Employers are almost required to approve a request to work less hours than full time. The reasons why it would not be allowed are fairly minimal. The only reasons allowed are:
- Nobody else can take over the work (ie very specialized knowledge)
- Insurmountable problems with work shift planning (simply having to hire another person is not considered insurmountable)
- Not enough money or work (rare, would primarily occur for people wanting to work more instead of less)
- No space in the personnel formation (would presumably also mostly apply for people wanting to work more rather than less)
In addition this law only applies to companies with more than 10 employees, the employee requesting part time has to work there for at least 26 weeks and they need to file the request at least 8 weeks in advance (to give the employer time to hire additional people)
That said, yes it is great and I agree completely with TFA. I fully believe that having 5 employees at 32 hours/week is better for a company than 4 employees at 40 hours/week, for the reasons stated in the article. It is better for employees too, because an extra day a week to do errands (while the kids are at school!) brings some much needed extra time in a household where both partners are working. Even if you are not married having more time for yourself can be a great choice if you already have enough income.
Government workers are well organized and don't notice that the rules they thought up (and are responsible for having enforced) actually are ignored by most non-government employers.
In fact, government is usually calling for a more flexible labor market, even though the Dutch labor market is among the most flexible in the EU (if not the most flexible as, again, any costs to getting rid of employees in an illegal fashion are neglible in the first place. They are also not enforced at all unless the illegally fired employee has the wherewithal to sue. Which is not trivial for lower paid people as access to subsidized legal help has been slashed. And even if you have a fixed term/hour contract, no country has as many temps and contractors which can be shown the door by the people paying their fees, which leads to unhealthy power dynamics with their immediate employer as well.)
So yes, in theory (and for government workers in practice) it's all nice.
I'm a software dev and was one of the two employees with in-depth knowledge about a crucial part of the stack, so I had more leverage than most, but still the response was so much "yeah of course, we have to allow this by law" that I would be surprised if any of my colleagues would have had a different response.
There's also the power dynamic to think of: are you really going to ask your boss to change your hours if you think that he/she will react badly and only grudgingly allow it?
Or maybe I'm completely off base... but anyhow, I guess I just wanted to point out that it's not clear to me whether this law has teeth.
"It would be more expensive" is clearly not an insurmountable problem. "But they don't have the requisite knowledge" is also not insurmountable, as it can obviously be mitigated by extra training.
That said, taxation and society as a whole is structured such that it doesn't always make sense to work 5 days. Like the author mentions, in a certain tax bracket you effectively lose 10% of your income to go from a 5 day to a 4 day work week.
Then, if you have kids, getting daycare reduces the benefits of working full time even further. To wit: I spend ~€1250/month after tax cuts on putting two kids into daycare, for 2 days. That exceeds my mortgage.
Earn more? Less tax cuts. Work longer hours? Be prepared to fork over even more money.
This isn't downstream impact. It's more of a choice. The women choose not to strive for senior level roles. They express this choice by choosing the 4 day work week.
We shouldn't call it an unintended downstream impact because it's not something that should be corrected. If women choose not to work as hard as men, then we shouldn't try to equalize their participation in senior roles.
Speaking from personal experience with a cohort of Millenial dads: a lot of "women working less to prioritize family" comes down to women being expected to be caregivers and men typically not having experienced the same socialization from a young age and feeling overwhelmed, thus retreating into work to both avoid care work and be able to justify it by being "the provider".
It's pretty telling when we chastise women for "not pulling their weight" at work when they're also typically expected to do most of the household chores, social labor (e.g. keeping track of birthdays, relationships and preferences throughout the family's social circles) and caregiving but don't call out deadbeat dads like Elon Musk who sire new children left and right while being completely incapable of maintaining a relationship with any of the mothers and abandoning any child that calls him out for his bullshit once they get old enough to form an opinion. And as a reminder: Musk holds several official positions including multiple C-tier ones and still spends an ungodly amount of time shitposting on Twitter. If you think that the time he spends on any one of his jobs on average accounts for more than the equivalent of a 4 day work week while also being this heavily distracted and spread thin, you're being ridiculous.
It is not an expectation. It's been part of human behavior across all cultures since history. Men are the workers and women are the care givers and home makers. The behavior is seen so consistently across cultures that it's safe to say it's more then social conditioning. It's biological. Humans are flexible enough to behave outside of biological parameters but you are in utter denial if you deny the evidence that spans across ancient history and all cultures across the world.
