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Comment by peatmoss | Hacker News Reader

I think three day weekends would be undeniably good for the health of our society and everyone living in it.

I have long (semi-jokingly) professed belief in the Church of the SubGenius. They extol the virtues of slack. I think the intended meaning of “slack” is as in “to slack off.” But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system.

While some might use that extra day to slack off, plenty more would use that day to invest labors in their communities, maybe to get some exercise, maybe do some neglected repairs around the house.

I feel like in the name of efficiency, we’ve purged a lot of slack from the system, but that has left us with a lot of institutions that are at risk for catastrophic failure. For people who are stretched to their breaking point, there needs to be more slack.

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According to the theory of constraints (on which I am expert since I read 1 graphic novel, The Goal, and 1 novel, The Phoenix Project) systems without slack become exponentially slower until no work is capable of getting done anymore.

The reason for this are statistical perturbations in stochastic events. If a task takes a worker rand(1,4) units of time you can expect them to do day/1 to day/4 tasks in the day.

You look at the worker doing day/1 tasks and you say, "Well shit, that person is slacking most of the time. Most of these tasks take 2 units, 4 is very rare". So you ask them to work harder and impose rules so they must perform day/3 number of tasks per day.

You look at your constantly busy workers and you're happy. No more slack in the system.

But your assembly line grinds to a halt. Nothing ever gets done anymore. Everyone is busy all the time. Everyone's always working. But nothing is finishing.

What gives?

Turns out any task that hits N=4 on the random curve, wreaks havoc and you fall behind. Then you have both yesterday's and today's tasks to do. You can't. The next day ... well the problem ends up growing exponentially.

Efficient systems have slack.

Yup. And on top of that, my team does have slack time, but that doesn't mean we stop working when the mandatory tasks are done. We rather spend the downtime resolving time-consuming technical debt, automating some steps in the workflow. So, slack will actually make the regular tasks go faster.

This is a very good bit of information, but most modern workplaces are not factory floors 'processing work items', so the analogy only goes so far.

Also, it very well could be that reducing to 4 from 5 does nothing but simply reduce the number of hours 'the factory is operating'. Surely there'd be a bonus because people might be more relaxed, but it's hard to weight that against the lost day.

For example, my local coffee shop is open 7 days a week, let's say that their staff works 5 days on, 2 off so there's a steady rate of staffers.

If they just switched to 4 on 3 off ... I'm not sure anything would materially change in terms of productivity etc. - and 'all else being equal' (i.e. demand, cost of goods, wages/hour), the staffers would simply make less money and I doubt they'd chose that.

But maybe '3/4 days' would be better in some industries than others.

> most modern workplaces are not factory floors 'processing work items', so the analogy only goes so far.

I recommend reading The Phoenix Project. It does a great job of dispelling the myth that software engineering is unpredictable and artisanal and whatnot. At the abstraction layer of a department or division manager it becomes indistinguishable and the same stochastic modeling principles apply.

But that’s besides the point. A more important point is the idea of effectiveness.

4 days of effective work are often better than 5 days of being busy but ineffective.

Personally I get more done in a 4 day week because I am more cut-throat about saying No to things that don’t matter.

Even just "more relaxed" waiting staff would result in better relationships with customers, resulting in better tips and more returning customers.

Again, this could only be (dis)proven in a large-numbers experiment (so no, not in a single cafe :)), but I don't think this is limited to any one particular area of work.

Zvi Mowshowitz put the concept of "slack" well: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/slack/

Productivity has increased ~250% almost linearly over the past 70 years. Wages increased only ~100% (adjusted) and only until ~50 years ago, basically plateauing since then.

Going to a 4 day work week would bring the weekly productivity to the level of a 5 day week from the early 2000s while also providing a "virtual" wage increase.

I don't really see companies flocking to sign up.

Why would wages follow productivity? Arn’t there a ton of counteracting factors, like productivity decreasing demand for labor?

I was just pointing out that companies care about productivity and workers about wage. I see no reason for shareholders to be the only ones happy at the end of the day.

This assumes that weekly productivity scales evenly with hours worked. It doesn’t. It will vary per person, profession, etc. but four day work weeks can be surprisingly effective even before considering the effects of potential mental health improvements.

You could also consider 10 hour four day weeks, though I guess at 10 hours many would see fatigue affecting their work.

An episode of Marketplace this week highlighted a recent survey showing a strong majority of people preferring 4x10 rather than 5x8. It's unclear why it isn't more common.

Because most of the people of a high enough pay-grade to have any bargaining power are already working 5x10, or more.

I work 4x10 and keep a timesheet; any time I work over I take back at some point in time. Planning on decreasing the hours slightly soon, drop back to 38 or whatever the norm is here in Australia.

