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."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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.