But this is besides the point. The point is if I run a business, my objective is to succeed. My objective is not to hire some women who wants to do a 4 day work week to support a child. It may be beneficial to the mother to give her advantages but it is not beneficial to me as the person who spent my hard earned cash paying her.
>It's pretty telling when we chastise women for "not pulling their weight" at work when they're also typically expected to do most of the household chores, social labor (e.g. keeping track of birthdays, relationships and preferences throughout the family's social circles) and caregiving but don't call out deadbeat dads like Elon Musk who sire new children left and right while being completely incapable of maintaining a relationship with any of the mothers and abandoning any child that calls him out for his bullshit once they get old enough to form an opinion.
As a person who risked all my resources on a business how the hell does house hold chores apply to me? If the woman demands to have the same pay and rank as the hard working guy who works 5 days a week because she spent a lot of time caring for some kid that has nothing to do with my business, how is that fair to me?
It's asking for a handout. And sure if the government wants to force me to give a hand out to make society a better place than great. I support this. What I don't support is this lie that what was given out is anything but a hand out. It is extra help and it is not something that was earned with fair trade. The person who devotes the most effort and has the best results deserves the most reward.
>If you think that the time he spends on any one of his jobs on average accounts for more than the equivalent of a 4 day work week while also being this heavily distracted and spread thin, you're being ridiculous.
If you're asking me what I think is ridiculous I would say your response to me is ridiculous. Not being snarky here, your hypothetical implies ridiculousness and I respond with another hypothetical about your statement.
What does Elon have to do with anything? If Elon sired 50 children and abandoned them, that's evil and wrong, but that's completely orthogonal to my business. I pay someone for results and Elon delivers. What he does outside of that is a completely different thing.
In general Men spend more time and more effort at work so they tend to deliver better results and thus they get more senior positions. It's obvious if women choose a 4 day work week they're just not as into it as men and thus they get paid less and get less senior positions.
Not all women make the choice to take care of children. A good number of women choose to do what the men do and when you control for that the data shows that the gender pay gap largely disappears. https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gende...
I support equal pay and standards for the women who deliver equal results as men. Are you saying you don't support this? You support unequal standards? You support handouts for women when they raise kids? It's a valid thing to support. But don't call it what it isn't. It is a gift and not something women are entitled to.
It's valuable to you as a person who has kids.
You will note the majority of people in the US will not have kids.
Why should I pay for your kid? You have to put yourself in the shoes of the person who doesn't have kids. Or the business owner who actually has to hand out the money. I support the payment because I have kids, but at the same time I'm able to play the devils advocate and see the other side of the equation rather then blindly support something in my own self interest.
To further the point, the decision whether to have a kid can be influenced by how that affects someone’s own finances. These programs put a finger on the scale to encourage having children, something that financially to the individual doesn’t make sense with modern jobs. Many countries have negative pop growth today and that *will* be a national financial problem
Why make me pay for that?
Negative population growth has benefits. Japan doesn't have a housing crisis like the US.
Like I said two sides to every story. I'd rather have flat population growth not positive growth and helping me pay for child care in a cause I don't believe in is not fair.
The fairness argument is just a general argument against all redistribution of wealth, if you are against all redistribution then many popular programs and policies are already failing your moral test.
What do men not take care of kids? Don't we already give benefits to people who are married?
Except that's not true, is it? It's somewhat consistent "across cultures" today, as are many things that are barely decades or centuries old. If you look at isolated peoples that are likely closer to "our biology", you see something very different. This makes sense if you consider that the atomic family is a fairly recent phenomenon. Even agrarian societies did not necessarily have a division of labor across the gender binary: harvest meant everyone had to help, including children. Even the idea of blood kinship breaks down in agrarian Europe with farmhands being part of the family "unit" in a way more resembling adoption than employment.
> If the woman demands to have the same pay and rank as the hard working guy who works 5 days a week because she spent a lot of time caring for some kid that has nothing to do with my business, how is that fair to me?
I don't know what strawman you're trying to construct here but I never said someone working 4 days a week is entitled to the same pay as someone working 5 days a week if their contribution is entirely measured in hours. In fact I said nothing about pay or social welfare at all.
I do think it's funny you seem to value "more hours worked" as a measure of entitlement on a website that's literally all about "working smarter not harder"(what did you think a "hack" is?) but it sounds like you're more invested in evopysch nonsense and 2010s era pay gap discourse so I don't see any point in continuing this conversation.
You can't quantify working smarter. It's a vague term.
