I’m not sacrificing shit, asshole. We fucking deserve a 4 day work week after decades of skyrocketing productivity and shit wages.
We’ve been sacrificing every time we get a “raise” or a “cost of living adjustment” that doesn’t even come close to keeping up with inflation.
Productivity has been on a rocket to the moon since the beginning of the industrial revolution, so centuries.
Every time I see any discussion about a 4 day work week, it’s always the same. Discussion is focused around what changes/sacrifices the workers are willing to make to accomplish this. Fuck that noise, nothing should be sacrificed. Your pay shouldn’t change, your leaves shouldn’t change, nothing should change. Fucking capitalist mentality bullshit.
“Studies show productivity increases with 4-day/32h work week”
“Ok but we’ll only pay for 32 hours.”
“I literally just said it makes us more productive. Maybe you should pay us for 48 hours”
But you won’t have suffered as much for it, so good you really earn it?
I want to believe you’re joking
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Teleworking was possible in the 90s. It took goddamned covid for the stonewall of telework being “impossible to manage” to topple.
Yet we still have corporate-backed talking heads doing everything they can to convince us to the contrary, and there’s a significant amount bootlicking morons that lap it up like the pet dogs they are, which ducks it up for the rest of us. “You see Steve? He works 60 hours a week for minimum wage with a smile, you all should be more like Steve,” nevermind Steve has the IQ of a grapefruit and has zero life outside of work.
Belgium already has this, and Portugal is implementing it.
really sick that at least half of the country hears about 4 day work weeks and starts crunching the numbers for their overlords
i have to assume it’s pure bitterness. it’s a rite of passage to waste your life from 20-70 and fuck you if it’s any easier for you
Not to mention a complete absence of service/retail voices.
The only way they could afford that is going to ten hours a day over 4 days- or the company has to increase their hourly wages to compensate.
But of course no one is actually advocating a 4 day for retail and service. It’s for office workers who want to go shopping on Friday too
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My recycling center closes at 3 and obviously isn’t open on weekends. 🫠
…. The irony of your complaint….
And the entitlement.
It’s delicious.
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I have worked in service/retail, and this argument doesn’t make a lot of sense. Most service/retail is actually 7-day weeks, but the workers average out to 5-day weeks with rotating shifts etc.
All that would have to happen is the workers now average out to 4-day weeks, with a similar level of pay (which is what the 4-day week advocates are asking for).
The 4-day week isn’t about office workers, it’s about everyone.
All that would have to happen is the workers now average out to 4-day weeks, with a similar level of pay (which is what the 4-day week advocates are asking for).
You’re forgetting that retail and most service workers aren’t salaried in the US. They’re paid hourly. And most are living paycheck to paycheck-or very close to it.
In order for to not loose on pay, either the company has to increase their rates (lol. Not gonna happen,) or they have to work more hours across the four days to make up for the lost day.
And many retail workers are already do 12’s and 16’s to eek out overtime.
Edit: To put this another way, OT starts at 40 hrs. Most retail/service managers do everything they can to keep their employees at less than 40/week. OT is a very big sink, it’s cheaper to hire more employees than, if one can, than it is to pay staff OT.
If you reduce the threshold to 32, that’s still going to be true- on the 5/2 week day-weekend rotation it only helps the weeked- moving hours to them. It doesn’t matter to managment whose working that shift- only that it gets worked.
So, now, you’ve got an entire sector’s worth (and the largest economic sector at that) of people who are being shorted hours- and we all know that corpos are not going to be increasing wages to match: that would be a 25%increase in wages- and not just for the full time employee. Most large companies will dictate the wages for everyone at a given position.
Alternatively, they can just pay time and a half for the last 8, which might be only a 10% loss.
Regardless, retail/service sectors won’t really see any changes. This is probably true because many are working 20+ hours of overtime at low wages anyhow. Those companies have already decided paying adequate wages, and attracting employees is “too expensive”
I think most of us realise that corporations will not do this out of the kindness of their hearts. Doesn’t mean we should just say “Fuck it, never going to happen”. We should demand better.
*eke out overtime. No need to be surprised about it by saying “eek!”
OT is a very big sink, it’s cheaper to hire more employees than, if one can, than it is to pay staff OT.
