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.
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
I was more going for a 15 hour work week…
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
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am i allowed to say what i feel about the businessmen who perked up at the ‘sacrifices’ section without getting a TOS violation
Probably not bc lemmy.world is probably the most censored instance at this point
If they’re willing to make sacrifices why not ~1-2 hours a week dedicated to unionizing their workplace
I don’t see why companies wouldn’t want people to work fewer days a week. Paying at least 20% less compared to a full week seems great for them, given they won’t get 20% less value. Since some days are already largely spent twiddling thumbs waiting for things to happen.
What you’re describing is “part time” and companies LOVE part timers. Lower pay, no benefits. What people actually want is full time, but full time means 4 day work weeks. Around Europe there have been tests where everyone maintains their salary but works 4 days instead of 5. The workers are better rested and more productive so even despite less time worked per week, the net work output does not decrease.
Why not have different options for full time? Or is that what is being advocated for? But my original question was why would companies be opposed to 4 day full time?
The perception of lost productivity, whether true or false, would be the opposition. I’m sure with a lot of specific jobs, productivity is highly maximized even at 40 hours. And in customer service positions, you might still need coverage 16 hours a day 7 days a week. So ultimately if your whole team of 12 works 8 fewer hours a week each, they’ll need to hire 3 more people to cover the lost time. If nobody’s weekly pay amount changed, now suddenly your labor costs have risen 25%.
I’d assume they’d pay less so the hourly rate would be the same. Maybe it’s the training and getting up to speed the has a longer payback time? Or just communicating between more people to do the same work is difficult?
The tests I’ve read about in recent times have not netted a loss in pay - simply a reduction in hours but an increase in productivity because workers are well rested and happier with their work life balance.
Again - what you’re describing already exists, it’s called a part time job. If it comes with a loss in pay, then how improved is your work life balance when you have to go get a second job to supplement your income as a result of transitioning to a 32 hour work week? And how much more productive are you going to be if it means you’re now working a 6 or 7 day work week?
I was thinking moreso in terms of higher paying jobs. Programmers often complain about how draining their jobs are, but it pays so well they stay with it. I think a lot of them would be happy for 20% less time for 20% less pay. I’m in engineering, and I would think hard about it as well. I could live off 20% less, and I would be happier with more free time.
Part time doesn’t have benefits does it? Or as many protections against getting fired? So I don’t think that’s exactly equivalent.
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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.
Inb4 “if you only want to work for 4 of 5 days then you must only want 80% pay and oh by the way we still expect you to come in all 5 days anyways because corporate culture or something.”
The workplace is a big family after all. You surely don’t want to only spend 3 days a week with your family do you??
It’s not mentioned much but there is a huge psychological boost to working 4 days a week
5 days a week feels like a week but 4 days only feels like half a week
They specifically don’t want a psychological boost. They want us beat down, exhausted and miserable so we can’t fight them.
I work in a role that’s 12h shift. With an average of 2.8 shifts a week when stat and holidays are accounted for.
I dread the day that I can’t do the nights anymore and have to move into a 4 or 5 day a week role. With the nights sometimes it doesn’t even feel like I lost the whole day on each end of a set.
My first sacrifice: the billionaire CEO
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.
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.Mmmmmh the sweet taste of polish on one’s tongue
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.
Working 4 days (30h) a week for years now. There is no way for me going back into a 5 day week. It means less wage but for me it’s worth it. I have more time for my personal interests and family. I know that this is not an option for everyone but I am always a bit surprised how few colleagues in comparable circumstances are choosing this option.
What field do you work in? What’s the best way to find a 4-day weekly job?
You can ask the company if you’d be allowed to work 4 days a week. Some will say yes if they have coverage. Some will say no. It depends on the company.
I really need to go look up these work studies on the 32 hour work week. I fully believe that a 32 hour work week in an office setting may boost productivity… But since I work in construction, a 32 hour work week doesn’t seem like it would speed anything up on my end. The work generally just takes time. I can only measure, cut, attach, and repeat at a certain speed, and no amount of rest is going to speed that up.
I worked in an excavating company for a bit. One old crochety guy worked 12 hours every day running an excavator. A younger guy who had stake in the company (also drove an excavator), who never worked more than 8 in a day, looked at him and said: “Why do you only get half as much done, but it takes you twice as long?”
The young guy wasn’t wrong. Being tired does slow you down. But yeah, a four day work week in construction, might slow the project down a bit. But they should just hire more people. And on top of that 6 hour days with additional staff would make the work go a lot faster.
This is why I’d like to read the actual studies. I can only speak on my own anecdotal evidence of 8 hours 5 days a week isn’t draining on me to an extent that I’d actually notice an increase in productivity if I were to only work 4.
That’s what I thought until I got a union job that did 4 10 hour shifts a week. The work days didn’t feel much longer, but that 3rd day off a week made it possible to plan short trips any weekend I wanted without needing to take time off work. It also did wonders for my mental health to have a day off every week where I wasn’t recovering from, or thinking about going back to work.
Working 4-10s is good stuff when the job allows. It also does increase productivity in many ways, mostly due to less overall time setting up. Definitely a win-win.
From the few studies I’ve seen headlines for, and a lot of the stuff over in work reform, the topic is usually about 32 hour work weeks.
Is there even enough of a supply of people to just add more people? I’m with you, I’m just skeptical about the logistics of how many people are available that have an interest and skills in (or desire to learn) those trades that aren’t already employed in them.
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Go for it.
We all do better when we ALL do better
81%? that’s like… 4 out of 5 right?
I see what you did there
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.
