I need to know if you'd work longer hours to have more time off

[andrewducker]

Poll

Context: Amazon is apparently doing this for all permanent staff.

Personally, I'm torn. Part of me would love this, but I also find it hard to juggle things as it is, particularly around Julie and her chemo-drugs/fasting. I can see it making life harder for some people with kids (or other caring needs) too.

Comments

[kerrypolka]

We have the wealth and efficiency to be able to work four-day weeks period.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely, if we didn't mind being 80% as productive as we currently are.

The problem is that people expect more than they did 30 years ago (as we discussed a few days ago), and some resources are in the kind of rivalrous demand that means that their prices rise fairly constantly with our wealth.

[kerrypolka]

Right, but efficiency is also increasing, so it's not like we're going to stop being more productive, we'll just be increasing productivity slightly less quickly. Which I think most people would be fine with, especially if it means we start focusing on efficiency as a way of increasing leisure time instead of something that makes shareholders wealthier and employees poorer (due to being made redundant or compensation being tied to hours worked).

[andrewducker]

I can't see any reason why you wouldn't tie compensation to hours worked.

Well, to some measure of productivity.

The whole point is that you exchange productivity for cash. If you suddenly produce 20% less than you were last week then why would you get as much in exchange for that?

[kerrypolka]

I'm a little confused, because productivity and hours worked are two totally different things. Retail workers are paid £7 an hour no matter how many things they sell. A wedding dress maker is paid £800 a dress no matter how long it takes her to make it.

Increased efficiency means you can do more work in the same amount of time, or the same amount of work in less time. If efficiency is increased - which it consistently is, in general, because of technology - productivity can stay the same or go up while the worker works fewer hours than she currently does.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. Provided their standards don't go up and prices don't go up on important things.

The problem is that (a) the prices of some things go up as fast as productivity does and (b) people keep wanting stuff that was better than last year.

If people stop wanting better stuff, and we build a load more houses, then at least some slowing of productivity would work.

As it is, we are getting richer by about 2% per year, so you could cut back on your hours right now if you were happy to go back to a historical standard of living.

[kerrypolka]

Provided their standards don't go up

Yeah, I feel like this is the nut of it - the intersecting movements of what (middle-class, I think we're mostly talking about) people feel they 'need', what prices are going sharply down and which are going up. EG I have a lot of things that are both significantly better and significantly cheaper than I did five years ago, especially technology, so it's not that increasing standards of living are necessarily more expensive (again because of increased efficiency). And leisure time is part of living standards too.

What part of history do you mean by 'a historical standard of living'? There's quite a lot of it!

[andrewducker]

Depends on how much less you want to earn :-)

If you look at wage inflation and RPI you can subtract one from the other for each year and see what the difference is, and then work out how many hours less you could work.

Of course, that's been negative since 2008, so you'd have to work harder to get back to a 2008 standard of living:
http://www.economicshelp.org/blog/6994/economics/uk-wage-growth/

[kerrypolka]

I'm aware of that, I was just a little amused by the idea of 'a historical standard' being a singular thing considering there's several thousand years of varying standards to pick from :P

[xenophanean]

Not sure that's strictly true, it's in the mythical man-month area.

Are you sure that workers on a five-day week are exactly as efficient as more rested, four-day workers? I'm not, and I've heard the contrary.

[andrewducker]

Nope. But you try measuring developer productivity...

[xenophanean]

Developer productivity is simple to measure, all you need to do is count the lines of code written.*

*This was an actual suggestion from a management meeting for a massive multinational which an old boss attended.

[andrewducker]

IBM used to do this. Pissed off MS no end by wanting to pay them based on it.

Also, Apple:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt

[xenophanean]

But I take the point, the only way to find out would be to get a huge company, with very similar departments, and change the working hours of one of them, then give it a year.

Even then you'd suffer the "someone's paying attention to us" work statistics problem (it improves productivity).

[palmer1984]

Not sure if anyone else has made this point, so apologies if they have, but we wouldn't be 80% as productive. Productivity per hour increases as total hours go down, we'd be more than 80% as productive.

[fiddlingfrog]

I wandered in to make the same point. My wife gets more done in a 30 hour week than she did when she worked 40 hour weeks.