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Kill the 5-Day Workweek

posted by mrpg on Tuesday June 22 2021, @04:43PM   
from the yes dept.

upstart writes:

Kill the 5-Day Workweek:

The 89 people who work at Buffer, a company that makes social-media management tools, are used to having an unconventional employer. Everyone's salary, including the CEO's, is public. All employees work remotely; their only office closed down six years ago. And as a perk, Buffer pays for any books employees want to buy for themselves.

So perhaps it is unsurprising that last year, when the pandemic obliterated countless workers' work-life balance and mental health, Buffer responded in a way that few other companies did: It gave employees an extra day off each week, without reducing pay—an experiment that's still running a year later. "It has been such a godsend," Essence Muhammad, a customer-support agent at Buffer, told me.

Miraculously—or predictably, if you ask proponents of the four-day workweek—the company seemed to be getting the same amount of work done in less time. It had scaled back on meetings and social events, and employees increased the pace of their day. Nicole Miller, who works in human resources at Buffer, also cited "the principle of work expanding to the time you give it": When we have 40 hours of work a week, we find ways to work for 40 hours. Buffer might never go back to a five-day week.

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Original Submission

[...] In 2018, Andrew Barnes approached the employees of his company, a New Zealand firm called Perpetual Guardian that manages wills, estates, and trusts, with an offer: If they could figure out how to get more done in a day, they could work one fewer day per week. In consultation with employees, the company installed lockers in which workers can voluntarily stash their phones for the day, and soundproofed meeting spaces to reduce the sound of ambient chatter. Meetings were shortened; employees started putting little flags in their pencil holders whenever they wanted to signal to coworkers that they didn't want to be disturbed. It worked: Perpetual Guardian's business didn't suffer, and the four-day workweek is still in place three years later.

[...] Natalie Nagele, the CEO of Wildbit, a small software company, introduced a four-day, 32-hour week in 2017, after reading about research indicating that the optimal amount of intense cognitive work is no more than four hours a day. (The four-day schedule even applies to Wildbit's customer-support team; their days off are staggered so they can respond to inquiries all week.) "I have this dream that knowledge workers can get to a point where we can clearly define what enough means," Nagele told me. "We don't do a good job of saying, 'This is done,' or 'I can put it away.'" She wonders if Wildbit's next schedule could be four six-hour days.

[...] Not all business leaders favored the change. "Any man demanding the forty hour week should be ashamed to claim citizenship in this great country," the chairman of the board of the Philadelphia Gear Works wrote shortly after Ford rolled out its new hours. "The men of our country are becoming a race of softies and mollycoddles." Less aggressive but just as resistant, the president of the National Association of Manufacturers, a trade group, wrote, "I am for everything that will make work happier but against everything that will further subordinate its importance."

• Re:Great Idea for Salaried Workers Re:Great Idea for Salaried Workers (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday June 22 2021, @09:04PM (1 child)

  by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday June 22 2021, @09:04PM (#1148152)

  Government jobs notwithstanding, most jobs exist because they're needed to do something, not because a set of chairs needs the warmth of a human behind.

  Counterpoint: A lot of jobs are completely useless and exist for basically bullshit reasons [strike.coop]. If you've ever worked in a larger corporation or non-profit, you will have no difficulty identifying a bunch of Wallys or Peter Gibbonses walking around who are accomplishing absolutely nothing but vaguely looking like they might be working. And no, that's not limited to government, because despite what a lot of libertarians seem to think private corporations are not even close to perfect models of efficiency.

  --
  The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.

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• Re:Great Idea for Salaried Workers (Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday June 23 2021, @02:40AM

  by khallow (3766) on Wednesday June 23 2021, @02:40AM (#1148252) Journal

  Sorry, don't buy it. First, the author classifies all service jobs as "bullshit jobs".

  So what are these new jobs, precisely? A recent report comparing employment in the US between 1910 and 2000 gives us a clear picture (and I note, one pretty much exactly echoed in the UK). Over the course of the last century, the number of workers employed as domestic servants, in industry, and in the farm sector has collapsed dramatically. At the same time, ‘professional, managerial, clerical, sales, and service workers’ tripled, growing ‘from one-quarter to three-quarters of total employment.’ In other words, productive jobs have, just as predicted, been largely automated away (even if you count industrial workers globally, including the toiling masses in India and China, such workers are still not nearly so large a percentage of the world population as they used to be.)
  
