Why We Should Demand a Shorter Workweek
dsausa.org
dsausa.org
IIRC, a related issue that came up on HN a while ago is unpaid overtime. As any employee programmers surely know, giving employers unpaid overtime when projects are behind schedule is especially bad, because it creates moral hazard (incentives to set excessively tight schedules). But everyone does it, because it's expected (if you won't do it, they'll hire someone who will, right?).
Regulation -- punishing employers who accept unpaid overtime, and somehow widely enforcing these rules -- is one of very few approaches that seem theoretically able to make any difference to this situation.
In Sweden, this is a no-brainer. In the US, for salaried workers, it's an interesting possibility. For factory workers? They were probably only paid for 6 hours, given a 36 hour work week to avoid "full time" status so paying for benefits could be avoided, etc.
I wouldn't be so fast to praise US businesses for lowering hours in the work week - there was an explosion of this practice after the ACA passed, so employers could avoid paying for healthcare.
They'll fire you anyway for insubordination, and hire equivalent or worse employees that are easier to intimidate.
It's also common to see brilliant engineers "broken" after going through job after job with the same ridiculous politics and the meaninglessness of exerting anything but the minimal effort.
If I'm paying for a person's productive power, working from home even part time is ok only if that person is equally or more productive at home as they are at work (on average). If their remote productivity is weak, then I would most certainly value their physical presence.
(Not everyone who fits this bill needs to be fired, either. It takes a certain amount of personal discipline to work remotely, and not everyone has that ability. That doesn't always mean the person isn't a valuable team member.)
I took a $5K paycut (at a new job) to get flex time and limited work at home, but I ended up saving something ridiculous like $10K after tax, on child care and commute related costs by being able to swing shift start and end times and avoid rush hour whenever possible. My kids are grown-ish now and I've been thinking about going back to 9-5 M-F but it just sounds like a nightmare, a living hell, after having a superior lifestyle for so long.
Classic primate dominance ritual at work.
The value of limiting employees to 6 minutes in the bathroom per day isn't in any rationalization of increased production or puritanical virtue or even inherent superiority of capital over labor, the dehumanization is in itself an inherent good or benefit for the managers to feel dominance over those employees.
Note that a workplace that dehumanizes humans will continue to dehumanize humans if you force them to stop one particular implementation or another. I guarantee it'll be a living hell of a workplace if that is banned or made socially unacceptable, just a living hell in a currently unknown manner. So better the devil you know than the ... etc.
for example, some people act as social glue, between team members and between teams, that makes the team as a whole more efficient. some people silently clean up after others. some people attend meetings to allow the rest of the team to focus. some people think much more about design and architecture than others (trading short-term inefficiency for long-term efficiency). some poeple may just like being there (vs. elsewhere) more than others. there are just so many ways that more time at the office does not equal being less productive.
Of course there is 1 in 100 special cases like a critical server that died etc , but I never skip lunch because I then know that my work will have much lower quality
People don't seem to realize that working extremely long hours was the norm in the early 20th century. It was a long sustained effort by labor unions to those hours down from 100 a week to 40 a week.
We're regressing fast, but there will be no change in the US because everyone in this country believes they'll be the capitalists one day.
Correction: no one who is currently in power cares. But there are plenty of young people who absolutely despise working even 40 hours a week and would do anything to change it.
You need a good option to vote well.
This sounds barbaric to the ears of an European salaryman.
work to live, don't live to work.
I'm thinking about negotiating fewer hours when I have more seniority.
As an American, I've worked at a "good" company in terms of expectations of hours and "bad" where one would want to come early and stay late (and make it known on the team chat) if only for appearances. I can say anecdotally that my amount of time slacking off increased with my time spent in-office at the second company, and from walking by, it seemed the case with others as well.
Honestly, what with software being salaried and exempted from any overtime, what incentive do I really have to kick out an extra couple hours a day?
How is that a statistic?
It's simply an overly general claim without any supporting evidence.
Most places aren't like that, though. More like 40 +/- a few hours.
