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My company typically gives everyone half days on Fridays from Memorial Day to Labor Day (and most people only put in a token amount of work - if that - on those Fridays - no meetings are allowed to be scheduled on any Friday of the year). This year, in addition to that, they gave everyone every Friday off for the month of July. And... the company still functioned just fine. We run on sprints and we finished just as many story points during those sprints as during sprints when we work full Fridays. I'm pretty sure we could all stop working every Friday and things would go perfectly well.
Also, we aren't allowed to make any code changes from Thanksgiving to New Years. So nothing really happens from Thanksgiving to mid-December and then the entire company stops working the last two weeks of December - we don't even submit time off for it, you just don't show up. That is essentially 10-20 business days where no real work happens. That is almost the equivalent of a year's worth of Fridays.
Similar thing - half of the year now with no meeting Fridays & 4hrs Fridays.
This gets extended month to month based on performance, so it could stop, but if they stop it I will really try to find a job where they do a similar thing.
No meetings on Friday means that in four hours you can do as much as with normal Friday but with meetings (given the meetings produce 0 value, which is not the case of course, but also sometimes the meetings could have been an email, a tweet, or a joke).
No code changes from Nov to Jan seems _crazy_ to me. But if it works good for you guys.
This is pretty standard for organizations that see a large portion of their revenue during those months. This is especially important for ecommerce-like shopping around the US holidays, for instance. Black Friday, Cyber Monday and every intervening day between Thanksgiving and Christmas and the New Year's holidays.
No daily/sprint code changes, release management, emergency approvals and the like. It works pretty well, no major outages and the site kept taking orders.
Source: worked on high-traffic e-commerce infrastructure around US Black Fridays/Cyber Monday shopping days.
That is the time of year when the vast majority of our business occurs. The systems must be as bug free as possible, so no changes are allowed unless a bug pops up that is mission critical. If that were to happen it would involve huge meetings with tons of conversations and dozens of eyes looking at it, even if it is a simple change on one line of code.
No code changes _pushed to production_ is what I've experienced in such places as a risk mitigation strategy, not that everyone is sitting around twiddling thumbs. Every hour of downtime between Black Friday and Christmas will cost a _lot_ of revenue, and sometimes the company will be working with a skeleton crew for a huge chunk of that time,which makes fixes take longer as a bonus. So why risk it?
This was standard protocol in my org at Microsoft as well. The time was suppose to be spend reviewing tech debt/the years oncall issues and come up with plans for them.
No code change at all or nothing pushed to production environment ?
Nothing pushed to prod, but for all practical purposes all code changes stop. We use the holiday season to learn stuff, write documentation, brainstorm, clean stuff up, etc.
Any chance you’re hiring?
My department is not.
That just sounds like your company has too many employees. But also if they haven't discovered this themselves, good on them for paying for extra, unneeded jobs.
Well, the company does have tens of thousands of employees. I'm not sure how anyone would determine if there are too many. Of course some of the salaried employees are the lifeguards at the pool, the rock climbing wall people, etc. You would probably consider those to be extra, unneeded jobs.
More employees is irrelevant. I determined you have too many simply based on the information you gave.
That's not a bad thing, it's probably a good thing. But they're definitely unneeded.
>Of course some of the salaried employees are the lifeguards at the pool, the rock climbing wall people, etc.
???
FWH has exposed how many white-collar jobs were only full-time in the ass-in-seat sense and how many employees should have _Professional Meeting Attender_ as their job title.
I used to be the guy who would champion efficient meeting practices. Now it's the last thing I want given that I can now work-out, make breakfast, do manual labor, etc., while listening to meeting.
4 day work week in grasp you ask ? For many I'd be surprised if they actually did 15hrs of work a week. I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.
> I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.
That's a knee-jerk reaction that you probably already know has some serious problems ;)
People who are _working_ 40 hours a week have no capacity to take on some important task with no notice unless they go past 40 hours a week. Which generally doesn't cost any extra money.
Hiring a contractor to _work_ 40 hours per week is going to get really expensive really fast when you need them to suddenly ramp up beyond 40 hours on no notice. If you can even get them to do it!
If you're any kind of normal modern business, this is going to eat all your cost savings and probably even cause you to unnecessarily miss a lot of deadlines.
_People who are working 40 hours a week have no capacity to take on some important task with no notice unless they go past 40 hours a week. Which generally doesn't cost any extra money._
Which is the problem. What we need is overtime for all. Time and a half after 8 hours in a day. Time and a half after 40 hours in a week. Time and a half after 5 days in a week. Double time on Sunday. Minimum of 4 hours of pay per workday or if called in. Those factors multiply. That's not at all unusual in union shops.
I don't disagree with you at all. If you regularly exceed 40 hours with exempt employees (especially developers) the compensation structure will have to reflect that or you will have retention problems.
That cost is far more transparent when dealing with hourly contractors, and maybe the employer prefers this! But, you know, _theory of the firm_ etc tells us that in the long run you are usually better off with exempt employees even if they are frequently working less than the 40 hours you expect from them.
>I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.
That's not going to save you any money though.
A FT developer who makes $75 an hour only accepts that pay because it's closer to $300/hr in practice (if you only count the hours they are actually productive, which maxes out at 2-3 per day for knowledge work).
A freelance developer of similar skill, who accurately bills per hour worked, will simply charge $300 per hour.
Yeah I don't understand this mentality. You're paying for finished work not hours. People cannot seem to separate themselves from the hourly concept. If you want finished work faster then who cares about the hours?
All you're doing by requiring a certain amount of hours is ensuring the employee stretches out the time it takes to get things done.
> (if you only count the hours they are actually productive, which maxes out at 2-3 per day for knowledge work).
What's "productive", though? Typing at a keyboard? For creative knowledge work (like designing stuff, not answering technical email queries) sometimes the back of your mind just needs time to chew on something.
Time spent tethered to the computer or in the office looking busy isn't as valuable as real free time though, assuming this fully efficient job market a given dev might take $300 for real work + busywork or $250 for just the actual work
I'm not surprised you made a throwaway to hide behind, because not only are you a coward, but this is the worst take I've ever seen on a website full of terrible takes. I can't imagine working for someone with this point of view, and I'll happily say that, on the record, without a throwaway account.
As an engineering manager- an actual one- I'm not paying for hours, I'm paying for output. I couldn't care less if my employee was working 15 hours or 40, as long as they got an appropriate amount of work done for my investment in them.
Are we praising someone for demanding itemized timesheets? How absolutely toxic.
This is why I choose to be a contractor and an engineer. If I work, I bill. I never understood how anyone in good conscience can work 15hrs while the others at the company work 40hrs and still collect full-time benefits. As an engineer I have never had that luxury though, somehow we are always busy and I have to make an effort to reduce my billable hours without needing to pad them. I am probably also culturally biased from working class roots that overpraises hours worked and that mindset is admittedly self-defeating.
Preparing/eating a meal during a meeting is admittedly perk but it doesn't affect my focus or participation.
> This is why I choose to be a contractor and an engineer. If I work, I bill. I never understood how anyone in good conscience can work 15hrs while the others at the company work 40hrs and still collect full-time benefits.
If they are working 15h/week and delivering what is expected from them, who are you to guilt those into working the schedule you judge as "right"? My employer pays me to deliver them value, if I deliver the expected value for my salary in 10h instead of 40h am I in the wrong? Should I be forcing myself to work harder just because? Nah.
> I am probably also culturally biased from working class roots that overpraises hours worked and that mindset is admittedly self-defeating.
Yes, you are. I came from the same roots, had the same twisted view about "hard work" and judging others when I worked my ass off and saw some other people relaxing. After 17 years of career, this is all bullshit. I'm being paid for my expertise and my results, if my employer is happy with my results why the fuck should I bust my ass longer than needed? I have a life outside of work that I care much more about.
I do have a work ethic, I do my work with a lot of care, craft and thought, I deliver value and improve products and processes. I don't fucking care if I do that in 10 or 40 hours a week, it's a motivation for me to allow my laziness to be a driver for being more and more efficient and effective, so I can work less hours while delivering more value, being paid more per hour in the process.
> Preparing/eating a meal during a meeting is admittedly perk but it doesn't affect my focus or participation.
It's also a perk to have enough time (1h-1h30m) in the middle of the day to go enjoy your meal fully, to prepare it with care, without multitasking in some bullshit meeting just because you feel you need to be hyper-efficient.
The best perk I have of being a software engineer is that, comparatively to many other fields, our careers allow us to take back a lot of control of our own schedule and time.
If you feel guilty, give some of your pay to your coworkers or charity, not your capitalist overlord.
> I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.
As a contractor, I would just charge you for the time it takes to itemize an invoice while I do it sitting on a call for another job I’m also billing for. And I would be _very_ thorough with my itemization so you know exactly what you’re getting…
The non-itemized invoice is free. We can argue over contract terms if you want to or come to an arrangement if you don’t feel you got your money’s worth, but if I disagree the result is going to be completion of the terms of the contract and we go our separate ways. I’m not hurting for work, I can fire an obnoxious customer if it buys me QoL.
The pandemic tipped the balance of power from the money men to the workers. We’re going to watch this dynamic play out in ways large and small, but the net is that employees have a lot more power to set the terms of engagement than employers do right now.
Here's what my invoice looks like for today
0.5hr chats, code reviews, time-audit
1.25hr Bug#12345
...
So I have captured the ~15 minutes I spent itemizing/cleaning up my invoice for the past day or two in a "time-audit"/misc line item.
"very thorough with my itemization" implying you'll just over bill your customer because they have the nerve to have you professionally account for your time ?
"tipped the balance of power from the money men to the workers"
Right so if they weren't operating with integrity that doesn't mean the worker shouldn't either. Tit-fot-tat might be an optimal game theory but better to optimize for a clear conscience.
Note, I realize I am being unfair to your comment. When my customer first asked me to itemize my invoice it was an annoyance, but now I am efficient at it and see it as win-win. I just keep adding to it in real time as I work through out the day and then do a periodic clean up and aggregation.
I think the GP just hasn't discovered the magic of the "minimum billable increment" yet. Lawyers love this trick! Customer wants you to itemize the bill? No problem - it comes with a 15 minute minimum billable increment. The more demanding/PITA the client is, the longer the minimum.
Send me a text a minute after I've finished working for the day to check on the status and it takes me a minute to read and reply? No problem, I just billed the client for 15 minutes. Takes them 15 minutes to come up with and send a response that I need to respond to ASAP? Another 15 minutes billed. Want me to spend 3 minutes at the end of the day itemizing the bill? Perfect, that's another 15 minutes billed!
The more granular the itemizing, the more opportunity to shove the minimum billable increment in their face. Called me for a two minute chat while I'm in the zone on their project? Gotta itemize it! 15 minutes billed and I restart the work (out of the zone) at the top of the next interval.
I'm a regular employee but at a professional services org - you basically described how I generate my timesheets.
The main difference is that at the end of the day I try to just stop when I have "enough" hours, since I don't get paid for overtime like I would as a contractor.
To the original topic: roughly 40% of my week is wasted on pointless meetings or inter-meeting dead time. The other time is roughly equally split between useful meetings, actual work, and admin or training tasks.
The issue with the pointless meetings is that they are generally a series, where one 10-minute slot out of every four one-hour meetings is genuinely useful - but you don't know in advance when that slot will occur. The other kind of pointless meetings generally involve customers who are unprepared.
> Called me for a two minute chat while I'm in the zone on their project? Gotta itemize it! 15 minutes billed and I restart the work (out of the zone) at the top of the next interval.
That's double billing and afaik illegal, you can not (and rightly so) bill your customer twice for the same time.
