I live & work in Stockholm, Sweden. I start work at 8:00 & leave at sharp 15:00 to pick my son from day care. And these are the most beautiful days of my life. I play with my son every day, I'm doing hobby projects, preparing for summer marathon, read HN & CS papers on cutting edge & getting full 8 hrs sleep.
Now tell me how can I do that all with working like donkeys?
Human side of life is much more than living in a Software bubble.
There's nothing wrong with it, but all the parties involved just need to be conscious of the tradeoff involved: shifting focus from the production of wealth to the consumption of it. As long as the production is higher than the consumption, it's all good and sustainable.
But remember that especially in the scandinavian welfare states, your consumption isn't just your salary, it's a wide range of often rather expensive public services.
As is mentioned in the article, this has a flavour of political posturing, and it's not given that it will treated perfectly scientifically. But, of course, if it turns out that the employees are actually more efficient at the same cost, you can have your cake and eat it too.
> But remember that especially in the scandinavian welfare states, your consumption isn't just your salary, it's a wide range of often rather expensive public services.
It seems that outsiders (I am guessing you are, by the way you frame it) are eager to remind us that we have large public sectors, or whatever you want to call it. It feels a bit rude to me; as if you know better than us how our societies/governments are structured.
We do know that money doesn't grow on trees. We do know that "free" doesn't mean "from out of nowhere", handed to us by our benevolent, watchful, government.
Does it really need to be pointed out that if you work less (absolutely, not just measured by hours), you will be less productive? Please. Give us some credit.
> It seems that outsiders (I am guessing you are, by the way you frame it) are eager to remind us that we have large public sectors, or whatever you want to call it. It feels a bit rude to me; as if you know better than us how our societies/governments are structured.
It can be easy to take for granted your current situation, and become oblivious to it. So it often takes an outsider to remind the insiders of their situation. It is no different from how the lack of universal health insurance in the US may not be apparent to the ~85% of Americans who do have health insurance.
I'm not an outsider, and no, "we" don't understand that. The average citizen is only close to breaking even financially in the public budgets, and that is "what's wrong" as the GP asked.
This is the life I want and the main reason I keep trying to start my own business. I really don't think it makes sense to work that long and having adults leave work when children get out of school makes perfect sense.
Funny cause most people I know on paternal and maternal leave says it was such a chore. That it was more work being with their child and that coming to the office was like "vacation" for them. But I'm already expecting most of them just say that because otherwise hardworking non-parents would become very jealous of their lifestyle. :) I could probably also work just a few hours per day and be measurably many times more productive than my peers, but jealousy makes it completely impossible.
Note that this option is only available for those having small children (paid paternal leave). There is no way to shorten your work hours for any other kind of lifestyle
You get 480 days paid vacation per child (shared between husband and wife). It is very common in every office (regardless of occupation, work type) that people go to 6-8 months vacation for full time. Lot of persons take half day off for extended period of time.
I don't think 6h/day of work is particularly unreasonable, if you can avoid losing blocks of time to useless activities (unneeded meetings, or waiting for people).
If you're remote, and only clock-in when actually working, spending 3-4h/day working productively can easily outdo someone spending 10h/day in an office. I've worked in places where my ultimate client billable rate was obscene, and tracked to the 6min or 15min interval, but we also had "house time" for other projects. A day where you spent 3h directly working for the customer and nothing else was perfectly fine (especially if you blocked the entire day out with "need to be available for client" so no one else could interrupt you.)
Spending the downtime doing actually interesting research (not so much 20% time as 50% time) was awesome.
How shorter work day would eliminate any useless activities? Useless activities happen not because work day is too long but because work processes not organized perfectly. Shorter workday would not make processes any better, so the same percentage of time would be wasted.
When the day is artificially constrained, you have a good excuse to get rid of non-critical activities. It's like YC -- "meeting with investors for coffee" (or other good but non-key activities) is always viewed as "a good thing to do", but over the 3 months of YC you have license to tell them to wait.
This only works for short periods of "burst" activities, if it is routine then the waste is distributed more or less equally so you get the same percentage of waste unless you work for very short periods. I.e. if somebody goes to smoke for 10 mins every 2 hours (just an example), then he would be out for 1/12 of time regardless of how many hours he works, as long as its substantially more than 2. If he really-really needs to finish something in 3 hours, he may forgo the smoke break once or twice, but if we take a period of a year, it will revert to regular schedule soon.