Not that I would complain if the US went to a 35 hour a week European style regime.
In the US, the competition for functioning schools and safe neighborhoods is incredibly high due to the Title IV and Fair Housing laws championed by DSA and their political allies. So you either work your fingers to the bone, or your family will be forced to live in the dangerous part of town.
It doesn't matter if it is possible to make it work, it matters if it is feasible for most people, which it isn't. Don't get sidetracked focusing on outliers.
Source: I haven't had a full-time job in several years and I know I'm an outlier (I also know I may pay a steep price for it in a couple decades).
It isn't common now a reason (several, actually). Once again, just because a solution works for some small portion of people doesn't mean that it can be generalized to the rest of the people.
I think the fact that they are not doing this shows, that they value money more, than free time.
People think they value free time, but they act as if they value money more.
Well, that's false.
First, the actual mean work-week is not that high, once you take unemployment into account: some people are working their ass off, but many others either have precarious part-time jobs (fewer hours, but often no reliable schedule), or don't work at all. Reducing the official "full time" work-week would merely force the capitalists to re-allocate work a bit more equally. This will mean less unemployment, and less expensive unemployment insurance —which plays a big role in compensating for the loss of gross revenue.
Second, we could consider allocating less money to capitalists, and more to workers. The ratio used to be 60/40 in the 70s. Now it is more like 70/30, if not worse. Taking that ratio back can easily compensate for 20% cut in our working time.
Of course, such a change is impossible to initiate through individual action alone. You did capture the current conundrum of the isolated proletarian: work one's ass off, or don't earn enough. But there is a third alternative: rise up and change this rotten world.
Not easy. But as history has proven to us time and again, the world can change.
The other other trouble is that the soi-disant "social sciences" aren't and cannot be, because controlled experiments are impossible. Historiography and inference are fine and valuable things, but inflicting one's conclusions on others is a project best approached with a maximum of trepidation.
And the final trouble, the really insuperable one, lies in the fact that true collective action, the seat and soul of theoretical socialism, is in practice impossible save on the smallest and meanest scale, such as the rough music of medieval Europe, or the lynchings of the postbellum American South. In a larger arena, such as that of political action, true collectivism runs contrary to the unified intent and direction necessary to survival; begin as it may, a political movement must grow a leader or die. It may, as many, achieve both; it cannot possibly achieve neither, for the same reason its individual members cannot achieve orbit unaided, no matter how high they jump.
No doubt the world can change. The Bolsheviks changed it, quite effectively. Did they make of it what they intended? Did they make of it a better world than they found it? Will you?
Where are those ratios coming from, who's allocating this money, and how would you change the ratio?
Back then, the US had a tax structure that meant that the 1%ers paid much more in income taxes (FWIW, the poor also paid less in FICA); government was better funded, and could hire more people to clean up some of society's loose ends.
I'm not a fan of "basic income", although some "welfare" may have a place, but there is a lot of infrastructure that goes into supporting a business friendly environment, as well as making the country a nicer or safer place to live.
Of course, the powers that be in this country don't want us to turn into some kind of socialist hell-hole like Germany or Sweden :-)
It always makes me laugh when I see this sort of talk in places like Hacker News. This is a very privileged subculture. If the proletariat rises up, the "intelligentsia" of Silicon Valley will likely be on the chopping block.
An ever growing share of household spending is driven by the positional goods you mention. People work harder and longer so they can outbid other people for particular houses and schools and vacation rentals. The net effect of cutting everybody's income is not anymore as important as is typically assumed. The bidding war for good neighborhoods and so forth simply de-escalates with lower incomes.
Bug or feature?
It's not the we can't enjoy ourselves, it's that the exhaustion of work affects the kind of enjoyment we seek. Instead of going for a nice, long empty walk for free, we feel we have to spend $30 at the movies. Or we don't have enough time to cook, so we spend $50 on a restaurant. Both of these activities keep the "economy" flowing, by constantly moving money out of our hands.
