[HN Gopher] Japan wants its hardworking citizens to try a 4-day ...
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Japan wants its hardworking citizens to try a 4-day workweek
Author : rntn
Score : 29 points
Date : 2024-08-31 15:31 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Interesting to see Greece taking population decline one way -
| more work days, and Japan the opposite.
|
| Hopefully Japan is right.
| voidbert wrote:
| From what I read, Greece's policy was (partially) due to labour
| shortages during the tourism season, while Japan has lots of
| workers who work many unproductive hours (some just go to the
| office for the sake of going). I'd say they're different
| policies for quite different contexts.
| drak0n1c wrote:
| They're starting from different baselines. Japan has a
| widespread culture of overwork, and Greece is notorious for the
| extreme opposite.
| maeil wrote:
| Greece is always on top of those "hours worked per month"
| statistic for Europe. So at least the data strongly
| contradicts that notion.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| I think "hours worked per month" and "hours _reported as
| work_ per month" do not have to correlate.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| All 4 day week pilots to date have been overwhelmingly
| successful [1]. This should be a no brainer considering
| existing productivity levels combined with Parkinson's Law
| ("work expands so as to fill the time available for its
| completion"). With process improvements and scheduling, the
| biggest hurdle is ideology around work. You see this emphasized
| in the US with people bragging how hard they work themselves,
| in Japan it's not leaving until the boss leaves and similar
| [2].
|
| Tangentially, as the working age cohort shrinks, labor has more
| power in this regard, and Japan's labor force continues to
| shrink due to structural demographics decline [3].
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39992783 (citations)
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_work_environment
| ("Wikipedia: Japanese work environment")
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_market_of_Japan
| ("Wikipedia: Labor market of Japan")
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Strange - some years ago a visiting Japanese Engineer was asked
| "What do you do on the weekend?" and answered with an eye-roll
| "In Japan, week is Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-
| Friday-Friday".
|
| What matter if they make it four 'Fridays'?
| killingtime74 wrote:
| They can't even do a 9 to 5 day and we are to believe that they
| can go to a 4-day week just because the government suggests that
| they do so? This is literally a marketing campaign with no law
| changes or subsidies or anything. Public policy vaporware
| beefnugs wrote:
| Is there a special name for these purposefully imprecise meme
| like terms? "4 day work week" means 10 different things to 5
| different people.
|
| People sick of capitalism are like, finally some kind of relief?
|
| Business owners are like, yeah great everyone can work 12 hours
| days and i pay less office heating.
|
| Japan is like, if you are a good quiet slave you may get fake
| praise for your incredible dedication worth well over 100 hours a
| week crammed into 4 days.
|
| Greece is like, enough of this communism they will work more days
| by force!
|
| Everyone has their own different flavor of propaganda around it:
| like people stating "studys" without thinking for one second
| people arent so desperate for change they would try to game that
| study at all costs
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(page generated 2024-08-31 23:02 UTC)