The reason for this are statistical perturbations in stochastic events. If a task takes a worker rand(1,4) units of time you can expect them to do day/1 to day/4 tasks in the day.
You look at the worker doing day/1 tasks and you say, "Well shit, that person is slacking most of the time. Most of these tasks take 2 units, 4 is very rare". So you ask them to work harder and impose rules so they must perform day/3 number of tasks per day.
You look at your constantly busy workers and you're happy. No more slack in the system.
But your assembly line grinds to a halt. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Everyone is busy all the time. Everyone's always working. But nothing is finishing.
What gives?
Turns out any task that hits N=4 on the random curve, wreaks havoc and you fall behind. Then you have both yesterday's and today's tasks to do. You can't. The next day ... well the problem ends up growing exponentially.
Efficient systems have slack.
Also, it very well could be that reducing to 4 from 5 does nothing but simply reduce the number of hours 'the factory is operating'. Surely there'd be a bonus because people might be more relaxed, but it's hard to weight that against the lost day.
For example, my local coffee shop is open 7 days a week, let's say that their staff works 5 days on, 2 off so there's a steady rate of staffers.
If they just switched to 4 on 3 off ... I'm not sure anything would materially change in terms of productivity etc. - and 'all else being equal' (i.e. demand, cost of goods, wages/hour), the staffers would simply make less money and I doubt they'd chose that.
But maybe '3/4 days' would be better in some industries than others.
I recommend reading The Phoenix Project. It does a great job of dispelling the myth that software engineering is unpredictable and artisanal and whatnot. At the abstraction layer of a department or division manager it becomes indistinguishable and the same stochastic modeling principles apply.
But that’s besides the point. A more important point is the idea of effectiveness.
4 days of effective work are often better than 5 days of being busy but ineffective.
Personally I get more done in a 4 day week because I am more cut-throat about saying No to things that don’t matter.
Again, this could only be (dis)proven in a large-numbers experiment (so no, not in a single cafe :)), but I don't think this is limited to any one particular area of work.
Going to a 4 day work week would bring the weekly productivity to the level of a 5 day week from the early 2000s while also providing a "virtual" wage increase.
I don't really see companies flocking to sign up.
You could also consider 10 hour four day weeks, though I guess at 10 hours many would see fatigue affecting their work.
I don't find that 10 hours fatigues me, it feels the same as an eight hour day anyway.
US working hours are nuts, IMO.
On the other hand it's possible that a 10h work day becomes less productive than an 8h one if applied long term. Of course it depends on the actual job but it wouldn't leave much time for anything personal. For a lot of jobs 10h shifts sounds like looking for trouble.
Even now, programming on salary, I'd rather do 4 tens, 7-5. The overhead of commuting is what kills me, and it'd actually be less traffic if I went in earlier. Besides, those two hours before everybody else gets there could be more productive than the whole rest of the day.
Even a short commute just kills me. This is why WFH is so effective IMO. Up between 5am and 6am. Workout, then work. Those few hours in the morning before anyone else gets in is when I do most of my 'work' for the day. The rest of the day is meetings, answering questions, etc...
Because many companies are already getting 5x10 out of their salaried employees. They don't want to lose that extra work.
8 hour days are probably a good balance between how much work you can productively put in during one day and the auxiliary time. Increasing the number of hours per day would probably decrease productivity via fatigue. Decreasing the hours wouldn't bring much of a benefit for the worker since the auxiliary time stays mostly the same (you still commute).
A good chunk of the lost productivity would probably be offset by higher worker satisfaction.
https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...
Most important and revealing graph in the entire book
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/wh...
As well as that you have growing land use regulation making certain types of housing illegal, e.g. apartments or houses below a certain area, or flophouses/SROs. Zoning more generally does this everywhere. Most of the residential buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today. So land holders capture much of the gains in productivity and that doesn’t show up in the labour share of productivity growth. But land ownership is extremely widespread; this is the lower middle class and up, not just the rich capturing increases in productivity.
Less important but still significant is that due to the US tax code’s treatment of benefits compensation has gone up more than wages have. The cost of health insurance has gone up enormously since the 70’s, A’s has what you get for your money.
I now take 2-4 hours a day off during the day instead.
Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.
2. Successful businesses are making their owners and shareholders lots of money. As an absolute worst-case scenario, every company takes a 1/5 hit to the profit they produce for their owners.
3. Point #2 means that a four-day work week would do a lot to rebalance the value of capital vs the value of labour. The balance has been tipped towards capital for far too long.
Edit: increased productivity needs to be a huge part of the argument here
What's magic or received about five days?
If your business dies at a 2% loss of profits, i’m ok with that.
But frankly i doubt you’d lose 1/5 of your worker productivity by cutting hours by 1/5 (assuming pay rates stay the same) - so that’s a worst-case scenario where productivity is directly tied to time-spent-working.
But the point was that the loss of pay due to working only 4 days, vs 5 days, is not going to make any workers happy. Business paying 5 days of wages for 4 days of work is not going to make anyone happy, especially shareholders.
You might make up some of the loss by cutting vacation time, but there's no extra room to make up 42 days of lost productivity.
Prices will have to increase to make up for lost profits, but with less money for people to spend, this sounds like a recipe for economic disaster.
If labour is 100% of your company’s costs, then yes you are facing a 20% increase in costs. 100% labour businesses are VERY rare.
It is also very unlikely that cutting hours by 1/5 (while keeping wages stable) would result in a 1/5 loss in productivity. There is so much time wasted in the typical 9-5 workday because nobody can be productive for 8 hours straight.
So if you have a business that’s near 100% labour costs, and the work is such that productivity is very nearly equal ti hours spent working, and your margins can’t take a 20% hit, then yes you are going out of business.
There are whole classes of business that would work if 50 or 60 hour work weeks are legal to mandate - but we don’t care... why do we care about that thin slice of businesses that require a 40 hour work week? 32 hours or bust.
I don’t think that forcing people to do things is ideal, personally.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
If human civilization is to go further, we need to recognize some of our generic assumptions. Work is a means to an end, most commonly a means to support oneself and one's family. It should support us in our basic needs (shelter, food, clothing), and allow us to put our creative and intelligent side to better use.
Sure, some would spend all of their time playing PS4, but by opening up opportunities for everyone in the civilization, civilization as a whole should see progress.
If you don't believe in benefits of the civilization and how it has advanced through history mostly through people with spare time (usually higher classes, but with spare time becoming more accessible, through everybody in the past ~100 years), I am sure you are fine with a bigger, stronger dude walking in and taking your car keys and driving off (that was the status-quo at a distant point in history).
One might be happy making $100k per year. Would they be happier making $1M / year? Yes, probably. That doesn't mean they aren't happy to begin with.
I have long (semi-jokingly) professed belief in the Church of the SubGenius. They extol the virtues of slack. I think the intended meaning of “slack” is as in “to slack off.” But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system.
While some might use that extra day to slack off, plenty more would use that day to invest labors in their communities, maybe to get some exercise, maybe do some neglected repairs around the house.
I feel like in the name of efficiency, we’ve purged a lot of slack from the system, but that has left us with a lot of institutions that are at risk for catastrophic failure. For people who are stretched to their breaking point, there needs to be more slack.