Ask HN: Why don't we have 3 day weekends yet?
After covid, and the temporary transition to remote (for some), it seem that switching from 5 days to 4 days would be an arbitrary decision, with very little real impact. (Of course I'm referring to jobs done in typical 5 day week).
For those who say it would lead to a decrease in productivity. Well that is only relative to the 5 day week. And the 5 day week, only exist because of some archaic reasons. It is not some law ingrained in the universe.
And beyond that we can see that increases of productivity has not led to increase of leisure time, maybe the opposite.
And we know many people who work barely a fraction of the week, yet need to maintain this kind of presenteeism. It seems absurd. Will we be trapped in this irrational mindset forever, or just until a certain generations dies out?
237 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadAnd if a run a company, surely I could require my employees to work 5 days, 40 hours?
The solution is to let business owners switch to 4 day weeks and then let the free market sort it out.
If labor regulations ratchet the work week down, you’d be free to offer 32 hour work weeks to employees, and pay them for overtime beyond that. Productivity has exploded over the last four decades (across various economies, developed and developing), it just hasn’t been shared equitably with labor. This effort contributes towards correcting that. Unions in the US brought about the 8 hour day and weekend, for example.
https://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html
High level, humans exist to live, not to work. The work is a means to economically support one’s life.
I for one, choose to not take the 20% pay cut and will happily work a 40 hour work week. That's my choice.
The world libertarians describe of “everyone is free to enter into contracts” is the modern day version of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” We’re currently trying it, and to be frank, it’s pretty fucking terrible for a majority of workers. Perhaps that’s why support of unions in the US is at record highs (since 1965); the beatings continued until we were all out of morale.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2014.html (Refer to Key findings)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-hi...
(crafted as politely as possible and not intended as a personal attack; my belief system is a natural result of robust amounts of consumed data, actively collected ground truth, and an overwhelming amount of empathy)
We can have a free and open market and legislation to protect individuals from abuse by employers. Setting a required number of hours to work to qualify as "full-time" and a minimum wage are dictating what an individual is allowed to negotiate for themselves. A high number of work hours or extremely low pay are not abusing individuals if they agreed to work for a company knowing full well what they got in return.
Allow people to make their own choices, whether you agree with them or not, and you will be surprised by the result.
Those companies are lobbying for higher minimum wages which will make it impossible for any company to compete with them. If you think their treatment of employees is bad now just wait until their employees truly have no where else to work.
Most people in the US live paycheck to paycheck as is, and it's not that they're spending frivolously. Our standards of living are based on what's needed for subsistence, yes, but also cultural and historical. Based on how we grew up and how our parents grew up, and how culture (e.g. hollywood) tells us we should be living. So most people are trying to live according to established standards.
It's already much harder for the present generation to live at the standard of the previous generation or two (e.g. buying a home is less of a possibility). Choosing, then, according to our "freedom", 20% less pay would require also choosing poverty according to established standards of living (i.e. it would look like poverty).
The narrative of "the individual" is a nice narrative from the perspective of the elites of our society to distract from the fact that, as always, there is class conflict and systematic forces in place. Of course, don't get me wrong: it is nice that there is some legitimate freedom on an individual level in the US. But for one, that legitimacy is overblown via mass media marketing (e.g. of course Jeff Bezos is going to tell his rags-to-riches story for everyone to hear). And more importantly, there is also the question of the overall structural forces that establish the population level structure.
With China aging very rapidly and a total fertility rate that will decline below 1 in the next 2-5 years, doesn’t make much sense to save for a future with limited returns (time value of life vs money and so forth).
https://archive.ph/2022.05.23-232226/https://www.bloomberg.c...
> Home prices in China have been falling since September, Chinese stocks and mutual funds aren’t great bets these days either, there’s little access to international markets and cryptocurrencies are officially illegal. Instead, people are increasingly shelving their money in savings accounts, despite benchmark deposit rates staying at record low levels.
> “No matter if you’re high net-worth or not that rich, the golden time of parking your money and letting your wealth grow, it’s gone,” said Wei He, an economist at Gavekal Research Ltd. in Beijing.
> “There’s no other investment options,” said Clawde Yin, a 45-year-old Shanghai resident. “I’ve got no choice but to wait and see.”
Also, dumping your money into savings accounts is definitely better than dumping it into 30% APR BNPL offers for designer clothing and electronics. Or gas guzzling, expensive SUVs and trucks. Ask yourself why Apple has a 50% market share in the US.