  But rather than allowing a massive reduction of working hours to free the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas, we have seen the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations. And these numbers do not even reflect on all those people whose job is to provide administrative, technical, or security support for these industries, or for that matter the whole host of ancillary industries (dog-washers, all-night pizza delivery) that only exist because everyone else is spending so much of their time working in all the other ones.

  Notice how the whole service industry has become "bullshit". This ignores that a large part of it is effectively manufacture (such as the creation of valuable software to power all that hardware that has been manufactured). And that another large part of it is valuable support for the non-bullshit jobs (such as those administrators, HR, dog washers, all-night pizza delivery, etc).
  
  Once the author has failed to understand the value of "bullshit" jobs, he then spins conspiracies about why they exist.

  It's as if someone were out there making up pointless jobs just for the sake of keeping us all working. And here, precisely, lies the mystery. In capitalism, this is precisely what is not supposed to happen. Sure, in the old inefficient socialist states like the Soviet Union, where employment was considered both a right and a sacred duty, the system made up as many jobs as they had to (this is why in Soviet department stores it took three clerks to sell a piece of meat). But, of course, this is the sort of very problem market competition is supposed to fix. According to economic theory, at least, the last thing a profit-seeking firm is going to do is shell out money to workers they don't really need to employ. Still, somehow, it happens.

  [...]

  The answer clearly isn't economic: it's moral and political. The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger (think of what started to happen when this even began to be approximated in the '60s). And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.

  In other words, he's an idiot.

  This is a profound psychological violence here. How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one's job should not exist? How can it not create a sense of deep rage and resentment. Yet it is the peculiar genius of our society that its rulers have figured out a way, as in the case of the fish-fryers, to ensure that rage is directed precisely against those who actually do get to do meaningful work. For instance: in our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one's work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it. Again, an objective measure is hard to find, but one easy way to get a sense is to ask: what would happen were this entire class of people to simply disappear? Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics, it's obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well.

  Now, we're doubling down on the idiocy. Nurses, garbage collectors, and mechanics get paid pretty well contrary to the narrative. And elimination of those otehr jobs would result in an unsubtle destruction of human organization down to the hovel level (private equity CEOs is a pretty big category of human organization, for example, even covering labor unions and non profits). You'd end up with those fantasy towns in RPGs that have a blacksmith, a farmer, a mayor, a bartender in an inn, etc with nobody having a clue what to do about these huge rats in the basement.
  
  Here's another example of the cluelessness.

  I would not presume to tell someone who is convinced they are making a meaningful contribution to the world that, really, they are not. But what about those people who are themselves convinced their jobs are meaningless? Not long ago I got back in touch with a school friend who I hadn't seen since I was 12. I was amazed to discover that in the interim, he had become first a poet, then the front man in an indie rock band. I'd heard some of his songs on the radio having no idea the singer was someone I actually knew. He was obviously brilliant, innovative, and his work had unquestionably brightened and improved the lives of people all over the world. Yet, after a couple of unsuccessful albums, he'd lost his contract, and plagued with debts and a newborn daughter, ended up, as he put it, ‘taking the default choice of so many directionless folk: law school.’ Now he's a corporate lawyer working in a prominent New York firm. He was the first to admit that his job was utterly meaningless, contributed nothing to the world, and, in his own estimation, should not really exist.
  
  There's a lot of questions one could ask here, starting with, what does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law? (Answer: if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call ‘the market’ reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else.) But even more, it shows that most people in these jobs are ultimately aware of it. In fact, I'm not sure I've ever met a corporate lawyer who didn't think their job was bullshit. The same goes for almost all the new industries outlined above. There is a whole class of salaried professionals that, should you meet them at parties and admit that you do something that might be considered interesting (an anthropologist, for example), will want to avoid even discussing their line of work entirely (one or t'other?) Give them a few drinks, and they will launch into tirades about how pointless and stupid their job really is.

  First, there is a massive number of artists out there. Just because a skilled indy band doesn't make it, doesn't mean that there's something wrong. What's ignored here is that the rock band market is vastly oversupplied. It just takes some cheap instruments and a garage to make a rock band. That's not hard to come by. Meanwhile our society supports a vast abundance of music. It's far less limited than the past.
  
  The 1% envy is meaningless. Corporate lawyers contrary to assertion are valuable. That's why there are a fair number of them and they get paid a lot. And a ton of corporate lawyers has no impact on the supply of rock bands.
  
  This is the sort of clueless rant that adds nothing. What are we supposed to do about these alleged bullshit jobs? Fire people? Mandate that only valuable work is done? Force people with the good jobs to share?

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