I don't find that 10 hours fatigues me, it feels the same as an eight hour day anyway.

I think you're a big outlier, or at least you would be in the US. I have no idea what work culture is like in Australia, but it stands to reason it would be better than here.

US working hours are nuts, IMO.

Was this a US specific survey? 10h of work, 1+h of break, and at least 1h of commute means you leave home at 8 in the morning and come back after 8 in the evening. I doubt this would be very popular in Europe with anybody in a non-managerial position or at least very high on the pay grade. But it sort of makes sense because it improves the ratio of productive time (work) to unproductive time (the commute), and results in getting a full extra free day.

On the other hand it's possible that a 10h work day becomes less productive than an 8h one if applied long term. Of course it depends on the actual job but it wouldn't leave much time for anything personal. For a lot of jobs 10h shifts sounds like looking for trouble.

I was pretty great when working a blue-collar industrial job. I'd work 6:30-5 (unpaid half hour lunch) monday-thursday one week, then tuesday-friday the next. So you'd get a four-day weekend every other week, and if there was extra work, you'd get time-and-a-half for it. A ten hour day wasn't bad, because you went until 9, had a half hour break, went to noon, ate lunch, went until 3 and had another break, then closed out the day until 5. It was almost an extended pomodoro.

Even now, programming on salary, I'd rather do 4 tens, 7-5. The overhead of commuting is what kills me, and it'd actually be less traffic if I went in earlier. Besides, those two hours before everybody else gets there could be more productive than the whole rest of the day.

> The overhead of commuting is what kills me

Even a short commute just kills me. This is why WFH is so effective IMO. Up between 5am and 6am. Workout, then work. Those few hours in the morning before anyone else gets in is when I do most of my 'work' for the day. The rest of the day is meetings, answering questions, etc...

Her in Norway most people work 37.5 hours (40 hours present with an unpaid half hour lunch break). And if you are salaried then you can pretty much come and go as you please. I read somewhere (VG perhaps) that about 100k people work a four day week (same total time) here (out of a total 5.5 million population). It's especially attractive for people who have a long or stressful commute.

> It's unclear why it isn't more common.

Because many companies are already getting 5x10 out of their salaried employees. They don't want to lose that extra work.

The calculation was back of the napkin of course, and worst case scenario. But it never implied all people and professions are the same (that's not how statistics work), or that weekly productivity varies with hours worked. Rather with days worked. A day is a fully self-contained unit of work/life so to speak: it contains the commute, the breaks, the work, the recovery time (sleep), etc. This makes it a much more relevant unit of measure.

8 hour days are probably a good balance between how much work you can productively put in during one day and the auxiliary time. Increasing the number of hours per day would probably decrease productivity via fatigue. Decreasing the hours wouldn't bring much of a benefit for the worker since the auxiliary time stays mostly the same (you still commute).

A good chunk of the lost productivity would probably be offset by higher worker satisfaction.

Wages won’t track linearly with productivity because different goods and services have different demands for labour and capital. As we get better at making physical goods prices decrease or quality increases or both. A haircut or a dance recital still takes the same amount of human labour though and it gets more expensive in relative terms. If it didn’t people would leave the service industry for the higher wages available in goods production. And more advanced economies have a higher share of services than less advanced ones. That’s Baumol’s cost disease and it explains huge amounts of the growing relative costs of highly labour intensive services like education or healthcare. See Why Are the Prices So Damned High?, Helland and Tabarrok.

https://www.mercatus.org/system/files/helland-tabarrok_why-a...

Most important and revealing graph in the entire book

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/05/wh...

As well as that you have growing land use regulation making certain types of housing illegal, e.g. apartments or houses below a certain area, or flophouses/SROs. Zoning more generally does this everywhere. Most of the residential buildings in Manhattan would be illegal to build today. So land holders capture much of the gains in productivity and that doesn’t show up in the labour share of productivity growth. But land ownership is extremely widespread; this is the lower middle class and up, not just the rich capturing increases in productivity.

Less important but still significant is that due to the US tax code’s treatment of benefits compensation has gone up more than wages have. The cost of health insurance has gone up enormously since the 70’s, A’s has what you get for your money.

This is a great read. I especially appreciated “Most times are ordinary. Make an ordinary effort.“

I used to work 4x10 hour days, I took the Wednesday off though - no more than two days in a row was great, and having a day off in the week while most were at work was so much more efficient

I now take 2-4 hours a day off during the day instead.

In the US, if you don't work, you don't get paid, so this sounds like a recipe for disaster for most workers here. Small to medium businesses would potentially be losing 42 days a year of production (52 days - 10 days std vacation time) and that would hurt the profits that they would need to increase wages to make up for that lost day per week just for the workers. Shareholders will still expect year-over-year increase in profits, which won't happen if you're paying people who aren't working.

