4-Day Work Week
From Treehuggers; “Spain To Try Nationwide 4-Day Workweek”
A shorter workweek has been suggested s a means of improving work-life balance and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Freelance Writer, Olivia Rosane. The topics of a shorter work week and climate control was brought up by Sandwichman at Econospeak with the former being touted numerous times by Sandwichman.
Íñigo Errejón, a representative from the new leftwing party Más País, tweeted that the government had agreed to launch a pilot project to trial a four-day workweek.
“We have agreed with the Government to promote a pilot project to reduce working hours. European funds must also serve to reorient the economy towards improving health, caring for the environment and increasing productivity, ”
Globally the momentum for a work week reduction to 32 hours sans a reduction has been building. As the article reports, Microsoft Japan tested the idea in 2019 and Unilever is currently trialing it in New Zealand. In Europe, the governments of Scotland and Wales are also looking into experimenting with work week reduction. The UK Labour Party had added it to its platform for the general election of 2019.
Spain is the first country globally to actually fund such an experiment to test the idea.
Proponents of the shorter work week believe the four day week is a potential solution to
Climate Crisis: A four-day workweek would reduce the UK’s electricity-based greenhouse gas emissions by 24 percent. With regard to the shorter work week is the logistics of producing 4 days a week or work share.
Childcare: The pandemic has brought about the closing of schools and day care facilities leaving parents lacking for alternatives. Balancing work with a need for child care could be alleviate some of the pressure on families.
Mental Health: Shorter workweeks reduce stress and give people more time to relax and self-care. Try a drink that can put a smile on you and improve your mental state. Visit the salon and choose between acrylic vs hard gel nails.
Productivity: Automation reduces the need for Labor and a shorter work week potentially will put more people back to work.
A relationship reduction of the exploitation of the Earth and the workforce can be achieved with a four-day workweek movement as a part of a broader push to an economy that is more sustainable and humane.
Also, as a long time observer of human behavior, I’m all for a shorter workday. 99% if not 100% of workers, from the lowest to the highest, waste at least 40%of their time in the office with chit chat, lolly gagging, etc. Which is probably why people who work from home are more productive. If we had a 4 or 5 hour work day, and a mandate to spend some time doing civic tasks, we would have a better workforce, workplace, environment, family life, etc.
Carol:
I always liked getting home before dark. It made one feel better being in the sun even if for a little while.
I could walk to work, so when I was able to shorten my work week, I chose five 6 hour days. The company did not benefit on utilities, but it had a happier employee.
Arne:
One of the easiest jobs I had was for 3 years working with a Korean company. It was sales and I spent a lot of time getting them business which they were not competitive in. I could bring multi-million bids to their table and they could not match pricing. Futile although I was paid well. I had my own office in a nice building and often times just worked from home. They would lie to me; but, I kept giving them more business which they could not fill. In the end, I retired with a ton of money saved.
Carol
people are not machines, so i’d be careful about saying lollygagging and chitchat were “wasting time.” a bit like saying Newton should never have taken that long vacation from Cambridge.
Run
i agree about time in the sun. i am afraid the shorter hours experiment will fail because the bosses …or the workers…will find ways to srew up that efficiency things. i know that i, and my crew, could do in about two hours (no exaggeration) what an ordinary crew could do in eight as long as no boss was watching over us and we got the time we saved to ourselves. but what will happen when workers grow to “expect” the shorter days, and bosses keep on bossing, may be that the same percent of time on the job is “wasted” as Carol said.
i have no idea about “sales”… not in my genes… but i imagine you were more productive when you could goof off on your own schedule and not have to keep your nose to the grindstone because the boss learned his ideas of bossing from the overseer school of business management.
despite what you may have heard, the rabbit beats the turtle every time.
Part of my job as a manufacturing engineer was to help the people more effectively operate the tools I was providing. I had a manager who understood (and had to tell me) that I needed to spend some time developing a personal relationship with the operators so that I could do my job better.
Arne
do you mean chitchating and lallygagging? i am not much of a people person myself, but your manager was right.
most of the mangers i saw were into the kind of reasoning that goes “if a man can run a mile in four minutes you should be able to run fifteen miles in an hour and 120 in an eight hour day like i’m paying you for.
as for the four day week and the nironment: our best hope is that people find out they like time for themselves more than they like cheap plastic toys. (yes that means less pay for less work.)
notice how i saved 20% off the time it takes to spell environment.
Coberly,
I had a plumber that was more turtle than rabbit, yet he could finish a plumbing job faster than any rabbit plumber they had. He never put together a joint that leaked and he always knew exactly the steps and the sequence to clear pipes of water before he sweated a copper join. He also could diagnose a problem precisely before trying to fix the wrong thing perfectly (Ian Mitroff reference there). If carpentry is your thing then you know this as measure twice, cut once.
I worked with a guy once that could write code at twice the rate that I could but when it came time to debug then he took ten times as long to get his code working correctly.
