Do you think a 4 day work week would be a much better system overall?

Great Debates
1

I have this theory that a 4 day work week would actually be more beneficial and in the long-run be better for this world.

This is not meant to be a lazy excuse to work less and get paid more. I’m serious. The traditional model of 5 day work weeks and 9-5 working hours is old. It’s outdated. With technologies, we are able to do more in less time. We don’t even have to be physically at work or in a specific location either. Time doesn’t move the same way today as it did a generation or two ago.

I believe a 4 day work week is more advanced and progressive than say working 5 or 6 days a week thinking you will somehow get ahead in life and be better off.

Here are some of my reasons:

While the advanced nations have more financial prosperity and a higher standard of living, it’s interesting that we also have higher rates of suicide, depression, divorce rates (broken families) and even health problems. You’d think the poor nations would be the runaway winners, but while they have less, they also seem to have better sense of community, family, seem content or happy even with what little they have and how difficult their lives are. I think we are overworking ourselves in the name of progress and financial gain, but falling behind in our own health, social/family situations, mental/emotional well-being, etc.

A four day work week would allow more time for people to spend with their families, focus on their own health or other personal life issues to work on, stay more relaxed, lower stress, and thus this would increase the happiness, production, and efficiency in the 4 days you do work. Over the long haul, you’d be able to last and burn out less than someone who is just pedal to metal mentality. Life is more a marathon than a sprint. The key is to run at a consistent and steady pace that is healthy for you to stay in the race as long as possible versus trying to burn yourself out and then resting for a couple days and repeating this process of stop and go stop and go.

I would also propose that the 4 days work week go in the form of 2 1 2 2. That is, 2 days on, 1 day off, 2 days on 2 days off…so you work Mon and Tues, get Wed off, and work Thu and Fri, and get the weekend off and repeat.

This would eliminate the monday blues (gone), and this would eliminate hump day (wed) and this would also eliminate the notion of a work week. The longest you’d be working consecutive days is 2 days. It would feel like you have 2 fridays now each week (Tues and Fri), and at this pace, you could literally go without even having a holiday because you won’t ever feel burned out or tired. Of course, we’d still have our paid holidays/vacation time but just saying, if you didn’t have it, under this system, you’d still be just as good and fresh.

Now of course, I’m not saying everyone has to be forced to do this. I can be optional for those who want to work 5 days or even 6, can do so if they choose. Some people are workaholics and love working 6 days a week. Some people don’t see their work as work and love it so much that they may not like a 4 day work week. That is fine. It’s optional.

Most people may want to keep the 4-3 system (4 days work and 3 days off) because they have longer weekend so for those who like to plan to travel or something where they need consecutive days off, that’s fine too. You can keep a 4-3 system. But I recommend that a 2 1 2 2 system be optional/available.

I’ve actually had the experience of trying my 2 1 2 2 system for 4 weeks in the past year. I have to tell you, my experiment was a huge success. It was a night and day difference for me. I had more energy, I had more motivation, less stress, less tension, more zest and enthusiasm for work and was way more productive with my time, both work and personal life. I was able to use that extra time to focus on certain things in my life and it helped a lot just to have that extra day off. I couldn’t believe how much I changed both my mental/emotional and physical state in just doing that system for a couple weeks at a time.

We are also heading into an era where A.I. and A.I. assisted technologies can do and will do most of the work for us. We are not required to follow this 9-5, 40 hour 60 hour work week anymore (unless you want to). AI will take care of most of it and freeing humans up to focus more on their creativity and innovation…to spend more time and our strengths in areas we never had time to focus on before. It makes sense to go in this direction. The 4 day work week is not meant to be a lazy excuse. In fact, you’d be doing more and getting more done under a 4 day work week system because of how liberated you will feel and you 'll find yourself completing all your tasks and then some.

I really believe societies will head in this direction. Remember, the current system in place are from another era. We are no longer factory workers or assembly line workers or just slaves that need to labor away…all systems are beginning to change and slowly new systems will replace the old.

2

I like working 4/10. It’s not the best schedule I’ve ever had (14 - 12 hour days followed by 14 days off) but it’s pretty close. I think working in long concentrated blocks makes me more effective and I’ve found that concentrated blocks of vacation make me more rested. So, I’ll never take a friday off for a three day weekend and I burn my 4 weeks of vacation in 3 shots in the summer, fall and winter.

