The trick is getting a job you enjoy. I work over 110 hours a week right now. I couldn’t imagine handling these hours if I didn’t mostly enjoy my job.
Proposing to halve hours and maintain full pay is literally proposing to double labor costs for every good or service that is sold. Isn’t this obvious?
Here’s alternative proposal: mandate that everyone’s pay be doubled; then we will still work our same schedules but everyone will be twice as rich … Right?
Thanks for all that data DSeid. Ravenman, I didn’t suggest maintain full pay.
You completely miss the point, which is not to make every one rich but to give everyone more time for things other than work.
Of course, under such a system I would advocate that those that truly love their work be allowed to work more than 20 or 30 hours in a week, but for the rest of us, more time outside of work could have many benefits. More time with family and friends, more time for hobbies, sports, study…
Heck, the average American could benefit just from another hour of sleep every night.
Well, what ARE you suggesting? Because the issue of pay is, don’t you think, rather an important issue in deciding if this is a good idea or not?
Do you believe that most people who are working 40 hours per week would jump at the chance to work 75% as many hours for 75% of the pay? Do you think the reaction of most would be: “Oh boy! More time for hobbies and sports!” Is it currently the circumstance that most of those with 40 hrs/wk jobs are looking to get part time ones of 29 hrs/wk (for proportionately less pay and benefits) and cannot find them?
In point of fact there was a huge shift in America with a significant increase in those working less than 35 hours/week and a significant decrease in those working more. It occurred in beginning with the onset of the Great Recession in 2008 and peaked by 2010 and has been pretty flat since, maybe slightly shifting towards more over 35 hours/week as some of those who want those hours find them.
Yes. It does not support that claim. If I missed something, can you point it out?
There are a lot of jobs that you really need a full day to do.
My mind immediately goes to teaching. Teachers already work more than 8 hours a day (and the rest of us never hear the end of it! :)). If the norm becomes a four hour workday, then teachers should be entitled to even more benefits. Unless parents are willing to use their extra free time to teach their own children and teachers get to go home at 1:00PM like everyone else.
Other jobs may be in such short supply that people have to work a full day to cover the demand. I’m thinking of doctors and lawyers, but I’m sure there are others.
Dutch here. I don’t know about 20 hours, and I certainly doubt the culturally restricted part (what do you even mean by that?) but I do know that yes, we have a short work week *on average *. And that this is due to three things:
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With married couples, typically the woman after she has kids works 20-30 hours and the man 32-40 hours. So our typical model is the one-and-a-half-income/workweek-model.
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Dutch corporate culture is not about preseeintism. (Making long hours on the job just to make a good impression). When you’re at work, you work, and if you don’t have anything to do, you tell your boss and you go home. If you have more to do then you can do in your workweek, usually you notify your boss, and he has to make sure the overtime won’t be structural. Most people just go home after five o clock. Staying longer just to make the impression of working hard is frowned upon by bosses and co-workers, because everybody knows that kind of thing is contagious and drags everybody down. Dutch culture is about spending quality time with kids and about being home for dinner at six o clock.
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We have a lot of vacation days.
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We have a rather high minimum wage, and hiring people is generally expensive because of the social premiums. Firing people is hard, too. And people have mimimum welfare so they don’t have to take second and third jobs.
So we don’t have as many people as in the US who have to work 2-3 jobs to get by. That also makes for a lower average of hours per workweek.
As for the housing PhillyGuy mentions, I don’t really think that is a factor. Throughout history, people have been willing to commute about an hour to their place of work. More then that, it is not economically sound, and they either moved or sought another job.
That one hour commute covers more and more area as the means of transport evolved from walking to walking along better roads, travelling by cart/horse/train/car/subway etc, of course.
The Netherlands is densely populated, and travel from one side of the country takes about five hours (North-South) of three hours (East-West). (Yes, we are the size of Massachusets, with about 17 million people, about the number that live in the state of New York). So, most people have a commute of one hour or less, here as anywhere.
When I started my current job, I was begging to be given more work. Now, 45 to 50 hours per week isn’t enough. And it’s not like ‘OK, let’s give him more work,’ as if they just divvy it up. It’s that, fortunately, we have more coming in. Due to outside-of-work responsibilities, it’s very difficult to work longer or on weekends. There’s not enough work to justify hiring another person. Perhaps I could do the programming and running the data through the programs, and my coworker can do the tedious and time-consuming stuff that comes after. (She can spend half an hour or so complaining she has too much work to do, plus an hour or so a day talking about non-work things. And she takes her two 2-minute breaks a day!)
I’d prefer to have more vacation time, and I wouldn’t mind a raise. The company is rather backward, in that you only get two weeks of vacation time until you’ve been there 10 years; and no one has gotten a raise in the 6-½ years I’ve been there. Not that I have time to use the two weeks of vacation I get, but it would still be nice. Full-time telecommuting (instead of three days per week) would be good. I’d have an extra 10 hours per week to get through the data, which would give me time to use my vacation time; and it would be like getting a $5,000/year raise.
Shorter work week? Wouldn’t work for me.
I doubt the Netherlands is close to an average of 20hrs/wk, unless you count SAHMs. I do have some friends who work in small offices where everyone works 4 days and from 10-5 or 9-4, it seems to be a fashion of some sort. They’re little IT businesses and such.
