Experiments with a shorter workweek have shown that shown that working fewer hours improves worker well-being and productivity. But we can’t expect employers to implement this transformative change of their own volition.
I’ve been doing a 4-day week for the past 12 years, it’s great, and even better when working remotely. Once in a while, I have to cycle to the office to attend a face-to-face meeting, but not all that often. And, it not being the US, there’s also the 6.5 weeks of vacation every year, and a separate and effectively unlimited pool of sick leave.
Including commuting, my US work week was typically 60-70 hours. At peak times, even more. I got paid significantly more, but it was killing me.
In this political environment we’re more likely to wind up with the elimination of the 40hr work week
Especially with people enthusiastically voting for fascists worldwide
Hell no!
24 hours a week.
3x8 or 4x6.
Not one moment more.
Yes! I’ve been advocating for 4x6. I don’t think we should be stuck for 8h at work every day. Especially when you take lunch into account, and then the commute. Those hours are killing me, and I think we as workers deserve better. Laws have been so far behind we’re fighting for 4x8, when we actually want 4x6 (or 3x8).
If argue for less, but either way we should be compensated for every minute of our lives disrupted by it, not just production time.
Pay should start as soon as you do the first thing that you wouldn’t do if you weren’t going to work.
As in getting lunch together, putting on a uniform, diving (+ gas cost and maintenance stipend), all time on premises and working, obviously, up to washing uniforms when you get home.
All that and no difference in benefits (aka no “part time”/“full time” distinction past a low minimum, say 20), and any time above minimum is completely voluntary, with excessive hours highly discouraged.
Yeah, remind me why humanity strove to create a technologically advanced civilization if not to fucking work less.
It’s almost like people with more money and power are continuing to make us work harder than we should have to in order to benefit themselves to a degree I would consider comical if I thought it was funny.
We should have a 20 hour workweek, the same pay, and hire more people and train them. More time to be human.
Capitalism isn’t built for that. It’s built to burn you dry so someone else lives in luxury because they already had a bunch of capital and want to make more.
I made a compelling argument to a die-hard Republican for UBI, by pointing out enormous job losses on the horizon due to automation. Basically, I said that there will only be so many labor hours available, so either huge numbers of people on unemployment, or less hours worked by each person. So if everyone had a baseline food/shelter/medical, and worked based on anything beyond that they want, there would be enough labor hours available for everyone. And you tax the shit out of automation to pay for it.
Automation should benefit society, not just a handful of people.
Give me the same pay for 4 days as for 5 and I agree.
Cut my pay 20%? Yeah, fuck everything about that.
I once took 4-day weeks for 80% pay for about 2 years. It was wonderful. Nothing about it whatsoever was to be fucked in any way. But I had the luxury of a very high paying job that allowed me to afford this. And though I could do it, it certainly did cost me a lot.
I dunno what to tell you. It’s not like you’re getting the fruits of your labor in the first place. They’re already paying you as little as they can get away with. How it shakes out depends on what economic frame you’re going with, but the idea is at least the lowest wage 4 day week is a living one. I don’t think getting into the weeds with inflation and such is worth it for this. Just accepting that you’re already not getting a realistic “piece of the pie” in any measurable sense should be enough.
My point is, if someone has a 4 day a week job and needs a second job to make up the difference, that defeats the purpose of a 4 day a week job. 😉
If rent, mortgage, bills, etc. also see a 20% decrease, then cool, cool. No worries, we’re all good.
/saying this as someone contemplating starting their own business and is expecting to work all hours, all days, to get it running.
Yeah I mean that goes hand in hand with the living wage argument. Where that goes and who absorbs the cost is in the weeds. Ex: landlords extract based on expected potential profit margins of the renter for commercial real estate so theoretically if margins drop everywhere all at once because of increased labor costs then rents drop to pay for that labor because unutilized real estate loses money. Unfortunately landlords are financed by banks and their mortgages create sticky price points that are very resistant to those drops. This isn’t taking into account general political resistance to property devaluation (which is huge). So telling you who is going to pay for it beyond saying “eventually it’ll get paid” is kinda impossible. Could be the worker, could be the consumer who is the worker, could be the capitalist, could be finance. Generally it’s a little of all. But you need strong unions to protect what little you got.