I don't believe us working hard enough to ensure that we can only entertain ourselves by spending money is a diabolical plan. But I think the evil part is when we're influenced to think that we need to spend all that money on ourselves...
Exhaustion might be a very real effect, but I don't think it is usually a goal of an employer.
Unions, which are most widely found in western Europe accomplish little these days (the negotiated wages for call center workers are barely livable for example).
If you're a skilled developer, you can work your way to freelancer / self employed consultant or join one of the companies that offers part time work / 4 day work week (there was a recent article about one in Portland that only does 4 day work weeks).
If you're unskilled, you'll always be fucked to varying degrees, as such is life unfortunately.
Also it's hard to take an article seriously when it cites Marx, whose theories obviously don't work in the real world, as humans are competitive to varying degrees by nature.
Even better, those feeling this way can refuse to work for more time than they'd like. They don't need to force the rest of us.
Marx's "theory" was a method of analyzing history by focusing on class conflict as the main driver for history. By applying that analysis to capitalism, he predicted that the proletariat would inevitably come into conflict with the bourgeoisie. Das Kapital was a deep dive into how and why this conflict comes about (both economically and philosophically).
As for what happened next, those are "implementation details" which Marx didn't write too much about. We've seen a few implementations (Bolshevism, Stalinism, Cuba, Maoism) and a few modern contradictions (current China, North Korea, etc.) and most have been flawed.
However, not every implementation of capitalism has been successful, either. There are plenty of fascist and repressive states that are capitalist. Nazi Germany and Italy during WWII, Argentina during Pinochet, hell, you might even say ISIS is capitalist.
So, I'd argue that many implementations of communism have failed in the same way that several implementations of capitalism have failed, but there is a large space for experimentation as there has been with capitalism. For example, democratically planned economies with analytical input is a space that hasn't been explored too well beyond very tiny experiments in sectors within Latin America.
I wonder if they think that if only the bankers were democratically controlled, their risk modeling wouldn't have gone berserk. The experiences of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should serve as a counter data point to this assumption.
This is a general problem with Marxism. Embedded very deeply in Marx is the idea that if only the correct social class controlled everything, things would be better, and that violence and injustice--which Marx explicitly advocated--are acceptable ways to achieve this. The idea that social class and morality are economic forces is a good one, but Marx wasn't the first guy who thought of this--he actually very deeply studied earlier economists and used their ideas--and we would do ourselves a service by not paying attention to someone who repackaged these ideas into a loathsome story about the inevitability and rightness of the "dictatorship of the proletariat". (I'll add further that mainstream economics has moved on from many others of these ideas because they turned out to be dead wrong--like the labor theory of value.)
Edit: Intolerance of informed criticism is not a convincing defense of your ideas.
That his theory lives on is a testament to the degree to which people a.) never learn anything ever and b.) the intoxicating nature of what he proposes.
I don't see what it is you believe relies on the labor theory of value.
Marx theories span a wide range, but certainly his political ideology did not in any way rely on the labor theory of value to underpin it, and it is something most people advocating Marxism don't even know or understand very well.
What it does rely on is whether Marx hypothesis that capitalism will necessarily self destruct as it reaches the limits of market expansion is correct (no more people living out of reach of capitalist competition). Marx expected this to happen by forcing capitalists into ever harsher competition and automation at the cost of starting to throw workers back into poverty and as a result pulling the rug out under their own markets, eventually leading to sufficient social upheaval to drive the working classes to revolution.
It further relies on Marx hypothesis that upon the self destruction of capitalism, that the working classes can end the class struggle by seizing control and redistributing wealth and the control of the means of production.
The LTV is used by Marx as justification for why some of this is "right", but at the same time Marx theories on the political and economic development of society does not rest on right and wrong, but on how the self-interests of the members of the various classes affects society as the economic development alters the relative powers of these classes.
There are plenty things that can be wrong in these theories, but whether or not the LTV is right or not is an entirely orthogonal issue.
