PM Marin has proposed this idea as "utopia" in August 2019. When she presented this vision, she was not yet PM.
Additionally, she proposed 6 hour work-day OR 4 work-day week, not AND.
It is kind of weird that here in Finland this was "nice idea, but probably problematic to implement" when this was on the news in August. And now it pops out in not-so-respected news media like this.
If people work less, especially if engineers, scientists, doctors etc work less, then technological progress will be taking place slower than it is currently. The disappointment of my teenage self with 2030 will then be even greater than that with 2020.
I'm genuinely puzzled by the general anti-work sentiment I perceive on HN (maybe my perception is simply incorrect). I'd expect that most folks here work as engineers or in a similar field that rewards with interesting and meaningful problems and that a substantial fraction had once been sci-fi-imbued teenagers like myself and possibly feel the same disappointment with the pace of technological progress.
I'm very worried that the anti-work movement is (inadvertently?) pushing on the breaks of technological progress :-(
i'd argue that the "anti-work" sentiment here is more to do with lack of fulfillment due to an epidemic of bullshit jobs, rather than not wanting to work.
4 day weeks or 6 hour days would have been pretty awesome, I could have likely been more productive in life things.
My new job is also nothing world changing, though probably marginally more beneficial to more people and less environmentally damaging, but the lack of 6, nine hour day weeks makes it more appealing in many ways.
Though, I'm kind of torn, because I find the actual work less fulfilling and enjoyable, but having time is nice.
The anti-work movement is not 'anti-work' in general. It's anti-meaningless degrading work which allows me to make ends meet while enabling a small number of people to become unbelievably rich.
This book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs outlines some of the issues you mentioned. Technological advancement allowed for a lot of jobs to disappear which should theoretically allow us to have more leisure time or time invested in other directions. However, we need to keep 'the machine' going, so..
If anything, people should be disappointed at the technological progress that has received priority over others.
Personally I'm aghast at the pace of "technological progress" due to the direction it is going in.
Professors working 30-hour weeks would write more papers than their harder-working colleagues. Business owners would show up for 30 hours a week and go home. Fruit pickers, paid by the bucket, would pick more fruit in 30 hours than their colleagues could pick in 50. Professional athletes who spent less time training would beat their harder-working competitors.
Reducing working hours would likely improve output and employment.
I bet most of you reading this do not spend 8-10-12 or whatever number of hours you claim to be at work actually working productively. You goof off often as much as half the time. Possibly more if you work for someone else.
_Work_ when you are at work.
If you are not actually working or if you are tired and unfocused: go home. If you are disciplined about this you will outperform those who spend more hours at work _easily_.
This is why a world where everyone is an independent contractor feels...right.
I don't know how you could implement it properly, but from a high level it works: work when you want to, take holidays when you want to, move around. There's no such thing as "businesses will take advantage of workers though!" because everyone is a business. Screw enough people and no one will work with you.
Of course, for this to work you'd need a universal safety net or UBI...
My solution was to charge by the day. You pay me a fixed price for every day I work on your project. Some days I may work 4 hours, other days I may work 15 hours. But it provides me with more flexibility and, at least in my experience, it is easier to end up with a fair price (as long as you don't try to take advantage of the customer).
I actually stumbled across this solution. My initial motivation was to reduce the amount of pointless accounting work. But I eventually discovered that this had other benefits.
I have a team of programmers working for me (full time, fixed salary) and they all manage their own time and their own projects. If they need to take a week off because they feel tired, they just need to let me know. And I trust them to act responsibly. As long as we deliver what we have promised, I don't care if people take more time off than their contractually stipulated paid vacation. The only time I may step in is if they do not take time off. (Actually, in Norway, you can get in trouble if your people don't take at least some minimum amount of time off.)
And I think the results speak for themselves. I'd be hard pressed to find a team that is more productive in my company. We easily outpace other teams by a factor of 2-3 in terms of productivity within a company of about 25-30k employees.
There are, of course, multiple reasons for the high productivity - not only the fact that I don't interfere with how individuals manage their time. I think one important reason is that I often hire people who are older than the average developer. My people are probably 40 years or above on average. One of my most productive people is in his mid 50s. I think the reason the holder people on my team are faster is because they're more experienced, and in particular, they have more experience in attacking problems that they have never been exposed to before. (And that's what 90% of the work we do consists of).
Especially for piecemeal labor, after getting to the point where you maintain your baseline level of skill (say, 10 hours/week?), it seems like each marginal hour will have less productivity than the previous. It probably never drops to negative, unless we're talking 80 hour weeks.
It's less clear to me that the same is true of so-called knowledge workers. Or, at least, the baseline is much higher. My bet would be that an engineer who only works 10 hours/week is going to be less productive, on an hourly basis, than one who works 20 hours/week. I'm not sure what the inflection point would be, though.
I think a better model would be having a year or two of relatively long workweeks (40 hours a week) to be followed by a year or two of vacation and education, instead of 20 hours/week consistently.
Another approach would be decreasing the retirement age. I'm less a fan of this, as too many people end up depressed and lost after they leave the workforce. Plus, it's a raw deal for people who die before they retire.
If I only worked for 6 hours and 4 days I'd lose my mind. I've tried it and I didn't like it one bit. May be that's just me but I enjoy my work so much I wish there were 25 hours.
The devil will make work for idle hands.
One can just as well "vegetate" as an employee to a boss; indeed, we know that the nature of the current work setup is such that many come home drained from work all day, sit in front of the TV, take up drinking as a hobby, argue with strangers online (see me, now), decay into nihilism, etc, all the same.
The purpose of life isn't to work; the purpose of life is the other things, the fun and play.
Thank you for telling me the purpose of life in a very matter-of-fact way. I think you would find a lot of people who would find your assertion extremely debatable. To be frank, I pity anyone who thinks the purpose of their life is to have fun.
If you go back a century, people in Britain, Europe, USA, Australia etc were probably working 70 hours a week.
If you asked a random selection of people in those countries now if they think we should all move back to that figure as a standard work week -- you know, to save society from itself -- I'm guessing you wouldn't get a lot of support.
What we really need to do is enforce the separation of church and state and keep the religious arguments out of political debate.
What is your impression of mortality?
Based on what? The 40 hour work week is entirely artificial and came around at a time when people had shorter commutes and could afford to feed, cloth and educate a family on a single income.
Now people are churning out 40 hours a week, mostly in dual income homes, and a vast amount of people are struggling to put food on the table, clothes on themselves and their kids and a roof over their heads even here in the developed West.
What is optimal about it is that we've all been coerced to do the same amount of hours, give or take, and therefore your competition will be putting in the same amount of hours, give or take.
Meanwhile people are taking far longer to get to their place of work, often sacrificing lunches or eating in isolation, and then dragging themselves home to do the basic chores required of keeping a home for themselves. Add in kids and most are exhausted.
So what, except for the benefit of business owners, is optimal about this situation?
I'm no socialist looking for a handout here, but as times changes and the circumstances with them, society should change and adapt with it and not cling to relics of a by-gone era that were created to optimize life in a time we can barely relate to now.