> doesn’t make much sense to save for a future with limited returns (time value of life vs money and so forth).
Saving doesn't mean saving until retirement, it just means not spending beyond your means.
The point is, though, that the population level class structure and socioeconomic mobility/opportunity would remain. As would the fact that the current generation cannot (as a whole) afford housing the way two generations ago could.
The narrative of “the individual” encourages non-elites to compete amongst themselves for a progressively shrinking portion of the pie. From the perspective of elites it has a twofold benefit: discourage worker solidarity and encourage productivity. From the perspective of workers, the latter benefit is good (we all should strive for competence and contribution), but the former is not good (even just in terms of life enjoyment). Also, at some point the pie needs a drastic and more balanced reallocation.
Big business protectionism results in big business abuse of employees because a "where else are the going to go" mentality sets in. Competition is required to allow people to build businesses that put the "employee abusing" companies out of business.
Protectionism comes in many forms but all of it comes from government. Big businesses are currently supporting an increase in the national minimum wage. They can afford to pay their employees more. Their competitors can't. With no competition the big business are free to abuse their employees. Nearly every business that has lobbied for government regulation is playing this same game to secure their place as king of the hill.
Difficulty: their counter-parties are often creations of "arbitrary government regulations" (corporations).
That's interesting, because it's not free market capitalists advocating for importing billions of people and cramming everyone into urban centers in the name of efficiency.
Different people have different relations to work in different stages of life. E.g. it makes sense to work your ass off while saving for downpayment for a home. Or saving for XYZ. Same people may scale down when kids come up.
So the "free market" for workers says they should unionize as soon as they have the power to, because they can drive the price of their services up. Monopolies happen even in free markets.
We do "let" business owners switch to 4 day weeks, most don't. The free market has sorted it out.
https://www.4dayweek.com/
Based on that experience, I'd also be open to such an arrangement for employees based in geographies where that's not legally required, but is legally and practically permitted. My guess is that most people are working a 5-day workweek because they're most comfortable doing that, from both a "well, all of my friends are doing that anyway, so I wouldn't have anyone to hang out with" as well as from a "I'm working for my financial future and working only X hours per week is unlikely to give me the same career trajectory as working 25% more hours per week" perspective.
Having done that now for a while, I would probably keep my 4 days even when the kids get older and aren't at home.
The total output in knowledge work doesn't decrease much (if at all) working 4 instead of 5 days. It's much more about what you output then about how much time you spend on it. And working less hours for me meant being more focused in those hours. My targets and bonus remained the same.
People are always surprised when I tell them I work 4 days a week; asking if I have kids or a sick mother to attend to. Recruiters are especially weird with questions like: "why do you only want to work 4 days a week?"
I usually just reply "Why do you want to work 5 days a week?", most of the time they don't know what to answer
So there are parts of the world where you could reasonably go to a the day weekend if you wanted enough.
A nice side effect is that if you live in a country with progressive tax you end up getting a higher net per-hour wage than if you worked 5 days because of the lower income and thus lower tax rate.
IIUC the US has this perma-work culture where if you don't want to always be working and earning the most you can earn then something must be wrong with you, maybe you're a commie or a hippie or sth. I hear that Japan had the same but this is radically changing as a result of the pandemic. Maybe the US will change a bit too?
Employment is a mutually consensual relationship, and communication is key to make it good.
The way the post is worded right now seems to be phrased in a way that 3-day weekends are blindingly obvious, but if you look at the history of labour rights I dont see why anyone expects it to just happen without a massive amount of organising
The five-day work-week came about because Henry Ford declared it to be so in 1926, and wasn't made any sort of law until 1939.
Ultimately, the decision to move to four-day work weeks can only be made by CEOs or equivalents, and while some have, most haven't. At my previous company, the head of HR proposed it, the CTO agreed, and it went to the CEO, who said no. He didn't want the CTO org to have benefits the rest of the company didn't have, and didn't want to extend a four-day work week to all departments.
When they continue to have trouble filling open job positions because they aren't competing will in the market, perhaps he'll change his mind.
https://www.4dayweek.com
Not how it happened when going 6 to 5 days. People made it happen. And OP is one of them.
People (trade unionists) made eight-hour workdays happen, but Henry Ford made a five-day workday happen[0]. As I stated, most labor rights came about because of blood, sweat, and tears. Just... not that particular one, oddly enough.
The fact that Ford's five-day work weeks were made up of eight-hour days, for that you can think unions and the hard work of many people! But the shift from six days to five, not so much.