I agree and this kind of work day contraint is by far not suitable for everyone.
If you'd tell average Joe, working in retail in some DIY market filling the shelves (just an example for a rather simple job, no implications, judgement or anything) that he from now on would have to work just 6h instead of 8h a day for the same paycheck...would this make him do the work more deliberately? I highly doubt it.
Six-hour days may be more productive, but this won't prove it one way or the other because:
- The people working six hour days have been told that this may improve productivity so the excitement of being part of the experiment may indeed encourage them to be more effective in the short term
- They have a strong incentive to work harder because if the experiment concludes that six hour days are more effective, they will likely get to keep working six hour days.
Annoyingly, the article doesn't say why Kellogg's stopped their 30 hour work week. Is it unsustainable in the long term? Then it might be a good idea then if A) your business is creative and not an assembly line and B) you plan to sell your business before the strategy becomes unsustainable. They still had a small amount of departments working 30 hour weeks until 1985. When the company was handed over to new management in ~1947, it seems that the management immediately went on a crusade against 30 hour weeks without reason, creating incentives to work in 40 hour week departments and other things.[0]
Personally, I loathed 40 hour weeks at jobs where things are repetitive or physically demanding (I have terrible ankles at 28 from so many on-my-feet positions. I'd probably work 50 hour weeks at a programming gig, switching between studying concepts, coding, and studying existing code simply because you can change up the work sequence.
In the '50s, a new management team arrived, one that may have tended to "denigrate and 'feminize' shorter hours."
They became embarrassed by the short hours that they were working -- shorter than the shifts worked by men at other local jobs. They changed their rhetoric, downplaying the freedom that leisure gave.
Six-hour workdays wouldn't let them keep up with the Joneses, and many men did not receive much enjoyment from their marginal leisure hours. "Like management, senior male workers were concerned about the loss of status and control. Several men told about the friction that resulted when the men spent too much time around the house: "The wives didn't like the men underfoot all day." "The wife always found something for me to do if I hung around." "We got into a lot of fights." Many of the men confessed that they were at loose ends when they were working six hours. [Mr Zine]
Maybe not the same reasons, but I read that the four day work week was ended because of benefit costs (e.g. health care coverage). Fewer hours meant more employees, which meant more benefit overhead. I also read that the works held a mock funeral for it. The were not happy going back to five days.
The first of your points is the Hawthorne effect, and I agree that we should not conclude anything from short term productivity increases.
But your second point is just absurd. If wanting to keep your shorter working hours turns out to be such a good incentive to work harder and smarter that it improves productivity on the long run, then how does this not prove that shorter hours improve productivity?
> It's unclear how, or if, a lunch break will factor into the scheme.
It's a common misconception that eight-hour work day means 9-17 everywhere. In Sweden, the common work day is from 8-17, meaning 8 hours paid time and 1 hour non-paid lunch hour. To my understanding, it's more or less required by law.
So if you look on how many hours we will be "at work", we will go from working one hour more than Americans to one hour less.
7.5h of work with 30 mins lunch break is fairly common in Europe; when my wife was an accountant in London, she had that schedule. In the UK, the typical hours for that would indeed be 9-5. (In some parts of Europe, 8-4 seems more common)
7.25 hours of work plus 1 hour of unpaid lunch and including 0.5 hours of paid breaks is the standard in the Canadian public sector. That is, 9:00 am to 5:15 pm, 7.25 hours of which are paid and 6.75 of which are spent working.
Huh, why does that annoy you? Too little or too much? That seems kind of normal to me (well less and less so). Anywhere between 35 and 40 hour week I would class as normal (though the trend is towards 40).
I've never had that - 9-5 from my experience meant working 7 hours with a 1 hour lunch. Of course YMMV, but I don't take any employer seriously when they say otherwise - if they want to raise hell, I'd probably just walk.
The "typical" 9 to 5 workday typically only applies to blue collar workers who get two paid 15 minute breaks and a 30 minute paid lunch, with each break coming after 1.75 hours of work.