Where exactly is that happiness supposed to come from? Workers may be miserable, but less money equals even more misery, near as I can tell. I guess the rich will be happy.

1. There are very few jobs where doing them in a miserable state does not greatly reduce the quality and quantity of work you do.

2. Successful businesses are making their owners and shareholders lots of money. As an absolute worst-case scenario, every company takes a 1/5 hit to the profit they produce for their owners.

3. Point #2 means that a four-day work week would do a lot to rebalance the value of capital vs the value of labour. The balance has been tipped towards capital for far too long.

That 1/5 hit is enough to turn a +10% return to -10%.

If your business model requires miserable employees, your business should not exist.

Please don't post unsubstantive comments that take a thread further into flamewar.

Only if labor is 100% of your costs.

If you do it unilaterally, yes. However, if your competitors are forced to make the same change at the same time, prices will adjust to compensate.

They’ll go up to make up for loss in profits.

Forced to? Even if it forces small businesses out of business?

I don’t think that forcing people to do things is ideal, personally.

We already “force” people to do all kinds of things. We call them labour laws, safety regulations, minimum wages. These are all mostly good things.

I'm sure no legal business ever set out to make their employees lives miserable (not being sarcastic there, either).

But the point was that the loss of pay due to working only 4 days, vs 5 days, is not going to make any workers happy. Business paying 5 days of wages for 4 days of work is not going to make anyone happy, especially shareholders.

You might make up some of the loss by cutting vacation time, but there's no extra room to make up 42 days of lost productivity.

Prices will have to increase to make up for lost profits, but with less money for people to spend, this sounds like a recipe for economic disaster.

My argument is actually that you should not decrease pay but should decrease hours. I suspect you’d make up most or all of what you lost in hours by way of increased productivity. I also think “economic productivity” is just capital efficiency. And i don’t think that is a proxy for quality of life - something i care a lot more about.

Not sure how you came up with 1/5 to the profits at most. If the labor costs increase by 20% it may well mean going from black to red got the company or the profits being reduced by 80% or whatever other number depending on the margins the company is operating on.

1/5 is 4 days a week instead of 5.

If labour is 100% of your company’s costs, then yes you are facing a 20% increase in costs. 100% labour businesses are VERY rare.

It is also very unlikely that cutting hours by 1/5 (while keeping wages stable) would result in a 1/5 loss in productivity. There is so much time wasted in the typical 9-5 workday because nobody can be productive for 8 hours straight.

So if you have a business that’s near 100% labour costs, and the work is such that productivity is very nearly equal ti hours spent working, and your margins can’t take a 20% hit, then yes you are going out of business.

There are whole classes of business that would work if 50 or 60 hour work weeks are legal to mandate - but we don’t care... why do we care about that thin slice of businesses that require a 40 hour work week? 32 hours or bust.

I think the confusion is not where the figure 1/5 comes from, but rather why that is the change in profit. It looks like you meant revenue.

Right. I see how that was unclear. A 1/5 increase in labour costs is a much more precise way to frame it.

It's more precise but the whole point is that cutting 20% of profits sounds like a reasonable price to pay but once you realize increasing labor cost by 20% may mean for example 80% cut in profits it's not so simple anymore.

A 1/5 hit in revenue might have a larger impact on profits. It would completely wipe out many businesses with small margins. Are we saying that those businesses should not exist?

Edit: increased productivity needs to be a huge part of the argument here

First off, if you want that profit back, hire more people. Unlikely that labour is 100% of your costs. If it’s 10% of your costs you’d have to hire 1/5 more people, and costs would go up 1/5*0.1 = 2%

If your business dies at a 2% loss of profits, i’m ok with that.

But frankly i doubt you’d lose 1/5 of your worker productivity by cutting hours by 1/5 (assuming pay rates stay the same) - so that’s a worst-case scenario where productivity is directly tied to time-spent-working.

Think of the number of businesses that could exist if we had a sixth workday. Are we saying those businesses properly have never existed?

What's magic or received about five days?

Evidence suggests that having more time off increases productivity. And let's be honest, most people working 40+ hours/w are not working at 100% all the time. So one possibility is to slightly increase the working time (say by 1h) for each of the four days. That loses you half a day for work, but the increased productivity takes care of the balance. The caveat is that only works for businesses that are charging for output rather than time.

"Evidence suggests" there must be a limit, after which more time off reduces productivity, yes? If your boss gives you 168 hours off per week, you won't be at maximum productivity. Instead of a generalized statement which can't possibly be true in all circumstances, perhaps your argument would have more merit if you could accurately identify the inflection point.

> But I choose to believe in it as slack (i.e. spare capacity) in a system.

This is essentially how Tom DeMarco defines it in his book Slack.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/123715.Slack

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