P.S. OP was probably not working age in 1926, as they would need to be to have made the shift happen originally.
0. https://www.truthorfiction.com/henry-ford-invented-the-5-day...
And it probably goes without saying that most people would not be OK with a pay cut--which might have to actually be more than 20% given the cost of benefits is fairly fixed.
On paper, it may have seemed like the right move, but it was huge demoralizing to the engineering org to be told, essentially: we will neither pay enough to be competitive, nor offer any other compensatory advantages, primarily in deference to this other department that we do pay well.
The morale question was apparently only considered in one direction.
Seems like all anti-work propaganda (ie: r/antiwork) to me, there's no meat. You could turn this post into an inductive proof saying it is so obvious that having X-1 days is better than X days of work until you get smacked in the face trying to hand wave that 1->0 will have no impact on productivity.
This ignores that there have been trials about this. Companies trying 4 day work weeks have found their workers to be more productive.
Also, consider that worker productivity has gone up since the 70s, but wages haven't kept pace.
In surveys, most people say they'd rather have 4 day work week. 5 days is in second place. then it goes down from 3.
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...
I'd compare it to getting rid of smaller coins. Sure, it would cause some rounding hassle, but the last time we got rid of a coin the smallest remaining one was worth more than a 2020 quarter.
It seems pretty obvious to me, based on the non-linear utility of money, that as productivity increases the ideal work week shrinks. Is that not a good enough sketch of a proof?
A 3-day work week (aka 40% less productivity if you assume a perfectly linear relationship between time working and productivity) would still mean a nice little gain for the capitalist compared to 1979 numbers.
If you've worked, you've contributed to that 44% productivity gain. Why should you need to revolt or organize to get what you've already worked for? Capitalists are taking a larger and larger share every year. Is that ethical?
I get that pragmatically many aspects in life are a power struggle, but "throwing the question back" is really a way of putting the burden of fixing an unfair system back on the victim.
Benefits costs do a better job explaining increasing wage inequality, but again not all of it and doesn’t address what’s happening outside the US
It used to take a room full of highly trained engineers using slide-rules, protractors, and graphing paper to design the newest car or plane. Now it's done in AutoCAD. But it's not obvious to me why the employee should collect the difference for the capital investment poured into technology.
In other words, it's not as if humans have evolved since the 1970s to be more productive. Any gains are entirely the consequence of investments in tech and tools and modern managerial techniques.
As for tech and tools, who do you think made those things if not humans?
We created a system that heavily favors the capitalist starting with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to that most of society was subsistence farming. Encouraging capital investment in new machines and factories through laws/policies made sense to help raise society (and thus the workers) out of that situation. We have made enough progress since then that there are now barely any subsistence farmers in the US.
Why should we continue to embrace policies favoring the capitalist? Why should we continue to award 100% of the gains of new technologies to capitalists? Maybe they should only get those gains for a few years, or they should get half and half should go to the workers?
Because they assume the risk of these ventures. Ever hear the statistics about how 95% of startups fail in the first x years? Meanwhile, the guy clicking around in AutoCAD did nothing to further the rise of productivity. Why should he be gifted the benefits of other's toil simply for breathing?
But, remember, that’s before considering the impact of healthcare costs (which are majority paid by capitalists and majority benefiting the workers).
I'm not so sure about the healthcare argument. The link I included above compares productivity to compensation. I'd assume compensation includes the value of benefits like healthcare but I could be wrong. I'd also argue that many of the rising healthcare costs are being rewarded as profit to the capitalists so it might not be as cut-and-dry even if healthcare is a large source of the pay-productivity gap.
How is this possible? Wouldn't capitalists willing to take a smaller share (higher wages, better product for lower price) out-compete those that don't? It seems to me that the major advantage of capitalism is protection from this type of situation?
"Job Stability" being a factor in the labor market is a perfect example. People are afraid to leave a stable job for a less stable one even it pays more because they know it takes time and effort and luck to find another job (aka imperfections in the job market). If your unstable job disappears, that might mean there's no money for food or no health insurance. This puts a huge thumb on the scale in favor of the capitalist. If they can offer "stability" then they can also lower their wages considerably.
While some fraction has gone to the corporations/shareholders ("capitalists"), what fraction of the productivity gains has turned into cheaper consumer goods, aka (can't point at the data, just many who comment on it) the populace owns a lot more 'stuff' like electronics than they did 43 years ago, aka QOL gains resulting from productivity.