I do 9:30 to 6:00 75% of the time and 9:30 to 5:00 25% of the time, with either a 30 min lunch break or 1 hour lunch + gym break. I never work the weekends. I don't make the most money on HN, but you can't beat that work-life balance, and I won't burn out for a long time.
Do the eight hours really include an actual lunch break for Americans? I did not know that … that’s why that 9 to 5 thing never made sense to me. The standard workday without overtime in Germany would be more like 8 to 13, then one hour break, then 14 to 17 (or something like that).
In Germany you are required by law to take at least a 30 minute break during an eight hour work day, but that break is not paid. You have to clock out. (I suppose employers could pay employees for that time, but they don’t have to and they usually don’t.)
In fact, at my last internship the system automatically subtracted 30 minutes from the work time at the end of the day if you didn’t manually clock out for more than 30 minutes, assuming you just forgot to clock out. After all, the employer can’t pay you for eight hours of continuous work, that would be admitting to illegal wrongdoing.
Employers can also require employees to clock out for shorter breaks, though they usually don’t when you are just chatting a few minutes with your coworkers in the office kitchen while getting coffee or something like that. (General, uhm, personal maintenance like just getting something to drink in the office kitchen or going to the toilet is not considered taking a break and employers can’t force employees to clock out for that.)
I never even considered that it could work any other way … (My dad is a civil engineer and always has too much work. However, during my childhood I vividly remember him coming home every day at 1pm until about 2pm to eat lunch at home. His office is only about a seven minute drive from home. He was and is often at work until 8pm, but he hardly ever missed lunch at home. I know that’s not the norm even for Germany – most people find some place to eat around the office or bring something to eat to the office – but that may explain my perspective on this.)
Reading all of these comments with personal hours is kind of blowing my mind. I always thought people in tech had easy cushy jobs? Personally, I am at the office 5-6 hours a day (at a major company). Sure there are some rough weeks, but even then, 50 hours at most. Just today I was at the office from 1030 and left at 3, spending a half hour at lunch. On average, probably 35-40 hours at the office, with an hour spent playing games during lunch most days. On Fridays we might spend 2 hours at lunch and always, always ends at least 2 hours early (I might hang out at the office during this time, but never doing work). Many of the employees with kids might be at the office 3.5 days a week on average.
Thanks for the comment - I wanted a little more information about your work - did you have to search extensively/move a far away for this type of employer?
Also what kind of words would the employer use to describe these working conditions (looks like its beyond normal "flexitime" arrangements) so that others might find them too?
This is my first fulltime job, having just graduated in December and spending most of January traveling. It was actually the only job I got an offer -- it was near the top of my list of choices but I was still pretty disappointed. I probably applied to maybe 300 places over the course of a year, but after getting an offer (following an internship over the summer) I probably only applied to 3-5 places I was serious about.
The employer doesn't use any words to describe it, its just part of the culture I guess. Just get your work done, no one cares when you're in the office. We have a scrum meeting we're expected to attend and a few sprints meetings/allhands, but everything else we are free to schedule whatever suits us best. Initially I was a little disappointed about how little vacation time I was getting, but I've taken a few days off and have never been docked days from my balance.
It's true that most people work 9-17 in Sweden, but it isn't legally mandated. A lot of the details about when and how we work is decided through collective bargaining between businesses and unions.
This system has very deep historical roots, and is something that the social democrats (that dominated swedish politics for a long time) and the unions are very proud of. Because of this Sweden doesn't have a minimum wage, for instance. It could be argued that this is a more liberal (in the classical sense, not the us meaning) way to go than what most of the US has done, which is a bit interesting.
(We do have laws about paternity leave, vacation time etc, so it doesn't encompass everything.)
Denmark also has that system, but part of it is law in addition to tradition. It's essentially impossible to be a large employer and refuse to negotiate with a union— all large workplaces have labor agreements in place. So there isn't the whole American system of "unionization drives" where unions try to "unionize" a workplace and companies try to keep it "non-unionized"; working conditions are negotiated between the employer and a union by default, except in some small shops. In cases where no one union represents the employees (at my workplace, employees belong to several different unions, and some belong to none), one union is appointed to be the main negotiator.