A minimum billable increment is not double billing when properly outlined in a contract. If one item is an hour and two minutes and is interrupted by a three minute item, the bill comes out to 65 minutes of work and 25 minutes of contractually obligated rounding. Anything that had to be item had to be rounded up to the minimum and that's the price the client had to pay for itemization. I wasn't going to play guessing games about which calls counted as an item and which ones didn't.
There’s a lot of grey area and nobody can prove it either way. If you maintain good relationships with your clients and keep them happy, they don’t ask questions.
Consulting is a relationship business. You’ll make way more money focusing on the people rather than the work. You can cover up sloppy execution with a good relationship, but stellar execution won’t save a project where you fuck up the client relationship.
I’m very fair with how I bill my clients, and I do bill distinct tasks on separate timers. This means I’ll sometimes have a dangling 5min to be attached later to a 15min increment when I resume it. But yes, if my task is interrupted for another billable thing, that is a new clock that’s started, because it’s another task that’s tracked separately.
Okay, so then just take a 13 minute break after the call and then start working again
I started a management consulting job during pandemic, and quickly realized that this Big 4 firm did nothing but meetings. I had my assistant color code any non client meeting with more than 10 people.
Very quickly I got 15-20 hours a week back.
(And my hourly billing rate was in the 4 figures.)
> I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.
I'm just curious as I've been the employer and the contractor in this scenario - do you think the output between a FTE and a contractor would be different? Do you think it would be different financially?
In my experience, developers tend to behave like a gas that expands to fill their container - people tend to work up to their compensation (whether it's hourly contracting or some form of salary + comp), and no more.
> I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.
I don't understand this. Doesn't your full time employee itemise their time? Don't you do timesheets or something? Does the full time employee not have deliverables that you track with deadlines that they need to meet?
"Hours of work" is a terrible measure of productivity. I'll take an employee who gets the job done in four hours, goes to walk the dogs, and then spends the afternoon coming up with neat improvements, over a "hardworking" employee who spends 15 hours trying to get the job done.
an excellent point. speaking from a more blue-collar perspective, i would argue most "real" (non meeting attender) jobs have been 3-4 day for a long time now thanks to automation and a perverse incentive to avoid paying benefits.
bartenders, repair staff, custodial, fast food and construction have never offered a solid 40 hour week. many of these roles are highly automated and simply do not need a full 40 woman or man hours of work anymore. farming has been this way for a very long time and as such, most farmers wives would take jobs as lunchroom staff for the local elementary school to provide health insurance for the family that a farming job simply couldnt.
what i wonder now is that if this affects 'white' collar workers, will the rules change? will nail-swatters in the construction yard see benefits and retirement? or will an elaborate machination take place to ensure only the cloistered ass-in-seat see affordable flu shots and checkups.
You should include your location, I assume you are talking about the USA because this isn't reality in the countries I've lived in my life.
benefit-less jobs are up to 29hr/week, not 15.
and it's not because of automation. Fast food restaurant isn't run by one person with downtime.
I went from a corporate job to bill-by-the-hour consulting.
The volume of work I have to get done in 40 hours has roughly multiplied by ten since I now have to justify every hour spent.
It’s pretty easy to ten times almost-nothing though!
While meetings can be a waste, it's a misunderstanding of communications to suggest they are 'entirely a waste'.
One level above manager (basically Director and above), it's practically all you do, i.e. 80% meetings and emails because that's the mechanics of the job.
Imagine a fisherman fishing at the dock: he is paying attention to signals, and then being super active for short moments, that's the nature of fishing. Managing is a lot of fodder communicating and hyper action / participation in some instances.
Imagine how much time you have to spend interviewing, listening to multiple vendors, talking to the legal department about the 'why you can't use some SaaS and how to get around it', the commercial guys trying to get under budget, your IP lawyers worried about the wording of the license, the DevOps team who are totally understaffed to release your product, the HR team pressuring you to hire 'the other person' in order to meet some strategic staffing targets, or their launch of the new HR portal which is a mess, prepping your slides for the conf. talk next month and the marketing team wants you to tweak your language, the Research Agency completely missed their objectives and you have to get them to re-do part of the research and you're not going to pay them extra, and you have to get your managers to focus on that. It's a lot of meetings.
FYI it's perfectly reasonable to listen to meetings while doing labour if the situation allows for it!
The true killer feature for the remote tech stack would be to attend more than one meeting concurrently.
Tried that with Teams just the other day, sadly no go.
Once when I was triple booked I logged into three Teams meetings simultaneously (laptop, iPad, iPhone) and turned up the volume to create a cacophony of chaos in my home office while I laughed maniacally to myself. Then I took a picture of the setup with my second iPad for my pandemic scrapbook.
I could only listen to two simultaneously… so I would modulate the volume.
My ADHD was screaming reading this but my everything else was clapping and wishing you posted a video link.
Am I misunderstanding something here? This just seems like a bad suggestion from the get go. I have a hard enough time paying attention to a single meeting sometimes and forgetting some of the information. If there were two going simultaneously, I feel that my absorption of the relevant info would be close to 0.
Lol, look at this guy, paying attention to meetings!
Me, I'd be tempted to hook the microphone to the speakers and create a "crossover" meeting and seeing how long it took till someone noticed.
> I feel that my absorption of the relevant info would be close to 0.
That's the point lol
You can do this on zoom although
I always found this quote from The Wealth of Nations to be quite insightful and was one of those surprising moments reading the actual text:
"It will be found, I believe, in every sort of trade, that the man who works so moderately, as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work."
I think that is just saying to work smarter, not harder. I don't think it's saying put in fewer hours. The "as to be able to work constantly" seems to be vital here.
I provided the quote which I thought most concisely communicated his thesis in this passage. The immediately proceeding lines I believe clarify it:
"Great labour, either of mind or body, continued for several days together is, in most men, naturally followed by a great desire of relaxation, which, if not restrained by force, or by some strong necessity, is almost irresistible. It is the call of nature, which requires to be relieved by some indulgence, sometimes of ease only, but sometimes too of dissipation and diversion. If it is not complied with, the consequences are often dangerous and sometimes fatal, and such as almost always, sooner or later, bring on the peculiar infirmity of the trade. If masters would always listen to the dictates of reason and humanity, they have frequently occasion rather to moderate, than to animate the application of many of their workmen."
This is all from Chapter VIII: Of The Wages Of Labour.
I don't think so; it says "moderately". As in, this is a marathon, not a sprint. If you run too fast, you won't get to the end of the race.
I started working a 4 day work week a few years ago and would not go back. The benefits to the employee are obvious, but consider those for the company: it gets a motivated, energised employee, and if like me they're a parent or for some other reason the employee has appointments (school, Dr etc), the employee often schedules them during the day off (or moves the day off to accomodate them), meaning the employee isn't taking any time off (usually, paid!) for them - I suspect I've had a lot less PTO than fulltime colleagues.
Are you on a 32 hour or 40 hour week? I would not go back either but 10 hour days are exhausting. I go work out and eat when I get off work and then I pretty much have to go to bed.
9 to 5.45 or thereabouts. Leaves plenty of family / hobby time _if_ you're working from home. Commute takes away from that.
And less sick days probably.
I've been working 4 days a week, 32 hours, for 4 years and I will never go back. It has made me hesitant to look for other work, I'm not sure if get the same deal, but so far I'm happy where I am.
As others have said the ratios are awesome. I have 15 days off every 20 days instead of 8. For a 20% pay cut, while getting full benefits.
For my geographical area, I get paid what feels like a very good salary (enough that I no longer have to worry about money at all). If my company said “hey, we’ll pay you half as much and you only have to work 20 hours a week” I’d take it in a heartbeat, even though I’d have to start being more careful with money. Sadly, I don’t see that offer ever coming, even though I could totally do my job in half as much time with some creative meeting deletion.
I think a lot are in the same boat.
Is Job-Sharing a potential solution?
Same for me and agree with it being awesome. I think you might've meant, 12 days off per 28? Over 4 weeks, you get 2 weekend days and an extra weekday so 4 * 3 = 12 ?
> I have 15 days off every 20 days instead of 8
Wait, what? How does working one day less a week get you to 15 days off?
The ratio is a little unusual but the math is right, the divisor is per days worked.
15 days off / 20 days worked (5 weeks of 4 day workweeks)
8 days off / 20 days worked (4 weeks of 5 day workweeks)
Another way of saying it would be: in a 4 day work week you have 4/3 (1.33) ratio of work days to days off whereas in a traditional workweek is 5/2 (2.5). So although it is just one day it dramatically shifts the balance between work and time off.
Oh, I see! I thought they were saying they had 15 days off in a 20 day period, not in a period when they worked 20 days
I have both worked 32 hours per week over 5 work days, as well as 28 hours over 4 work days. While they both have their merits, I found working 4 days better for my work life balance. I typically work on creative projects on Fridays or run errands. This frees up my weekend and I feel very rested returning to work on Monday --even during stressful times. Strangely, working on a different cycle than most of my co-workers has also increased my focus quite a bit.
disclaimer: I haven't read the linked article, apologies if the comment is slightly off-topic.
I think most people here likely don't have a NYTimes subscription so it is likely most are just discussing the headline as well.
I haven't taken a position which required more than 32 hours a week since 2016. The trick is that I've gotten everything through word-of-mouth networking where my reputation made bargaining down the hours feasible.
Our biggest hiring institutions (e.g. LinkedIn) for the most part don't provide a way to specify that you are only willing to consider "full-time but not 40+ hours". So I indicate "part-time only", but I still tend to get recruiters who ignore that and ping me for 40+ hour jobs.
The four-day workweek will be within our grasp when we can actually specify it in a job search.
I'd like to point out a less popular point that the FDWW does not lie only with employers improving but also is the decision of individuals. I remember reading somewhere about a survey where they asked people what they would do if they had 1 extra day every week (so, 8 days). The response on average was "that would be great because I could get so much more done". Now the "so much done" may not be for primary employer, but the point is that people say they would spend more time with friends and family, if they had more time, but when offered, we don't take the opportunity.
My point is, even if we did reduce our primary employment to 4 days, there are still a lot of people who will simply take this as an opportunity to work an additional part time job or side hustle. Then the bar for standard of living rises with them and we're back to where we started. Until we actually value rest, relationships etc, the maximal output mindset will endure.
I doubt that the majority of people who would take on a second job or "side hustle" would be so affluent because of it that they would raise the standard of living. Given all the people I know who have worked second jobs, the "choice" to do so has come from them needing more money to make ends meet or to provide for their families, all while dreaming of being able to spend some time with the families they are providing for, as opposed to being in traffic driving from one job to another or in another meeting where they are expected to talk once for 5 minutes.
The people in the world working 2 jobs don't tend to be affluent because of it. There are exceptions among the 3-letter elites, such as Jack Dorsey and his multiple CEO-ships, but those people /already/ represent a standard of living that is all but unachievable for the rest of us.
If you got no raise this year, working roughly two and a half hours less per week would bring your compensation back in line with inflation. If firms can't stomach wage increases this may be a valid alternative.
Shrinkflation comes to the workweek.
This is the secret reason some Oklahoma public schools switched to a 4-day week a few years back: as a retention bonus for underpaid teachers.
The whole idea that our lives should be divided into seven days chunks always seemed strange to me. If I'm "in a flow", 5 days is too little for me – I almost force myself to switch to "weekend mode". And two days of weekend is too short – I can't travel to anywhere, I can't switch so something else that requires another "flow". Basically, 5-2 cycle gives you sense of having some personal time without giving you any personal time.
Probably 10-4 or 10-5 would be more healthy and liberating in some sense.