The best thing to do with economic policies that might negatively impact unproductive sectors such as rentiers is to let them fail. Nobody guaranteed them an infinitely lucrative revenue stream. And if the pricing is sticky, it’ll come unstuck in a big wave once the insolvencies start. We just have to make sure even bigger parasites don’t use that as a reason to seize control of those assets.
I agree. Unfortunately that would implode the western financialized system all the way to the middle class so your options tend to be revolution or waiting for it to blow itself up. I’d personally speed it up like condemnation of vacant properties and liquidity provided by state development banks to homeowners and businesses to buy said properties instead of waiting for vulture capitalists (blackrock) to buy things up when they’re the only ones with liquidity.
Let’s call it 30 for 40 hrs at same pay. Instead of dictating the number of days…30 hrs is full time.
Unfortunate picture. At my hospital nurses work 3 12s. That’s how we look after a run of 4. 36 hours treated as full time. Don’t really know how that would relate to a proposed 4 day workweek for normies.
Is there anything like a rational explanation for why an area where focus and accuracy are most critical insists on working people long past their ability to function efficiently? In a sane world, there would be shorter shifts for this, not longer. (And there would be more people doing them, instead of the absolutely minimum necessary to avoid disaster.)
Excessive involvement of the private sector, leading to exploitation.
Because one of the biggest obstacles of continuity of care is handing over the patient. We try to write accurate notes and try to give complete report but there’s always stuff lost. You hope whoever you hand off to gets a chance to actually read progress notes but that’s not realistically going to happen. That’s why we don’t tend to do three shifts. Report easily takes 15 to 30 minutes of just talking and we still miss stuff.
Now you can set it up so this isn’t an issue but that requires staffing for clean documentation. I’d also like a pony.
Thank you for explaining that!
Youd do 29 hours, not 36. So like 2.75 days or whatever.
Counter offer. 1 day a week. No pay cut
God… after the 3 day weekend last weekend this is exactly what I thought.
Yeah, I work 4 days a week, my shift is 12 hours long…
Corporate monkey’s paw curls a finger: everyone now works 4*24 hr days per week, with 18hr of off time between days, and wages now being handled as overtime exempt salary positions paying on a weekly basis what you were paid on average per normal week.
When population shrink is well underway, it’s going to be a big fight between workers with more leverage, employers trying to squeeze more and trying to get more immigrants while politics wants no immigrants.
The only disadvantage to a four-day week is that people who can work hard but not smart will lose the only argument they’ve ever been able to win. A lot of this charade falls apart really quick after that.
There are people in the workforce that put in loads of hours to show up, but get nothing done, or at least very little, but they look busy and reliable. Then there are people who work smarter, get the tasks done and look like they slack off because they can manage proper minutes of downtime here and there
Worse are the ones who are adept at dumping all the work onto others. Lateral delegation. “Someone’s gotta do it, and it ain’t going to be me.” It’s really fun finding those net-negative producers and throwing them out into the street. They’re destructive of morale as well as being leeches.
And I hate the firefighter-arsonists even more. Those mostly appear in senior tech roles and middle-to-upper management. Fire prevention is much more worthwhile, but less dramatic, so the people you really need don’t always get the credit they deserve.
I’m stealing the term firefighter-arsonist. I’ve got one or two in mind
“Why aren’t you as stressed about this deadline as I am?”
“Because I’m actually good at my job, bud.”
Can you explain?
A lot of fields have people in them that will judge your worth by how early you show up and how late you stay and not by how good the work is. It’s more visible, and we too often equate have a shitty time with doing good work, as if having a good time at your job means it must not be as deserving of pay.
They will also refuse to learn new things, citing “not enough time for that” and you can watch them struggling when they really don’t need to. I spent a lot of time at my last job trying to make monthly, 1hr meetings happen among all the drafters and yet they couldn’t even find time for that.
