Americans want a four day work week

Discussion in 'Business & Economics' started by wegs, Aug 9, 2019.

  1. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Last edited: Aug 9, 2019
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  3. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Of course it would.

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    So would paying everyone 20 percent more as would free lunches every day.

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    I agree a work/life balance is important.
     
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  5. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    My name is wegs, and I approve of this message.
     
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  7. sideshowbob Sorry, wrong number. Valued Senior Member

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    Where I used to work, several departments had "compressed work week" - i.e. every second Friday off. It was not considered "practical" for our department, so we couldn't do it but our manager could. The every second Fridays that she was gone were certainly good for our morale.
     
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  8. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    haha ^ whatever works, right?

    My last employer, before this firm, we could leave work at noon on Fridays, that was always great. There have been studies done showing that many employees would choose time over money, if given the option of employment ''benefits.'' Time is hard to put a price on, really.
     
  9. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    10 hour day
    4 days a week
    this is the way of the future
    4 days on 3 days off
    massive increase in productivity & jobs & leisure

    only among those not suffering financial hardship which always creates psychological damage on the children of the family and creates malnutrition and poor long term outcomes.
     
  10. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I disagree that 4 10's results in an increase in productivity. People aren't as productive toward the end of an 8 hour day. Nothing is going to happen those last two hours.

    Also, who would they we talking to/dealing with? Only other companies that work that schedule?

    We're not talking assembly line work are we? That would decline as well.

    Four 8 hour days might be more productive. What would probably be most productive is just to increase general conditions of the workplace environment.
     
  11. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Quite a few employers these days offer flex time schedules to salaried employees at the corporate levels, as long as their deadlines etc are met. At my firm, I opt to work from home twice per week. To me, the commute is all added in with my workday so it’s nice to avoid it if possible.

    A few of my friends do the four days per week schedule as long as they meet their deadlines and they’re salaried.

    It wouldn’t be productive/beneficial in all jobs, though.
     
  12. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    the corporate deadline is defined by a preemptive production point of an ideology/mission absolute

    all jobs are set to minimize cost as a primary feature of profitability

    you are telling me the answer to a question you have not asked and then asking me a question to a different answer that you have put on the shelf.

    what regulation standard of working conditions applys to all jobs as a primary feature of employment remuneration ?
     
  13. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    I think it honestly depends on the employer, and what employees would want most. If an employee is paid an hourly rate for example, then it might not behoove him/her to work a shorter workweek, as they will earn less. But, if one is salaried, it can be a nice benefit. It all depends on how employers view flex time, if it's even possible in their industry, and if employees would want that as an added benefit.
     
  14. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    But unlike those frills, it would boost productivity over current US standard working week hours.
     
  15. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I can't agree that it "would" but I agree that it "might" and might work for some but not all industries.
     
  16. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    employer asking their employee : "would you work harder and be more productive if i paid you more?"
    employee answer : "yes"

    CEO asking their executive : "would you work harder and be more productive if i paid you more?"
    executive answer : "i am already working my hardest for you and trying to juggle a work/life balance, what is it that you want me to do?"
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    There was a time, early and mid 1900s, when guys with stopwatches threw serious effort at that exact topic.

    What they found was that anything over eight hours a day and/or forty hours/five days a week was counter-productive (literally: lowered productivity). The nature of the job did not matter, as far as they could tell - although their productivity measures were less reliable for some jobs.

    That was all standard American executive information for a while - it was rejected by many corporations, mostly for reasons of mistaken intuition and the biases of personal experience
    (you can stand there and watch an employee produce for nine, ten hours, right in front of you; you can recall your own extra production on long days - it takes expertise and imagination and unusual powers of observation to factor in the effects of overwork)
    but not all and not the best; well run corporations at the time would even debit executives for mismanagement if their employees were working hours beyond those limits. But that lesson seems to have been lost to all in the current generation - another casualty of Reaganomics, apparently.

    The striking aspect of those old findings, for me, was the severity of the effect - apparently one can have employees work a fifty or sixty hour week in an emergency, and benefit that once, but to even restore the former productivity level in subsequent weeks requires serious time off the next week - more time off than the extra they worked. And anything routinely over a ten hour day measured as a complete loss; the productivity not only dropped as a rate, but the total production dropped - all the way back to eight hours. An employee working twelve hours a day five days a week was on average being paid twenty hours wages for nothing. That was startling.

    Since in practice the standard "fulltime" American work week is now over forty hours, and the standard fulltime day is now over eight hours (those are both often treated as minimums, rather than maximums, these days), I felt safe in asserting a productivity benefit from a four day week. No doubt somebody can throw up a four/ten schedule replacing a five/eight week, and my assertion would be false, but I think that's rare in the current job climate.
     