10 continuous days of work would be horrible for me, as a programmer, and would probably jeopardize the health and even lives of many blue collar workers. While I think flexible schedules are a good thing, the default for most people is already too many working days in a row.
Fair, but I think the idea that everyone has to have the same schedule regardless of field of work (or even within the same field) isn't necessarily the best idea.
4 day work weeks as a concept real clicked for me when put into ratios. It's a 50% increase in personal time and only a 20% reduction in work hours.
I switched to a 4-day work week several years ago (maybe 7 or 8, forget), taking. 20% pay cut. Ot really does _feel_ like such a better work-life balance - as you say, it's a much bigger increase in personal time than it is a decrease in working hours.
And I am just as productive as when I worked 5 days a week!
I did the exact same thing. It was amazing and well worth the 4/5ths pay. My mental health was improved and the only thing that made me eventually leave was that i was offered 3x the pay to work at a FAANG.
Startups trying to compete for talent should probably take note of the fact that it took 3x more pay for them to poach staff, not 20% more. I'm not saying you'll get away with paying 3x less but you also won't have to worry about losing staff if you're in the ballpark since the 4 day work week is that valuable to anyone lucky enough to have experienced it.
where can one find such 4-day work week jobs? Jobs listed on most portals are either full-time or part-time (contract basis)
A lot of smaller companies are open to it once you've worked there and proven yourself.
My current and prior jobs have people in 3-4 day a week roles. But the people in those roles are senior contributors whose value to the company is as much knowledge as it is contributions.
I would argue that while this is true, equally sometimes at interview you can be in a good negotiating position too, that's when they've decide they want you. Sometimes being wiling to work for a little bit under what they'd have been willing to pay, sweetens the deal. I mean, don't ask for 4 day week AND top dollar salary at the same time.. unless you're a proven superstar. ;)
It was a startup and they were flexible when i asked to work for 4/5ths pay for 4/5ths workload.
It should probably be a norm but right now it's ad-hoc for companies to support it in order to retain staff.
I started with a regular 5-day week, but here in the UK (and I think the rest of Europe), companies have to give proper consideration to requests for flexible working. So all I did was ask HR, and they said it was fine.
This is better than the math looks, as the 20% you lose is taxed at your highest marginal rates. Your take home difference is probably closer to 12% which is much more palatable.
> And I am just as productive as when I worked 5 days a week!
For 20% less compensation! I'd rather do the 4-10s for full pay, without the pressure to get 40 hours of work done in 32 hours.
For me at least, it doesn't feel like pressure to get more done in less time - it's more like I'm a bit more focussed (e.g. less time on HN!), don't over-think things as much, and am more adamant about not attending meetings I don't need to be in.
One of my most enjoyable stretches at work was when we were allowed to start a project several months ahead of schedule, but only allowed 40hrs/wk until the normally scheduled starting time. My team voted to do 4/10s for the duration, and I argued it through management. We were working out of town so its not as if the longer days cost us time at home or with family, and it allowed for so much more time at home on the longer weekend. It was wonderful.
I recently did a contract where I negotiated a 4 day week. Hard to measure, but my hunch is I still produced about the same level of output. But I was happier, and I also think I was able to make better decisions with the added brain rest.
and less than 20% in net income lost (due to income taxes usually being progressive).
On the other hand, if large parts of your income are tied in near-fixed expenses (e.g. mortgage), then 20% more net income can mean doubling your discretionary spending, and 20% decrease - almost eliminating it.
..and even less if you consider the value of benefits, like health insurance in the US
Why should there be any loss in income?
If you negotiate with management to go from 40 hrs a week to 32 hrs a week, there is usually an expectation you will take a 20% paycut. Parent was saying that since income taxes are tiered, you will likely take a < 20% take-home paycut.
How does that work?
If you sleep 8 hours a day and work for 8 hours Mon-Fri, that's:
- work: 40hrs
- personal: 72hrs
- sleep: 56hrs
Switching to a four day work week would thus result in a 20% reduction in work hours but only a 10% increase in personal time.
I'm going to assume you weren't including non-work hours if they were on "work days", but that seems silly if you have a 9-5 job.
I don't know about everyone else, but my evenings are far from entirely "personal time." Chores take up most of my evenings, so really I get maybe 1-2hr of personal time on work nights. People with kids who do sports probably get next to zero personal time, beyond maybe vegging out on YT/FB for an hour before bed.
Weekends are the only days where I generally "plan" to do things, and even then, Sundays are half reserved for chores like mowing/shopping. Having an additional weekend day that I can plan for hobbies would be amazing. For me, it's honestly akin to doubling my free time.
I think you might be surprised to see how all that "extra" personal time can get absorbed by chores as well, ala Parkinson's law[1]. Chores _are_ personal time unfortunately.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
And a 20% reduction in commute time.
Don't you have personal time on weekdays outside of work hours?
My company switched to 4-day workweeks at the beginning of 2021[0]. I can't imagine we'll ever go back. I guess it's one of the advantages of running a bootstrapped company with no VCs breathing down your neck...
[0]
https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/how-we-switched-to-4-day-we...
This is awesome, congrats on making the leap! I'll be adding any of your jobs to
:)
thank you! checked out your site, but it says software jobs? and we hire primarily for content-related tasks (medical writing, video production etc)
Ah damn, ye it's mostly software jobs atm - but I've got plans to extend this. Will get in touch when this goes live :)
Shoutout to philmcp who was able to quit his job recently to work on
full time!
For being so progressive, I'm surprised that not a single listing I clicked had salary ranges.
It's just not worth the effort of even considering these companies without salary ranges. 4-day work weeks mean nothing if it means getting paid <80% market rate.
Why not? I gladly took a pay cut to be able to work 4 days a week.
Easy: Because I don't want a pay cut.
I'd do four 10-hour days. if that's what it takes.
But it's not worth the effort and time to research dozens of companies if they're all going to tell me that I'd need to take a significant pay cut. And if a listing on that site doesn't have the salary range, that's what I'm going to assume is going to happen.
Thanks for the shoutout Koch! Appreciated :)
I took a new position in March this year and only accepted it after they agreed to 4 day workweek. I took 20% pay cut. One of the best decisions I made in my life. I wish all people who can, to do this. There's nothing you'll miss on Friday or any other weekday and so much to gain.
Most of my colleagues, and myself, could easily take a 20% without a noticeable impact to quality of life. That's also a problem, if we where allowed to make that trade, I believe that most would.
If, as others have seen, productivity goes up, then it might not matter. It's a risky bet for companies with highly paid staff.
I mean most other tech people I know just take a de facto half day on Friday or "Worked" from home that day.
Which is part of the reason why you can work 32 hours a week and look no less productive. ;)
I did a few interviews this year. I specially asked for a 4 day work week. Almost every single recruiter seemed baffled by the idea. One said they offered it but I have to be available on my off day for “important” (they couldn’t give me a definition) meetings, which defeats the purpose.
I'm currently working for a company that forces office staff to work a half day on christmas eve with the additional stipulation, of course, that you must burn a full day of vacation to skip it. This despite the fact that no one in the company can ever remember a customer calling on christmas eve.
So I'm very skeptical that this trend will grow. It took the IWW to get us the concepts of The Weekend and Sick Days, and I expect it will take nothing less extreme to claw back any more of our time from the corporate slave-driving overlords. Absent a few easily-dismissed outliers, of course.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the company I work for shuts our offices down from the 24th to the 2nd. Engineers submit availability for on-call schedules, and get a gift card for each on-call day they're responsible for. I feel very spoiled, but I think this is generally a trend amongst west-coast tech companies?
I've had a similar experience at previous places, and it seemed like the rationale for the holiday shutdown was "we don't want to risk any downtime while lots of engineers are out and potentially unreachable if something breaks". All that is to say, if it's within your power to leave, the grass is potentially much greener elsewhere.
As long as "elsewhere" is SV or some other big city, that grass will never be green enough for me.
> corporate slave-driving overlords
> big city, that grass will never be green enough for me
Take your pick, I guess. I like cities, and I certainly don't want to feel like I'm a slave.
SV is a big suburbs, not a city. SF (and Oakland) are medium sized cities.
San Jose is over a million people. That counts as "big" in the US, I think? 10th most populous.
The "suburbs" between SJ-SF-Oakland range from very dense urban areas, to very sparse (and expensive) bedroom communities, to uninhabited (protected land) areas.
I think it's fair to loosely characterize SV as a big city, from almost all US perspectives.
My employer does this, and is the only one in town who does. It isn't deducted from our 4 week of vacation either. Its the only reason I stick around despite subpar pay.
It turns out the HR books are right and pay isn't the primary consideration after a certain point. The problem is that most HR people take that and say, "We're already soooo generous, we already offer unlimited vacation (lol), so we don't have to pay people too!"
> we already offer unlimited vacation (lol),
I offered unlimited vacation in every business I started or ran since 1989.
But the abusive bullshit many companies have pulled while claiming “unlimited vacation” has justifiably made people cynical. This stated policy has become a warning sign instead of a benefit.
So in my new company we have a written policy four weeks but there is no way to track it (where the law permits this). _sigh_
I have worked 3 places with unlimited vacation, and there was zero pressure to not take vacation.
One company specifically said they we needed to get our asses out of the office because they saw people not taking at least 3 weeks a year.
That’s how it’s supposed to be.
Once you have a full time employee who is "the HR person" who has a department to run, and has OKRs, unless there is absolutely stellar company culture pushing for the contrary, that's it, that's the end, all your good benefits are going to get micromanaged away.
> On the opposite end of the spectrum
I'm so stockholm-syndromed into typical corporate apathy, I'd probably feel so weirded out if I found out myself in such an environment I wouldn't be able to handle it like somebody who spent 50 years in prison is unable to cope with the reality of life on the outside.
It isn't uncommon in industrial situations to shut the plant down for two weeks or so around Christmas/New Years.
Since A: The staff want it off and B: It gives a good window to do heavy maintaince and such
Who does that maintenance?
Hopefully split off among staff so nobody works more than 1 or 2 days during those 2 weeks off, plus they get a bonus.
This is probably a silly question, but she not just give the cash value of a gift card instead of a gift card itself? I've heard from people who work in HR that gift cards given to employees are still taxable as income for the value as if it were cash, but maybe that's changed or just a conservative interpretation of IRS guidelines.
The real rationale is to remove a metric shitton of accrued PTO from their books if paying out PTO on employee departure is something the company does.
In my experience xmas to NY holiday shutdowns are more likely to _not_ come out of individual PTO, but I'm sure this varies.
We do something like this now, and the rationale is that it's a positive experience for the staff, gives everyone a bit of a break, and you only "lose" days that nobody was very focused in anyway.
My office shutdown this year is three full weeks, from the 20th to the 7th. Nobody is burning PTO.
How does shutting down the office remove PTO obligations?
I worked at a company where we had 10 days of vacation + the office shut down for the last week of the year. Nobody had to use vacation time during that 1-week shutdown. If anything, it increased PTO accrued obligations because nobody had to use their PTO for time off during that week.
It varies by company. Accrued PTO is carried on the balance sheet as a liability, since it's owned to employees and would generally have to be paid out in cash if the employee is terminated. Reducing that liability makes several financial metrics look better. Some companies shut down for a week and require employees to use up their accrued PTO (or take unpaid leave). Other companies give it "free" essentially as company holidays. There's no right or wrong here, it's just one of many factors you have to consider when deciding where to work.
Worked at a company that would do that (using PTO or unpaid) with a couple months notice.. really messes with any vacation plans you might have made before you've been there long enough to accrue significant PTO!
Our office shutdown doesn't use PTO, either.
