SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
It's time to implement a 4-day workweek
In May, Andrew Yang, the entrepreneur and former Democratic presidential candidate, floated the idea of implementing a four-day workweek to better accommodate working Americans in a time of uncertainty, saying a shorter workweek could have mental-health benefits for employees.
There's not one overarching definition of a four-day workweek. "There are different models for the shortened week, some of which envision the same output condensed into fewer hours while others simply imagine longer hours spread over fewer days," a Washington Post report said.
Some involve a three-day weekend, while others mean a day off midweek.
[...] "It would help get us off of this hamster wheel that we're on right now, where we're all sort of racing against the clock in service of this giant capital-efficiency machine," Yang said. "And the race is driving us all crazy."
In a Harris poll conducted in late May, 82% of employed US respondents said they would prefer to have a shorter workweek, even if it meant longer workdays.
The idea of a shorter workweek has become so popular in Finland that Prime Minister Sanna Marin has called for employers to allow employees to work only six hours a day, four days a week. In New Zealand, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern proposed the policy as part of a coronavirus economic recovery effort.
Andrew Barnes, the CEO of Perpetual Guardian, introduced a four-day workweek at his company in New Zealand in 2018.
Barnes, a cofounder of the nonprofit platform 4 Day Week Global and the author of "The 4 Day Week," said he found that "stress levels drop, creativity goes up, team cohesion goes up" under such a policy.[...] Microsoft experimented with a four-day workweek last year at a subsidiary in Japan as part of its "Work-Life Choice Challenge." The subsidiary closed every Friday in August and said it saw productivity jump by 40% compared with the previous year.
I'm somehow attracted to the idea, be it only for the reason the weekends are the most productive time for me, with no meeting interruptions (large grin)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 12 2020, @08:19PM
I was going to post something along these lines.
Especially that this would effect different jobs very differently. Some of them, part of what you're paying for is simply having a warm body handy just in case. A lot of service jobs default to this when things aren't busy, but you still need every hour covered. And given the huge overhead of hiring one additional person, no business that needs a lot of hours-fillers will ever go for this proposal, and no amount of productivity increase will do anything about that bar full automation. Manual labor is in a similar situation for the reasons you gave.
Lots of rote salaried office jobs could handle the reduced work week without issue, and probably without changing staffing. Only hit will be to some of the middle management's egos.
Salaried creative work is never going to touch this. There are superstar coders, and of course plenty of superstars in the entertainment industry, but those are hardly the only ones with some people who are huge outliers on whatever the relevant scale is. Those people will continue to do what they do, and most of them give no shits about hours as it stands now. They'll work what they need to, and that goes in both directions. I've known great coders that have pretty much checked out of the promotion train who'll do their work in a short burst and then bugger off (even pre-COVID) and won't get in trouble for it, and ones that work pretty much every waking hour (although that latter was at a startup).