days a week our AP department is months behind, sounds like the easily replaced people in accounts payable needs to work more than 5 days a week less they be replaced by a tiny script in SAP
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So according to you the definition of work applies only to time paid? So if your job is a cook you can prepare meals for your family after finishing your shift, since you are not being paid, but you can't take on any extra paid work to prepare meals?
None of the studies I've read ever were as concise and clear as your statement. The studies I've read point to many factors that can determine an individuals productivity. Time is one factor. Motivation is another. Pleasure is another. Task to be performed is an
for me, not for thee (Score:3)
I had to be in the top percentile to get in, then worked 80-100 hours a week for 16 years to get the education and training after college to get my current job, most of that time at 1-2x minimum wage. I currently often work 80+ hours a week, often with night calls on top of that. At the same time, I get to hear that I'm making too much money all the time here on Slashdot. I got to spend the last 2 years neck-deep in COVID. Simultaneously, the programmers on Slashdot continue to write about the plight of wor
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I am getting a distinct sense that there's a deep disconnect with reality occurring here.
There is. On your side. You have been doing it wrong and you harmed yourself and your employers. A "80-100" hour work week has very low to negative productivity. It is great to mindlessly virtue signal to other morons that think only the absolute number matters and there is no context and everything is linear.
Heading to a 6-day week (Score:2, Insightful)
Whinee Wimps !! (Score:3, Funny)
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sounds like your life sucks compared to mine. sorry you made such severe and awful mistakes with your life choices. better luck next time.
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You have chosen to have your job define you. Kinda sucks as you'll be dead in about 8 months, your job will be restaffed 60 days thereafter, and by this time next year you'll be generally forgotten around the office. But you "gave it your all" while you were there.
I'll pass.
Hours are Bullshit and Weekend Wednesdays (Score:3, Interesting)
At the end of the day I think this is really why we still do this. It's easier. No matter the number of hours we'll still want to assign them and try to manage them. So even if we moved to a 30h (5dx6h) or 28h (4dx7h) work week or any other division that may never be the correct way to deal with it. In another part of the series Holman discusses working asynchronously [zachholman.com] and how that provides some of the grease necessary to make it possible for everyone to kind of keep their own hours. But I've really only working in a couple of roles in my career where this was possible. And it was still a struggle to keep up with what I felt was necessary to do my job effectively.
The second was a CGP Grey from earlier in the pandemic titled Weekend Wednesdays [youtube.com]. His proposal in the video is that we should be dividing up the week differently. Instead of working for 5 days and resting for 2 we should be working 2 (M,T) taking Wednesday off and then working the rest of the week (F,Th,S) and taking Sunday off. The advantage being that you're not so exhausted from working come Saturday that you don't lose the whole day to recovering and Sunday isn't fully relaxing because returning to work is "just around the corner". The idea feels intriguing to me but doesn't really fit with a company that is running a traditional 9-5 for most of its staff (especially when your job is to support them) but I did at least make an effort to carve out large chunks of time in my day which are meeting free and at least have my Wednesday completely free so if I don't have anything pressing I can take it off. But I will concur with the article that this stuff is changing and companies which don't change are going to see an exodus of employees. At the very least I want flexibility, autonomy, and trust. But I'm honestly not sure if that's possible for everyone [slashdot.org].
Re:Hours are Bullshit and Weekend Wednesdays (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of what a developer does should still have fairly steady progress. Working with people to understand the requirements, cranking through simpler code, building the test suite, and documenting what is going on so that others can understand it -- those are just as important as solving tricky bugs or devising clever solutions, but they are also often tedious. In those cases, it is absolutely reasonable to count how many hours someone spends working.
Even in the cases of tracking down a bug or innovative design, there's a very good correlation between time spent and bugs solved or design work completed. It's not perfect, but that doesn't mean it is helpful to ignore the number of hours spent on a task.
Keeping similar hours is also very important. Even after working with people for years, there will still be areas where expectations and understanding do not line up exactly. Real-time discussion is way more effective at identifying the points of alignment and mismatch -- you can spend an hour or more trying to write a clear memo or email, but you'll find out in two minutes of discussion that you and your counterpart were talking part each other.
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Secondarily he goes on about not wanting to track hours worked, and instead wanting some kind of qualitative metrics. Note that he does not give details, just ideas about "how good is their code". Why? Because he says that "as soon as you make it about hours, their job becomes less about code and more about hours."
Well, tha
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We can hope for shorter weeks.. (Score:2)
We are still in a very peculiar working normal due to the pandemic, and it's giving this sentiment a bit more room to breathe, but my impression is that the people that would need to believe it largely do not, but want to avoid antagonizing their employees until the pandemic restrictions subside.
There *might* be a hope of a delay of return to normal as people are afraid of going first and scaring off their workforce to competitors, but I think eventually they'll settle back into their expectations.
Of course
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Employers are faced with regulations that make per-person overhead extremely high, and it's far far cheaper to try to double-up work on one guy than hire two
The four day work week isn't hiring more people to make up the difference. It's just cutting work hours, and the difference is made up by increased productivity.
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There are a few sorts of jobs that need to be considered.
-You have a fixed amount of work to accomplish in a timeframe, and no work to be done beyond the fixed amount. For example, if you have a repair center you only have to fix what's broken, and when you take care of everything that's broken, you are done. In this case, sure, if you can consume the work in shorter time, then you are golden. However, the theoretical ceiling can be quite high and companies will tend to find work.