My friends in agency life used to have their office shutdown from the time of the holiday party, until the new year. Which was about 2 to 2.5 weeks.
Where I work everyone gets Dec 24 - Jan 2nd off, "for free." You can also take PTO along with it if you want a longer break.
Hmm... in a few companies I've worked holiday shutdown was not coming out of PTO budget.
I personally believe that the government should focus on a shorter workweek rather than minimum wage increases in the near term.
If we shorten the nominal workweek to 36 hours before overtime is required (and encourage this to be in the form of 4x9 or 9/2 * 8):
* Supply of labor will fall, increasing equilibrium pay for everyone
* Everyone's quality of life goes up
* Traffic and environmental impacts from commuting should improve (a little).
* It's a better hedge against automation and outsourcing than artificially increasing the minimum price of labor.
You need both: A minimum wage ensures a wage of enough income someone can pay for basic needs (housing, food, health, etc) and ratcheting down the work week distributes productivity gains of capital to workers in aggregate. The former is, arguably, more tenable politically at the moment ("Fight for $15" and so on), the latter likely in the future as the electorate (and the beliefs around work and its contribution to someone's identity) evolves. Increasing the minimum wage would also lift ~20 million people out of poverty (at the cost of about 1.4 million jobs) per the US CBO [1] [2] [3].
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
[2]
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-02/56975-Minimum-Wage....
[3]
https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965483266/-15-minimum-wage-wo...
> A minimum wage ensures a wage of enough income someone can pay for basic needs (housing, food, health, etc)
This isn't really a criticism of your comment, but I've always felt that this is a convenient supporting argument that obscures so much nuance that it is actually harmful to the broader goal of more fair wages. There are three huge assumptions that a statement like "an hourly wage should be enough income for basic needs" obscures:
1. that the person is employable (I don't think it's necessarily good to economically guarantee that severely disabled people are forced out of the workplace, even if they have other support systems to guarantee their needs)
2. that the person works a certain number of hours. ($100/hr is not livable if you work one hour per week.)
3. that a person has an assumed set of needs and an assumed support system (different life circumstances require different incomes to meet basic needs)
Everyone deserves to afford their basic needs, regardless of any of these confounding factors. Much of our worst poverty is because of one of these factors, not a variable as simplistic as hourly wage. Wages should be fair, but basic needs should be for everyone regardless of their ability to work a 9-to-5. While I do think we need some upwards pressure on wages, I also think social safety nets are a more equitable way to ensure basic needs are met. And we don't need to let employers off the hook for paying the bill, we can tax them to do this.
I agree that one needs both and that they serve complementary purposes.
But a minimum wage is useful to the extent that there are jobs for your lowest skill, least desirable workers. And ensuring that may take reducing the work week.
Higher minimum wage laws do hurt low skilled workers. We have two great big machines at work each will pay for it's self in under a year at current minimum wage rates. There is no choice but to replace the people for machines if we want to remain competitive.
It is a win-win. They force other businesses who can't buy a machine to pay a higher floor. If no jobs exist at all those voters will bring in someone who will tax companies like yours and spread the wealth. Your company gets more productive.
Paying some a lower wage because it delays another machine purchase is not a long term solutiom
That job was not a long term position most would either move on or up. People are more flexible than machines. They're a better choice if you can afford it.
Living off of redistributed hand outs sounds like a horrible way to live. How do you improve your life? How do you find meaning?
I live in a country that has 3rd generation beneficiaries. Their lives don't appear enjoyable. Once in that mind set it's so hard to get out. They often turn to drugs and mindless entertainment.
You're on a site full of motivated self-learners who would hopefully use that free time to improve their selves and contribute to far more interesting, useful, and fulfilling things than making the widgets the machine can make.
Most of us also probably live in countries where a significant fraction of the population would choose Playstation/Netflix/heroin instead. That's their choice, but you're probably right that much of it is learned behavior. Perhaps some significant resources (government funded or volunteered) should be applied toward teaching people how to make better use of their free time, if that's what they want.
It's certainly a better vision than making widgets 40 hours a week for a company with dubious social impact.
> If no jobs exist at all those voters will bring in someone who will tax companies like yours and spread the wealth.
And those companies will calculate the ROI for moving into a lower tax burdensome area. After the company leaves the people wont have a job or the tax revenue.
Which is why all companies move to Somalia rather than say California
No one lives in California; it's too crowded.
Tesla? Some companies are leaving California.
I hear Hargeisa is nice these days.
If the machines can replace people then they will replace people regardless. Its a capex vs opex decision and capex is almost always better in the long run. That's why that argument is a bit of a red herring.
Self checkout came regardless of whether the state had a minimum wage increase or not. As soon as the technology was mature enough it was rolled out.
We should consider thinking of those jobs not as lowest skill, but jobs where the workers have the lowest negotiating power.
They go hand in hand.
Why do the workers have the lowest negotiating power in these jobs? It's because they are the most easily replaced and the net benefit from employing them is smallest.
[There are some edge cases, where a field is swamped from people doing the job for the _love_ of it... But this is not the typical case.]
Isn't the whole point of the minimum wage that the federal / state / local governments are the negotiator of last resort?
I.e. people with minimum wage jobs would be paid even less, but for the government using its power to negotiate for them
> Isn't the whole point of the minimum wage that the federal / state / local governments are the negotiator of last resort?
Yes. And it's a necessary thing to have.
On the other hand... if someone is doing work that returns $15.50/hour on average to the business, and is employed at $10/hour, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour doesn't get that person a raise: it gets them laid off.
The things that IMO really help the fundamentals are:
* Raising the demand for low-skill labor (e.g. economic growth above productivity improvements)
* Raising the average skill level of the workforce, and/or
* Reducing the supply of labor.
> On the other hand... if someone is doing work that returns $15.50/hour on average to the business, and is employed at $10/hour, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour doesn't get that person a raise: it gets them laid off.
No, what it does is it causes prices to go up, which are amortized across all of society - between both people who are paid $15/hour, and people who are paid $150/hour.
On average, it is a small wealth transfer from the average person to the working poor.
> No, what it does is it causes prices to go up, which are amortized across all of society - between both people who are paid $15/hour, and people who are paid $150/hour.
Do people who are paid 10x necessarily consume 10x over a person paid minimum wage? If raising the minimum wage causes across the board price increases (aka inflation), then those whose income is lower are affected more since a higher percentage of their income is spent on essential consumption (food, water, shelter).
If the operational concept is "small wealth transfer" to the folks earning the lowest income using inflation as a stealth tax then it is a highly regressive tax.
_Using polling data for 31,869 households in thirty-eight countries and allowing for country effects, we show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top national concern._
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2673879
> Do people who are paid 10x necessarily consume 10x over a person paid minimum wage?
Even if their consumption was 1x, my point would still stand. Most people aren't earning minimum wage, nor are their salaries affected by minimum wage increases. This means that the cost of most products does not increase as minimum wages increase.
Minimum wage increase money comes from somewhere, and since ~everyone relies on minimum wage workers, that means that ~everyone pays for that wage increase.
If you take a dollar away from 100 people, and split half the resulting money between the 10 poorest in that group, and the other half between the next 20, it's a _regressive_ tax, with a _progressive_ benefit that has a net benefit for the poorest. Minimum wage increases work the same way. The rich lose very little, the middle class lose some, the poor win.
Are there better ways of structuring this sort of thing? Theretically yes, but practically, the rich are really, really good at protecting themselves from wealth redistribution. If you're going to hold the poor hostage to them, you're never going to get anything done.
The stealth taxation of inflation affects the lowest 30 in the 100 the most in order to pay the lowest 10. The change in purchase power is not like taxing everyone $1. Whether it’s like taxing on a sliding scale from low to high income that is $1 to $.5 or $1 to $0, I don’t know, just $1 across the board isn’t right. There are probably second order confounders as well, for example since federal gas ax is not inflation indexed, inflation acts as a tax cut.
“It isn’t the sum you get, it's how much you can buy with it, that's the important thing; and it's that that tells whether your wages are high in fact or only high in name.”
Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)[0]
0.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221480431...
$1 across the board is, indeed, not right. In reality, people higher up on the wealth scale would pay more (as they consume more goods and services - just not 1:1 proportionately more.)
A change in real dollars still affects lower income folks more because a higher percentage of income is devoted towards basics. Inflation reduces purchasing power for all, but some categories of spending cannot be substituted or eliminated.
_U.S. households with higher incomes spend more money on food, but the amount spent represents a smaller overall portion of their budgets. In 2020, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $4,099 on food (representing 27 percent of income), while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $12,245 on food (representing 7 percent of income)._
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
So, you're saying that for every dollar taken from the poor (to be redistributed to the working poor), we'd be taking three dollars from the rich (to again, be redistributed to the working poor)?
That seems to support my point that raising the minimum wage disproportionately helps the working poor.
Key word is proportionate. Inflation disproportionately affects those with low income. The affects are not linear—look at the difference in pct income to food in lowest quintile compared to others. A dollar from the lowest quintile is objectively more valuable in purchasing power than three dollars is to the highest.
It’s akin to the company town giving a buck more in wages but charging 2 more in groceries. Sure you make “more,” but since you can buy less of what you need, you are effectively making less.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/HighSchool/RealvsNomi...
> No, what it does is it causes prices to go up, which are amortized across all of society
It does both of these things. Some jobs are lost and some prices go up.
Some tasks are better off outsourced, automated, or not even done at all as the floor price on labor increases. Raising minimum wages here hurts. Shortening the work week helps.
The demand for some tasks is inelastic but easily performed by many different people. The price of these tasks increases in proportion to minimum wage. Raising minimum wages here helps the employees, and shortening the work week is a small hurt.
Some tasks already have an equilibrium price well above minimum wage due to a supply limitation of the capable labor. Raising minimum wages here is relatively neutral. Shortening the work week should increase compensation here and increase the motivation for employers to find ways to bring more lower skill people into the field.
Most things are somewhere _between_ these extremes.
I'm a little worried about how that would affect the lower class in the short term. It's easy to say that they'll get more money as they'll get a day of overtime, but I think it's more likely that a lot of people will find that businesses just staffed up more for low skilled positions (and eventually for skilled positions), and then people have more time but are only making 80% of what they were previously, and can't afford both rent and food together in a given month anymore.
I think the instability this would cause i the lower class would be _devastating_. The very people that don't have savings and that can't easily weather large financial events would have once forced on them all at the same time.
I'm not saying to abolish the minimum wage. I'm just saying to reduce the nominal workweek before overtime.
> just staffed up more for low skilled positions (and eventually for skilled positions),
There's not an infinite supply of bodies out there. It's not clear where you'd just "find 10% more people"-- at least not without raising comp. And, of course, getting closer to full employment is a good thing in itself...
> but are only making 80% of ...
36/40 = 90%, even in this worst case where someone has their hours reduced from 40 to 36 to avoid overtime pay. I think there's a lot more poor people that are getting 30-35 hours from their job who would be nowhere close to the overtime threshold before, but now that their normal workweek is closer to the max get it sometimes.
Any policy change will hit some people negatively, but I think this would be a net positive for the vast majority of lower earners.
> It's not clear where you'd just "find 10% more people"
As another commenter noted, maybe from all those people that are no longer making enough to make ends meet. Now you have someone working two jobs, maybe at like 16-24 hours each, and if one of those needs more hours, well, now you're working more than 40 hours a week overall but less than 32 per job and not getting overtime for any of it.
I could easily see something like this being one of those well intentioned policies with major negative outcomes.
> 36/40 = 90%,
My mistake, I missed where you defined it as just dropping four hours off, and "shorter work week" sounds like cutting a day off to me, so I assumed the wrong thing.