Even when I was working on the Oil rigs less longer days was prefered so I don’t believe that is a manual vs mental labor thing. The hardest thing is that on the management side handling your staffing becomes more difficult since 4x10 doesn’t fit into the current week very well. When I staff 24/7 manufacturing operations I tend to use a 4 day week followed by a 3 day week with 12 hour days then 4 crews stacks in pretty easily with a minimum of overtime.

3

I did the 4/10 routine when I was driving for a same day courier service. They simply had float drivers (also 4/10) who’s work days were the days off of four other drivers.

4

I’ve worked with a number of small to medium sized manufacturing firms who actually let the workers vote on whether they wanted to work 4/10 or 5/8. All chose 4/10, almost all of them unanimously.

I know I’d WAY prefer a 4/10, though, as a professional who doesn’t punch a clock, it might not end up mattering.

5

Sure, I’ve done floaters and swing shifts but I’ve found both to be annoying from a scheduling perspective and from a keeping employees perspective. Most people seem to crave a more consistent schedule so at best I’ve ended up using swings as a hazing for new guys and newly promoted but then it needs more management which is also a pain.

6

Yes, I think it would be better, and a 32 hour work week makes sense too, it doesn’t have to be 4X10. I do think more and more jobs won’t conform to simple patterns of employment, but right now with our economy needing an eventual reboot the 4X8 work week should result in more steady employment. The trouble with 4X10 is that will be too intensive for some jobs, especially involving manual labor. The result could be increasing workplace injuries and stress in those cases.

I briefly worked a 3x12 shift in a computer center, there was a regular crew of 5-6 people doing this to make 24 hour operations work better. Back in those days many computer runs went longer than 8 hours and it helped to keep the same people around to follow the process start to end. Mostly for the times the process didn’t make it to the end on the first try. Anyway, I liked the 3-4 days off at a time, but those 3 days of working were entirely used up, commute, work, commute again, eat, sleep, repeat.

7

One of the reasons when I was working an odd work week back in the day [my weekend was Tuesday/Wednesday] was because I had a couple days to run errands where they were open and working and I was off, so I didn’t need to take a day off to do errands. Maybe make it optional to shift the single off day to suit - some people may prefer monday to be the 1 day and Th/FR to be the weekend.

Back when I was a rad whore I did 13 twelve hour days, 1 day to shift from day shift to night shift or nights to days, then 13 days/1 day. In the short term [none of my contracts was longer than 3 months] and while younger and crazy, it was fine. I have also done the 10 hour day/4 day weeks, and that was fine [as long as it didn’t involve a long commute, I have had jobs with a 75 mile one way commute]

I will say that I don’t like split shifts, or jobs that have you shifting your shifts constantly [I like overnights, please leave me the hell on overnights!!!] and I detest the way work has gone for places like Walmart and fast food places where you change up your shifts and days all the time, I worked retail back when one worked a specific shift/day and that was that - no wondering if you were going to get enough hours to pay your bills and actually manage to buy food to eat as well. I would like some sort of assurance that people would actually get a living wage and a safe workplace …

8

So I’m not an economist and so am probably wrong, but overall it would seem to me that , mandating a shorter work week with time an a half paid in order to work longer seems to me the most efficient way to balance our economy as we enter the age of automation. The direct effect of automation means that there is less work that needs to be done for the same unit of production. As it stands now this extra time is used up in two ways. The first way is to use up the extra capacity with more and more consumerism straining our planets resources as we consume for the sake of consuming, while not having the time to fully enjoy what we consume. The second way is to have fewer people working, which increases the demand for work. This in turn reduces the bargaining power of workers, which makes wages lower, which makes people have to work longer hours to make ends meet, which in turn increases the overall work being done by the individual worker, which increases unemployment making the bargaining power even less continuing in a positive feedback loop, with business owners reaping all the profits of the extra productivity.

It would seem to me that the more straight forward way to balance all of this is to simply give the excess productivity back to the worker in the form of free time. If people expect to only work 32-35 hours a week, Employers will have to hire more workers, unemployment will drop, wages will become more competitive, and eventually things will balance out. There isn’t a free lunch, so the extra unutilized time will probably result in a reduction of profits for businesses and lower standard of living for everyone else. But with more time to enjoy it, I expect that people will actually be happier. Which would you rather have, the newest I-phone to watch the first episode of game of thrones as you commute to work, or time enough to watch it and a couple of other episodes on your old TV at home.

9

Machines have never, on the broader scale, reduced the amount of labor needed in an economy. That’s simply not a thing that’s happened, as evidenced by the fact that prior to the pandemic people were doing lots of work despite being the most machine-drenched society that has ever existed. They may reduce labor needed in a really particular role in one company but overall, doesn’t happen (and in some cases it can causes a demand for MORE labor.) We just find other stuff to do, that’s all.

