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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: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday August 13 2020, @01:46AM (6 children)
Wages and benefits. If you're looking at wages alone, you miss that wages and benefits track productivity pretty well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @01:23AM (5 children)
The study that everyone cites for this, including the sibling post by bmimatt, already factored that in.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 14 2020, @03:07AM (4 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2020, @07:54AM (3 children)
It does factor that in, otherwise they'd get a negative growth just as your own source points out and even makes a pretty Chart 3 of it. Instead, your source attempts to change deflators in order to claim a different rate of change and tries some other tricks to artificially boost the numbers. Even the pro-business BLS, Minn. Fed. and other conservative groups disagree with some of Heritage's tactics as also comparing apples and oranges and being a bit too obvious.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday August 14 2020, @02:30PM (2 children)
Over the span of time studied: 1973 to 2012, productivity was claimed to have gone up 100% and wages and benefits went up 77% - these are adjusted for inflation via an "implicit price deflator". So what negative growth?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2020, @04:08AM (1 child)
You didn't even read your source or the exact citation I gave within it. Bravo.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday August 16 2020, @11:36PM