The union system is also much more highly coordinated, though part of that is indeed traditional rather than in law. Rather than every union having to negotiate its own conditions, some conditions are agreed at the central level, in framework agreements reached between the Confederation of Danish Employers (DA) and the Danish Confederation of Trade Unions (LO). The minimum wage is one of those: effectively all Danish workplaces have a minimum wage of 109 DKK/hr, the amount agreed to in the last framework negotiation.
That's funny, I have never had a job 9-17 in sweden during my 25 years of working life. First job was 6:48 - 16:00 (industry) or something odd like that. Next was 8:00-16:30.(university) Also worked 11-21 (store) and shorter other days at same job. Now I have pretty flexible times as long as I get together 40 hours per week.
This sounds great for salaried people where an hourly bill rate doesn't play in, but I doubt will get much traction when you're getting paid by the hour. Less hours = less revenue and upping the bill rate to compensate that's not going to catch on. Companies will just view it as a higher bill rate.
Too bad though, because I've worked in alot of offices and from home, contracting etc.. Clearly at least two hours out of eight are wasted every day. People take smoke breaks, people chit chat, go to lunch, browse the web, stay in meetings too long, and on and on. I could see people really trying to be productive knowing they are only on a six hour day.
> Too bad though, because I've worked in alot of offices and from home, contracting etc.. Clearly at least two hours out of eight are wasted every day. People take smoke breaks, people chit chat, go to lunch, browse the web, stay in meetings too long, and on and on. I could see people really trying to be productive knowing they are only on a six hour day.
Very valid point.
I saw a doco, years ago, about Americans who'd moved to France for work. A constant comment was the astonishment at how much more productive the French were per hour in their office environment. They were coming from US workplaces where the norm was to have a big commute, work an hour or more a day of unpaid overtime, to one where the sub-40 hour work week was rigidly enforced. The main thing that went away was zoned-out office workers spending their days talking about TV and office gossip. (YMMV, of course).
As a contractor I would love 6 hour days and gladly take the pay cut. One size doesn't fit all.
That being said, I could imagine a scenario in Sweden where contractors are now more in demand. As it might be a way around the 6 hours and still hire for 8-9 hour days.
I'm a little torn. On one hand, I have an aversion to things like this being done in law. It seems wrong to limit people and it makes sense to me that some people would prefer to work 40 hour weeks or 50 hours every other week. I'm not extremist in these regard or a libertarian by most definitions but I do see an inherent bad in coercion like this. It seems to outlaw so many potentially win-win arrangements.
OTOH, I think the dynamic in labour economies is such that it doesn't seem to correctly value employee "surplus." I do think that empirically it's hard to ignore the fact that regulation of labour markets has had successes, some of them very important. I think most employees would be worse off without labour laws.
Labour economies (maybe norms is a better word) seem to be much more influenced by "cultural" forces than "economic" ones. If this market was functioning in a healthy way, I would expect to see much more variation in arrangements and less standardization within companies. I believe there's an explanation to be found in Ronald Coase's "The Nature of The Firm" (1937 Economics paper), but I don't have a mature enough idea to be able to boil it down to an HN comment.
Laissez Faire vs labour laws aside, I think that the notion that the number of hours we work today should be lower than 20 years ago is reasonable.
In an increasing number of jobs more hours doesn't mean more work gets done. For a shopkeeper, dermatologist or factory worker, output per hour is fairly fixed (and transparent). More hours = more work. For a graphic designer, policy analyst, medical researcher or social media manager the relationship is fuzzier. Productivity varies a lot and shorter days can boost productivity. At the same time, worker productivity is opaque and a 'last person at his desk' culture often develops with employees trying to demonstrate their commitment. We are shedding the first kind of job and adding the second.
As a moderate libertarian, I share your aversion to things like this being done in law. I default to the assumption that the free market is the right way to solve problems, and I accept the need for government intervention only when compelled to do so by an overwhelming weight of evidence.
This is an area where I now accept the need for government intervention because I am compelled to do so by an overwhelming weight of evidence. We now know that the optimum working week for economic output, let alone quality of life, is substantially less than forty hours. We also know that it cannot be left to individual employees to negotiate with their employers. In a perfect world perhaps it could, but in the real world it cannot. It's one of those problems that just has to be solved by collective rather than individual action.