Take, for instance, an extremely important job that might be automated someday; truck drivers. It’s an immensely critical job; essentially every single thing in your house, with few exceptions, is there because it was conveyed to you on a truck (many trucks, really.) That job could be automated, and given that there are never, ever enough truck drivers, it’s actually an area where automation would really improve the economy. So would total labor needs go down?

No, not really. Aside from the fact that you still need mechanics, dispatchers and whatnot, effective robot drivers would be a truly enormous economic boon - it’d be worth hundreds of billions a year to the world economy in improved productivity. People would do other jobs now, jobs further up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. More service jobs, I guess. More people would have money to spend on personal trainers, life coaches, yoga classes, guitar lessons, so on and so forth.

Anyway, the thing that’s rarely ever discussed when this comes up is - what’s the actual ideal work week? It’s common to assume 32 is better than 40, but people only think that because it’s shorter, not because there is any evidence it’s true. If 32, why not 24? 16? 3? At some point it’s obviously the case that we can’t all work a tiny number of hours and expect shit to get done. There ARE some jobs that simply require a minimum number of hours be worked and there’s nothing you can do about it.

10

I’d like to see what the dropoff in productivity is when you move from 8 hours to 10. When I worked at Intel we went to having dinner in and supposedly working after that. No one actually worked. I’ve seen studies showing that after a certain number of hours you make so many mistakes that you might as well not bother. That’s more than 10, though.
One problem is childcare. That’s an awful long time to leave kids in daycare, butting into dinner time.
I’m retired, so I don’t care, but when I was working I’d have loved to do 40 hours a week only. Even when I only stayed at work for 9 hours, I’d do at least an hour more at home.

11

Re: productivity, I think it depends on the work. When I was in the lab, it just took a long time to get things done. Organic chemistry is slow. And a lot of things can’t be left for tomorrow. But I assure you, I want doing any good thinking by the end if the day. Data analysis and planning need to wait for a fresh brain.

12

I proposed an average 42 hour week in my first post and I think that pretty close to ideal. When you start looking at shorter weeks there isn’t enough time to get everything done. While you could make arguments that some of those functions are non essential and could be limited to achieve a shorter day I would counter that its more likely to result in a reduction in the work force proportional to the time saved.

I like the concept of work days and life days. On work days all you think about is work and life days you don’t think about work. It’s harder to do this with a family particularly a young one but then so is a 8-5 work life.

When I worked construction I would typically go work out for several hours after work so moving to a 12 hour day wouldn’t have bothered me and when I was working on the oil rigs as a roughneck I worked 12 hour days and then hit the gym for an hour after work. Of course at that point I was living on the platform so there was nothing else to do. Now that I’m older I doubt I could do physical labor 40 hours per week in general and I generally am doing 12-16 hour days on the weekend when I do projects on the house. For thinking work I work 6-6 commonly and while I’m not as sharp at the end of my day I’m fine by the next morning so I schedule my hard thinking for first thing and a lot of emails and clerical stuff for the end of the day. The biggest problem I see is the long time off after the short work week there would be potential to forget where you left off or not be able to come to a natural stopping point in only 3 days.

From a society stand point people have either 3 or 4 days off per week makes it possible to relax as well as get stuff done. I would guess lots of shops and cafes would see changes to their staffing patterns as people were more likely to show up to show Thursday at 2 pm.

13

At my last place we had the option (which most people, not all, exercised) to do a nine-day fortnight, working slightly longer days and having the final day off. Of course everybody wanted Monday or Friday, which made it difficult to be sure of ever getting hold of anybody on those days.
More recently that employer has been phasing out this practice by making new posts only open to people who agree to work standard hours.

14

When I was an applications programmer, I learned fairly early on that staying late to solve a problem was time wasted. As someone said, tired brain is not the way to work. I’d find I’d introduce more errors than I corrected. So, I’d work until I could tell I was getting to that point and go home. Usually, I’d see the problem the next morning in less time than I would have spent chugging away at it late at night. And not turning my code into a tangled spaghetti mess.

15

I often found when fault-finding on PCBs, if you left it until the morning and came back, you would spot the fault right away.

16

Productivity has increased substantially in the last 60 years, both due in part to technology and automation, but also due to the increased education and sophistication of the workforce. Have the workers seen an increase in pay to match this productivity? No. Have the workers been allowed to work less due to this increase in productivity? No.