Ultimately it comes down to an idea that a lot of people find uncomfortable: Salary should pay related to the value of work you produce, not the amount of time you spent on it. If you can produce a lot of value very quickly then you should be allowed to go the fuck home. I once did everything asked of me in half the time, and even asked for more work which I never got, so I would spend hours in my office just watching Youtube. The very conservative, “hard work” manager would even tell me I was working hard because all he could really see were my results.
Some companies may offer a 4-day work day at 80% pay, but because that system is actually better they end up with a 20% discount on the same value created. They’ll even act like they’re doing you a favour.
A lot of fields have people in them that will judge your worth by how early you show up and how late you stay
Those people should be horsewhipped, sacked, then sued, along with the cunts who count the attendees in a meeting, then loudly inform everyone of how much it’s costing the company. My usual response is “so how did you calculate the cost and risk of not holding the meeting?”
Hmm… I don’t know where you worked, but your experience seems to have sucked.
Nowadays I feel that it’s not so much about how late you stay in the office. Most professional jobs now are hybrid. Part time in the office, part time work from home. Managers don’t see how much time you spend on work at home. So this mindset has changed quite a bit since the pandemic.
Regarding learning new things, you’re asking them to sacrifice a whole hour. Even in a 40h work week that’s a lot of precious time and it’s difficult to get everyone together at the same time to do a learning session. Maybe let them learn in their own time by providing a video or documentation on the topic instead.
Finally, you wouldn’t believe how much time I spend on chores during my work hours. I still get my work done on time. Which proves a 32h 4 day work week is totally doable for professionals working 9-5 office jobs. Of course for other fields it might have a greater impact, like construction. But they can plan around that and allow more time to finish their projects.
So this mindset has changed quite a bit since the pandemic.
Except among the shithead micromanagers that are on the warpath against hybrid and remote work.
Regarding learning new things, you’re asking them to sacrifice a whole hour.
Most organizations with a structure more complex than that of a bloom of pond scum have an expectation that overhead activities such as training and admin make up part of the workweek. Budgeting effort for the actual job should take that into account, or those necessary housekeeping activites fall by the wayside. And in my case, continually learning new things and sharing them with the organization is part of my job description alongside planning and delivery.
I’ve always been reprimanded for basically learning and sharing because it affects delivery. So I stopped.
“A whole hour” if you don’t have an hour free then how do you expect handle literally any emergency? There’s this expectation that if an employee’s schedule isn’t filled to the brim that they’re slacking off, but that’s not how this works. What if you get sick? What if there’s an IT issue? If I say it will take 4 days to do something then you tell the client it will take 6 or even 8. Clients would rather you take longer and deliver on time than be ready for something only to have you be late. And no, I will not expect people to learn things outside of work hours as the default. That’s unpaid work and inacceptable as an expectation(if they want to do it themselves, by all means).
The mindset has changed a little but it’s still mostly on paper, in my experience. Many companies will even quietly expect you to stay later since you’re at home and “can”. The government of Canada is forcing everyone working for them back into the office and they’re not even prepared for it, nor can they actually explain why it’s better.
It’s better than it was, that’s about all we can say.
No it isn’t. NO IT ISN’T. The overwhelming majority of people do not work salaried jobs.
In the industry I work in, I would end up on the street if I only worked four days a week.
Entire trades such as appliance repair, construction, and especially manufacturing would struggle under a four-day work week.
Every time I see this argument, it boils my blood.
What about teachers? Are students only supposed to attend school four days a week? There are not enough teachers to run multiple overlapping schedules throughout the week.
What about competition? Are we going to prohibit companies from operating five days a week? If one company switches to four days, another will simply step in and say, “We’ll work five.”
As long as our economy remains based on scarcity, there will be no universal four-day work week.
Now go ahead and downvote me and tell me how great socialism is.
Seems you haven’t read past the headline any time you’ve encountered this.
In the industry I work in, I would end up on the street if I only worked four days a week.
In the industry you work in, your employer would be required to raise your hourly rate such that you would be paid the same as you were in the old scheme. The same thing happened when 40 hour work weeks were mandated.