Even so, 10% is not an amount a lot of people can sustain. You posit that there's a lot more people getting 30-35 hours, but I'm not so sure of that, so would definitely want to see some numbers before endorsing anything like this. Additionally, I think a lot of people that are working less hours are doing so because in some cases employers can get around some laws about sick time and paid time off if employees aren't "full time".
The bottom line is that if people have more money, they can choose to work less. Just make sure people are paid more and they'll choose to work less if that's actually important to them, and they'll seek out jobs that offer things they care about (such as less work hours) if that's important to them. Reducing the expected working hours is nice, but I doubt most the people that would actually need it (those working demanding or demeaning jobs) would trade that for less pay given the realities. The only people that can really make use of that are the middle and upper class, and they can already choose to prioritize that and look for work that allows it given their financial stability.
>It's not clear where you'd just "find 10% more people"
Well, you just gave millions of low-income workers 10% less money and 10% more time, so my guess is that more people would be forced to get a second job.
On the absolute margins, of people already working 2 jobs-- sure, this policy is likely to mostly cause a reallocation in hours between employers at first.
* Some other people will be content working less.
* Other people who already get overtime every week will be getting more overtime.
* Exempt employees are likely to slowly evolve to working less as the 36 hour workweek becomes the norm.
* Employers faced with paying more overtime or getting less hours will need to pay more and work harder to train up lower skilled workers to fill positions.
And in the end, everyone shifts up a bit from this reallocation.
One of the problems with low wage work is that it also sucks down all of your time AND you can't afford to take time off--unpaid. The only way to get a new job is finding another low paying job that can hire you on the spot. There is no time for personal growth...job hunting and interviewing. Getting out from underneath it requires a massive time and energy investment that a lot of people cannot maintain for the length of time needed.
Lol, Congress couldn't even get a minimum wage increase with majority Democrats, there's no way anything else about the workweek is changing any time soon.
I'm on a 40 hrs one week, 32 hrs the next. That yields every other Friday off. If I get a pronotion / pay increase I'm gonba try to opt for 32 hrs every week.
> Everyone's quality of life goes up
Ideally, yes. But for those who struggle in various ways the extra free time could be dangerous. I'm definitely in favor of a shorter work week. But there are always unintended consequences.
For example I live in NJ. As the pandemic lockdown kicked off so did the adverts for gambling via your mobile device. I'm not in favor of the Nanny State but I can't help but wonder how many ppl are nursing an addiction and associated debt from this intersection.
Yea- if you're not making money, you're usually spending it. Idle time costs more than the $0/hr you make while not working.
Unless you use part of your free time to do things that you previously had to pay someone to do because you didn't have time.
The biggest problem is the minimum wage for salaried exempt workers needs to be a few hundred thousand dollars.
Otherwise, businesses will continue to label employees managers with no actual management responsibilities with the sole goal of paying someone a lower hourly rate in exchange for a more certain periodic payment.
Once you remove this loophole, hourly pay will naturally rise as businesses will opt to hire more hourly workers. The biggest reason hourly workers lack negotiating power is businesses can lean in the salaried “managers” to fill in at no extra cost.
This is an interesting idea, but it seems really impractical to me. As you point out, people enjoy some benefits from certainty in compensation. Outlawing a compensation arrangement far in excess of minimum wage seems questionable.
And how far does this extend? Can I not pay a contractor a fixed rate for a project? Or a fixed rate to handle _____ for me for a week? It would seem to encourage arm's-length contracting arrangement for services and coverage, which isn't ideal.
Is it far in excess of minimum wage? A manager can be asked to be on call 24/7. But per hour, that is not much.
I don’t see what it would have to do with contractors. Minimum wage laws apply to employer employer relationships. Independent contractors can charge whatever they want.
> Is it far in excess of minimum wage? A manager can be asked to be on call 24/7. But per hour, that is not much.
So you want to pay someone for every hour they might get called, too? Even if that is a very rare responsibility?
> I don’t see what it would have to do with contractors.
It would further encourage contractor relationships, as I said. I don't see this as a good thing.
Yes, because as is demonstrated in real life, businesses will skimp on hiring sufficient, quality hourly staff and dump the workload on meagerly paid “managers”. One popular way is to use immigrants from one’s own country, and tie the ball and chain around them. They need the consistent employment to get established in the country, and have few options.
It will not encourage contractor relationships anymore than now, it will simply require businesses to pay the hourly workers more and give them steady schedules, benefits, etc.
> It will not encourage contractor relationships anymore than now,
Doubtful
> it will simply require businesses to pay the hourly workers more
Why? It seems like this is a lever you're hoping to use to get the _exempt_ workers paid more and/or a slightly greater allocation of work away from what had formerly been exempt workers.
> benefits
Why?
Because they will need to hire more hourly workers.
The whole concept of hourly minimum wage is undercut by the ability of businesses to pay a meager salary.
The mechanism of action for increases prices paid to workers is by decreasing supply of man hours from one individual at a low price (i.e. increasing salaries minimum).
> Because they will need to hire more hourly workers.
I think this is absolute rounding error on the number of additional hourly workers needed.
Yes, a reasonable percentage of salaried workers in low wage industries are exploited as you describe. In turn, with an hourly wage, they'll work a small percentage fewer hours.
>I personally believe that the government should focus on a shorter workweek rather than minimum wage increases in the near term.
The government being involved is the most likely answer as to why a 40 hour work week is standard and why there are so many "minimum wage" jobs. A funny thing happens when you set floors or ceilings in markets, you hit them. There should be no minimum wage. People excepting jobs will set the minimum wage because people act in their own self interest. If the pay is too low, no one will take the job. This is how labor markets are set everywhere else in the economy, I don't understand how the bottom is different.
The government shouldn't have anything to do with the work week, the market should decide because what works in one sector in one region may not work in another. The government isn't as smart as the entire labor market making decisions for themselves.
In an ideal spherical cow world, having no minimum wage would work exactly as you describe. In the real world, that's you how get slavery. For many reasons, not everyone has a choice to turn down a $1/hr job.
Where I am McDonalds is begging for people to work at $15/hr. How would they even think about paying less?
They'd simply cut wages when the labor supply shock recedes and labor is in surplus again. Businesses do not pay the minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts; on the contrary, it communicates "we'd pay you less if we could, the law simply doesn't allow us to."
Sure.
But note also that there are people one might be willing to gamble on employing at $12/hour but that don't offer a positive return at capital at $15/hour.
I think minimum wage laws are important, but that reducing the supply of labor will do more to push up the wages of the lowest earners.
Then pass UBI instead and drop the minimum wage laws (there's no need for them if UBI were a thing). Problem solved.
Right now the problem is in the power dynamic between companies and employees - the dynamic is very unbalanced in the companies favor. In "Bullshit Jobs" Graeber compares the current system to a Dom-Sub relationship with no safeword for the "fake-competitive" industries that are not unionized.
UBI is the safeword.
Why aren’t they offering $20 an hour?
I don't understand how people hold your view. Would you except a $1/hr job? No, then why do you think other people would. If you can make more money walking through a parking lot picking up change, why would you work. Plus companies wouldn't want to hire at $1/hr because what kind of employee are you getting? Your competitor down the street paying more money would then get the better employees and drive you out of business. This would then lead to wages going up as companies compete for employees.
This is not some ideal spherical cow world, this is how literally the entire labor market works except for the mystical bottom that the government feels they have to be involved in. Why else do you think FAANG's pay so much money? Its because they want to attract the best talent.
People work and sleep in factory floors during periods of overtime in some places in China. In the most competitive tech companies, they worked 996 until the government stepped in.
All of this bullshit free market fundamentalism relies on many nice assumptions - one being that there is plenty of good, high-paying work to go around. The actual fact spelled out in a hundred different ways, from wages to market conditions to books like Bullshit Jobs, is that the economy doesn't need nearly as many workers as we have people particularly in low wage jobs that don't require much training. There is much more supply than demand. Its perfectly possible that if McDonalds paid $1/hr, their competitors would ALSO pay $1/hr. In that situation someone with little skills would have a choice of 1. making $1/hr 2. making $0 and starving. These are the conditions 50-60% of the world works in. We've already seen collusion to keep wages low in technology, not to mention other industries and times in the past, no doubt it happens and can happen again.
As is usual, every time someone points out a bad situation, you say its "not really a free market". So its not, most markets aren't ideal "free markets". Employers can collude, information asymmetries do exist, power imbalances are real. There are literally zero "free markets" in the world. They don't just arise naturally. Even with all the intervention we have, I have yet to see any market where there is no information asymmetry or imbalances. Its a fucking idealized model from Econ 101, not the state of reality.
This kind of thinking is fundamentally un-empirical. It starts with a theory and insists that the world conform to it rather than looking at the world and examining which theory really does explain it best. In this world I would simply refuse to acknowledge the existence of non-spherical objects as a non-spherical boulder rolled down a hill and killed me.
>People work and sleep in factory floors during periods of overtime in some places in China.
lol - then you go on to complain about free markets? China is NOT a free market!
I don't care how many fast food joints colluded, no one is going to work for $1 an hour. Heck with all the COVID bucks floating around I see fast food joints advertising $15 an hour jobs and STILL not getting any takers.
Your position is utterly nonsensical. This isn't the turn of the century. Workers have never had more mobility or information. If anyone tried to set up a "Company town" in todays economy it would be empty from day one.
I don't have a problem with no minimum wage, but I do have a problem with people starving and homeless. So I'm willing to give up on the minimum wage for any viable alternative. For example, UBI paid for by taxes on employers.
> Its because they want to attract the best talent.
When we are talking about minimum wage, you need to consider the people with the worst talent. Think sweatshops in China, construction camps in Dubai, prostitutes in the US. Not Google or Facebook employees.
Yes but you want the best of your labor pool.
As for sweatshops in China, these are the growing pains of a developing economy. The work conditions there suck but I bet they are better than being bent over in a rice field all day. You are also rapidly seeing this change as the economy becomes more developed there, even in the face of an oppressive government.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-working-its-way-up-fro...
The construction camps in Dubai is about government corruption. They lure in overseas workers then take away their passports so they can't leave. Not exactly a free labor market.
Again prostitution in the US is not a free labor market because of government interference. If you go to places where prostitution is legal, the girls there make pretty good money.
Most of the areas where you can point to the worst employment situations is because of government interference in a market place.
You're still looking at the best case scenario (ie. a person willingly entering into prostitution), while blind to the worst. The are reason why unions, minimum wage, unemployment insurance, universal healthcare is so common around the world.
How do any of those things fix slavery? Or are you using a different definition for "willing" more akin to "would strongly prefer to".
I don't understand your questions exactly, but I was differentiating between "I do prostitution because I don't mind it and I make lots of money" vs. "I have to sleep with landlord because my minimum wage job doesn't pay the rent".
>this is how literally the entire labor market works except for the mystical bottom that the government feels they have to be involved in.
Several replies are addressing your wrong points but I had to bring this up:
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
> I don't understand how people hold your view.
The usual argument for this is that while there is some efficiency gained in trying for a pure labor market here, the externalities can be brutal. So the reason that the government gets involved in the lower end is that typically they are the ones that have to deal with the fallout when things aren't working well. There are other approaches, but for whatever reasons many places find min wage more politically acceptable/expedient.
A recent immigrant who was brought here from a foreign country by a "relative" and then told to work in their shop for $1/hr or be sent back home (or worse) would gladly take that $1/hr job. This actually happens in places that don't have labor protections.
And not just immigrants. Anyone with an abusive parent or partner or any situation where one person holds power over another.
Hence "this is how you get slavery".
It actually happens everywhere, even in places that have labor protections.
