There's a lot of people calling for a 4 day work week, saying we "deserve" it.
There's lots of jobs with a 4-day work week, 4-10s. There's also jobs with 2 weeks off a month... 14 days off, and 14-12s on. There's also shift work that's 7 and 7, 7 12-hour days on, 7 off, especially in fields like medicine where they need someone there all the time and it's easier to have 4 crews working 7 days at a time.
Essential jobs like manufacturing were among the first to do a 4-day workweek as in 4 10-hour days. While it's more stressful to the worker during the 4 workdays, it's much less stressful during the 3 day off, and statutory holidays mean that the workers get 4 days off which is nice.
For the most part, when people talk about a reduced work week, they actually mean a reduction to a 32-hour workweek and therefore 4-8 hour days, and then they'd pay everyone enough to make up for a day per week not working. Maybe we could get to a point where work weeks are really short, but what do most people actually contribute? Many spend 40 hours barely contributing to society as it is, doing relatively cushy jobs in air conditioned buildings that barely accomplish anything (for example, I believe America's largest employer is Walmart, where people take something someone in developing nations manufactured and put it on shelves so people can buy it) while people in most other parts of the world do jobs (like manufacturing the stuff sold in Walmart) that actually are physically demanding and dangerous for a fraction of the pay so we can keep having stuff delivered to our house despite having no part whatsoever is making that stuff. some asian cultures call for 9-9-6, or working from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week -- and many of the people calling for a 4 day workweek are doing so using devices manufactured by those asians.
Of course people are individually better off when they make the same money doing less work, but that doesn't mean it's better for the world in general. It's great for people who have already proven their worth and could be given a 1/5th raise anyway (at least in the short term, it's possible wages stagnate as a result), but it's also important that we are productive to the extent that we justify the additional wages, and that we aren't just making it illegal to be less productive than that. We're seeing very high youth unemployment in many developed nations for exactly this reason, that the minimum bar is set at a point where you need to be older and more experienced to meet it.
We've actually got a huge problem right now because many young men aren't able to get the stuff they need to join society. They can't get decent jobs, they can't buy houses, they can't get married, they aren't having kids, and raising the bar a little more isn't going to help at all in that regard. You're just creating a bigger underclass of have-nots and making life even easier for the haves.
There's lots of jobs with a 4-day work week, 4-10s. There's also jobs with 2 weeks off a month... 14 days off, and 14-12s on. There's also shift work that's 7 and 7, 7 12-hour days on, 7 off, especially in fields like medicine where they need someone there all the time and it's easier to have 4 crews working 7 days at a time.
Essential jobs like manufacturing were among the first to do a 4-day workweek as in 4 10-hour days. While it's more stressful to the worker during the 4 workdays, it's much less stressful during the 3 day off, and statutory holidays mean that the workers get 4 days off which is nice.
For the most part, when people talk about a reduced work week, they actually mean a reduction to a 32-hour workweek and therefore 4-8 hour days, and then they'd pay everyone enough to make up for a day per week not working. Maybe we could get to a point where work weeks are really short, but what do most people actually contribute? Many spend 40 hours barely contributing to society as it is, doing relatively cushy jobs in air conditioned buildings that barely accomplish anything (for example, I believe America's largest employer is Walmart, where people take something someone in developing nations manufactured and put it on shelves so people can buy it) while people in most other parts of the world do jobs (like manufacturing the stuff sold in Walmart) that actually are physically demanding and dangerous for a fraction of the pay so we can keep having stuff delivered to our house despite having no part whatsoever is making that stuff. some asian cultures call for 9-9-6, or working from 9am to 9pm 6 days a week -- and many of the people calling for a 4 day workweek are doing so using devices manufactured by those asians.
Of course people are individually better off when they make the same money doing less work, but that doesn't mean it's better for the world in general. It's great for people who have already proven their worth and could be given a 1/5th raise anyway (at least in the short term, it's possible wages stagnate as a result), but it's also important that we are productive to the extent that we justify the additional wages, and that we aren't just making it illegal to be less productive than that. We're seeing very high youth unemployment in many developed nations for exactly this reason, that the minimum bar is set at a point where you need to be older and more experienced to meet it.
We've actually got a huge problem right now because many young men aren't able to get the stuff they need to join society. They can't get decent jobs, they can't buy houses, they can't get married, they aren't having kids, and raising the bar a little more isn't going to help at all in that regard. You're just creating a bigger underclass of have-nots and making life even easier for the haves.
@sj_zero It really does hurt my brain that people can't see how little sense this makes. Most people are hourly. How out of touch with reality are people who have salaried jobs?!The vast majority of people, at least 9/10, are living paycheck to paycheck. I legitimately can't think of words for how messed up this whole thing is. Many people work 2 or 3 hourly jobs to survive, while somehow there is this upper caste of people who are getting paid much more to do much less. And now these clowns want an extra day off. And student loan forgiveness. Eat my absolute ass.
Man, you get it. And you're right, it's a complete disconnect.
I saw an image recently showing the average wage at Tesla (about 40k/yr) and the average wage at Google (about 400k/yr), and it seems to me like a good indication of the disconnect between people calling for stupid bullshit and the people who have to live with said stupid bullshit.
I saw an image recently showing the average wage at Tesla (about 40k/yr) and the average wage at Google (about 400k/yr), and it seems to me like a good indication of the disconnect between people calling for stupid bullshit and the people who have to live with said stupid bullshit.
- replies
- 0
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 2
@sj_zero One possible unintentional benefit of a 4 day workweek is that it would force companies to train an employee to cover for the missing day an experienced person is not going to be there.