Or is it just silly of me to not assume that ~100% of gained productivity went straight into corporations'/shareholders' pockets?
Don't forget the massive growth at all levels of government.
Also don't forget that wages are not the right measure - total compensation is. Total compensation is often 150% of wages (things like health insurance, retirement plans, 401k matching contributions, etc.). All those "employer-paid" benefits are actually coming out of your paycheck.
Because you won't get it otherwise. They're not going to give it back or forgo it in future because controlling a greater share of resources gives them more leverage.
I don't disagree with you necessarily but the people who game it now, will game it with 4 day week as well. Slackers are always going to slack. 5 day or 4 day.
EDIT: To give context, I'm a software engineer.
Similarly, talking to coworkers, even (especially) at unrelated parts of a company can be super valuable, even if it codes as “unproductive time wasting”.
TLDR your definition of work might be too constrained.
it's also peculiar in my opinion to point out worker laziness without apparent recognition of the worker-employer power dynamic where wage theft vastly outweighs so called time theft dollar to dollar
What should be allowed is to work as much as you want and get the pro rata of the full time salary
I'll let people waste their lives in the office and enjoy the world, if I could get the monthly equivalent of a min wage in my country while working one day a week I'd do it, call me a slacker if you want
The most typical example I've seen, are gov. / state jobs where one person was basically working 150%. Then they created an extra position to offload that worker, and suddenly you have two workers with 75% work. And if it turns out they miscalculated the need, because maybe the new worker is much faster / more efficient at their task, said worker is now only working 50% of the time.
Same goes for inefficient workers. I've worked with people that had zero knowledge in how to automate tasks, and would spend a whole day doing stuff in Excel, which could be automated to just seconds. No need for VBA, just basic macros would do the trick.
9-5 5 day office jobs aren't everything that's out there, they're not even probably "most jobs". Shift work and contract work are obvious counter examples.
But it is ingrained in the profit metrics of the company so are you okay taking a 25% or so compensation hit (the extra 5 is due to benefits not scaling down)?
Presenteeism is blight on society and ruins many a fine country and its people (Japan, the US, etc.).
Moving to shorter working hours simply requires hiring more people to keep those things up and running. Now if hourly wages remain the same then labor costs don't change much and it might even improve hourly productivity (as tired people make more mistakes). However, will the resulting decrease in income for the workers be worth it to them, in terms of having more free time?
To maintain income levels, there would have to be a raise in hourly wages, resulting in an increase in labor costs, which would have to be balanced by a reduction in shareholder dividends and executive salaries and bonuses.
That's the answer to the question. Corporations have been doing everything they can to cut labor costs since the 1970s (global outsourcing and automation) while directing the profits to relatively small group of executives and shareholders, and won't change direction willingly.
My understanding is that in the medical field, handoffs are viewed as large opportunities for mistakes to happen through miscommunication, and that's at least some of the justification behind having people work 12-24+ hour shifts.
I mean... If you increase work productivity there's basically two things you can do: Increase free time or increase consumption. Increasing free time is not a popular position. It is widely seen as a given that "increasing consumption" and "economic growth" are good things by itself that don't need any further justification (while of course society could strive for "free time growth" instead). Switzerland had a referendum on reducing work time not so long ago. It failed.
I say this noting that I disagree with the popular position here, but I can't avoid seeing that this is what most people seem to want.
Frankly, given where we are at as a society in terms of labor and productivity relative to demand, it seems like now isn’t the time to be pumping the brakes. The basis of fully automated luxury communism has not yet been delivered and won’t be for a while; Europeans will likely freeze this winter and even in the US, if I call 911 I’m lucky if the wait time is less than 10 minutes. We still need humans working, as much as it pains me to say it.
Maybe a better approach than specifying an arbitrary number would be to have full flexibility.
Example: I work hourly at a software company. Some days I work 12 hours. Some days I work 3.5. If I’m not going to be productive that day, I just don’t work (this is to my employer’s benefit, because I’m paid by the hour). If I’m on a roll, I keep on rolling. Some days I plan for 9 hours then leave at 6 because my focus is shot. Others I think it will be 5, then leave after 10.
I get to use my time as I see fit, the employer doesn’t deal with me wasting time in the office unproductively, and on net I think I’m as productive if not more than my coworkers.
In jobs where you need time-based coverage, an Lyft-like bidding system to get a wage premium would probably make sense and let people self-sort based on desire to work and schedule preferences.
