[HN Gopher] UK four-day week pilot begins: employees get 100% of...
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UK four-day week pilot begins: employees get 100% of the pay for
80% of the time
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 53 points
Date : 2022-06-06 19:26 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.independent.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.independent.co.uk)
| anm89 wrote:
| From an econometrics perspective, gdp essentially is a function
| of labor force size X worker productivity. Either this baseline
| assumption of economics is drastically wrong, this policy
| increases worker productivity by like 25% (which seems
| hyperbolic), or this policy is incompatible with continued
| economic growth.
|
| I'm not making any moral judgement on whether any of this is good
| or bad in any direction.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| If you start by assuming people only spend a small fraction of
| their workdays actually doing work, it seems very reasonable
| that the same amount of work could be achieved in shorter
| times.
| anm89 wrote:
| That is essentially arguing that this causes a defacto 25%
| increase in productivity simply by cutting down on wasted
| time. Again I'm skeptical, but I do see the argument.
| dotopotoro wrote:
| Other factors to consider (at least theoretically
| possible):
|
| - shorter week is part of compensation; (possibility to
| atract more or/and better employees).
|
| - more people will start working/get hired;
|
| - productivity is not uniform thoughout a day/week
| (tiredeness);
|
| My best counterpoint at the same time is that intuitively I
| think that 1 person doing 5 days is more productive then 5
| persons doing one day each, because
| communication/coordination does have a cost.
|
| (Surely tradeoffs and optimal points vary from role to
| role; some tasks are easier to parallelise)
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| yes. For some job functions (especially those in govt), I
| strongly suspect that "producitivity" is capped by factors
| beyond the control of employees at the bottom.
| joecot wrote:
| This economic perspective was not updated for the advent of
| office and technological jobs. If you're running a factory,
| reducing total work hours by 20% would reduce output by about
| 20%. If you're writing software, doing desk job work, etc, this
| would not be the case.
|
| For example, how active is Hacker News during what would be
| expected to be work hours. How many people are taking time out
| of their work day to post on facebook, reddit, twitter, or
| here? People aren't doing 8 hours of technical work for 5 days
| a week. They have a certain amount they're expected to produce
| over the course of a week, and they spend their time
| accordingly. If they had 4 days to do it instead of 5, with the
| same length of a day, they would spend more of those 4 days
| doing productive work, and enjoy their 3 days off more, without
| feeling guilty during work hours about "slacking" when people
| really can't stay this technical, or creative, productive for
| 40 hours a week.
|
| This is also why tech CEOs and managers are so paranoid about
| people working from home. They _know_ that the job doesn 't
| really require 40 hours of work. They just want to make sure
| they're getting 40 hours of captive time.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Consider productivity increases over the last 40 years while
| workweek hours remained the same. Workers are arguably already
| owed a 4 day work week. The idea that they would need to be
| even more productive to arrive at this shorter work week is not
| grounded in reality.
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/labor-productivity-per-ho...
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| What does owed in this context? living standards and goods
| are not the same as 40 years ago.
| elzbardico wrote:
| And in the end they are lucky if they are not fired because
| of the increased productivity.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Growth is overrated. We sorely need to have financial
| architectures of capital that don't depend on the assumption of
| endless growth.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| GDP should not be confused with production. It is a sum of
| transactions, not goods.
|
| I could make a $1 widget, then the two of us could exchange it
| back and forth to produce an arbitrarily High Gdp. At the end
| of the day oh, we would still have just one widget
|
| This becomes very clear when you look at economic breakdowns of
| GDP, where things like Finance and government are included
| jsdaa wrote:
| This is not true, the sale of used goods / intermediate goods
| / transfer payments is not counted in GDP [1].
|
| As an aside, be careful with tone that sounds too sure. If I
| hadn't know, I would have guessed you knew a lot of this
| topic based on the tone you're using here. I personally try
| to sound more doubtful on topics I don't know enough about.
|
| [1]: https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/19-1
| -mea....
| klyrs wrote:
| > gdp essentially is a function of labor force size X worker
| productivity
|
| Sounds reasonable. But how do you measure "worker
| productivity?" Is a retail employee standing in an otherwise
| empty store "productive?" If you work 24 hours a day, 7 days a
| week, without sleep, are you "productive?" If you spend the
| weekend working on a side project, could that be "productive?"
| jsdaa wrote:
| I don't see why it has to be thought of this way. It's not a
| bad way to simplify things, but I don't think it's necessarily
| the only / main econometrics perspective.
|
| Why could a 4 day week result in similar / higher GDP? (not
| saying it WILL, just pointing out how it COULD)
|
| + A big chunk of the jobs are white collar / don't require you
| to physically be somewhere. If you're a security guard (and
| you're there mostly for deterrence reasons), then your
| productivity won't likely change much. Say you get a white
| collar worker that has a burnout, you'll be producing 10% of
| your potential. If that extra day of rest prevents the burnout
| you get x10 for that person. In less dramatic fashion, someone
| more energized and happy can easily increase productivity by
| 25% (at least in many of the white collar jobs I'm familiar
| with) + Network / dynamic effects. Some people won't be more
| productive, but they might spend the extra day off building
| something new / learning something new. Even if it's just, say
| 1/20 that do that, that might offset some of the decreased time
| working
| ShaneMcGowan wrote:
| Having worked a 4 day work week for 100% pay for 6 months in my
| previous job, I would rather work a low stress job for 5 days
| than a stressful job for 4 days
| mathgladiator wrote:
| I feel similarly except I prefer working a few hours seven days
| a week allowing for moments of burst creativity.
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