Coberly,
OTOH, you were spot on that “lollygagging and chitchat” are not wasting time. My wife does that a lot with her coworkers because they are a team that works together under high stress and long hours. So, they social bond and cooperate rather than backstab each other. My wife is a project owner now, so she expresses her appreciation of other people’s work and ideas with frequent thanks. She gives others what she would have liked to have had more herself when she was in the trenches. Her team gets high marks from the brass.
My work was individual except for the occasional hardware implementation team after a procurement was completed to fulfill a recommendation that I developed. That was also the only occasions that I played a quasi-leadership role, the technical lead rather than project lead. So, my place was to always be accessible and approachable rather than chummy. Anyone could come to me with a question or problem out of a staff far too large to be individually acquainted.
Of course, I find the shorter work week amusing relative to my former trade. The 40 hour work week that I keep hearing about IS a shorter work week in IT projects. The 50 hour work week is typical with weeks approaching 80 hours not uncommon. The salaried employee not eligible for overtime line was intentionally drawn to exclude highly technical workers from overtime compensation. That never had much impact on me because my productivity rate was easily twice the average in my field.
Ron:
In lieu of hiring another person?
Ron
don’t take my rabbit joke too seriously. but… i would bet turtle plumber decided when to take his own breaks and didn’t have a boss doing time and motion on him. as for the code writer… i could write a program about like writimg a note to the milkman back in the day. much faster than most (not very complicated stuff, and never made the major leagues) and back then i didn’t make typos… but i got so fed up with bosses, i wrote my own programs and made to effort to make them user friendly and never told the boss i was doing it. he didn’t think there was any place for a computer in an engineering field office. but i think that yes, even us rabbits need to be turtle-like at times (our own times)… it’s faster that way.
anyway, i was talking rabbits, not jack rabbits.
Run,
I don’t know Lieu :<) Two things come into play there.
The first is specialized knowledge. My wife has 28 years of experience at Anthem, beginning with the call center for membership issues. She has been a business systems analyst there for over twenty years now. Business specific knowledge is key to their work. That is roughly how many trades acquired the FNG meme.
I grew up with IBM mainframes and coding. I learned about Algol when 12, back when computers were made of vacuum tubes. I advanced through computer operations from the most basic sorting and collating to lead console operator where I learned a bit of business as business computing was more hands on then. So, that took me into applications programming for eight years before I advanced to systems programming. Then I got a state job doing storage management and performance and tuning after couple more years in, then after four more years I became capacity planner for large systems where I stayed for thirty years since there was no higher technical calling with the state. After 21 years in planning then Northrop Grumman took over the financial planning and decision making roles. I just did reporting and performance problem solving, which were the best parts of my job. Finance, budget, and procurement were not really fun. During my last nine years I got to see first hand what value that I brought to the finance side of my roll as the Northrop Grumman people made a series of errors where they ignored by recommendations and cost themselves a few million in profits. It is not like I was necessary, just cheap for the pay considering the alternatives. Inexperience comes at a high price.
The second is well known. Mo’ people cost mo’ money in benefits. Since salaried tech workers get no overtime pay, not even straight hourly much less time and half, then there is no downside for corporations. Of course, CA has state laws requiring overtime compensation, which is the leading reason that Anthem is moving back office operations out of CA.
The reason that I have time to do this today is because my wife is working on an implementation for no compensation while I type.
In IT we joke that “If one woman can make a baby in 9 months, then nine women can make a baby in one month :<)”
Ron,
sounds logical to me.
as for your career experiences… those sound about right (par) to me too. though mine were different in detail, the bureaucratic mind-set seems to be universal. it might even be inevitable.
what got me into this discussion was comment above about lollygagging and chitchat. i knew a woman (not well) who was offended because she saw people at the DMV “not doing anything.” she had no idea what “doing anything” looked like, and made no allowance for the fact that at a place like DMV sometimes it’s busy and some times it’s not. you can’t send people home and call them back an hour later, and you kill morale if you demand make-work to make them look busy when the rush slacks off. and you need to pay people for their time at work… because as Ayn Rand would say, “time is money.” though she wouldn’t have thought of it that way. it’s a little like the fire department or the army. you can’t always have a fire or a war, but you need the people standing around waiting for the fire or the war.
and of course that led to my forever-rant about bosses who destroy productivity by “bossing” because they are too dumb to know that free-labor is more efficient than slave-labor.
you catch more rabbits if you stop and rest once in a while. I had some dogs that i thought were pretty fast, but they never caught a rabbit, one day i was out with them and my daughter’s dog, an old border collie mix who looked like barbara bush. she watched my dogs chase a rabbit down the bunny trail and come back empty. she said, “oh, you want a rabbit? wait here a minute.” she went into the bushes and came back about thirty seconds later with a rabbit in her mouth. since i really didn’t need a rabbit I did not look especially pleased. she thought maybe she had brought the wrong rabbit, so she went back into the bushes and came back in about thirty seonds with another one. there’s some kind of moral to that story, but i’m not sure what it is.