As a Swedish employer myself I'm not worried that I will have this forced on me. (Not that I think that a 6 hour working day would be bad)
Sweden actually doesn't regulate many of these things in law, for example there is no law for minimum wage unlike most other countries. Instead the government has traditionally let unions and employers' organizations hash it out.
I also live in Stockholm Sweden and Im furious over how its becoming the norm here to not strive to become anything. Never take risks.
The plan here is to work for a midsize company with a good secure reputation, have kids and then just do the bare minimum until you retire.
I think its undermining the intellectual capital we have to not be ambitious, not work hard and not accomplish more than the bare minimum.
I work a lot more than 6 hours a day. I run two startups, about to quit my fulltime job to do said startup. I have 7 am meetings, I work weekends and nights.
My girlfriend is not always impressed with how hard I work but she gets it and supports me.
I think the option should be there, but it should not accepted as default.
If the American dream is to be something the Swedish dream is to be nothing.
What you do at work does not equal what and who you are. Luckily more and more people realize that we already have so much wealth that we can change some income to extra free time.
I can see an argument a 6-hour day hurts workers. They get less pay while putting in more effort.
If it's true there are 5 stages to producing ideas, a 6-hour day benefits from unconscious thinking done away from the task [1] at lower pay. Whereas an 8-hour work day benefits some of a worker's thinking for their non-work projects, which currently happens on the job.
The substance behind the work is more important than its structure on paper.
Sounds like a win-win situation to me. I'd be very willing to take a modest pay cut while still "giving" my employer the fruits of my subconscious labor. And if the economy is reasonably efficient, wages will eventually come to reflect the increase in relative productivity regardless. If they don't, it's not really a big deal - two extra hours of leisure per day is a big deal.
Hell, putting the stuff you've figured out overnight on paper (or into the IDE) is very satisfying even in the absence of payment, because for a few hours, you can be super efficient. This always feels like a strong and productive use of time.
I'm much more productive with 10 hour work days. Get in the zone, write a shit-ton of code, and then get back to reality. Three or four 10-hour days sound a lot nicer than 5 6-hours.
Agreed, 3-4 day work weeks sounds better all around.
Less commute time, more time to pursue hobbies and take trips.
I bet 4 * 9 hours days would have a negligible impact on worker productivity and reduce costs like heating, cooling, lighting, since offices would be closed an extra day.
Well, I think the benefits of the 6-hour day would disappear then. IIRC correctly research shows that productivity falls steeply after 5 hours at work, with hour 6-8 being at 75% producitity, and after that 50% (approximately). So having 3x10 days would kill the benefit of increased producitivity during the time you are at work, while still costing as much.
As a policy, this sort of thing probably would not work but the statistic does not apply to all people. I'd be interested to see a large company which allowed the workers to decide freely. Measuring results would obviously be difficult.
For me, when I work has a much, much bigger impact on how much stuff I get done than the number of hours I work.
I'm not a morning person, yet my job has me coming in before 8:30 so I can attend morning standups (ugh). Right after lunch though, I can easily get in the "zone" and do a ton of good work.
I'm exactly the same. I get in the zone everyday, and 10-12 hours usually blows by like it's nothing. Glad I have a job where there's always (fun) development work to do...I don't understand how 6 hours a day could ever be enough though
I don't think many people work more than six hours a day.
Most work probably considerably less, the fact that they are at work for 8 hours notwithstanding.
If they could remove some of these inefficiencies and return the time to employees it would be great.
They wouldn't work for net 6 hours either. It's not like the exchange is 8 hours including coffee breaks, Facebook checking and staring at the ceiling to 6 hours pure net uninterrupted work. It's 8 hours with distractions to 6 hours with distractions.
Why do people, even (possibly) smart and well-meaning people, think there is some one size fits all lifestyle that works for everyone? Maybe some people/jobs work better on different schedules.
And exactly how is this experiment going to collect useful data about the impacts of a shorter workday? Details matter if this is actually science. If it is really just politics then who cares as long as it is popular with the majority.