His analysis of this in Capital uses the LTV as a base assumption. Under the LTV, capital profit is "surplus value" that is driven down by competition, and capitalists cannot exist as a social class once their surplus value fails to exceed their personal labor cost. Marx was very proud of this claim, and bragged in a letter to Engels that he had "proven" this historical inevitability.
Like most economic models, they cease to be correct when the premises fail.
Disproving/invalidating the LTV does no more disprove the claims underlying Marx political ideology than disproving one meterological model would be sufficient to say I'm wrong if I say it'll rain tomorrow.
If you want to attack the validity of his ideas regarding the long term viability of capitalism, there are many possible approaches, but the LTV is a sideshow.
As for being "disastrously, murderously false in practice", the only thing this demonstrates is that you are conflating Marxism-Leninism and Marxism.
Lenin devoted years to revisionism and campaigning to justify how Russia could break central tenets of Marxism and successfully transition to socialism without first going through a capitalist phase. Even then, he was left with having to carry out a coup in the October "revolution", overthrowing not the former oppressive Czarist regime, but the democratically elected socialist interrim-government (SR and the Mensheviks making up the bulk; both were hunted down over the following years), after it was clear that contrary to Lenins theories, Russias landless peasants did not rise up to join the working classes (the Bolsheviks got the support of about 10%; mostly based in the big cities - this was prompty explained away as the result of counter-revolutionaries etc.)
While this does not prove Marx is/was right, the abject failure of the SSSR was directly in line with Marx theories. Already from 1845, a central portion of his thesis was that a pre-requisite for a successful socialist revolution would be a well developed capitalist economy where redistribution would not merely lead to making poverty common, as well as the working classes making up a substantial majority of the population. Neither were true for Russia, nor for any of the other countries where Leninist inspired groups tried to carry out revolutions.
Understanding the employee/employer relationship is at heart of understanding capital and the returns capital receive over time. The employee is paid in advance of sales (most of the time) and thus the employer shoulders the risk of those sales never materializing in the first place. To compensate employers for that risk, employees are paid less than the full output of their labor. As we know wages are not taken back if the product or service they were developing was never sold. It's a mutually beneficial relationship that explains profits in a way that does not involve exploitation but rather mutually beneficial exchange.
If there is no exploitation you don't have Marxism in the first place. This is a very basic summary of "Karl Marx and the Close of His System".
Capital is an economic work which is of minor relevance to his political ideologies. It tries to explain and provide theories that certainly would support some of his political views if true, but Capital is not a pre-requisite for the political ideology (in as much as there's a large number of other possible theories that could equally provide justifications for the political ideology).
> If there is no exploitation you don't have Marxism in the first place
That's simply not true at all. For the political ideology, the concept of exploitation is merely one of many arguments used to justify why the working class should consider it morally acceptable to overthrow the capitalist regime. It was realpolitik.
It's worth noting that Marx' philosophical works are far more "capitalist friendly" than most modern day socialists, for example. Marx may have talked about exploitation, but he also talked about these structures as equally binding the capitalist into a role he could not escape, and spoke with admiration about the development the growth of capitalism was creating. After all, according to Marx, the growth of capitalism is what will make socialism possible. But those bits don't get people out in the streets. Talk of exploitation does. And so Marx-the-politician was far more aggressive in terms of language than Marx-the-economist or Marx-the-philosopher.
The subjective view of the working classes on whether or not there is exploitation is the only thing that ultimately matters in the context of his political ideology, and even then only because it has historically been an effective recruitment factor.
Other than that, the presence or absence of exploitation is relatively irrelevant to Marxism. Marx ideas about the structural development of social and economic systems and inevitability of socialism, for example, does not rest on exploitation, but on whether or not capitalism eventually will develop to a state where it causes sufficient social upheaval to be a catalyst for new revolutionary movements amongst the working classes, and whether or not the structure of this will lead to a socialist system.
I am no expert in Marx, so I cannot say that's invalid statement, but I do consider labor theory of value wrong and I agree with many of Marxs' views.