That isn’t necessarily true. Assuming OT is paid out at a time and a half rate, if you have one employee working 50 hours a week at $10 an hour, you would pay $1040 + $1510 = $550 per week, plus the cost of benefits per employee, which is $75 per week. Total: $625
If you hire an additional employee, each working 25 hours for $10 an hour, you pay $500, but the cost of benefits has doubled to $150. Total: $650
This is a extremely simple example. I am ignoring the fact that you would probably pay someone new to the job at a lower rate, the associated training costs of hiring an employee, payroll taxes, most businesses employ a higher number of people, does the business do 401K matching, whether these people work on the same shift and probably a hundred other things.
I can’t deny the truth of this, it’s true that only a relatively small group of jobs could realistically implement this. You can’t make a delivery truck go 20% faster, or get 20% more customers in your store at a given time. Many such jobs scale productivity with time by their nature (to some extent). While I absolutely think those workers deserve the same pay for less work at the very least, the reality is that no company will do it. There’s no benefit for them.
No, no sacrifices are acceptable. Workers generally get taken advantage of in the US. I think everyone is tired of being taken advantage of. It’s time for businesses to actually treat people better.
Yes, we are tired of being exploited.
having fewer vacation days, 16%; having a longer commute, 12%; taking a pay cut, 10%; or taking a step back in their careers
Yeah right, what are employers sacrificing again? What a BS article
Fewer vacation days? Heck no. If I wanted to burn vacation to get a 4 day week, I’d do it already.
Longer commute? Heck no. WFH or I walk.
Pay cut? Heck no. You KNOW that 99% of people will be just as productive with a 4 day work week as a 5 day, so why take less money for the same output?
Taking a step back in career? Not like I’m shooting for being a VP or anything, so I guess I don’t care if I don’t get promoted to senior middle manager meeting organizer, so who cares on that one.
If neoliberalism didn’t completely decouple wages from productivity 50 years ago, workers would already be making the same wages for a ~3 day work week.
So yes, they can absolute go fuck themselves. The only way a realignment will occur is if workers organize, unionize, and demand it at a national level.
What happened in 1974?
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Ah, so that’s where all the surplus money from workers’ productivity has been going
Same time and place here too!
Oh thanks, nice to see I’m not the only one who’s had that thought
Edit: damn 1971 seems like the year that changed the world
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Anything labeled “money” or “finance” or “CNBC” is like this.
I would literally do any of those for a four-day week. It would be nicer if my job just sliced a day off, but since I know that’s unlikely, I’ll make sacrifices to get it here quicker.
This attitude is exactly why workers have continously been getting fucked more and more
The attitude of being willing to compromise to get what I want, rather than waiting until my perfect conditions are met? I just don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation for people to stop thinking like that. I use compromise every day of my life - I used it ten minutes ago, to choose a slightly damaged monitor for less money over a brand-new, more expensive one.
I am of the mind that the faster we can get a few companies offering a four-day week, the faster it will become standard - or at least common. We saw it happen with WFH: Companies now have to expect to compete with offers that include remote work, so they either have to provide it as well, or improve other parts of their offer.
That’s not compromising, it’s groveling at their feet begging them to give you the slightest bit of respect, a tiny little crumb of the ever growing profits.
Good luck saying that to your boss and expecting them to capitulate.
Man the concept of a union is going to blow your mind
I know what a union is. Unless you’re about start one, recruit people, and bargain collectively with your employer, I suggest you start somewhere more realistic.
Fuck no, no sacrifices. Productivity is up, wealth is up, people should be paid more for their time and have more time to spare.
Yea this article is painting that the people are the problem here. Sacrifice the super rich CEOs instead.
Sacrifice I’m willing to make: sacrificing the CEO to the Old Gods.
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Jokes on them. I barely give three days worth of effort in my five-day week.
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I got you beat and maybe do a total of 12 hours of work to get paid 40. Only shit deal is was wfh doing first years of covid. And was 4 days a week, but management stuck their heads up their area and decided to make us 5 days week.
Exactly. I read the headline and was like: no, that’s what corporations want - for you to sacrifice pay or something else so they don’t lose out.
Most corps have posted record profits these past few years - they can afford to let their workers work a day less without reducing their pay, they just don’t want to admit it.