True, but in the US, you have to commit illegal acts to do it (like paying under the table), putting the employer at risk and lowering the chance that it happens.
If there were no minimum wage, you could put the person on payroll and be completely legal in your actions, allowing the employer to exploit unknowledgeable employees.
> Your competitor down the street paying more money would then get the better employees and drive you out of business.
No, they would cooperate and set an informal maximum wage to replace the minimum one (or more accurately, they would _lower the already informally established maximum wage_.) This would be a win-win for both businesses.
It's not a coincidence that all low-wage jobs pay between 0% and 25% over the minimum wage, and it has nothing to do with labor demand. It's because a bidding war is no good for anyone, and because having the _best_ low wage employees will not improve net revenue more than always paying as little as possible. The idea that the Burger King paying $22/hr is going to drive the McDonald's paying $14/hr out of business is a libertarian fantasy never borne out by reality.
I don't entirely disagree with you, but:
> and it has nothing to do with labor demand.
If not having an employee costs you $30/hour in revenue-- your desire to avoid a bidding war won't prevent you from making an offer at $22/hr if it's necessary to fill the slot.
It has everything to do with labor demand (and supply). Collusion (formal or informal) between loosely coupled, adversarial entities breaks down under pressure.
We're actually seeing this with massive labour shortages in traditionally low paying fields. People did better off government hand-outs and then didn't ever go back to these roles at the offered wages.
This is the very reason unions exist. To protect all workers from the bad deal that other workers will accept. You have little appreciation for how much people can undervalue themselves. It is enough to where people think working at an Amazon warehouse for $15 an hour is a good deal. Sounds like a great deal for Amazon and Walmart. The workers making that wage don't know that it's a bad deal. Same way people pull out money from thier retirement accounts to buy cars "because they don't want a payment." Dumb personal choice.
I am all for unions as long as they aren't mandated.
In some areas an Amazon warehouse job is an exceptionally good job. I grew up in a place where one of the best job you could get was working at a Walmart distribution center. Basically like an Amazon warehouse but the whole this is a freezer.
Also the government can't and shouldn't try to govern bad choices away from people. This would lead to a very authoritarian society.
Unions are not allowed to negotiate benefits and wages exclusively for their members. Non-union employees are forced by this to become free riders.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
> > I am all for unions as long as they aren't mandated.
> Unions are not allowed to negotiate benefits and wages exclusively for their members.
Parent is talking about "closed shops" where a union uses its bargaining power to ensure the employer will only employ people represented by the union. On the one hand this prevents the free-rider problem you mention. On the other, this is coercive and can erode employees' ability to negotiate about things important to them.
It can also be inefficient-- I've been in workplaces where I got in trouble for moving a desk in my office a few feet, because moving furniture was a closed-shop union job, and I wasn't a member.
> There should be no minimum wage. People excepting jobs will set the minimum wage because people act in their own self interest.'
I'm very capitalistic and libertarian, but reality is all systems need to manage edge cases. Minimum wage is a part of that. To believe that the market can figure everything out requires serious tunnel vision.
> Minimum wage is a part of that.
It's not the only way though. We have no legally defined or mandated minimum wage here in Norway (nor elsewhere in the Nordic region I think). But the effective minimum is probably higher than the mandated minimum in any other country.
Broadly speaking the way it is done here is that the national association of employers and the principal unions negotiate a tariff for each industry and type of work each year. The state is involved to the extent that it provides an official who acts as referee in the negotiations and tries to chivvy the parties to an agreement.
Employers are free to ignore the rules but risk losing employees to companies that pay according to the tariff.
Of course the difference between here and the US is that solidarity is stronger here so the negotiations are less hostile here.
It's not perfect but it seems to work quite well
Sure, not the only way. But unions are an example of circuit breaker for when a pure capitalistic system fails. Some countries extend the union to all citizens in all industries as a minimum wage. The nordic region (including gov't) seems to have their shit together, more than the rest of the world. I think less gov't is better, just not the anarchy the previous poster suggests.
> There should be no minimum wage.
Spoken like a true capitalist! The young, dumb and disadvantaged should be thankful for the pennies that trickle their way. It's not like they're gonna sue if they get ripped off, they're broke. Besides, they can always move into high paying career ladders just as soon as they can afford to stop taking the bus everywhere. /s
You will be paid at the highest rate you can command based on the value of your skills in the labor force. If you have no relevant skills, you don't make much money until you do have relevant skills. You earn shit money and then build your skills and then you will no longer earn shit money. It's pretty simple and it is what happens to most minimum wage workers and workers in any sector of the economy.
Great for those with support, safety nets, options & abilities. The young, the mentally challenged, the old, the handicapped, the convicted... they're supposed eat cat food and go sleep under an overpass until they get motivated/healthy/unconvicted/a car/____?
> the mentally challenged, the old, the handicapped
We have disability safety nets (that could be better). And FLSA and state regs all allow paying these groups under minimum wage (and this is a good thing).
My wife's brother is severely mentally handicapped. He lives in a nice, well-run group home (I'm aware this is not universal). He also has the option of going to "dayhab" where there's educational content and the option of working making crafts for a couple of dollars per hour of spending money.
I am not sure his labor output is worth the $2-3/hour he gets paid: a lot of this is probably charity, but it makes a difference to him to be able to earn something and work towards goals, and not just spend his entire day watching TV instead.
You don't fix these things with a minimum wage and you possibly make them worse. They've got different solutions.
> The young, ... the convicted
These are harder problems.
* How do we provide a good on-ramp to productive work and independent life for at-risk youth?
* How do we allow those who have broken the norms of society in the past to rejoin in an orderly way, with hope and better prospects from compliance than reoffending?
Note that I think _we should have a minimum wage_. I just think it's also a band-aid at best, and often causes a fair degree of problems as well. It's better than nothing, but one would be better off addressing the problems it's targeted at in any other available way.
As I noted above, if we had UBI to cover bare essentials, we wouldn't need a minimum wage.
That's basically what Walmart abuses anyways via the welfare system; it's almost a subsidy to make their model kind of glue-together in the end. Let's just make it explicit. Pass UBI, repeal minimum wage laws.
Just look at the chaos being cause by COVID bucks right now - fast food joints offering $15 an hour and $500 signing bonuses and still having no takers.
That anyone has the guts to still be pushing UBI when we can see how a limited UBI with the current government handouts are utterly destroying the current labor market is beyond reprehensible.
Additionally: "This collapse of worker power has been overwhelmingly driven by conscious policy decisions that have intentionally undercut institutions and standards that previously bolstered the economic leverage and bargaining power of typical workers; it was not driven simply by apolitical market forces."
(Same source)
First, COVID bucks stopped quite a while ago (September at the latest)
It's not destroying anything, it's giving labor bargaining power back versus capital. Yes, it's harder to hire workers at $X/hour when they have alternatives. That's the whole point of UBI.
Also note that pre-handouts, the companies were hiring workers for $10/hour, now they're willing to pay $15/hour with bonus (and can't find anyone). What that means is that companies actually had room to pay much higher than they were actually paying (and still make sufficient profit) - so the previous wage was not a fair market wage, but was rather exploitation; which the article goes into below:
"Labor markets in capitalist economies are fundamentally tilted against individual workers’ ability to bargain effectively with employers. Policy does not have to be rigged for employers to give them particular clout in labor markets; instead, the very nature of these labor markets gives them clout. In the past, when economic growth was broadly shared across the population, it was because policymakers understood this basic asymmetry and used policy levers to bolster the leverage and bargaining power of workers. Conversely, recent decades’ rise of inequality and anemic wage growth has resulted from a stripping away of these policy bulwarks to workers’ labor market power."
https://www.epi.org/publication/what-labor-market-changes-ha...
The old - One's employment options often severely diminish as they approach retirement. With health insurance (and those costly prescriptions) tied to employment, how little do you think some are willing to work for? Would you work for free if your life depended on it?
I feel like you avoided engaging at all with my comment. I explicitly commented that the safety nets and retirement system are not perfect and could be better, but that I believed minimum wage was not a solution. Increasing the minimum wage isn't going to get more people just short of retirement health insurance.
Why would I pay you more than I have to if I know you're desperate and have few (or none) other options? Mind if I pay you in scrip?
I don't believe in your good faith desire to discuss. I've said above I believe there should be a minimum wage, but that it's a crappy lever for the groups that you describe and that there are better ones for different subgroups (social safety nets, reducing the supply of labor by shortening work week).
Instead, I get a bunch of strawmen that have nothing to do with what I said.
You've presented a group home as a possible solution for the severely mentally handicapped. Presumably great for the few who can get it.
What you have not addressed is the extreme imbalance in power for many employers at the expense of employees. If there is no floor on what someone can get away with paying, then it is reasonable to expect the marginalized or powerless to be fully taken advantage of. Even today, some employers try to get away with not paying by having employees work "off the clock". At least with the minimum wage, litigious employees can eventually expect something for their lost time.
> What you have not addressed is the extreme imbalance in power for many employers at the expense of employees. If there is no floor on what someone can get away with paying, then it is reasonable to expect the marginalized or powerless to be fully taken advantage of.
???? I have stated throughout this entire conversation that I believe there should be a minimum wage. I do not know why you continue to argue with me as if I have not. Your messages have _nothing to do with what I am saying_. I have pointed this out to you now _three times_.
You haven't confused me with trcarney who said far above that there shouldn't be one, have you?
I just don't think the minimum wage is a solution to many of the problems you cite. It will not generate more employment income for the severely disabled, etc.
The way to get young/unskilled people to build skills earlier in life is to lower the minimum wage, not increase it.
No one is going to hire a 12 year old for a part time job if the minimum wage is $15. It just increases the minimum skill level to be hireable. But hire them for $7.50 and they might have skills worth $15 by the time they're 18.
I think you overestimate how wage-sensitive most industries are. Most companies today have consolidated enough to have a lot of pricing power - if they raise prices, consumers will just have to buckle up and take it.
We've already had history in the U.S. where the inflation-adjusted minimum wage was way higher than it is today and yet the labor participation rate was also higher than it is today.
But my personal preference is for UBI coupled with a repeal of the minimum wage.
How do you build your skills, if you're spending 40+ hours a week working to make ends meet and trying to care for a family?
You're arguing from an ideal situation, without taking into account that reality's average is very much less than ideal.
You are building your skills while you are working. If you can find time outside of work, you are just accelerating things.
You sound like someone who has never worked a minimum wage job. None of the skills you learn in these low end jobs is ever going to help you do anything but work similar low end jobs. I put myself through three associates degrees cleaning cars for a rental company. You know what that taught me? How to clean a car interior in 5-15 minutes. That's not exactly the most marketable of skills.
Fortunately that wasn't particularly laborious, so I still had the energy to do school too. Many people are not as lucky, and these days often have to work 2 or more jobs to get by. Worse, the kind of schooling I took advantage of is increasingly turning from vocation-oriented education to cheap-university-transfer education.
> You sound like someone who has never worked a minimum wage job
Nah. He sounds like someone with class and privilege who's worked a minimum wage job.
See, a minimum wage job for someone who is a privileged youth-- is a good way to learn the last little bit of organization, focus, "eye on the ball", working with a supervisor, attention to detail skills-- that will serve them the rest of their life. It's a great skill building opportunity.
For someone who's been stuck in it 3 years--- well, it's exhausted all of its value in those respects by this point.
People who are scared of the minimum wage going up are often worried that it's going to squeeze out kids from getting these first work experiences. And it's a valid concern. But the people who spend their lives stuck in those jobs are invisible to them.