Why replace one arbitrary system with another?
Henry Ford thought his workers could be just as productive, if not more so, in 40 hours as 48, and would be happier at the second day off to boot, and he was correct.[0]
You call it arbitrary, and it was, except it's based on what has been collectively deemed obvious: one gets dramatically diminishing returns when requiring an employee to work more than eight hours in a day, or more than (now) five days a week.
It could be that we are also seeing diminishing returns from five days a week, and would be just as productive in four[1], but it will take CEOs acting on that theory to move the established norm.
0. https://www.truthorfiction.com/henry-ford-invented-the-5-day...
1. https://www.4dayweek.com
Pretty much any reasonable white collar job already lets you work however many hours you want as long as you get the job done and you show up to meetings.
In addition, since humans are not machines, I expect that an extra day off might make workers more prompt and less likely to take six days at the beginning or end of a workweek.
At the time the trade unionists were fighting for our rights, the question wasn't burger-flipping, but generally factory work. The speed and accuracy at which a person working in a factory could produce goods safely diminishes beyond a certain point, and while it's probably closer to five or six hours for peak efficiency, employers were demanding ten- or twelve-hour days at the time, so a 50% reduction was a bridge too far. Still, through a combination of many different kinds of protest and some documentation that safety incidents climbed dramatically as workers grew more tired, they managed to get hours pushed down to no more than eight as "normal," with anything beyond that requiring overtime pay.
Henry Ford took the reasoning of the trade unionists, who had successfully pushed him into eight-hour days already, and took it farther. He reasoned that giving workers two days off instead of just one would enable him to push them harder, and get just as much work done while making happier employees, more loyal to him. Which worked out well for him, and 13 years later became the norm by law.
If you're talking about work which requires workers to be physically present for a set schedule, then yes, clearly capping each worker at 80% of hours would mean needing to increase staff by 20% to achieve the same result. But most businesses in which physical presence for given hours is important already have flexible scheduling to handle days of the week and times of the day at which business is busier.
If you're instead talking about, as you say, "any reasonable white collar job," then rather than letting only bold or clever people to get their work done in 32 hours while attending meetings to avoid raising eyebrows, it seems more reasonable to make that the norm, so that everybody can do the same. Then the receptionist can also work four days a week, with someone else filling in, rather than only those less visible.
This is completely unrealistic - you clearly have never worked in food service or any sort of low wage customer facing role. There is a rush for each of the 3 meals of the day, and in between your volume is pretty low. And you never work a 10 hour shift, if anything they don't give you enough hours and you work 3-4 hour shifts.
> Then the receptionist can also work four days a week, with someone else filling in, rather than only those less visible
The difference is that the clever people who get their work done in 32 hours are still giving 100% output. The receptionist obviously cannot give 100% output if they are only present for 80% time.
> He reasoned that giving workers two days off instead of just one would enable him to push them harder, and get just as much work done while making happier employees, more loyal to him
No, it was not because they got just as much work done, but because it would reduce turnover [1]. It was a calculated economic decision. And in the real world, corporations have done that analysis and either decided on Ford's approach (as Costco has) or on the minimum pay possible approach (like Walmart). As a worker, you have the choice of going to Costco or Walmart to work.
I'll remind you that factory jobs needed a lot more training than fast food, which meant turnover cost had a real impact for Ford.
> But most businesses in which physical presence for given hours is important already have flexible scheduling to handle days of the week and times of the day at which business is busier.
But each worker still serves X customers per hour and works Y hours per week with flexible scheduling. If you suddenly have 20% fewer hours, then the worker has to get paid 20% less, else the business now pays more for labor. Considering a lot of restaurants operate on razor thin margins, this doesn't work out as well as you think.
[1] https://hankeringforhistory.com/history-weekend/
Weird that you know more about my life than I do, I wonder how I made up those memories of working at Carl's Jr as a young person. Tell me, what else have I done or not done, contra my own lived experience?
>> He reasoned that giving workers two days off instead of just one would enable him to push them harder, and get just as much work done while making happier employees, more loyal to him > No, it was not because they got just as much work done, but because it would reduce turnover [1].
Weird that you started with "No," and then went on to say the same thing I said? "happier employees, more loyal to him" vs "would reduce turnover" seem like the same thing. You linked to an article covering almost exactly the same ground I did, and thought that represented disagreement? So, so weird.
> And in the real world, corporations have done that analysis and either decided on Ford's approach (as Costco has) or on the minimum pay possible approach (like Walmart).