Interestingly though, the idea of meritocracy relies on labor theory of value as well. (As someone else above noted: "A large part of the problem for the working classes, according to Marx, is that they buy into the capitalist idea that people are paid what they deserve, rather than what the capitalist can get away with.")
If you believe that capital, or machines, or biological systems, or historical experience, do create value, and not all value comes from the human work, how are you going to split the extra value? Machines don't need it. Anyway you split it, it's not meritocratic, because merit is measured in work.
For example, if I automate something (let's say by happy accident), then I am doing less work now and should deserve less than my previous me, yet at the same time, more value is produced. Meritocracy fails to reconcile this difference unless you ascribe all value that is produced to human labor.
There isn't necessarily any connection between labor and the things people value. For example, the work that goes into designer purses is often the same as the cheap purses at Walmart or whatever but the former could sell for multiples of the cost of the latter.
In a meritocracy, a contributor is paid in relation to doing the work that their team values most. It could be the case that what they do has no direct connection to their labor performed but rather could involve doing very little work that no one else wants to do (or can do). The business values that labor very highly even if it's in very small chunks.
I find this a curious objection to Marx, as if anything a major part of Marxist thinking around class struggle is about how to stimulate the working classes to stop silently accepting the hand they've been dealt and organize to rise up and demand more and to compete against the bourgeoisie the same way Marx describes the bourgeoisie as having outcompeted feudalism. A large part of the problem for the working classes, according to Marx, is that they buy into the capitalist idea that people are paid what they deserve, rather than what the capitalist can get away with.
Furthermore, Marx spent quite a bit of time praising capitalist competition, as an absolutely essential pre-requisite to create the economic efficiency required to make socialism viable. The first chapter of the Communist Manifesto for example, starts as a homage to the advances brought about by capitalism, and first towards the end does it turn to criticism of where capitalism was going.
The one thing I sympathize with is the steamrolling of the low wage worker where some of those jobs are such that they don't have regular hours and can't get a full forty hours in order to skirt some labor laws and in order to maximize flexibility for the commercial concerns.
On the other hand I'd totally welcome the dsausa and any other parties to set up companies based on their philosophy and show others how things are done. Bring on that 32hour workweek without virtually being on call and somehow make it viable to keep on the worker who tends to be workshy, and the one who tends to make poor decisions, etc. Show me how it's done.
The work week would be shorter for everyone. The more productive workers are already carrying a couple of their workshy colleagues. For those dangerous idiots with negative productivity, they'd individually have less time to screw things up. Why would a shorter work week make the sum of those things any different? Everything should be about the same with a slightly higher overhead for HR.
We got to the hotel after sundown, and it's so remote that you can't really leave. Fortunately, they had a restaurant. The waitress there was a young woman, mid-twenties. She was extremely nice and helpful, though her grasp on English was tenuous. By the time we finished our meal at approximately 10:30pm, we were ready to go to bed. She waved goodbye and say "See you in the morning!"
We were up bright and early at 7:30am, and we went to get breakfast. Sure enough, the waitress was there. Needless to say, after an extremely long day of sight-seeing, we returned to the hotel and the girl was still there and served us dinner.
Long story short, this woman was working 16 hour days, and she was happy to do it. The job she had was one of the nicest, cushiest jobs you could get in her region -- by far. I didn't ask, but if I had to guess, I'd say she sends most of that money home to her family so that their extreme poverty won't be quite so bad.
I spend a lot of my time reading Hacker News and other non-work related websites. I can justify it -- my happiness is important -- but I'm loathe to say that I work too much at 40 hours a week, especially when I know what conditions are like in Peru and other third-world countries.
I get it. I understand the argument for shorter work weeks, and I agree wholeheartedly. But my sympathies go out to this nice waitress in Peru before they go out to Joe Brogrammer who "works" 50 hour weeks or Sarah Hedgefundmanager who has 6 minutes of bathroom time a day.
Then again, maybe I'm just a monster with no grasp on how hard life really is. :)
I have achieved work-life balance by predetermining what I will deliver and when. My manager has buy off and he consequently doesn't care what hours I work.