-You must provide coverage
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you get your expected workload done in 4 days? Well, implement more things in the 5th day.
If it's that simple. Maybe some places it is, and others it isn't. Maybe quality goes down after 30 hours or 32 hours, so you end up spending more time fixing errors than if you had just let the employees stop at 4 days.
No matter how productivity per person improves, there's always more work to do and the employers will want that if they can't get cost savings.
If they're in a field where high quality workers are in high demand, then there's a lot of value in offering a job where people want to work. It may be worth giving up some small amount of additional production to make the work environment something that attracts and retains top notch tal
Mandatory paid annual leave. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Mandatory paid annual leave. (Score:5, Insightful)
In response we'd convert everyone to gig workers and indendent contractors. We're the richest country in the world yet some people work two or three jobs to support a family. It would take comprehensive reforms to bring the US up to EU standards. And culturally I don't think we're ready or willing.
I would be IFF (Score:3, Interesting)
If an only if people actually, oh, I don't know, WORKED. Things have gotten so bad that people aren't at work when normal people are and don't return phone calls. To add insult to injury, these people expect to be paid MORE for working less and having a bad attitude and work ethic. On top of that, people are suggesting that these people get paid for not working at all. GODDAMNIT!!! Get the eff back to work!
The beatings will continue until moral improves!!! (Score:2)
Employees are not the business owner, employees will (almost) never have the same passion and drive as the owner, you need to get over this idea that it's anything more than a way to put bread on the table and get back to what THEY are passionate about. If you want them to be more passionate about their job show them how much you value them, the exact opposite of what you've done.
People have said this same thing about every younger generation, your elders said the same thing abo
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In a decade perhaps (Score:2)
I am in the process of changing jobs right now. In Switzerland, 20 days of paid vacation is the minimum by law if you work full time. Usual work hours per week range from 40 to 45 I think depending on profession.
I will be having an interview on Tuesday with an airport IT. For my age they have 23 days of paid vacation and 42 work hour weeks.
Just to give you context, my company, a relatively large cloud provider, has been seeking people for my team for two years without a shred of success. You hear left and r
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Most US employers offer as little as they can get away with, but I suppose that's true everywhere and the real story here is that we Americans aren't good at standing up for ourselves, for the most part. We're too busy thinking about fighting over stupid shit.
"The Great Resignation" is a misnomer (Score:2)
What is being called "The Great Resignation" should be termed "The Great Renegotiation". In short, primary control of the labor market has shifted to workers, and employers need to come to terms with that shift if they wish to remain viable in an increasingly-competitive market.
For detailed discussion of this change in terminology, the reader is invited to listen to the Planet Money podcast episode [npr.org] which discusses both the semantics and the reasoning.
All examples have one thing in common (Score:5, Insightful)
None of the groups mentioned do manual labor. All are paper pushers who don't need to be in the office.
Now think about all the IT support needed for these people. Machine needs to be reimaged? User has to come into the office and wait while tech images machine. Dog chewed on your video cable? Tech has to provide cable to user. Switch or server doesn't come back up after a reboot or update? Tech has to go into office [reddit.com], find switch/server, turn on switch/server, verify switch/server is up and running. Execcs want to have a product meeting in the office to show off said product? IT has to be on site for possible issues with presentation.
Supplies need delivered? Someone has to be in the mail room to receive packages. Same with all the network switches, computer parts, computers, and so on. Also, someone from tech has to be there to put said equipment into storage or configure/image and then package for sending out.
Working from home or working fewer days sounds great, until you realize all the people who need to be on site every day or can't work 4 days a week because everyone else depends on them.
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Truck driver here. We work every day of the week. 14 hour workdays are common. If I was doing full over-the-road trucking, I'd work to the DOT Max (70 hours) of drive time and then take the 34 hour "reset". A four day workweek is a myth.
Thank you, and this goes back to my last part above. Someone has to deliver those switches and other equipment. They don't get there by themselves.
I'm not knocking people who work from home (well, I do because many are idiots, but that's another story) or want/can work four days a week, but there is a large contingent of other people who either can't work from home or can't work only four days. So while the paper pushers are at home nice and snug, the rest of us are out in the trenches doing what we can to
It's 3 AM, Sunday morning (Score:2)
We need you on a Zoom call to the factory third shift.
Fastest Runner (Score:2)
Fastest Runner in the world does 100m dash in about 10 seconds (it's actually 9.58, but close enough). It goes to reason that the same runner would be able to do 10k (10000m) in 1000 seconds if they keep the pace right?
Yet riddle me this, fastest runner runs 10k in 29:01 (1741 seconds).
Now apply same principle for work. Can I do 174% productivity in 1 hour? Maybe. Can I keep up 174% productivity for 100 hours straight? HELL NO.
There's your difference. People are happier working 30 hour week, so they sprint/
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Can I keep up 174% productivity for 100 hours straight? HELL NO.
Well, it's a new year now. So, you know, keep trying and you'll get there. I think we both know you can do better.
--Your boss
For office workers, sure. But not for others. (Score:3)
Global competition - work week in India (Score:2)
I don't think it matters how hard the US and Europe lobby for this if the rest of the world doesn't do the same thing.
As a software engineer, I compete against workers throughout the world. I don't see how a US company would offer a 4-day work week to US workers, given that a worker in Brazil or India works a 5-day week for a fraction of the cost of their US counterpart. It seems like it would make outsourcing even *more* appealing to management. Even if they lowered my compensation 20%, they still would