/liberty/ - Liberty

>>103452

A four-day week won't make the planet any more green, but if government wasn't involved, we would have moved towards the 20-30 hour work week fucking decades ago much in the way we moved from the 80 hour work week to the 40 hour work week back in the early 1900s (unions like to push this as their greatest achievement, but they basically just rode productivity curves and mass production models that made goods cheap enough for the first time in history for people to not NEED to work long hours every single fucking day). Human productivity dips dramatically after the first 4 hours of work in a given day to a level where anything longer doesn't make sense outside of critical operations (trucking, rigging, construction, etc.), and we should have reached a point where anything more than 25ish hours would be for the purpose of purchasing luxury goods.

That is to say, 40 and 60 and even 80 hour work weeks would still exist, but the national average should have been reduced to about 24 hours globally outside of those specific jobs and/or third world nations. Government forces us to work more and harder than ever and now these damn hippies are jumping on the bandwagon like some sort of psyop to further prevent what has been common fucking sense to anyone with a brain-most office workers only need to work maybe 4 hours in a day tops plus checking their email once or twice in the evening, or only have them work like 2-3 hours in the mornings and 1-3 hours in the evenings where they're most needed with maybe checking their emails three times a day on their off-weeks. "Crunch days" might exist where you need everyone (really the code monkeys, middle management, and like one salaryman) in the office for 8+ hours to accomplish a task, but generally you don't. Salaries are one of the only reasons businesses are loathe to adopt the "20 hour work week" because they feel like they're wasting money not having the dude work even though his work becomes almost nonexistent by hour 6, hence why salarymen typically have to put in 50-70 hours a week. On the hourly end of things, the only reason the 40 hour work week still exists at all is because of government taking a third of your damn paycheck (or more in other countries) and proceeding to take another fifth of your company's earnings (and let's not forget the tenth taken by the local state/city governments or the 1-3% taken by sales tax after the fact), and installing a million regulations that you have to climb through in the process.

Here's that video I was talking about. It was on fagbook of all places, but it let me access the post without an account somehow. This was the accompanying text.

https://pastebin.com/czA7SPDn

I could have sworn FEE, Reason, and a number of other websites wrote articles on this topic, but I can't seem to find them. Then again I haven't been heavily invested in discussing this topic in detail since around 2015-2016. I know at least a company in New Zealand experimented with a 32 hour work week where they paid their employees the same but asked them to only come in four days a week instead of five, and the results were that they maintained the exact same level of productivity, but that there was a…

>24% increase in work-home balance reported by employees

>Higher productivity from the employees when they were in the office

>Attendance increased significantly (employees were punctual in showing up on time, didn't leave early, and took fewer breaks when they were in the office)

Sweden did a similar study where they reduced the work day from 8 hours to 6 hours, and found that the employees working 6 hour days were less likely to quit, take sick days, or otherwise provide poor performance. They also found it heavily reduced the number of emails sent or meetings requested since people were trying to maximize what they did during those six hours. Sahlgrenska University Hospital tried something similar, and while the initial costs to the hospital were pretty damn high (about $1.5 million USD per year), they managed to increase their operations by 20%, take on operations they'd normally send elsewhere, reduced sick leave to almost nothing, and decreased the waiting time on surgeries from months down to weeks. Basically the biggest downside they found to the 6 hour work week was that employees who weren't part of the program bitched up a storm and became more likely to quit when their counterparts got to work 2 hours less for the same pay.

Article related from 2017: https://archive.fo/jid9s

What needs to happen for the 20-24 hour work week to become a reality is simple- employers need to cut hours more than they cut pay. It seems counter-intuitive, and obviously a compromise must be made somewhere, but the productivity curve is closer to 6 hours a day 4 days a week or 4-5 hours a day 5 days a week in which a company that fully utilizes that sort of schedule gets far more done, and with there being more laborers than there are jobs, it wouldn't hurt to hire more people to work fewer hours (while still being within reasonable wages of course, unlike this part time minimum wage bullshit that's typically used as a counter-argument).