I'm not sure the last time you checked in with "the real world," but these days Walmart isn't paying minwage any more, at least not where I live. That extreme turned out to be unsustainable in today's labor market--again, at least where I live--so "the market" and "the real world" seem to be moving on.
> But each worker still serves X customers per hour and works Y hours per week with flexible scheduling. If you suddenly have 20% fewer hours, then the worker has to get paid 20% less, else the business now pays more for labor. Considering a lot of restaurants operate on razor thin margins, this doesn't work out as well as you think.
I have a child working in food service today, right now, in 2022, in America, in the real world. So I can tell you that many employers already flexibly schedule their workers, especially their front-of-house workers, and in some cases get closer to 32 hours than 40 already, specifically ensuring that they're not paying employees to sit idle during slow times. Most restaurants don't have 40 rush hours per week. That was my point--businesses that require physical presence are already scheduling as needed. I then contrasted that by shifting to "office jobs."
But yes, costs rise. Industry-wide, chains which had locations paying federal minimum wage and other locations paying local wages as high as $15/hr had menu price differences ranging from 4-10% for the same food at the same chain restaurants. While restaurant margins are thin, many chains find that location rental costs dwarf even labor costs when determining prices. A McDonald's in Manhattan has menu prices higher than a McDonald's in Pocatello, Idaho, not only because they pay their employees more.
Still, yes, part of this popular push at the low-end is alongside a $15 minimum wage. Either way, labor costs are rising. Some fast-food restaurants in my area have resisted the push for higher wages, and have struggled to find workers, with several (Taco Bell, Wendy's, Dairy Queen) reducing hours of operation, or switching to drive-through-only until they could staff up. Many (including a local McDonald's franchisee) had no trouble with hours because they raised wages to $12/14/15/hour. How much of the subsequent rise in menu prices is due to higher labor costs, and how much is due to international shortages affecting everyone, is unclear. Either way, I'm happy to pay even 20% more for my hamburgers if my kids can get better treatment as workers.
Yes, the minimum possible being the minimum market wage that they can hire workers for (even if turnover is high). I don't mean they pay $7.25...
> So I can tell you that many employers already flexibly schedule their workers
Yeah, but those employees get paid only for the time they work, not 100% pay for 80% time. That's the point I was making.
> Either way, I'm happy to pay even 20% more for my hamburgers if my kids can get better treatment as workers.
What actually happens is those jobs get replaced with automation and your kids can't get fast food jobs in the first place. Order taking gets replaced with kiosks and things like fry production get automated [1]. It might not happen overnight but the tech is basically there already with computer vision and robotics.
My local Walmart is already 50% self checkouts (advertising $18/h wages, btw). Amazon has licensed their Amazon Go tech to 3rd party stores. If wages go up 20% overnight the impetus to buy that tech goes way, way up.
[1] https://misorobotics.com/
The implicit threat here is withdrawal of benefits - specifically health care insurance
My brother in laws sister was recently diagnosed with cancer. Before she was diagnosed, she quit her job with benefits to stay home and take care of her father with advanced Parkinson’s. Her cancer is treatable, but she doesn’t have and can’t get insurance and doesn’t qualify for government help. Her choice is death or go into such incredible debt that she will never have hope to pay it off. She is 29. She has chosen death.
A society is much better when it's healthy, leaving health to be taken care by the law of the jungle isn't really building a healthy society.
Irrational might not be the right word; arbitrary is pretty accurate, though. If productivity and output change minimally, why should expectations or pay? Let’s be honest, the typical 5-day office job work week the OP is referencing has a LOT of downtime.
the way I look at it, I'm being paid for being available during those work hours, not necessarily doing work during all those work hours.
If I was working retail, I suppose it'd be more like 5/95 productivity/availability.
Is your full time remote employer aware that you're not really "full time"?
Because "full time" measures time, not productivity:
From Google:
occupying or using the whole of the usual working day or week
From Merriam-Webster:
the amount of time considered the normal or standard amount for working during a given period
From Oxford:
for all the hours of a week during which people normally work or study, rather than just for a part of it
The only way this is a problem is if you think you're getting paid by your output and your employer thinks they're paying you for your (full) time. The easy way to test if this is to check with your employer to make sure they know you actually work 10 to 30 hrs per week and the rest of the time you're on call. If they know and they're good with it, then great there's no problem. If you're not comfortable telling them then that's a problem. In that case you would effectively be a "mouse jiggler".