What about teachers? Are students only supposed to attend school four days a week? There are not enough teachers to run multiple overlapping schedules throughout the week.
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/the-4-day-school-week-what-research-shows-about-the-alternative-schedule/2026/04 Academically, there is little difference in a 4 vs 5 day instruction week, but certain non-academic markers improve, including teacher retention rates.
What about competition? Are we going to prohibit companies from operating five days a week? If one company switches to four days, another will simply step in and say, “We’ll work five.”
The main driver of a 4 day week is that people are at least as productive in those four days, and have more time to live their lives - leading to them being more rested and able to be more productive. There are already companies using a 32-hour workweek and are quite successful. If this is adopted on a large-scale, companies clinging to a 40-hour week simply will not be able to compete in recruiting quality workers.
As long as our economy remains based on scarcity, there will be no universal four-day work week.
As long as rubes like you believe that you just have to grind harder and your millions will come, there will be no four-day week
Now go ahead and downvote me and tell me how great socialism is.
Go ahead and downvote me and tell me how much you love the taste of boot. Maybe also read up on how McCarthy created a propaganda system to denigrate socialism and communism to enrich corporate America at your expense.
And you seem to have a problem understanding basic economics.
your employer would be required to raise your hourly rate such that you would be paid the same as you were in the old scheme.
And where would this additional money come from? In my line of work I get paid per work order closed. And that money comes from a fixed flat rate we charge. If our flat rate went up a small company would swoop in with a lower flat rate and would be willing to work more than 4 days a week.
Academically, there is little difference in a 4 vs 5 day instruction week, but certain non-academic markers improve, including teacher retention rates.
So do you pay teachers for the amount of time they work decreasing how little money they already make? There is a reason why schools operate the way they do and it’s not because the four day or five day work week is better or worse they operate with the fact that parents work. That’s why school starts so early. So parents can get their kids ready for school and not be late to work. What are parents supposed to do with their kids if they have a free day? Pay more for daycare or a babysitter? How would you cover that cost? As a parent I heavily rely on the school schedule to keep my kids safe while I work. But you’re right academically there is no difference between going to school for 4 days or 5. Which apparently is the only metric your little brain has come up with.
The main driver of a 4 day week is that people are at least as productive in those four days
I once again agree and the amount of companies and industries that can support this kind of throughput is few and far between. I noticed you glossed over those parts. Salaried office workers comprise only a small fraction of the work force in America. Office workers aren’t keeping this country afloat. It’s plumbers and electricians and garbage men. Industries that cannot adopt a 4 day work week.
As long as rubes like you believe that you just have to grind harder and your millions will come, there will be no four-day week
This is what pissed me off the most. Where did you draw this conclusion from? Did I say anything like I think we should grind harder and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps? You think I don’t see the massive wealth inequality especially in America? That people are literally dying on the job day to day? Or the pro corporation administration currently in power in the US? We’re fucked. We’re all fucked. As a four day work week isn’t the solution. Which is why I brought up the fact that we live in a Scarcity-Based economy, which you once again glossed over conveniently.
As for the part about McCarthy I’ll leave with my regular disclaimer before this becomes the topic of conversation: Socialism refers to collective ownership of the means of production. Social democracy refers to a capitalist market economy supplemented by welfare programs, labor protections, and public services. The two terms are not interchangeable despite frequent misuse on the internet. You are describing and advocating for social democracy not socialism.
Are we going to prohibit companies from operating five days a week
The number of days an individual employee is working doesn’t necessarily dictate the number of days the business can operate.
So some people are going to work four days a week, but management is still working six?
Are companies supposed to double their workforce to cover the missing day? Who pays for all those additional employees? If employees are only working four days a week, are they taking a pay cut? Or are businesses expected to pay the same wages for fewer hours?
What about small businesses? Where are they supposed to find the additional revenue? And how are they supposed to compete with companies that continue operating on a traditional five-day schedule?