I think the entire premise here is wrong. The x-hr work day is based on the model of factory work. That model is increasingly less relevant to real work. To imagine that merely changing these outdated labor laws which take factory work as the norm and tweaking the numbers on them in a "favorable" direction will somehow magically greater enrich or empower individual workers is like imagining that changing the laws of horse ownership is going to affect transportation in the mid 20th century. You're turning a knob that isn't connected to the right thing anymore. There are ways to empower individual workers in the 21st century economy, but those ways have very little to do with factory work, and changing the number of hours they are "forced" to work is so far removed from what actually matters as to be ridiculous.
The governing parties of the city doing this experiment are left-wing, which tend to be stuck in that kind of thinking. There aren't many factory workers anymore in Sweden, so I guess it's based on some kind of revolutionary romantic notion or whatnot.
Absolutely. There is a political problem here. Nobody wants to be in the control group. The fairness of the experiment doesn't lend itself well to the social-democratic thinking of the Nordics (everyone is supposed to be treated equally).
i'd also have to imagine the control group is going to perform worse because of the demoralizing nature of being in that group. and the experiment will be self-fulfilling.
Indeed, I'd value a day off in the week more than just fewer hours per work day. In fact, personally, I'd work longer hours on the days I do work in order to compensate--that's how much I'd value a four day work week.
At least in the US, having, say, a Friday off means you can easily run to the bank or do other personal business that is much easier to do during the week than the weekend.
One company I worked had 9-hour workdays, and then every other Friday we had off. It was pretty nice, but it was also before kids came into the picture. Now a 6-hour workday sounds amazing.
Yes, our wok started off with very flexible holidays and working hours. i was quite happy to put in a couple of hours extra per week to get things finished.
Bureaucracy has kicked in, and now the flexible working hours are less flexible as are the holidays. If someone insists that I be in by an exact time, I'll make sure I leave exactly 8 hour later these days.
The California state government has been running this experiment for a while (sort of). They require all their workers to take a day off out of each 10 work days (so a 5 day week and then a 4 day).
However, they don't get to choose the day. It is assigned to them. The state is doing it to cut down on traffic and commuting, as well as facilities costs.
However, so far they say they haven't lost any productivity by doing this program. Of course:
1) They want it to work because the taxpayers are watching
2) A lot of folks work from home on their "day off"
My point is these are all tough experiments to run due to human nature and not wanting to be perceived as working less than your peers.
> The California state government has been running this experiment for a while (sort of).
No, they haven't.
> They require all their workers to take a day off out of each 10 work days (so a 5 day week and then a 4 day).
No, they don't. Some California state workers have the option to take a "9/8/80" schedule (an 80-hour, two-week schedule with 8 nine-hour workdays and 1 eight-hour workday, and 1 weekday off) or a "4/10/40" schedule (a 40-hour, one-week schedule with 4 ten-hour workdays and one weekday off). [1] But these, like the baseline 5-days @ 8 hours/day schedule, are all 40-hour/week (averaged over each two-week period, in the case of 9/8/80) schedules, not reduced schedules like a 4-day, 8-hour/day schedule.
Additionally, most permanent full-time state workers have the option of an additional leave day per month with a 5-percent reduction in pay. [2]
And, recently, there were several years where most employees experienced furloughs varying between 1 to 3 days per month with accompanying pay reductions as part of a cost 'cutting' (large, cost deferring) measure. [3]
Something similar seems a good idea to me, too. Example. Germany has 42 million employees and 3 million unemployeds. Reduce working hours from 40 to 37 hours per week - with reduction in salary, but probably not the full 7.5 % - and hire one new employee for every 13 employees. And there you go - no more unemployment and more leisure time for everybody. Saved unemployment benefits can be used to counter salary reduction for maybe a few years. Problems: salary reduction, small companies, differences in job demand and availability.
While it's been pointed out that this is a reasonably well-understood problem (Lump of Labour fallacy), I think it's unfair to downvote this comment. I'm reserving my downvotes for abuse and bad conduct, not people I simply disagree with.
So these 3 million unemployed people can be evenly spread out over the economy, sharing in 3/40ths of the jobs of doctors, nurses, machinists, programmers, cleaners, gardeners, engineers, chefs, management consultants, inbiss cook and street sweepers?
And this can happen with less than a few percent friction cost?