Let's look at it another way. Why do you think someone who spends a majority of their assigned working hours eating, shitting, and flirting with the receptionist should earn the same compensation as someone who spends 100% of their working hours doing things that are the in their job description? When I was naive, I tolerated being the latter in a job with many of the former. This was a contributing factor in deciding to work for myself.
Now, if you want me to produce more than my coworkers that's fine, but I'll have to be compensated more.
I don't, but it doesn't matter what I think. All that matters is the agreement you have with your employer. If they trust you enough to let you judge when your weekly productivity target is reached before you pack up and go to the beach, then yeah you're golden.
All I'm saying is that I believe a lot of employers actually expect 40 hours of work, so if you finish your "job" in 10 hours then they expect you to let them know so you can do something else productive for them in the remaining 30. And if you don't do that, they would consider that to be dishonest and grounds for discipline. Not saying this is your deal, just that it's a common thing.
But I'm confused. Your employer collects "screen time" metrics, so they must care how much time you actually spend working. On the weeks that you only work 10 hours, how to you avoid getting flagged?
This conclusion doesn't follow. I don't know what they do with them, for which employees, and under what circumstances.
(BTW I'm as eager to find out if HN has a reply depth limit as you are)
You could always ask them. That is unless you're not confident they know you work part time ;P
Employers pay for productivity and the value generated by employees, not hours in a seat.
That mindset is exactly the mindset of an oppressed labour force, as workers we aren't being paid so employers can get their share of hours of my life, we are being paid to generate value, it shouldn't really matter if that value is created in 1h or 40h per week, for the employer the result is the same.
> Employers pay for productivity and the value generated by employees, not hours in a seat.
I'm not sure many employers see it that way. If they do, that's great. But I would guess that most think they should be getting 40 hrs worth of "work" out of their employees.
What I imagine happens too frequently is that the employee hides the fact that they're actually working < 40 hrs a week, so the relationship with their employer is dishonest. That's why products like "mouse jigglers" exist, so employees can fool their employer.
I'm sorry but I'm not going to shed a tear for people that defraud their employer because they think they're more valuable than everyone else.
Also just think of what a luxury it is to have the opportunity to fake it. People that do "real" work don't have that opportunity. Imagine a drive thru worker posing a dummy in the window.
If those conditions aren't met however, I don't really see why the worker should let the employer extract additional value out of them for no benefit, especially if they do fulfill the terms of the contract set to them.
Maybe it's a cultural difference but this seems like a Protestant-style fetishization of work and hierarchy for its own sake. The appeal to civility and honesty in the abstract is busted because the structural relationship is highly uncivil to begin with.
There are less lucky workers out there, so other groups of workers should relinquish their cards? Seems like a non-sequitur. You could turn it around and ask why the employer isn't grateful that they can extract as much value as they currently can. In some EU countries, they're not even allowed to monitor workers or send them work correspondence after hours!
I agree with this. My contention is that workers are not fullfulling the terms of their contract. I'm not defending the contracts themselves, or saying it makes sense for an employer to require butts in seats for 40 hrs, but I also can't sympathize with people that violate the agreement they entered into.
You're defending "mouse jiggling". That is a deception. Why would they feel the need to fake work if their contract allows them to not work?
The difficulty of doing that is in a sense what prompted me to respond earlier. For most workers in industries where it is physically possible, it is very difficult to negotiate 80% employment or time flexibility or working from home. Even some skilled workers on HN seem to have trouble with it as they testify to in this very thread, and anglophone coders are the cream of the crop when it comes to negotiating power, so we can only imagine what it's like elsewhere.
The typical modern worker (with some exceptions) has to essentially request the privilege of trading the majority of their useful lifespan towards increasing the wealth of another person or face the prospect of the complete dissolution of their life. By contrast, most employers (though of course not all) who face mouse-jiggling type problems merely have to contend with the loss of some self-actualization and additional wealth as the worse case scenario.
If Oliver Twist sneaks in an extra bite of bread from the coal mill's supply during a 12 hour workday, he is being deceptive to his employer when fulfilling a contract willingly entered into. Of course, comparing an office worker to a Victorian child laborer is ridiculous on the face of it, but only in a quantitative sense. In a qualitative sense, the power balance and the context of the deception means that we can't consider it in a vacuum or in comparison to an ideal world. In other words, if the environment were civil, the worker would be easily able to enter into the mutually beneficial contracts you alluded to, and the need for mouse jiggling would disappear on its own except for all but the most boundary-pushing workers.