  18. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    Ah, Reagonomics, everything bad is due to Reagonomics. He served for 8 years, 30 some years ago, he's been dead for nearly that long but his influence is still greater than those guys with stopwatches.

    It's not that clear cut obviously. If you are in a business that supports other businesses and you have your employees working 4 days then you have to hire another set of workers to cover Friday.

    If you are in medicine, it's much more common to work longer hours and fewer days. If your business is traditional enough, it's probably not an option as well.

    The competitive environment is what tends to make these things not occur as often and they would otherwise. If you have your employees working 4 days and your competitors have their employees working 5 days, they might be the more convenient business for potential customers/clients to go to.

    There is also a push for competitive advantage and to get market rates of returns and if that's not happening, it's a tough sell to give employees more time off because they will be "fresher".

    If it was really that clear cut it would be happening more often. It might not start with Amazon or Microsoft but smaller more nimble companies would do it more often.

    So, it's not only not that clear cut but it's also just not at the top of most corporate agenda's. People tend to work long hours for a good paying "tech" company (for example) and then when they get older and really feel the need for a more leisurely pace, they leave and go to a smaller company in a less demanding area since they have already made a lot of their money in their younger years.
     
  19. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    factory line productivity probably ends around 5 hours
    but the added 3 hours per day allows more income to offset forcing the employee to produce un-economically for an extra 2 hours while allowing 1 hour of 0 productivety and then create an illusion of income security
    the job would then have employees forced out of the role in a regular basis by over working them or bullying them to leave every 2 years or soo
    many companys around 1 year.

    how many hours per week is the average American employee paid for ? 40 ?

    whos illusion is most important ?
    the 10,000 community where the company is built ?
    or the owners ?

    it is a complex mathematical ergonomic process.

    unfortunately what is happening globally is globalisation of wages.
    this means all wages are going down, while company profits are expected to go up.
    Current Globalisation of wages is the modern sub-prime mortgage failure
    watch apple share price fall
    no doubt close on its heals will be the tech stocks
    uber has already gone down and the hunt is on for the new black(hyper inflationary trend for investment banking).
    arctic oil drilling ?
    lol
     
  20. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    The mind numbing jobs that are being spoken about (assembly line jobs or Amazon warehouse jobs, for example) are problems but eventually the solution here will just be automation.

    No one needs to be turned into an animal, regardless of the pay. Tractors replaced people and animals pulling plows.

    I'm sure some argued about "But what about those people who only know how to pull a plow?".

    Someone has to oversee, program, repair factory automation equipment. That will pay more than assembly line work because it requires at least a little training. People will be happier in those jobs.

    That's the answer whether you like it or not. We're not going to go back in time. Globalization isn't going to go away either.
     
  21. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    like politics
    though many americans probably wish politics would just disappear
    imagine all the money they would save not having to pay for politics

    is that the conversation we are having ?
     
  22. Seattle Valued Senior Member

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    I'm never quite sure what conversation we are having.

    The sky isn't falling. We have a clown for a President. If you don't watch TV, he goes away so if you don't really rely on the government, you're good to go.
     
  23. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    like motor vehicles ... oil, plastic, pollution... etc...
    they are a compulsory part of the society

    it reminds me of the ideological imperative that some business people have where they believe society owes them something for providing a business to society.
    They feel society owes them more than profit(i think that's a good thing as it clearly shows that socialism as a base driver for humanity exists inside a model of capitalism & is not diminished as a human core attribute by capitalism inside the heart of capitalisms' most rewarded)

    humans are so weird
    let me count the ways...

    we cant stop globalism unless we undo the world
    so it is a question of how shall it be used and managed

    ... "regulation/laws"

    like paddaboy asking me to change (how i post)who i am to suit him in a subtle way of compliance to become more understood in how i post.
    i know he is just venting his ego(we all do in some ways & fashions) and it doesn't bother me, however i am using it to make a point about individuality and the drive to understand Vs the drive to never change ones ideas

    does the desire to re-make the world over ride the moral value of individualism ? (i do not expect you to attempt to answer that question, it is a rhetorical moot)

    the illusions that we choose to live by are not necessarily scientific facts of how things work.
    e.g
    wegs
    do you force an employee to produce work that they will thank you for after ?
    is it force when they are being paid at the same time ?
    "lounging-off" Vs work a-holicks ...
    whos judging who by what ?

    the grumpy executive who is always complaining Vs the worker who is always at work and never wants to go home...

    do we simply smash both of their realities and apply our own and force them to comply ?
    (i dont expect you to answer that question it is more of a thinking point)
     
    Last edited: Aug 10, 2019

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