Ah yes, the economy. The thing we all need to endlessly sacrifice our lives for out of fear something terrible will happen otherwise. A fear that those in power yield continually like a stick that is very rarely backed up by facts and sensible ideas. The same economy that is leading to massive wealth inequality regardless of how much people work to stop being beaten by the stick.

It’s not crazy to suggest you need to balance labor demands with the demands of efficiently running a business.

Agreed. It’s too bad company leaders want nothing of the sort unless it’s a boulder on one side vs a pebble on the other side of the scale.

> working 32 hours is not as productive as 40 hours.

Absolute statements like this on this topic are invalid. It’s relative and fluid and not something you can prove scientifically and definitively.

It's safe to say 32 hours of work does not produce more than 40 hours.

The gray area is the point at which there are diminishing returns. Is that between 32 and 40 hours, or more? And how much do they diminish?

No, that's not safe at all. On the context of the article, I would expect writers total production to increase steadily with decreasing hours on that interval.

> It's safe to say 32 hours of work does not produce more than 40 hours.

This is too simple. 32 hours of huge output may produce more than 40 hours of light output. If the machine/human output is a constant, then sure you’re correct. But that’s not true. And that’s my point. It’s relative and fluid. It’s relative to the work, the individual, the health of the individual, the weather that day, and on and on.

But 40 hours includes 32 hours. If you can produce a huge output in 32 hours then you can produce a huge output + 8 hours worth of work in 40 hours.

there would be less time available for rest compared to a 32-hour week, which could potentially lead to reduced productivity

By that logic why wouldn’t the maximum be at 168 hours?

Clearly there is some cost to more hours that causes the maximum to be at strictly less than the maximum. Given that we have no reason to assume 40 hours is better than 32 hours.

Studies have shown time and time again that a 4 day work week results in higher productivity and happier employees. Happy employees also do better work.

No they have not. Studies by motivated parties show in some cases there are diminishing returns.

It's a non-sensical argument. If a 4 day work week is more productive than a 5 day work week it means the 5th days is producing negative work. You could literally do nothing every Friday and you would not be less productive than a 4 day work week.

> It's a non-sensical argument.

Your take is equally non-sensical. There is no magical constant unit of time that represents maximum productivity. It’s all relative and fluid. It’s based on many many variables. And even if such a time existed for one person in one company for one week, it wouldn’t be neatly packaged like “40 hours”. It would likely seem random like 34 hours 20 minutes and 25 seconds.

Arguing over such a universal time is as much a waste a time as arguing over the perfect diet. It’s relative.

What's nonsensical is your bad take. First and foremost, if workers say they're happier, you have no method of disputing that and every study that captures the employees perspective is literally saying the exact same thing. Find me some data that says humans want to work longer hours, we will all wait...

It also sounds like you're not familiar with simple ideas like Parkinson’s Law. Listen to yourself, you don't think people are fucking off at work? It's business hours and you're on hacker news not doing work, case and point.

> You could literally do nothing every Friday and you would not be less productive than a 4 day work week.

This would be an accurate statement for most work places. People are often creating negative value in the modern workplace in the form on tech debt, new bugs, unwanted features, meetings that drain the rest of the staff...

5 days isn't productive for knowledge and creative work, it leaves people in a state of perpetual burn out and greatly lowers the quality of output.

That's not non-sensical at all. It's completely plausible. In any task, fatigue results in diminishing marginal productivity, to the point where taking time to rest and recover will sometimes boost total productivity more than spending that time working. Evidence, not blanket dismissal, is required to determine if that's true for Fridays.

> If a 4 day work week is more productive than a 5 day work week it means the 5th days is producing negative work

Or it could mean that increasing weekly time off by 50% improves people's happiness and productivity, or that a 5 day work week results in days of work that are less productive than in a 4 day work week.

Productivity is output per hour worked. So you can work fewer hours and be more productive and produce less output all at the same time.

There's reason for skepticism, but negative work doesn't seem impossible to me. If you've got a 2 hour status meeting that zaps your motivation, reducing productivity by 50% for the remaining 6 hours of the day, that meeting produced -1 hours of work. (And if you postulate that 32 hours is the limit of productivity for the average employee, those kind of soul-sucking meetings are exactly what you'd expect to be scheduled to fill out the remaining 8.)

It’s very easy to produce negative work as a programmer so this isn’t as silly as you assume. How often have I spent hours debugging some code only to realize I did something stupid after staying up late the previous night.

If that were true, why isn't every company adopting 4 day work weeks?

How many have even tried it? Companies are profit-seeking but that doesn't mean they will automatically make correct profitable decisions at every juncture. They're led by humans who generally make small conservative changes based on intuition. We see companies languish, stagnate, and miss critical strategic opportunities all the time.

Poor management is endemic. Managers are for the most part trying to maximize their ego/status. This means having their "underlings" grinding away (preferably in view) for as many hours as possible. That this situation is bad for the company doesn't matter since management is the one executing the poor decisions.

I think there is a change of attitude with a shorter work week. If I am working 9-5 at the same place everyday, I basically live there. It is easier to decide to take more breaks because there is no Friday to relax or get chores done or go to appointments. I take every other Friday off and it helps me focus more at work. I schedule all my weekday appointments for Friday (as much as I can). Monday thru Thursday I can push a little harder and be a little more focused because I know I have Friday (or a week from Friday) to take my dog to the vet, me to the doctor, or whatever else I need to do. I would love a real 4 day work week.

Power, greed? Why do CEO's make 100x their employees? Some things just don't make sense.

If I was incentivized to care about business productivity (almost no IC is) why should I care if I’m more or less productive? My quality of life only goes up the fewer hours I work so unless there’s some incentive pushing the other way. It’s fine that business and workers have different incentive directions. We’ve been making workers more and more productive with computers and automation. Why shouldn’t I work a little less?

That's why these are two forces: the interests of the business, and the interests of the workers. The idea is that they negotiate and compromise, and a good balance is found.

I agree with the additional clarification that the interest of the business is somewhat the interest of the workers (and vice-versa).

My point is there exist many things that workers might want for their immediate benefit but shouldn't want because ultimately it will be bad for them via an unhealthy business and/or economy.

Remember, when someone says "X works", what they mean is "X is effective at accomplishing what I want to accomplish, and I don't give a shit what you want to accomplish".

In this meaning, when the headline says "unions work", it is being 100% honest.

Second sentence of the article: "This is a great example of how unions can really work for their members."

> And no, working 32 hours is not as productive as 40 hours.

By this logic, working 48 hours is more productive, working 54 hours even more productive, 62 hours even more productive. It can be cranked up even more - the English did and took meticulous records on it.

Dialecticaly it created a strong Labour party which took power in 1945 and nationalized coal, the bank of England, hospitals, telecommunications, national rail, iron and steel - the commanding heights of the economy.