My first sacrifice: the billionaire CEO
Working more than 3 days a week is barbaric and unnecessary.
Working 4 days would be OK if it was only for 6 hours each day. Although 8 hours for 3 days a week would be better even if they’re the same hours
Productivity has increased disproportialy to workers pay the last 40 years. Working less days and less hours is only fair considering that most of the benefits went to the employers side. 4 day/ 20 hour weeks should be the norm. And people should be able to work from home for as long as possible to avoid commuting and the barbaric micromanagement of the low/middle admins
edit: gramar
edit: grammar
Workinhlg
To be fair, that’s not grammar :p
ty
I was more going for a 15 hour work week…
My team at work recently instituted a “flex time” Friday policy. Basically, as long as we’re maintaining productivity we aren’t expected to work on Fridays. A lot of us still work half days to keep up but it’s nice to know that if I work a little more earlier in the week I can just take a three day weekend.
Ah interesting. I too have instituted a flex time Friday.
So far my company hasn’t seemed to notice
I dread the day my manager calls me in to talk about the flex time Friday
Eh as long as the tickets keep on chugging along, there should be no problem.
My boss doesn’t work on Fridays and I’m starting to push for this flex setup. I’ll check my emails and do the hour or two of work that might come in those days, but I want to do it from home while getting my household chores done before the weekend.
This is the way to go. What’s crazy is your productivity and efficiency is probably the same or better since you can have a softer reset with the weekend.
What is stopping your employer from giving you so much work that you are forced to work on Fridays so your employer only has to pretend the policy works?
We use a bottom-up work planning system (scrum). We have a backlog of work items that we (the people doing the work) assign point values to based on how complex we think the work is. Management knows about how many points of work we can complete in a 2 week period, and they decide what items they want done this work period based on their priorities. If we don’t get something done, it slips to the next 2 week sprint. If we get everything done and still have time, we pull additional items from the backlog. So long as the number of points we complete every 2 weeks stays relatively steady they are happy.
I know it’s hard to believe, because I’ve worked other places where it wasn’t like this. But some employers really do respect their employees and try to treat them with dignity and respect.
I will say that occasionally we have looming deadlines and more work to get done than we can normally do. When that happens we will be asked to dig in and work extra hours to get things done. It sucks but it’s also pretty rare. I’ve been with the company for going on 9 years and I think it has happened 3 times, for limited periods, and afterwards management will make it up by giving us time off as compensation. Most of us like working here enough that we don’t mind the occasional brief crunch.
That’s not how most jobs that can offer “flex time” function. The employer literally cannot just “invent” work to do.
The real problem is, how many politicians and capitalists are we willing to sacrifice before we get this 4-day mandate.
That sounds like a solution, not a problem. I’m all for it.
It’s more like: How many do we have to keep. The less the better.
A lot of U.S. factory jobs are 12 hour days, alternating between 4 day on, 3 days off, 3 days on, 4 days off. Probably not what most people are thinking of though.
My last cushy office job was 4.5 days/week about half the time (beginning of the quarter was 4.5 day weeks, end of quarter was 5 day week), and seemed to work well. Some stupid workaholic assholes would complain about the 4.5 day work weeks though.
In my experience, productivity per hour increases the less hours people work. Workaholics are just trying to stay away from their family, or don’t know what to do with themselves in their free-time, IMO.
12s do make sense in Healthcare where every handoff is an opportunity to miss important information. For instance if you forget to mention all the specifics of all your patients injuries after a car wreck, the next nurse might not realize their sinuses are cracked and just go ahead and insert that nasogastric feeding tube into their brain.
3 handoffs a day instead of 2 is 1.5 as many chances to make an error like that.
That said, 2x12s a week instead of 3 sounds lovely.
Ahhhhhh, but one is less likely to make an error when they’re tired. In sure that even nursing could rotate to a 3x shift per day cycle and the wheels wouldn’t fall off.
Honestly I’d settle for making sure the doctors hand off q12h. They often work 48 hour shifts with even more disastrous possibilities.
I’d sacrifice a couple of my daily hours of slacking off for a 4-day work week.
I probably only get about three, maybe three and a half, days of work a week anyway.
We don’t actually have anything much to do and yet the company has just expanded the department.