What we do know, (and you know this as well you're just not thinking critically) is that over a large population those that generally work more hours get more done and do better across the board. That's a statistical and data driven metric. Not some hand wavy "work smarter" bullshit.
What are you implying? that women are smarter than men so of course if they put less hours in their smartness suddenly makes up for the stupidity that is men? Come on.
This isn't a strawman, it's called common sense.
>Except that's not true, is it?
You ask, so I answer: It is true. There are enough exceptions that someone can construct a counter argument/research paper via miscellaneous examples but the general majority across current cultures and past cultures that men take on the bread winner role.
If you're so violently opposed to the notion that hours spent "butt in seat" is a good metric for entitlement to compensation, why exactly are we having this conversation on HN?
> What we do know, (and you know this as well you're just not thinking critically) is that over a large population those that generally work more hours get more done and do better across the board.
Interestingly there are studies demonstrating that the absolute loss of productivity from 4 day weeks compared to 5 day weeks is negligible in most jobs. Even for 25 hour weeks (i.e. 5 hour days) the absolute loss of productivity is not even remotely proportional to the difference in hours. There have even been examples of one full time job being split into two part time jobs resulting in greater productivity. Turns out most jobs (and especially knowledge work or creative work) don't function like conveyor belt manufacturing.
> This isn't a strawman, it's called common sense.
I'm starting to believe you don't know what either of these two things mean given that those two things aren't mutually exclusive nor do they apply to the same thing. Also common sense is a heuristic, not an empirical source. It's just a fancy way of saying "gut feeling" rather than looking at actual research.
> What are you implying? that women are smarter than men so of course if they put less hours in their smartness suddenly makes up for the stupidity that is men? Come on.
Again your unstated prejudices are showing. And again I have to remind you that at no point did I say two people working doing the same work for different amounts of hours should be paid the same wage. This is your strawman you seem to want to attack, not something I said.
> There are enough exceptions that someone can construct a counter argument/research paper via miscellaneous examples but the general majority across current cultures and past cultures that men take on the bread winner role.
Because god forbid someone debunks the renaissance era myth of the hunter-gatherer division of labor, I guess, despite zero archeological evidence for it and plenty of counter-evidence from looking at isolated indigeneous communities still in existence at the time. I guess it's just "common sense" that things have always been as they are and there's no such thing as a cultural bias that may inform our interpretation of data about the past, especially during the early stages of modern science when we tried to interpret the past through the lens of understanding ourselves to be at the pinnacle of human evolution.
Sorry, you're of course right. Historical studies and archeology never evolved past 19th century navel-gazing and if it feels true to you that is the absolute standard for empirical evidence we should all adhere to. Men always won the bread, whatever that means for a pre-agrarian society. One man, one woman, barefoot and pregnant at the stove as god intended. All of history just incidentally happens to reflect the cultural mores of early modern European aristocracy that rediscovered it. Sorry, I really have to tap out now. You've won this debate with facts and logic.
Tap out after writing a looong essay? That's another common strategy for geniuses who want the final word. Spend sooo much energy spilling your thoughts and then running away not wanting to deal with the fallout of the effort spent writing your retort. Why? Because you're insecure about it. Yeah no point in arguing your points if you're scared. I truly am sorry that you're scared. HN shouldn't be a place where people are like that.
This is a myopic, reductionist take. You're missing the forest for the trees. It is not a matter of women choosing not to work as hard as men, it is a matter of society being structured in such a way that men are disproportionately not involved in raising a family, and women being delegated to the task of caregiver even though they themselves would like more equality.
Economically, women are pressured to stay out of the workplace for 6+ months, whereas men get a couple of days-weeks to stay at home.
Think bigger. For eons and millennia society has been structured this way since forever. It's only in the recent three or four decades has there been a cultural shift. Men have been taking home the income since they were hunting, farming and now programming.
Women taking home the money is a new thing. That only happened in the last 50 or so years. And the social pressures aren't even forcing them to take home the money. To women, it's just an option. For men the pressure is worse. For men it's a social requirement... the survival of the family unit still rests entirely on their shoulders.
But again this is besides the point. The main question here is, how does this new opportunity for women to make money suddenly make women deserve a hand out when they choose divide the time devoted to these new opportunities with care giving? You do less work and as a business owner I have to give you the same pay because you're entitled to it? How does that logic work out? It doesn't.
If an employee works 4 days a week and obviously has his/her attention divided to other endeavors how does he/she deserve a promotion? Are you kidding? Maybe in her eyes she deserves a promotion, but as a business owner I'd rather promote the single guy who is 100% dedicated because he's the one that actually deserves it.