So what has happened? We’ve had to work more. People have actually been forced to put in more hours over the years despite increased productivity. A huge amount of women who were not expected to work 70 years ago now must work just to get by. All this increased productivity and all this increased workforce - we must be fantastically wealthy, right? Yes, collectively, the wealth of the US has massively increased, even though the average person has not received any part of that. It’s all concentrated at the top. Wealth inequality has reached robber baron levels. We are working harder, longer, and more productively than ever, and more of us are doing it, and yet we’re just doing it to be able to run in place, so that unfathomably rich people can become more unfathomably rich.

So yes, yes to a 4 day work week, yes to less working, yes to allowing the increases in productivity to allow the average person to get some more enjoyment out of life instead of being a serf serving their unfathomably wealthy lords. That we have become incredibly productive and yet do not reap those rewards in either time or wealth is one of the greatest scams ever pulled on humanity.

17

It would be more complicated for businesses and the government to obtain the same profits with the current costs if people were allowed to work only four days a week.
I doubt that employers would regard this idea as a feasible one.

18

Are you assuming 4 8-hour days or 4 10-hour days? If the latter, start up and close down time (and lunch time) becomes smaller parts of the day and so assuming no loss in productivity from long hours you might increase profits.

19

The idea of working 8 hours a day, five days a week dates back to ideas born at the latter end of the Industrial Revolution when it was accepted that making people work 12 or 14-hour days was counter-productive. In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for This Many Hours - Thrive Global

I remember reading a study on shipyard workers that was carried out in the 1950s. The researches simply observed (with binoculars from a high vantage point) what the thousands of workers in the yard were doing at various times of the day. The conclusion was that, in general, they were at their most productive for the first three hours and that it would be more cost-effective to employ the men for four hours a day, rather than eight. Of course, this radical idea was never taken up.

In the last couple of decades of 2019, I was working for the NHS and based in a hospital. At that time there was a radical change to the way that cleaners were employed and the whole service was contracted out. The contractor did not employ many full-time cleaners but on four-hour shifts. I guessed that they had read the same research as I had, but there were other factors too: The law requires that any worker is entitled to a break after four hours, so no breaks for these employees. Many (most?) of them were women with families, and it was far easier to fit a four-hour shift into their busy day. Of course, even though the new hourly rate was higher, they would not earn as much in total, but many of those that I talked to were happy, while some simply signed up for a second shift.

In the transport world, where I ended up, four days on, four days off was fast becoming a popular shift pattern in a 24/7/364 day business. Some drivers hate the idea, but the larger employers often offered 5/6 days as an alternative. It has a number of advantages, the main one being that taking four days of annual leave, gives the worker a twelve-day break. The disadvantage is the number of interrupted weekends. Truck drivers tend to work long hours, so 48 hours in four shifts is not out of the way, although some employers expect more or less.

One ‘problem’ with a shorter working week is what people do with the extra days. Some will take advantage of the extra leisure time, but some will just take the opportunity to work shifts elsewhere to boost their incomes.

20

Where to even start with this. You can flatline pay with shady tactics like looking at only base wages (no overtime, bonuses, shift premiums, benefits), ignoring about 20% of the workforce (for compensation, but not for productivity!), and, most dishonest in my book, using two different measures of inflation for productivity and wages, resulting in a plot like this. Otherwise, they track nicely. Which makes sense; real (CPI-U-RS) **median **household income was the highest in 2018 (BLS releases this every September, so we don’t have 2019 yet) that it’s ever been since anyone has bothered measuring it.

That isn’t because “we’ve had to work more.” Yes, a larger percentage of women work now than in 1950. And a smaller percentage of men do. It’s about a wash; labor force participation is up 4 points, March to March. You may have noticed that household composition has changed a bit over the years. Women aren’t chattel anymore. Sometimes she works and he stays home. Often there is no he. I don’t have data on earners-per-household going back that far (USCB H-12 only lists back to 1980) but the percentage of multi-earner households was lower in 2018 than it was in 1980.

And it’s not like women at home in 1950 weren’t working; they just weren’t employed. :dubious: You’re treading dangerous waters with that one. The utility of paid work available to women has changed considerably. I think that’s wonderful. If you don’t . . . good luck.

In my household, neither of us is “expected” to work over the other. We could get by just fine on one income. But despite the tax disincentives, two is mighty nice. Because there’s enough to do with that extra money to make that extra work worthwhile. If you think you’re “treading in place”, try living a 1950s lifestyle and let us know how that works out for you. Except you won’t be able to post about it here because the both the device you’ve been using to post and the Internet weren’t an engineer’s wet dream yet.