Where I think the OP has a good point is that the expectations of modern day life just don’t seem properly thought through.
We live in little bubble units of family, there is supposed to be man, woman and children. You need to work, balance it with school, but the hours don’t match up. Then you have to do normal chores (shopping, dentist, cleaning), but again, the hours don’t really work. The system seems set up for the 1950s upper-middle class model: you work hard long hours and come home to a clean house, clean kids and a g&t from your pretty wife, pat the children on the head and send them off to bed. Everything works so long as you get a 1950s wife-maid thrown in, take her out and there is a problem.
Everything you do to make your life work for you is some sort of mutation from that system. But that system, the idea it is based on, is not at all what real life is like. It never really has been, but for a few people. So I agree that there needs to be some sort of fundamental revision and that fewer working hours would be a natural result of that revision. How this would work? Beats me!
As it is now I don’t understand why people have children: it seems like a terribly bad idea in all respects.
Fundamentally the problem is that the value of things working people produce isn’t divided among the people who do the work. Instead it’s redistributed to the wealthy.
The companion to fractional employment is basic income. While both would require a complete restructuring of most Western economies, I don’t know what other future we have with continually rising population and continually declining man-hours needed for production.
There’s only so much need for management and “service”… so put that part of the population that doesn’t want to work on a basic income and let 'em play video games all day and divide up the important jobs among more workers to share the wealth (both ways - income and expertise).
Good article on basic income here.
It would be cheaper than trying to artificially create and maintain jobs while supporting some large part of the population on various forms of welfare. The bottom line is that there are not enough family-supporting 40-hour jobs and may never again be enough - once the high tide of “servicing” each other recedes, there will be far fewer. Basic income would subsidize a general return to intellectual pursuits… or at least get an unemployable percentage off a train they only crowd and slow down.
What about Four/Six hour shifts per day instead of Three/Eight, With 2/15 min breaks every 2 hours and 3/5 min breaks per off hour?
That’s an extra 10 hours personal time per week and adds an extra shift in 24 hours= more job openings.
Wages and Prices have to adjust to the less hours. One would be losing $400 a month @ 20 per hr. average.
I think most people with 50k incomes and normal lifestyles could afford a 30 hour work week.
20 hours? pfft
===No forget it I cant add…:P===
In post 12 your denied that your proposal includes half pay.
Actually, I understood that perfectly. But you seem to have missed my point: cutting labor hours by half and not cutting wages in half has more or less the same impact on prices as if hours stayed the same but wages went up by a lot.
I used a fallacious counter example (doubling everyone’s wages will make everyone rich) to illustrate the point that wage inflation (whether it is by arbitrarily increasing everyone wage, or by eliminating their hours but not cutting their wages by an applicable percentage) will cause the cost of goods and services to rise significantly.
In order for your money to purchase goods and services, someone has to produce those goods and services. Cut the amount that people work by 50% (or 25% or whatever) means that you cut the amount of goods and services produced by 50%. So now not only do you make half as much money, there are now half as many things to buy with your half income. Get used to paying twice as much for everything but only having half the income you used to.
Of course, mandating that everyone gets the same pay as before, but just works half as much (or 3/4ths or whatever) is so laughable as to not even be worth addressing. It is effectively the exact same thing as doubling everyone’s pay for the exact same amount of work. If we doubled the money supply but kept the same amount of goods and services, what would happen? Nothing would change except everything would cost twice as much. Changing the amount of money in circulation does not change the amount of goods and services that we produce.
I do think it would take a cultural shift to see if such a thing would have any appeal; right now, part-time jobs are almost inevitably dead-end jobs, and to accept a part-time position is to usually go to less than half of what you’d be making full time, and stagnating there.
I think some of that is probably inevitable: there is a certain fixed cost with maintaining an employee, and if you have twice as many employees working the same hours, those fixed costs double. But some of it is simply about expectations about what it means to be serious about a job. It would be very interesting to see how many people would drop down to 50% or 75% if their salary was merely prorated and their long-term prospects weren’t harmed–I think quite a few families with small children would have at leas one parent stay home more.
The changes we are able to make to our culture will really dictate if we are ever able to go on a shorter work week.
If we were to start off encouraging a society to start buying or making items that would last longer or in many cases for generations. We might pay a lot more for the product but we would save money on that particular product over a lifetime. We would also reduce the need for workers or hours worked.
As technology gets better less hours are required to do the same amount of work in almost any field you can think of.
We were heading for problems with hours and manpower in the 1980s but we were granted a reprieve by the dot. com boom. Now we are facing it again approaching critical levels. Companies could start off very gradual like a 4 hour cut in work but only a 2 hour cut in pay. Gradually over a period of decades adjust as needed keeping efficiency up in the workplace as opposed to just throwing people at jobs.I’m not an economist but I’m not sure that’s correct. In such a situation, one can expect that the price of real estate would drop. So that you would be earning less money but it would be less expensive to buy or rent a place to live.
Beside which, what matters is how people feel about their wealth and income. For example, household income has increased dramatically since the 60s and 70s because more women are working. Not only that, but the price of manufactured goods (and food to a lesser extent) has dropped dramatically since then. So peoples’ houses are full of junk and their bellies are full of junk food.
I would experiment with cutting the work-week from 40 to 35 hours and see what happens. If it doesn’t throw the country into a depression, then maybe cut again to 32 hours.