I personally favor shortening the work week because I think it will increase the compensation associated with low skill labor; provide additional incentives for employers to ramp people into higher skill positions; _and_ leave room for kids in low skill jobs.
> You are building your skills while you are working
What skills would they be? Surely the only skill you build while flipping burgers is that of flipping burgers. Is it applicable to any other job?
Yeah horrible idea to copy countries like Denmark and Norway.
>> forces office staff to work a half day on christmas eve
...or that traditionally lets people go home at lunch? This is pretty common but you frame it pretty negatively.
Obviously on-call has to cover holidays but Christmas eve is a work day for everyone (in an office) at your company? Why stay? That is simply barbaric
As with all things, it's about trade-offs. As much as I dislike this company for its policies towards time off and butts-in-seats[0], I am not on-call and am never obligated to answer my phone outside of work, no one bats an eye at me taking a few hours to make an appointment every now and then, I don't hate my manager or coworkers, and generally little is expected of me which suits me fine because I haven't found IT work fulfilling for at least 5 years.
[0] Which is directly responsible for infecting my household with COVID. Literally everyone in the company has had it.
As they wrote, barbaric.
Ahhh....the plantation still lives.
He was literally talking about how it was his choice to stay, and you're calling him a slave. Over only getting half a day off on Christmas _Eve_, which is not even a holiday. I honestly cannot tell what is sarcasm anymore.
Christmas eve is usually a work day for the vast majority of the world, even the out-of-touch white collar minority. We benefit from the fact that (a) the work is easy, (b) not much of it gets done and (c) you go home 1/2 way through the day. You sound even more out of touch than the rest of us if you think this is "barbaric".
Is this unusual? A quick google search shows Trump issued an executive order just last year to give the day off to federal employees, but Wikipedia doesn't list it as a federal holiday.
According to The Atlantic, religion started the weekend/5 day workweek, not the IWW.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/where-t...
In fact, I cannot find any source at all that says the IWW caused the weekend.
You are probably right, I am also unable to find a credible source saying that.
Why would you expect to get Christmas eve off? It's not a holiday and not everyone celebrates Christmas.
I think the question is framed such as it already assumes the employer perspective: you should only get off on federal holidays, or at least religious ones.
But if you want some justifications: christmas is the biggest holiday in the (once?) christian-dominated west, and in the US in particular it is quite common for family to be separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles of travel. It is also common practice for people to celebrate christmas eve with one side of the family and christmas day with the other, if they live closely enough to each.
All that aside, it is less about not getting christmas eve off than it is about there being absolutely no reason for us to be there at all. The company recognizes that there is some importance to the day for its employees by cutting the day in half in the first place, yet even though all evidence shows that there is no reason whatsoever to be there and it's costing the company more to have people there than it will ever make from it, they still insist that people show up. It's not even rational slave-driving.
I don't see where OP expected to get it off because it was a holiday. They expect to get it off because no work gets done, and they're annoyed because the company requires double the vacation time for those that do want it off for the holiday. Finally, Christmas Eve is definitely as much of a holiday as Christmas Day, for those who celebrate it.
Not American celebrates Christmas as a religious holiday, but most everyone observes it as a secular time of rest, travel, and/or family before the start of the new year.
Schools are off during this time. And many professions take a break during this time as well, not just office workers, but factories often use this down time for maintenance, and trades use it as reprieve from working in the cold.
I tend to attempt to ruin asshat companies like that, usually because it’s only the tip of the iceberg of abuse. I’ve taken out two so far, one by quitting as the sole engineer when their only client went down and i wasn’t paid properly and secondly by scaring all the permanent staff off after getting a bailiff appointed to take kit away from their office because they didn’t pay my invoice. I don’t shed an ounce of guilt for this.
Sure would be a shame if the employees collectively bargained with the company for more reasonable policies...
Yup… because their jobs may then go abroad as has been the trend for the past 20 years…
This happened to everything it could at least 10 years ago. It turns out that if you want software that works (at all), you need to pay people well, regardless of where they are in the world. Stop reenforcing this notion that leads to massive overwork and burnout in the US (+ Canada). Germany, the UK, Sweden, etc all have much, much better working conditions for software devs and their jobs aren't going away
I hear that many of the European countries have lower dev salaries than the US. So maybe better conditions, but possibly lower pay.
Our company just started outsourcing IT 5 years ago. It's still expanding that policy.
> I hear that many of the European countries have lower dev salaries than the US. So maybe better conditions, but possibly lower pay.
While arguably true, it's almost definitely not better conditions to blame. A more likely source is the massive and relatively homogenous US market, a culture open to immigration, and the huge reserves of capital sloshing about the country.
Yeah, I'm not saying they are related. Just saying it can be a trade-off between higher pay and fewer hours and there are many variables to consider when comparing internationally.
the significantly higher direct and indirect taxes are definitely related though
You'd be surprised.
Like, if we take taxes as a percentage of GDP as a figure, the US scores pretty well at about 27%. But Australia is at 28%, Canada at 32%, and even the UK at 33%. The differences aren't massive here. He'll, Ireland comes in at 23%.
My _average_ personal income tax rate was well over 40% during my last year in Canada. (The marginal rate is/was 53.53%.)
Even a high tax state like California would have a five figure amount less owed in taxes than Ontario at certain income levels.
This is not my experience. Overseas devs have only gotten better and more tightly aligned with the west in the past 10 years. The idea of throwing your work over then fence to the cheapest jurisidiction may have died but there are significant cost savings in going overseas, especially as westerners get more expensive and remote work grows
And good overseas devs have gotten far, far more expensive.
An ultimately the company will suffer in quality, be bought by private equity and gutted in the next twenty years.
Unfortunately, most companies aren't looking past the next few quarters.
Some of my best (ie: most profitable per hour jobs) were rescuing projects that were sent abroad.
This seems like it could be survivor-ship bias; i.e. your highest margin jobs weren't those that had been sent abroad, they were the ones that failed after having been sent abroad.
If they could they would.
I remember being told over 10 years ago as I was entering the field of software that I shouldn't bother: my job is going to be outsourced soon enough.
This is just a scare tactic with little teeth. Not to say it doesn't happen, but it doesn't happen enough for it to be a consideration.
You can't ship pretty much any service industry job abroad.
That’s why they are working so hard on AI, drones and robots.
They are perpetually 3-5 years away. This is why there is a shortage now. We've told an entire generation not to take those jobs, they're going to be automated anyway. 2021 arrives and still no FSD trucks, no robotized fast food, and no last mile drone delivery. Not only did these companies convince investors labor wasn't necessary, they also managed to convince labor labor wasn't necessary.
There's power in a union.
I would rather have a 6 day work week with 2 months of paid holidays every year. There isn't much you can do on a 3 day break that you can't do in a 1 day or 2 day break. But a month long break and you can do crazy stuff like hiking in Papua New Guinea or sailing across an ocean.
What you can do with 3 days per week instead of a month per year is to set good habbits. Fit a sport into your schedule, learn music. Anything requiring discipline is gonna be much easier if you're able to build a daily/weekly schedule around it.
Haven't done this long of a pure personal trip in a while but in a previous (US) job I took several month long trips with an otherwise conventional vacation/work schedule. Combination of fairly long tenure at the company, some unpaid leave from taking leave for a Christmas shutdown, and concentrating almost all my vacation on those trips.
A 6-day work week means you basically have to take time off to go away for weekends at all.
That said, I'm not convinced a 3 day weekend is much better than a 2 day weekend on a routine basis, certainly compared to have the same time allocated more flexibly.
Arguably that's what savings and sabbaticals are for. I've had several colleges take an extended (albeit unpaid) holiday to go travelling or sailing or something.
I'm not saying a load more PTO isn't worth it, but there are definitely ways to do this kind of thing, and it's worth asking your company about it.
We could just have 8 weeks of paid vacation by law and _not_ also work 6-day weeks. That's not so far from what other countries do as to be obviously crazy or unreasonable.
Why trade away your year for 2 months?
40 hour per week with 40 days PTO is not very common but in larger companies in Europe is not unheard of specially for senior ICs.
Life happens outside of two months a year, though.
Yet those two months will be more memorable than the ten months of monotonous life. I just feel work and related city life bullshit stays with you even on the weekends. There is some fun in just escaping. Or maybe I am too much vacation starved due to covid lol.
I would urge you to reconsider your work/life balance. Trading 10 months for 2 seems like a poor trade. A 4 day work week automatically gets you 52 extra days a year. If you have flexibility in the day of the week, it's very compelling.
I don't feel the same way but that's totally fair enough. Do you have any opportunities to take unpaid leave and use some savings for that 1-2 month period?
As of January I’m moving to 50% of full time - generally 2.5 days a week, I expect there will be certain months where I do a couple of weeks in a row and little else rest of the month. After 20+ years working full time am incredibly excited about the change and what I can do with the extra space in my life.
Due to how tax rates work I get about 58% of previous pay for 50% of the work.
I expect to deliver about 80% of the value I do today - by having a good excuse to jettison the low value stuff, feel more motivated and engaged in the time I do have, feel more refreshed with more mental energy
Time will show if that proves the case…
I work a 4 day week; just don’t tell my boss.
My goal is to find a good job I excel at so I can do 3 days and still have FTE output.
That's the tipping point: >50% of the week is now mine.
Boss is working three day week...
You and everyone else "working from home."
No, that's not true, and it's that fantasy which gets us the "butts-in-seats" management style.
This is correlated first to workplace morale and second to the individual worker. The workers who would do this from home are the same workers who would do it in the office. And employers who make their workers' lives miserable will have endemic problems with people not putting in effort.
You joke, I assume. My boss was notoriously against working from home. COVID proved him VERY wrong. People where just as effective, if not more. They where much more flexible with customer. It doesn't matter that a client ask you to say a bit longer, if you're already home and have everything set up.
Most people I know never _worked_ 5 days a week. They just pretended. Now they don't have to pretend as much (as long as that little Slack dot stays green!)
The ones in the office do the same. They just spread the day of not-working over the whole week and have the added stress of having to pretend to work some of the time.
Though actually it's more like 2-3 days of not working, spread out, more often than not.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
I’m close to doing 4-day workweek for my team. For now we do 4.5 (half a day on Friday).
That said, had to subscribe to answering services to cover off hours including Friday afternoon.
You’ll be surprised how many people call at 5pm on Friday.
I'd say its definitely within our grasp. It's a longterm trend which has only been accelerated by COVID
Plus there are now many companies offering this benefit, which is one of the most powerful hiring selling points for companies who cannot compete with FAANG salaries:
The problem with this idea (and don't get me wrong, I love the idea!) is that as automation takes away the busywork, what's left requires an increasing amount of specialized domain-specific knowledge, and this kind of knowledge is expensive. Finding someone good with the right broad skillset is hard enough. Then they also need just the right combination of experience, or extensive on the job training, to be useful in the role. And once you have the right person with the right knowledge, they then need a lot of knowledge about the specific project they're working on, which also costs time and money for them to acquire.
Also as your hours worked per worker goes down, the number of workers goes up, and your communication and coordination costs for a project are at least quadratic in the number of workers on that project.
As a consequence, it costs more than twice as much to run a project with two half-time workers as it does to run the same project with one full-time worker.
I've been looking for a job where I'd only have to work 3 days per week. Then my life would be only 3/7 work and 4/7 rest, which would be great for my work life balance. I also prefer a bay area salary, because of my high rental costs. Does anyone know where I could find such a job?
Build a low maintenance business that generates a profit higher than a Bay Area salary and requires less than 3 full days to keep it going.
Here’s an example:
https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22807858/tiktok-influe...
The founder makes >100k per month as mostly passive income.
