That experiment started in February 2000, a time where telework and work from home and other policies were much less common. Automation in the past 17 years have invalidated a lot of 'work' people do as well.

The idea that 40-50 is some magic number is the more ridicouls claim imo. If anything, progress, technology, and automation should naturally drive down hours needed per week. No one at my job does nearly the same amount of work we did 10-15 years ago. Our Fridays are all 'work from home' which is code for 'maybe check your email or finish up something.'

Our work world is only changing. Rolling with the changes makes sense to me and 35 hour or 4 day work-weeks seem like the a rational change. We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it by pretending to be busy or working at much slower paces in fear of layoffs.

Also French experiemnt only lasted until 2004, when reforms were put in to raise the maximum amount of work allowable per month. I think its disingenuous to say that it 'failed.' It had a short 4 year run almost two decades ago. The world of 2017 is very different from the world of 2000-2004.

> We should be benefiting from automation, not punished by it

That's such a great point. It's a signal that something is wrong if automating tedious work away creates more misery instead of less.

Getting paid to do a job = 'misery' now, apparently. Maybe we should all go back to working in the fields from sunrise to sunset and avoid all this 'tedious work' for regular pay, benefits, vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells.

If automation was creating 40-hour/week jobs with benefits, I think people would be pretty happy with it. Instead it's polarizing the labor market into underemployed service workers and overemployed professionals.

Children working in factories losing fingers every month got paid too. I think the idea that we've now, in 2017, reached perfection in employment is ridiculous.

I also think "go do farmwork if your job sucks" is dismissive and below the standards of HN discussions. There's always something worse, that doesn't mean we shouldn't ever complain.

I agree. I have a job I love (after numerous jobs which sucked), but I'd still vote for less working hours/days so I could actually, you know, LIVE: spend time with family and friends, enjoy nature, have hobbies, etc. The way I see it half the week should be for work, and half for life. So we should all work Monday through Wednesday, and half a day on Thursday.

>Getting paid to do a job = 'misery' now, apparently

It has always been a misery, even back to biblical times. In fact, having to work for his living was the original punishment for Adam.

Ancient Greeks and Romans, as another example, considered work beneath the dignity of free citizens. Not even Christianism was pro-work for the better part of 2 millennia. Older societies valued the fruits of work, but not work itself as much. Work only became a virtue in modern times because of the protestant-derived work ethic and the Horatio Alger types.

>* Maybe we should all go back to working in the fields from sunrise to sunset and avoid all this 'tedious work' for regular pay, benefits, vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells.*

You'd be surprised. People work more in tedious cubicles than they did in medieval times (where scholars calculate something like 150+ days of the year devoted to festivities and holidays). Much less stressed, too, especially for those farmers free from feudal lords asking for most of their produce. The life of a farmer in France (and I know of several) is so much better (in vacation time, lunch breaks and closing bells -- and sometimes in pay too) than the average office drone that it's not even funny.

But that's a strawman, anyway, as nobody suggested we get back to the farms.

Aren't suicide rates among modern farmers among the higher. Long working hours and low wages because of the demanding market.

Peasants don't get emails after sunset and their vacation time were entire seasons off between harvest and seeding.

Sounds great to be a peasant. Wonder why so many peasants try so hard not to be one.[1]

[1]https://www.ft.com/content/44096ed2-eeb0-11e4-a5cd-00144feab...

From the very article you've linked to:

“Rapidly rising migrant wages in cities and shortages of low-skilled labor suggest that fewer people than before — and fewer than warranted on economic grounds — choose to leave the countryside to move to the city.”

And, from the same article:

"Becoming a migrant was a matter of necessity for her and her husband as they attempted to save their family from a crushing debt. She is now materially wealthier than she could ever be from working her family’s tiny plot of land. But the things she has lost, including her marriage and the chance to watch her two daughters (now aged 14 and 21) grow into young women, make it hard to convince herself she made the right choice. For her and her family, the things they held most precious have been destroyed in the process of trying to save them".

It's easy to be lured by BS promises of wealth and consumerism and life in the "big city" and many did. But even the article you've posted argues that the trend is reversing...

No one here is making a "back to nature" argument.

Up until the great depression this was taken for granted.

There was even a "share the work" movement, something we could probably do with now.

Is that 35h with lunch, or without lunch? Different countries measure it differently.

e.g. I believe my contract says I have a 35h work week, but that doesn't include an hour a day for a lunch break. But I believe the US measurement does include the lunchbreak, which makes my 35h work week the same as the US 40h work week.

State law is what determines when and how breaks are to be taken. In most states, there is no law that requires an employer to give their employee breaks, let alone pay for them. In my experience, I've had mostly unpaid break times while an hourly employee.

So it's common to earn 8 hours pay working 8-5, with two 15 minute "cigarette" breaks and a 30 minute lunch break.

Typically a 35 hour workweek is 7 hour days with up to an hour of unpaid lunch.

Don't rely on laws to fix this. Simply don't sign employment contracts that don't work for you. I think a lot of the HN crowd can afford that.

This will guarantee that a change won't happen. I think a whole lot more of the HN crowd and the greater crowd won't demand less hour when "everyone else" is doing "normal" hours, even if they might "afford" it. I think you underestimate the power of wanting to be normal.

If enough special snowflake people would demand 6 hour work week that might become the new normal. But in my experience these demanding flake people seem to on the contrary be very confident that they can do 60 hr work weeks and be 10x productive so the demand is rather astronomical pay rather than fewer hours. Which is why currently the "normal" working hours instead seem to be increasing.

But if you believe in free will. This is correct answer, because everybody get to choose to work 60 hrs and no laws should interfere with that. No matter how much research says that this is not a sustainable way of life.