That being said if society wants to make themselves better and give hand outs to women for caregiving... I'm all for it. But don't twist it any other way. What's going on here is a charity. A kind gift to caregivers who are not entitled to said gift in any way.
Don't come to me as if women deserve promotions because they have kids to take care of or social pressures to deal with. That's just garbage. Also don't get me started on the pressures on men, it's magnitudes larger than it is for women, magnitudes and we don't go around screaming for a handout.
> Women taking home the money is a new thing.
This is ill founded claptrap smacking of near zero exposure to working history.
Farms in history would fail without women doing vast amounts of seriously hard work.
Hunter-Gather societies mainly functioned on what was gathered, predominantly by women.
It took both working together to make these things work.
China: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10834-014-9417-0
Afghanistan: https://ivypanda.com/essays/gender-role-in-afghanistan/#:~:t....
Western culture: (also describes the recent societal change) https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Breadwinner_model
Congo: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0192513X2110223...
Ancient greece: https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/greek-culture/greek-culture...
India: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/02/key-findi...
Mayan culture: https://samnoblemuseum.ou.edu/collections-and-research/ethno....
Inuit: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Inuit_women
mesoamerica: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gender_roles_in_pre-Columbian_Me...
There's a consistent pattern here that illustrates a general norm.
Modern Chinese wives in the US has F-All to do with traditional farming or Hunter Gatherers.
Home school essays submitted that outline the writers own particular bias are not exactly peak Histographic study.
An essay on Mayan division of labor does not undercut the reality that there's a ton of work to do and it gets split up (see my closing point), it actually reinforces it.
To reiterate - woman work just as hard as men in traditional farming and hunter gatherer lifestyles and your wealth of links don't run counter to that statement.
But even so an "essay" isn't wrong. I can find tons more because this pattern is real. Just a simple search yields so many results. Rather then attack the weakest link in an obvious counter strategy that has an agenda you should address the overall point at hand in good faith discussion. It's like I present to you 10 links and you dismiss the whole thing because one was an "essay" give me a break.
I never said women don't work as hard as men don't put words in my mouth. But the roles of what men and women do generally have clear delineation.
>It's not to your credit that you attempt to bludgeon yor way through with a mass of links in the hope that no one will look closely.
It's not because I didn't do this. All I did was do a quick search to prove your obviously wrong point wrong.
It's not to your credit to provoke such an accusatory and targeted attack.
You say I hope you wouldn't look to closely... well you looked closely and took 2 minor and miniscule details and constructed a full fledged baseless counter attack. Yeah, sure. What you're doing is called a witch hunt, doesn't look like your trying to start a discussion... Seems your in it for optics.
If I was in it for the optics, this point wouldn't even be brought up. Threads like this attract negative karma for me because it's not a mainstream opinion.
Bro, I want you to look closely. Press your eyes on every letter. You present facts which you pulled out of your ass, I present sources. Address the sources wholistically.
I will not engage in much of this angry diatribe because if you use words like "charity" and "hand outs", you're placing yourself on a level of discourse reserved for redpilled /pol/ commenters and angry incels. Please reflect on the high emotional content, and where these emotions flow from. It's not pretty imo.
The one comment I want to make is that you're missing my point, out of your own malice or out of my lack of clarity, so here goes.
I tell my coworkers (I'm male) that I'll be gone for three months after the birth of our daughter: "but isoprophlex, you don't breastfeed, why stay at home at all?". Out of ~15 weeks leave, only one is fully paid. As long as societies, and expectations, are structured in such a way that women are pressured into leaving the workforce (relatively compared to men), the divide will keep existing.
This was my point.
No need for frothing about how you'd "never promote a 4d/wk resource over one who's 100% dedicated."
I gave my opinion in good faith and you turned around and spewed vile personal insults. We're done.
Equality is about equal pay for equal results. Not handouts. People forget that although the handout might be good for society overall it is unfair to the person giving out the handout.
I don't think this step is intermediate. It is the most fair step possible.
If those workaholics are women then those women very much need to be promoted as well. The data actually shows this is already happening. It shows that when you control for the choices women make about child care... the gender pay gap is largely negligible.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gende...
This is an interesting podcast about the topic if you haven't hear of this concept already. They interview a female statistical professor from Harvard about it.
Claudia Goldin, the economic "Nobel" Laurette this year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudia_Goldin
The word “unintended,” while probably accurate, is bothersome. The intention should be to maximize individual choice. Are we supposed to force women into senior positions to please our sensibilities?