My dad, my sister, and sister in law all work for Lockheed Martin and they do the 4-10 schedule: 4 days a week, ten hours a day, and they get every Friday off.
I'm a little jealous of it, honestly; it's pretty rare that I work less than ten hours a day anyway, so I think economically it would be better for me.
Is that ten hours including lunch break (and if yes, how much?), or not?
Based on the stereotypical 9-to-5 office job in the UK or elsewhere, a "40" hour work week in those countries must obviously include some amount of _paid_ lunch break (at a guess at least half an hour, maybe even one hour, giving somewhere between 35 and at worst 37.5 actually worked hours)
In Germany on the other hand lunch breaks are typically unpaid, so 40 hours means 40 actually worked hours, _plus_ however long your lunch break is (at least half an hour is the legal minimum when working between six and nine hours per day).
I believe that LM is closer to Germany on this; I don't think the lunches are paid, so you're potentially at the office for ~11 hours a day.
Okay – a four-day week sounds tempting on the one hand, but on the other hand the place I'm working has a smaller-scale version of that arrangement whereby 8.75 hours Monday thru Thursday instead of 8 hours (lunch break not included) gives six additional days off per year plus a slightly earlier finish on Fridays, and personally _that_ already often felt long enough, nevermind 10 hours plus x days.
At least this autumn the working week has been reduced by two hours, so now it's only 8.25 hours + x.
Because our working hours are somewhat flexible within reason, I might possibly get away with unofficially implementing that 4x10 model on my own, but 10 + x hour days really don't sound that tempting to me.
The downside here is that LM pays about 30 to 50% of top tier tech companies with mostly worse benefits.
But otherwise, I agree. That’s a wonderful schedule along with usually great WLB in defense.
The other risk is that defense has been overfunded and high flying for years and years now. Usually goes in cycles with massive layoffs, and we haven’t had one in a long, long time.
I work at LM and most of my colleagues here do the 4x10. I opted for a traditional 5x8 because I have young children at home and found that being gone for 10.5-11 hrs means I don't see them during their waking hours. If I could afford it, I would choose 4x8 and take the 20% paycut.
The next 6 months will be really telling. I know many people who are being groomed by their employers to feel good about a January return.
“We’re asking you to come in three days a week if you are within committing distance of the office, oh by the way, enjoy a half day on Friday!” is the common theme of the message right now.
I’m usually hesitant to make predictions but I really think this is going to be a losing POV if we look two years out. The cat is out of the bag - good talent is going to gravitate toward employers who give their folks autonomy and optionality. This is the moment when the corporate world finally realizes that having a reputation for treating people well actually matters.
It certainly doesn't seem like it's within our grasp on HN. Looking at the December 2021 "who is hiring" thread, I see four posts which offer "part-time" but aside from that nothing which specifies that either a 4-day or sub-40-hour workweek is an option.
Bolt in SF has a 4 day workweek. Check them out.
Thank you, I did. :) While I'm not looking for a position at this moment, I've added Bolt to the list of companies I'll actively consider when I'm back in the market a few months from now.
My main worry about doing this personally is that it would be a form of "golden handcuffs". I'm pretty sure I could persuade my current employer to let me do a 4-day week (for a pay cut), but I'm also sure making that a negotiating point for future jobs would be problematic (at least while a 4-day week isn't standard or widespread).
Also, money.
My current (and hope to stay a very long time) job is 4-day week, and so were my last 2 before that. Its easy to negotiate in my experience. The thing is, most people simply don't ask. Maybe they're scared it makes them look not committed or something. But that's easy to fix by cranking out decent work for the 4 days you're there. Its probably harder if you have line management responsibility or some other expectation that needs you there more. But coding? No problem. I have an "excuse" in terms of extra caring responsibilities, which I declare, and that probably puts to bed any idea people have that its out of laziness. As for golden handcuffs, some truth in that perhaps, but if you enjoy 4 days a week and that frees up time, does it really matter if you then feel a bit tied to that employer? Its a trade-off. One other thing, you can save random bits of money with a weekday off by doing jobs you might otherwise paid someone to do, or cook cheaper but fiddlier foot etc. good luck asking. ;)
Thanks. Lots to think about. I do lack the "excuse", which might be a problem, but we'll see.
No we are not within grasp. I work as a care worker and we are short staffed every day. You could deem the official work week 4 days but they would still need ya to work 5. All this would change is when someone would be deemed full time and when they can get benefits. The companies would still be short staffed but after declaring 4 days a week would be forced to pay overtime for the last day. There are no more workers available we are constantly trying to hire.
As long as a 4-day work week doesn't mean 10-hour work days.
That would defeat the point - time with arse in seat does not equal productivity.
I switched to a 4-day work week years ago, and still work 7.5h each day. I found that I'm much more focused during working hours, and spend less time procrastinating - I'm just as productive as I was before.
I would do 10 hours day for Friday off. Working an extra two hours doesn't put a huge strain as you are already at work or in the work mode. During crunch time I would end up working until 21:00 to 22:00 and I felt it was like exercise in that as long as you don't stop it's not as bad.
You also avoid commute overhead if you work from the office.
Working 5 10 hours work days (at least ) already , four would be great.
I can't reply to the "
" comment by stuff4ben, the reply link is missing.
But first I got a "DNS Probe Possbile" in Brave, and after 4 refreshes I just got a Privacy error with "NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID".
If you have a young family, working a 4 day week would make all the difference. At the moment I work 5 days and then go into a weekend which can be just as tiring as a work day with kids to tend to. With an extra day, this would mostly be when the kids are at school, so it would be genuine time to myself.
What about five days but 6 hours a day? How is that compared to four day workweek?
You still need to do your full commute every day, twice a day. So you don't get the full range of personal time available by reducing your hours. You also lose the advantage of having a free day during office hours for personal appointments. I would also argue that (for me at least), a 6 hours day will be just as stressful as a 7 hour day.
5 Days x 6 Hours = 30 Hours per Week
4 Days x 8 Hours = 32 Hours per Week
I’m doing a part-time Masters and have used that as an excuse for why I need to work a 4-day week, but honestly, I’m never going back unless I get desperate. It’s a huge quality of life improvement.
I think 9 hours per day for 4 days a week would be very reasonable, since this is only a 10% reduction in work time and for me personally, work days are a wash anyways.
Our company is shifting to a 4 day week. The fifth day you can take off, work on a side project or even work on a company backed R&D effort. Work smart, not long.
Funny how two of these companies are a clothing store and a burger joint. I wonder if warehouse workers and line cooks get 4 day work weeks too.
I wish I didn't hate my job. I would work proper 10+ hours a day for a worthy cause. 4 days of boring and unfulfilling stuff is too much
How about a four day week and a three day week? That would even out the economy through the week and accommodate different appetites for work.
The rigid 5-day expectation is just as odd as the old commute-to-the-office expectation
https://web.archive.org/web/20211201195030/https://www.nytim...
I would actually love a 4.5 day workweek, where the half-day is up to the employee to take.
We had something like that at my work. From June-Aug we had "Summer Hours" where we would not have any meetings after 2pm and could stop working if then if there was nothing vital. Not exactly half day but still nice, though not sure why it's just for summer time...
The thinking is probably that more people are likely to be heading somewhere for the weekend in the summer or at least doing some Friday evening activity.
In general though I observe that I'm seeing a lot fewer scheduled Friday meetings than on other days and, while things sometimes need to get handled on Friday afternoon, people are often pretty apologetic is they schedule a Friday PM meeting.
Better to do 9 days in 10 or really make it to 4 (longer) days, IMO. Because then you're saving some commuter trips for people who have to be on site.
I think 4x9 as a nominal workweek makes a whole lot of sense. (9 days x 8 hours) / (2 weeks) is almost as good.
My company started 1/2 day Fridays a few months ago in what was billed as a temporary experiment. Today it was announced that we'd be keeping them permanently. From my point of view it has been a big improvement for everyone there. Having some time to play with my daughter during the day time is great, especially during winter while the days are short and the sun is already down by the time I am done working.
Easy: No.
We can barely get a small percentage of jobs converted to remote. What makes people even hope for 4-day work weeks to be common?
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
Stress makes it feel like less work and more time is necessary. I think the stress we feel is really a crisis about work feeling meaningless. If our work felt more meaningful, and engaging, we'd be happy to work far longer, and far more intensely. That stress gets exploited by the journalists, who, needing clicks, keep rewriting the same prose variants promising some "hope" of less raw obligated hours of meaningless work.
This hope looks to be pregnant with the promise that shorter work hours would leave more time to pursue work that feels meaningful to us while allowing us to support ourselves... But a question worth asking is how much of it would just get absorbed into the indolence that most of us have let ourselves slip too much time and energy into. I contend that the hope for shorter hours is indeed not pregnant, but simply sporting a beer gut.
EDIT: I went through the struggle of clinging to this hope. I'm still stressed by exhausting time management problems and there seems to be no systematic panacea approach that will make them go away. But fully letting go of this hope, and the tacit resentfulness that comes with its unfulfillment was one of the best things I've done in the last few months and I would whole heartedly recommend it. My psychological resources can be re-distributed to something better; I could dedicate that mental energy to finding or performing work I _do_ consider meaningful.
wasnt there a post about this recently and the comments pointed out how 50 years ago articles like this existed? iirc then we havent made a lot of progress
People are just lazy, greedy, and never satisfied. After 4-day workweek is a norm, people would think working 4 days a week is a horrible crime against mankind by capitalism, and ask for 3-day workweeks, etc. This will keep going until the country is broke and everyone is f*ked, but who cares if it doesn't happen in the next 10 years?
You mean NOT extract the maximum return on our labor investment? Lol, no.
Sincerely, your ruling oligarchs.
Came here to post something similar. Sort of nation-wide legislation (or some combo of CA, TX, FL and NY going this way on their own), we'll never see it. The ruling class has too much to loose. Even for creates and professionals, where there's an arguable case for higher productivity over 4 days vs 5, I don't see them ever giving up the control granted to them by the 5th day.
I _almost_ fell for the clickbait, but then I remembered Betteridge's law of headlines.
Nice, didn't know about that one. Cool law.
two day work week would be even better...
More junk economics from the NYT socialists
Please people, step out of your USA bubble.
I (Dutch guy) haven't had a more than 4 day workweek in the last 20 years.
It is _your_ choice to "work" 5 days.
The 40 hour workweek wasn't created for the worker's benefit, it was created because the owner of the factory saw that that was the most efficient.
Paying people to work longer didn't give him benefit.
It’s definitely not just a US thing. In NZ the vast majority of people work 5 days. I suspect probably the same in AU and UK.
Definitely also still the case in Denmark, which is a stone's throw away from the Dutch. Don't think this is in any way illustrative of a US-bubble.
> Please people, step out of your USA bubble
This is an article from the New York Times. New York is in the USA.
Hell I’m in the USA and I work a four day work week (four six hour days!!). Last time I was job hunting I simply told every prospective employer my desired schedule and I found one small organization that was fine with that. It’s life changing!
I’m not sure what you mean by “choice”? Even in NL, the majority of companies and contracts are for 5 days. And a 4-day negotiation always comes with a 20% pay cut, for monthly salary, resulting bonus, and holiday bonus.
Most of Europe works 5 days, 40 hr weeks. Sounds like you're in a bubble.
But 40 hours with or without lunch breaks? Based on the stereotypical 9-to-5 job, in the UK lunch breaks seem to be paid, so at a guess there's only 35 to at worst 37.5 actually worked hours per week.
In Germany on the other hand lunch breaks typically aren't paid, and a 40 hr week means 40 actually worked hours, _plus_ however long your lunch breaks are (half an hours is the legal minimum for an eight hour workday).
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