2. I fundamentally reject the principals of this article. If you feel oppressed by trading your products or services for a wage then please feel free to never take in a wage.
In America you are responsible for how much you work and how much you earn.
"As technology has boosted productivity into astronomic levels, we have not seen any shortening of the workweek or even a relaxing of the lunch break in fact we have seen just the opposite."
Of course not, the technology enables our work to be magnified. The company wants us to continue working to the same extent because they get more "bang-for-their-buck"
I would also like to say, I recently accepted a job paying about 20% less simply because I would be able to work slightly more relaxed. Ironically, it was a bank, as opposed to Google, Apple, Twitter, etc. As my friends all went and worked at those places, I noticed they had to work 50 - 60 hours a week pretty regularly.
Instead I chose to take a job where the work would have a larger impact on the company (i.e. I had more weight because I was more technical), and I could work less because I could out perform their expectations. Selecting my job in such a way is me selling my skill set for less money, but more time.
Usually people want to always maximize income, and because I am working on side projects I indeed feel I am maximizing income. However, the author seems to ignore this simple fact of life. Working less might be better for some people, it may even be better for the company... but there is no way in hell people are going to EVER want less in life. If this seems to be the case, then you likely don't see the full picture (i.e. perhaps they value freedom over money).
I'm not sure this is true, at least for the millennial generation and later. Most people I know who work a lot do so because they don't have any other choice, except maybe "move back in with parents and become a waiter at some diner."
For the former (my friends at Google, well-funded startups, and in finance, etc.) I'm afraid I'm not going to shed any tears for them.
For the latter, most people I know are neck deep in auto loans, mortgages, credit card debt, etc. Up until this year, I would be hard-pressed to name a friend who had a car that was older than mine. My group of friends roundly poked fun at me when I furnished my new apartment with nice craigslist furniture.
To address your point directly, for most people, finding a cheaper apartment is an alternative to "moving back in with parents".
I'm currently living in a 450 ft.² studio apartment in a small town in Tennessee for $400/month. I'm quite sure this is affordable to anyone who isn't making minimum wage, and probably them too. Making minimum wage? Get a roommate. I've had roommates my whole life.
No, people choose to work a lot because they're living a lifestyle that is more than they can afford.
For example, my friend has a nearly perfect credit score, he lives with his parents still, works 30 hours a week (making about $35k a year), and his expenses are about $12k yearly. Clearly he has to work, but not all that crazy.
However, if he wanted to move out, get a car, etc. it would be pretty hard.
I should note, he's a millennial, didn't go to college, is 23, and has about 50k in savings because he's invested all of his money, lives at home, and works remotely. He plans to buy a house in his mid to late 20's (28 is his goal). This is common all over the world, and was common pretty much throughout all history except the 50's - 70's.
Otherwise, that sounds like a good plan if your parents can support you while you pull it off. (you = him, or somebody like him)
He does quality assurance for a small business and handles other IT stuff. He loves digging around and finding bugs, and will also contributes to Gentoo. A fair number of the blogs he writes end up on the front page of HN, so you've probably read stuff by him.
Not salaried employees. No one chooses to work unpaid overtime which only decreases purchasing power or at best, keeps it the same while taking a toll on free time and health. People choose to work a lot because they're threatened by their employers with losing their jobs if they don't. That's the only sane reason that anyone would choose to work a lot while salaried. When making an hourly wage, at least the time is compensated, so perhaps people are increasing their purchasing power, but it's never by their own choice since in such situations overtime is always dictated by the employer, not the employee (thus it's not a choice).
We just have a sick culture of overtime and employers expecting free work. It's never necessary to do such free work (except to avoid getting fired) and certainly not necessary to do it to get things done. In plenty of contract jobs with no overtime, things get done at the same pace and quality of salaried (free work) jobs, only without the extra hours. Yet the myth still prevails, especially amongst startups. It's convenient for executives, owners, founders, and anyone at the top to get free work. After all, wages are the biggest expenditure in almost any business. What person with a stake in the company wouldn't want free labor, even if it's at the expense of their workers' health and livelihood, even if it ends up negatively impacting the business in the long run?