What about people like me who are paid based on completed work orders? Do I suddenly need to complete 14 work orders a day just to make the same income? Or do we charge homeowners significantly more to make up the difference?
And what about business owners themselves? Do they only work four days a week, too?
Every time this idea comes up, people talk about the benefits, but they rarely explain how the math is supposed to work in industries where revenue is directly tied to labor and hours worked.
So some people are going to work four days a week, but management is still working six?
No. I’m senior management, I work a 4-day week. So does my boss, and my boss’s boss. Not always the same 4 days, but we’re all doing it. And things still get managed, how about that?
What about small businesses?
Like, say, restaurants, which have always had extreme shift flexibility? Try doing that.
industries where revenue is directly tied to labor and hours worked
I worked in one of those industries. There is no business I know of where billable hours are exactly the same as staff hours. In this model, there’s no reason the price of a billable hour would necessarily change.
First of all, I have no reason to believe that you work in the exact kind of environment you’re using to support your argument.
I can just as easily claim that I work in an industry that absolutely proves a four-day workweek will not function. The difference is that I am actually offering reasons why it would not work in many sectors, while you have largely refused to address those concerns directly.
I’ve also freely admitted that a four-day workweek is possible in some industries. My position has never been that it is impossible everywhere. My position is that it is not practical for most industries.
A four-day workweek is not the solution to the broader problems workers are facing. The real issues are stagnant wages, rising costs of living, and the fact that the federal minimum wage is still only $7.25 per hour. Even the $15 per hour standard many companies have adopted is no longer enough to live comfortably in much of America. We have privatized healthcare, skyrocketing housing costs, and politicians who are allowed to trade stocks while in office, which is insane to me.
The amount of time people work is often less important than how much they are paid for that time. If wages increased substantially and people could actually afford a decent standard of living, far fewer people would be complaining about working five, six, or even seven days a week.
There is also a widespread misconception among managers that productivity means employees must be productive every second they are on the clock. In reality, what matters is the amount of work completed, not whether every minute of every day is being maximized.
A four-day workweek may be a viable option in certain industries, but it is not a universal solution. And the fact that you personally have not encountered problems related to billable hours, staffing, scheduling, or labor coverage is not evidence that those problems do not exist.
You would be more productive per hour in a 32 hour work week than in 40, simply by being more rested. Because of this, you don’t really produce much less in 4 days than in 5.
Your boss can still pay you based on completed work orders. Because you’ll be able to complete more every day, because you’re more productive.
If you’re compensated based on hourly work, your hourly rate just needs to increase by 20%, which is fair, because you’re still getting the same amount of work done.
People are telling you how this works and how we solve the issues. Try listening to them instead of being closed minded.
Did you even read the questions I asked?
I do not work hourly. Where is that missing 20% of revenue supposed to come from? Are employers supposed to magically generate it out of thin air?
I already complete seven work orders a day. If I lose a day or two of work each week, I would have to increase that to nine or more work orders per day just to make up the difference. No matter how you slice it, I would lose a significant amount of income on a four-day work week.
We cannot simply raise our flat rates either. This is a competitive industry. If we raise prices too much, another company will undercut us and take the business. That is how markets work.
And you still have not answered one of my main questions: what about the companies that want or need to operate more than four days a week?
I will freely admit that there are monopolies and conglomerates in certain sectors of the economy. But competition absolutely still exists throughout much of the private sector, especially among small businesses.
There is no giant nationwide conglomerate dominating plumbing, electrical work, or appliance repair. Those industries are overwhelmingly made up of small companies competing with each other.
What frustrates me is that you are not actually addressing the concerns being raised. You keep focusing on a few specific points while ignoring the larger practical questions about labor costs, revenue, staffing, competition, and business viability.
A four-day work week may work in some industries. I do not dispute that. But saying it is broadly feasible across most industries in America ignores the economic realities many businesses and workers face.
The work week we have today did not appear out of nowhere. It developed because of a large number of economic, logistical, and operational factors.
As long as our economy remains based on scarcity, there will be no universal four-day work week. Now go ahead and downvote me and tell me how great socialism is.
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- Profit