There was a story about a guy in Google who, as it turned out, worked only an hour a day, and the rest of the time he worked on his passion project. The thing is, he did everything he was supposed to do, every metric was OK, all the tickets were closed and everyone was happy.
When it was posted on one IT forum, the comments were full of people accusing him of stealing money from the company and how he should be fired into the sun. All of those commenters were basically a regular IT guys. The lack of class solidarity is astonishing.As the old saying goes, companies always want to fire the IT staff because everything’s fine and nothing ever goes wrong.
If you’re doing your job properly, then you basically never do anything.
Yesterday I did literally nothing, except at 4:55 p.m. somebody rang up because the spam filter had trapped an email that he wanted. So I was in work for 8 hours in order to fix an issue that took 2 minutes to fix.
But the company know how often I receive calls, but they’ve been around for decades now, so I suspect that they probably worked out back in the 90s that firing IT staff because they that much work to do, just results in them needing to hire more IT staff later on.
When I was younger, I worked as an IT guy on a printing factory, we had 24 hours shifts. The day was a usual IT shit, and at nights we did a little bit of maintenance but mostly we were on standby to fix IT stuff in the factory, most of the printing was done on the nights so the fresh press goes out in the morning. Mostly we were paid handsomely to play WOW the whole night, and once in a blue moon go to the factory floor and reboot something or repair a patchcord or reinstall a memory stick or something.
Then the company got merged with the other media company, they took over the factory, and their first decision was to remove night shifts, because why do you need to pay those IT wankers, they don’t do anything most of the time. Of course most of us left but they had their own IT guys and everything was great, they were able to conserve so much money on salary, until one day one of the computers run out of disk space in the middle of the night and that clogged the whole damn factory, and since all the IT was home asleep, nobody was able to clear the cache, so nothing got printed, everyone involved lost millions, and the whole company was ultimately bankrupted because of this.
Mmmmmh the sweet taste of polish on one’s tongue
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We can do that but dang, we’ll have to get rid of health insurance. Oh, you want health insurance? Darn, we just can’t see any possible way to do both.
Funnily enough that would push a lot more people into the Healthcare Marketplace (Obamacare) which is often better than healthcare offered through work, depending on your circumstances. Then we might get more people asking why we don’t just switch to socialized medicine and be done with it.
81%? that’s like… 4 out of 5 right?
I see what you did there
This is not the way, it’s better to work less hours per day than working more hours and fewer days. Productivity peaks at 6 hours, after that you’re either less focused or just doing unproductive things. It’s also gonna burn out harder.
What about less days and less hours ? That’s just me (or is it?), but I’m always better and more enthusiastic at anything I do when that thing doesn’t take up 80% of my awake time. I always solve problems when going back to them after a pause -always !
I mean yeah, that could absolutely work. My point isn’t so much about the total amount of hours or days, just that it’s not worth piling up too many hours just to work fewer days.
I’m with you. I recently asked my boss about part time options, and she laughed at me.
Yeah, totally respect your opinion, but I emphatically disagree with it. The goal of what’s being discussed here isn’t to maximize production for the sake of shareholders, it’s to maximize quality of life for employees. To that end, five six-hour days are worse than four 8-to-10-hour days.
If I start work at 8 and get off work at 2:30 or 3, I still can’t start my camping trip a day early, or spend the day at the water park with my kids. I still have to give up n x 10 hours of my life, where n is my commute time, assume I work in-office.
I would much rather work until 630 Monday through Thursday, and have an extra day where full-day activities are possible every week. That’s worth more to me than 10 extra hours per week of after-work time.
I think flexibility is key. There are days where I peak my productivity at 4 hours. There are days where I get in the flow and can be productive for 12.
That’s admittedly a great point. I think my record was either 12 or 16 hours a day, but it’s incredibly exceptional. Anything above 8 hours of actual, productive work is the result of high enjoyment and focus or a deadline panic mode that’s not sustainable. I think setting 6 hours as a baseline and being able to tweak from there would be ideal, but setting an expectation of over 8 hours as a tradeoff for fewer days is harmful imo.
Nice try Zoom CEO
How does me thinking it’s more sustainable to work fewer hours per day instead of more make me out to be a greedy businessman? I didn’t even propose working more days, just fewer hours.
I used to work 3 12 hour days a week. It was infinitely better than a 5 day week. No burnout.