The Barista's job on the other hand is much closer to being a commodity. If the Barista or the coffeeshop wanted 2 workers to handle the "60 hr" workload instead of one, the cost would be almost the same as having one person work. In fact, due to the way part-time versus full-time labor laws work in the US, it is probably cheaper to have 2 people do it. Therefore, the Barista is probably working 50-60 hrs/week spread across multiple jobs to meet ends meat or have extra money for aspirational goals.
* I'm butchering the language here, but I think I got the concept right. Engineers at the big tech firms aren't just paid strictly what it would take to bring them in, but also paid enough so they won't want to look to move. It's one of the reasons moving between companies can be so lucrative.
+ Of course, most workers in the US don't work a 50-60/week. Your average full-time US worker self reported a 47 work week (http://www.gallup.com/poll/175286/hour-workweek-actually-lon...), which I suspect is high due to people's tendency to remember the worst week they've worked recently as a representative week. Also, that poll conflicts with BLS data that suggests the average FT worker does 47h/ week inclusive off commute and breaks.
Corporations in the US are generally not great places to spend the day. That being said, US workers are in my experience, quite often spoiled, self entitled and lazy. So that is two problems, both of which prevent us from realizing maximum benefit as a society.
But I think the big gains for corporations right now may not be in squeezing the last percent from their workforce but in the simple elimination of nonsense work, nonwork, useless meetings, job making, resume padding and all the other counterproductive junk that makes up much of the business day. That's the low hanging fruit right now.
There is a happy middleground that is currently in place in Western Europe, a place which coincidentally has the highest quality of life in the world.
Didn't know that Switzerland, Austria, the Netherlands, Ireland, Belgium and Germany are tiny Nordic countries and not part of Europe.
Perhaps if you average all of Europe which is a couple of dozen countries however against specific large countries (say the UK, France, Germany) then I'd say it's not that clear cut.
Indeed look at the US, the disparity between the poorest state and wealthiest state is as great as the disparity between European countries.
The US is materially more wealthy (largely by want of having the worlds largest currency and the PPP boost that gets you) however the UK (for example) has shorter working hours, better social welfare system, free at the point of access socialised healthcare, 28 guaranteed vacation days a year, maternity and paternity leave and we are the nearest politically to the US.
All things been equal I'd prefer to live in France or Germany than the US quite frankly.
I don't see how working less solves the real problem here: how to improve wealth distribution.
Of course there have been short and long term, good and bad side effects.
The other important thing to factor in, is the general evolution of the unemployment rate in France since the introduction of the law. It makes it really easy to see that it the effect was limited, both in influence and over time.
(If you still don't like it, you must be from Mars or something. I don't know anyone who would hate to get the extra money, and in fact, I don't know anyone here who would want to work longer hours than 40.)
WTF does this even mean? Are they lumping all 'business endeavours' into one personified beast that has desires, and is in oppositon to the very parts which make up the whole?
If I tell a worker: "Ill give you $300 to update this website" and he does a good job, and then I say: "I will give you $2000/week if you can keep the updates coming" isn't he free to say 'No'?
Work can't limit your free time, you ALWAYS have the power to pick who you sell your time to, how on earth could a business ever limit the time you don't sell to them?
No boss, no hours, no office. Who is holding you back (but you?)
Even if all skills were suitable for freelancing (which they're not), not everyone is cut out to freelance. It's high risk, the income is uneven, you have to pay unemployment insurance but are ineligible to receive it, and you have to market yourself (which is difficult and eats up your time) and do collections (which also eats up a lot of time and is too often unsuccessful). You also take a hit on self-employment taxes. In the US you're also screwed on healthcare, which is a big deal if you have a family. It's very easy to end up working longer days as a freelancer and taking home significantly less pay than a full time employee would for the same type of work.