In Victorian times, the social norms justified child labor and asked workers to be thankful for their lot. Today, the conditions of workers has improved tremendously, but the norms are still designed (or rather, naturally emerged) towards extracting additional value in favor of the employer. The last 50 years have seen the bulk of productivity gains given to the owners rather than the workers, and wage theft is a huge concern all over the OECD. Hence the OP's Ask HN thread and the feeling of social dissonance regarding the work week.
Even though I do resent spending the majority of my useful lifespan "working", I don't feel like I'm being exploited. Rather, I mostly consider myself lucky and privileged to be able to work from the comfort of my home doing an activity that I mostly enjoy for a decent salary. Sure my company overlords make money from the deal, much more than I make, but they're not villians - they're just people that did better than I did and good for me that their quest for money gave me an opportunity to enrich myself.
The power imbalance and exploitation you refer to applies to people who aren't so lucky and have to do real labor. I don't that's who we're mainly talking about in this thread. Instead, it's the people that are already lucky and privileged that rationalize deception because they think they deserve even more.
- It leaves little possibility of advocating for better conditions, even if these might be straightforward to obtain
- Makes it more likely to expend additional energy for the employer due to a moral abstraction as opposed to a material or social/societal need
- Assigns high moral worth to the employer by virtue of their ownership and higher class. The employee can't merely sign a contract, but must also practice additional gratefulness in favor of the employer
- Could potentially lead to monitoring and reporting other workers based on the abstraction of dishonesty, at no material or social gain to either worker involved or any clearly identifiable societal improvement
The employer makes far more money, their relationship to work is completely different, they own at least a significant part of the company, belong to a higher social class, and yet both your worldviews regarding work coincide neatly, and do so specifically in favor of only one person in the equation.
We could transpose this to a hypothetical Victorian worker. They could say that they are privileged to work 12 hour days because they could also work as a literal slave. That they should show extra diligence for the employer because that God-given hierarchy is natural and wholesome. From our vantage point, this mindset sounds absurd and the result of internalized oppression, but a hypothetical worker of the future could very well look at us now rejecting the 4 day workweek the same way we look at our predecessors justifying child labor and black lung.
I disagree with this. I believe I have a mutual agreement that benefits myself and my employer. If I felt like I could complete my job in 30 hours a week instead of 40, I could have a conversation with my employer and negotiation for a shorter work week. If that didn't work, I could find a part time or flex job.
> a hypothetical worker of the future could very well look at us now rejecting the 4 day workweek the same way we look at our predecessors justifying child labor and black lung
I agree that people will look back and think it absurd that we stuck to a 40 hour work week for so long. Progress should be making our lives easier and demanding less of us but that's not what's happing for most.
The way we make this better, in my opinion, is by being honest about it. If someone fakes it with a mouse jiggler to make it seem like they're working 40 hours when they're not, they're actually helping keep the 40 hour work week alive.
But still, we're talking about people lucky enough to have a fakable job, not people doing real work. None of this applies to the person working the drive thru that can barely make rent on a 40 hour work week and would be underwater if reduced to 30.
yes you get it, the point of labor negotiating for fewer days is that employers don't want to do it because it could be more expensive for them in various ways. what you are really complaining about isn't workers not wanting to keep businesses open longer, it's that employer cost-cutting measures include narrower service hours, and why would workers take it upon themselves to donate their time to solving that if their organized negotiating power is such that it would be charity to the owners
The world isn't static, tradeoffs can change.
There were lots of us who couldn't believe that so many employees had to be at a desk from 9 - 5 in industries where it made very little sense.
This is the realist view, and it shows the power imbalance between employee and employer. It's easy for those with the power in this relationship to say "if you want to reduce work, expect reduced pay". However, worker productivity has risen for decades and compensation/hours worked haven't budged anywhere close to match. Employers will always say "meet me in the middle" while taking a step backwards.
Employers in the US can get away with it because workers are replaceable. The government has their back. Most of the (paltry) welfare benefits from the government have work requirements, so you have to take jobs with bad pay (and you'll be fired if you complain). Individual workers have no power in this relationship. Even recent fed policy is put in place to promote unemployment because workers were gaining just a little ground.
At least in the United States, that's the trend.
0. https://www.truthorfiction.com/henry-ford-invented-the-5-day...
he sure as hell didn't do it out of the goodness of his own heart.
He deserves some credit, which is what I gave him.
there we go. I don't know why acquiescence counts as creditable but whatever.