The research around shorter work weeks and productivity indicates "units of work" don't work that way.

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/06/1013348626/iceland-finds-majo...

> Now, research out of Iceland has found that working fewer hours for the same pay led to improved well-being among workers, with no loss in productivity. In fact, in some places, workers were more productive after cutting back their hours.

That's true in the sort of desk jobs most of the people who inhabit Hacker News do. It's patently not true of things like manufacturing line work, delivery drivers, chefs, and call centre operators. A chef can't drop 8 hours a week and still expect to serve the same number of meals because of efficiency gains, and a call centre needs to be accessible at the times people are calling.

For the record I fully support any push to reduce the amount of work people are expected to do, but claiming there's no impact because of productivity gains just doesn't add up in many cases.

Actually, this is largely true even for other professions. A chef for example will slow down significantly after 5 hours of work and make more mistakes, so will manufacturing line workers and call center operators.

For sure, some jobs are more affected than others. But there are few jobs that aren't affected at all, and we shouldn't cut off the nose to spite the face.

> That's true in the sort of desk jobs most of the people who inhabit Hacker News do. It's patently not true of things like manufacturing line work, delivery drivers, chefs, and call centre operators.

The study wasn't restricted to desk jobs. Broader studies and international comparisons lead to a similar though weaker conclusion; in general more working hours over the range seen in most of the world (from about the mid-20s average hours worked per week, including both full workweek length and time off up) leads to a dramatic fall off in per-hour productivity.

> A chef can't drop 8 hours a week and still expect to serve the same number of meals because of efficiency gains...

Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps being better rested makes them collaborate better with the other chefs. Maybe the improved morale helps come up with a new menu item, or a more efficient way to make a dish. Maybe they wind up staving off carpal tunnel.

If the task is coverage-related (“be available to run a cash register” or “answer any phone call that comes in” or “watch this area for security purposes”), it’s exactly that ratio.

> If the task is coverage-related (“be available to run a cash register” or “answer any phone call that comes in” or “watch this area for security purposes”), it’s exactly that ratio.

But no task that actually needs done is purely coverage related. If you want someone to watch dor security purposes, you want them to actually effectively secure it to some level, and if average ability to do that drops from overwork you need more people; if you want someone to run a cash register, just having a body next to it isn't enough, they have to actually perform correctly.

Many coverage-related jobs don't require a person's full potential productivity, so the fact that their productivity goes down with hours worked is irrelevant. If a cashier at a low-volume store only rings up a customer every 10 minutes but you've decided that they need to stay parked by the register all day rather than doing other tasks between customers, it doesn't matter if it takes them twice as long to ring up a customer at the end of their shift as at the start.

Not all companies are going to decrease wages in response to this legislation. In fact I'd be willing to bet it's less than 50% of companies. Right now we are already in a huge labor shortage because employers aren't paying enough to attract the workers they need. Companies that don't decrease wages in this situation will out-compete companies that do decrease wages if the primary scarce resource right now is workers.

This is similar to what's happening right now with companies that try to do locality adjustments for remote workers -- they get out-competed by companies willing to pay full price regardless of location. Eventually this will cause locality adjustments to vanish completely imo.

> If you have 90 units of work to be done you might hire 9 workers at 10 units each. If the standard work goes down by 10%, you now need 10 workers at 9 units each.

Assuming per-hour productivity is constant, which it is not; productivity goes down with more hours worked (both in a “full work week” and in the annual number of full work weeks.)

It's worse because you have more management overhead all the way to the chain, more HR and support needs, and more office space required.

A rule of thumb is a worker's full cost is 2x their salary in the US. This varies, but it makes the math easy.

So costs would increase about double that. But if your workers are doing creative work, they might be more productive now per hour and that might offset the costs.

"Unit of work" is not really a thing for anything other than repetitive physical labor. There's a reason why putting 2x the resources on a problem won't get it solved twice as fast.

> "Unit of work" is not really a thing for anything other than repetitive physical labor.

Declining marginal productivity by hours worked per unit time definitely applies to repetitive physical labor past, too.