There is no reason at all you could not reduce all of this to 30 hours a week and get the same amount of productivity accomplished. Why shouldn't people be compensated the same if the end result is the same? For labor intensive job where a human is working as a type of robot then hours of labour is directly correlated with hours of product (with some point of diminishing returns as you overwork people).
The thing is, when you look at the fruits of the labor put in, the result is nearly null. There are people who are working very hard on things that have no real long term (or short term) purpose or function for their employers, it's work that exists because "work" has to be done. When I look at the projects being busily worked on around me, nearly none of them have any value or will make a dent in the overall productivity of the larger company. These people aren't goofing off. This is the ritual of work.
People pray in the privacy of their own home but that doesn't mean there's a god listening. The same goes for the culture of "work" in most large organizations.
Sounds like a great opportunity for a more efficient competitor to undercut this company :D
Jobs running 5, 8 hour days always run on schedule better in the long term it seems (talking 2-3 year building projects) based on past anecdata.
You would think giving the guys an extra day off to rest would help but actually being present on the 5th day tends to be very important when there are major milestones to be hit.
I've seen 4, 10 hour shifts.
I've seen 3, 12 hour shifts + 1, 4 hour shift.
I've seen 5, 8 hour shifts
The schedules created to run 5 days a week always work better.
Now there is a case to be said for having shorter shifts so we can get out of our 40 hour funk zone here in America. I think if you ran a job where only the foreman/superintendents had to be present for 8 hours while the workers worked say 5, 6 hour shifts or even 5, 7 hour shifts would still be better and on time more frequently than pushing someone for 40 hours over fewer days.
People balked when the 40hr workweek was introduced but it ended up lowering injuries and illness and had a net increase effect in productivity.
But what about the case for simply hiring more workers to cover the dip in overall productivity?
The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio has increased almost 1000% since the 70s [1]. Surely this is due to the benefits in technology and automation. Don't the workers deserve to see some of those benefits in the form of shorter weeks?
It is possible for small businesses to adopt it, but perhaps only really in the knowledge worker/high customer contact space. If you're a small ecommerce shop selling lots of actual stuff, then you'll definitely need to have greater role coverage than you otherwise might.
During the rest of the year I just miss work for those appointments, which isn’t the end of the world, but I miss the guilt-free aspect of it.
My gut feeling is that the dev team puts out the same volume of work per month in the summer as we do the rest of the year, but I don’t have any data to substantiate that.
Imagine one has a machine that produces 5X widgets in 5 days. We now want it to be on for only 4 days and as such it produces 4X widgets but at the price of a 5X widget machine ... that just makes it more expensive ...
"We make the case for a general reduction in working hours __without__ a reduction in pay. We also make the case for a steady managed transition to shorter hours with a bolstered welfare state in such a way that the most vulnerable and underpaid in society are protected."
It's hard enough to ask companies to shift to a 4-day workweek for the various reasons outlined in the article and sibling comments, but usually this is accompanied by a corresponding cut in compensation. Adding the "without a reduction in pay" condition makes the proposition much more difficult for small-to-medium sized businesses.
In fairness to the article, there is the possibility of asking employees to work 10hr workdays for 4 days to accommodate the 40-hr work week model (or 8.75hrs/day in France to accommodate their 35-hr work week). Since (most of us?) are already overworked, maybe this then just boils down to a scheduling and staff coverage problem.