Explaining why this will fail, let alone describing how it did indeed fail where it was tried is econ 101 material. As someone else pointed out, look up Lump of Labour fallacy.
There are tons of problems with these types of schemes, the primary one being that there is management overhead and people aren't substitutable. The more people doing the same task, the more work will need to be coordinated and thus overall output would probably decrease.
I call the fallacy a fallacy - it seems way to simplistic to me. There is obviously a fluctuation in work demand, for example all the seasonal work, but this fluctuation is not arbitrarily large. Take it to the extreme, 20 instead of 40 working hours per week - how would this not require twice as many employees, maybe even a few more because of reduced efficiency, to yield the same output? In essence this is nothing more than more equal distribution of available work.
1. Not all jobs are created equal, and not all unemployed persons are qualified or capable of performing all jobs. There would still be a mismatch in positions available and workers to fill those positions; without "perfect" alignment a community productivity deficit would continue, moving the costs around instead of eliminating them.
2. It'd become politically desirable to disproportionately point these efforts at industries where it'd be easier to integrate the unemployed ranks (lower skill set barriers to entry). This would have an effect of reducing profit margins in those sectors given the increased overhead of a larger workforce for an unpredictable amount of productivity change. One expects if the total labor hours are the same, economic output of an individual entity in that economy would be equal while personnel costs would increase.
3. There will always be a small portion of the working populace out of work for legitimate reasons.
And, please do a little Googling on seasonal work. In the US, for example, millions of jobs fluctuate between seasons depending on buying and production trends. That's not small peas, so to speak.
It's hard to put this very politely, but you're making a fool out of yourself now. Lump of Labour fallacy isn't crazy voodoo economics, it's incredibly well established. Read the Wikipedia article, then look through some of the references. Your concerns are amply addressed.
No he isn't. I suspect he's starting to correctly identify that Economics has about as much scientific validity as Astrology: they both have the trappings of science, but frankly, they're both full of unverifiable and unfalsifiable nonsense.
I suspect the only reason most people accept it is that they learned it at school so it must be true.
People have been trying to demonstrate effects of Denmark's 1992 change from 40-hour workweeks to 37-hour workweeks, but afaict nobody's come up with much that's solid, whether showing a negative impact on output, a positive impact on employment, or much of anything else except the mere fact that hours worked per week went down. There are a lot of before-the-fact theoretical papers, from the late '80s and early '90s, but post-1992 nobody seems to have succeeded in validating them. That doesn't mean there was no economic effect, but at the very least it doesn't seem to have been a particularly large one.
There will also be one new manager for every 13 managers. I see that it would be very difficult to make a law to achieve this with a big bang, but I don't see any good reasons why a country could not make a law requiring to reduce working hours by 3 or 4 over a period of maybe 5 years.
Slightly related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqgMIRF7acw. On a more serious note it will be interesting to see if it works considering France has been thinking of scrapping the 35 hour work week.
Those two charts are begging to be combined into one two-axis chart, with average hours per week on one axis, and productivity per hour worked on another axis.
As it is, as two separate one-axis bar charts, they are mostly incomprehensible for the intended purpose.
This is a great question since depending on the measure the same thing can give opposite results. Also depending on how the product is linked with hours worked. If it's direct link and paid by the hour, it's one thing, if it's indirect link and paid on achieving output goal is another thing, if the result is binary - done or not, regardless of how many hours is spent, it's also different.
Given the description, it looks like the position is elderly care. Which is hard to measure directly, but the indirect measures (e.g. customer satisfaction, mistake counts, etc.) may actually improve from shorter shifts, but the costs would probably rise or services will be reduced since you'd need to either hire people to cover the hours or not serve people in those two hours. Since there are probably also fixed non-hourly costs to hiring this would be an additional expense.
I think first thing is to clarify why we have 8 hours work days. It is simply reflecting to the past when most of the workers worked in a factory. Several things changed in the last 50 years and nobody was revising these "standards". I am really glad that Sweden is revising these laws. It would be fair to have 4 days workweeks and 6 hours workdays. That would be closer to fair than the current situation. Corporate greed has to be stopped and regulated so that people can get a better life and more time with their family.
Now tell me how can I do that all with working like donkeys?
Human side of life is much more than living in a Software bubble.
EDIT: corrected some typos.