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Comment by 2pasc | Hacker News Reader

France did that (the infamous "35-hour work week") in 2000. This has proven to be a disaster on multiple counts: - it created a mess in public hospitals where it completely screwed up the organization of shifts for nurses and doctors and lead to French hospitals decline - it benefitted profesionals and middle managers who got more vacation with maintained good wages - it ended up being horrendous to people with lower paid jobs as it became an opportunity for their wages to compress. It lead to a significant stagnation of wages among lower class workers, and eventually their impoverishment.

I am actually surprised and disappointed that some of the smartest minds of our generation think that the best way to solve long term unemployment is to reduce the work week hours...

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Sounds more like a cluster of tactical problems that can be solved individually than an overall strategic failure.

I don't think it is a matter of the smartest minds of our generation trying to solve long term unemployment, but rather solving the problem of human effectiveness and happiness.

The idea is that we don't have to waste peoples lives on everlasting drudge work.

We've created this economic system collectively. We can change it. We have before. Around 1900 we were, on average, paying 40% of our wages for food and working a hell of a lot of hours to do it, mostly with farm work. Now we pay an average of 6% of our wages for food and work around 40 hours a week to do it.

It is better than it was and there is no reason it can't get better still.

There are people who will still work a lot -- I'm sure I'll be one of them, but we shouldn't really have to with how productive we are per capita and how truly cheap it is for people to live.

Maybe, but the fact that food is cheaper as a % of income today does not mean we have less poverty overall. It just means we have a different kind. First of all, lodging is still a very important budget item, and not one that is bound to decrease for high employment areas, as city regulations make it hard to increase housing supply at the necessary rate. Second, new needs have appeared that have replaced food among the necessary spending. Mobile phone plans and Internet are one of them.

We are the ones who work a lot and make a good living with that. The problem is at the other end of the spectrum with people that are barely making ends meetm and need to work as much as possible to earn enough to feed their family and survive.

You're right on all counts, however Google employees are most likely not low wages worker, and do not have complex and long shifts as hospital workers. I don't think that giving them more free time to recharge/replenish their energy would lead to the collapse of Google. And it is a bit different if it is a mandatory reduction of the work week at the federal level, and an experimentation by a company. If Google feels like they would benefit from it, they are free to try and report their findings.

Sure. But Larry Page was not referring to Google employees reducing their hours, but everybody else.

Let's not stop there: http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/21-hours

Piketty has the solution for the reduced wages at the bottom, with a tax on capital - just combine that with basic income and people don't have to worry about making a living.

Denmark, on the other hand, moved from a 40-hour to a 37-hour week in 1992 and it has been a success. It had no measurable effect on output, and does not seem to have impacted wage or employment growth. Maybe the length of the workweek is not the main problem with France's labor market?

But Denmark, like many Northern European countries is an economy with high tax rates and high redistribution, which can compensate for the lack of growth of labor wages. The US is not a market like that at all.

I've been told by a close friend who's an early Baby Boomer who's parents were therefore in the Greatest Generation that thoroughly experienced the Great Depression that there was a lot of social pressure against households with more than one job holder.

I think we can expect plenty more insane proposals as our current Great Recession grinds on and on. Fortunately our system of government is more responsive to the people, and we've got all these Petri dishes of states and cities that are trying out some of these bad ideas for object lessons, like e.g. Seattle and Michigan with elevated minimum wages.

On the other hand Obamacare is pushing vast numbers of hourly workers into < 30 hours per week for any single job ... so, really, we're already starting to do this to people with lower paid jobs :-(....

Trying once and failing do not mean we should never try again, I thought it was well understood here.

I am not saying we should not try again. I think that the arguments used by Larry Page reminded me of what French socialists were saying in the late 90s, and the effectiveness of these measures has been zero.

If you extend SV from it's hippy origins the ultimate aim for people is full time unemployment. People shouldn't have to work, the argument goes, if we have the ideal place to live in.

Sooo many errors in this sneering and ahistorical post. France voted-in that famous and world-leading 35-hour workweek as a 4-hour jumpdown from a 39-hour workweek in 1997 when unemployment was 12.6%. It took complete hold in early 2001 after several delays but with many companies anticipating. And before the US-led recession hit France in summer 2001, unemployment had come down to 8.6%. That's 1% less unemployment per hourcut, same result as the USA got in 1938-40 when the overtime section of the Fair Labor Standards Act set the maximum workweek at 44-42-40 in 1938-39-40 and unemployment went 19.0%-17.2%-14.6%. The "disaster" claimed is indeed just a dramatization of a cluster of tacticl problems as mentioned in Clavalle's comment below. The "infamous" "radical" "disastrous" 35-hour workweek was adopted by some of the most conservative industries in the USA as early as the 1950s, such as insurance and academe. The workweek for clerks in that radical! industry on Wall Street was 37.5 hours in the 1960s. "2pasc" seems to be very easily "surprised and disappointed" indeed, possibly assumes that Moses brought down the frozen Forty Hour Work Week from Mt. Sinai along with the Ten Commandments, when in fact, between 1840 and 1940 the American workweek was cut in half, from over 80 to 40, via the fight for the 10-hour day generally achieved by 1865, and then the fight for the 8-hour day. The 35-hr wkwk's problem is the same as the 40. No level is permanently freezable when we are not frozen at the same level of worksaving technology. And when productive innovation is constantly injected against a workweek frozen at any level, however low-sounding to current ears, it gets responded-to by downsizing, leaving us with the folly of trying to get growth=UPsizing by downsizing. So yes, it should have been further lowered. In fact, as outlined in timesizingdotcom, chronic overtime needs to be energetically converted into training&hiring and the workweek needs to be regularly and repeatedly adjusted downward, as far as it takes, to create enough convertible overtime to achieve full employment and maximum consumer spending. The USA nationally hasn't nicked the workweek one nanosecond since 1940 and the resulting overt and covert downsizing has resulted in mind-boggling welfare, 'disability,' homelessness, begging, crime, a world-record prison population, suicide, longer&longer hours due to job insecurity, lots of quiet featherbedding, employee pilferage and sabotage, and clientless self-'employment', all of which people who talk the talk of freedom but are leary of the real thing, like "2pasc", seem to overlook or be OK with. But many "smartest minds" would prefer a world-leading low workweek to a world-leading prison population. The real freedom? the most basic freedom? Free Time, without which the other freedoms are meaningless or inaccessible. The promise of technology is to make life easier for everyone. That promise is betrayed when technology is responded-to by downsizing. That promise is only kept and delivered-upon when technology is responded-to by what might be called timesizing, as much as it takes to maintain or raise employment and economy-anchoring domestic consumer spending. Otherwise you get the Ford-Reuther Paradox: Henry Ford, "Let's see you unionize these robots!" Walter Reuther, "Let's see you sell'em cars."

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