I moved from the US (high on the list) to the Netherlands (bottom of the list) a while ago. Different jobs and sectors vary, but the theme I can confirm is that the Dutch feel more productive, generally (I work in software development).
In very broad terms, the Dutch are more likely to plan and stick to those plans. Personal time and time off are valued, so you need to be efficient in your working hours. You can't really expect someone to respond to your emails after working hours. Having to work in the weekends at all is a sign of bad project management, and should be exceptional. Meetings have agendas which are sent out ahead of time.
Americans are generally more optimistic, which makes for worse time management and planning, which leads to overtime and stress. Being seen at work somehow equals working, and internal guilt for not working efficiently while at work leads to more weekend work. There's a big focus how much you've 'worked' this week. Interruption is common for things which could be structured.
To be honest, it's been pretty difficult to adjust, but the payoff is huge. Actual free time after work, real weekends, and longer vacations are all possible because people plan... whereas friends back home are often unable to plan vacations because they/their boss don't know how busy they'll be in 5 months.
Is planning and taking vacation really a problem for most people? In nearly 20 years, I've never had to delay a vacation, much less cancel one. Perhaps it's not a function of the company, but rather the worker, valuing work more than rest? The ability to forget work and recharge is critical for creative workers, something companies should be more aware of.
Same experience. I'm in the US and every employer I've worked for has allowed me to take my 2+ weeks off, no questions asked, no calls, no expectation to respond to emails (I don't have work email on my phone).
I've worked in the US and Canada for 20 years. I've never really cancelled a vacation, though at the senior level I've made a choice to delay one. It was a personal choice, however. Sure, it was for the greater good of the project, but no one pressured me.
In knowledge and creative work I find that if you take 4-5 weeks off a year (I've only done this once) work can bleed in to "off time" and it doesn't matter. When you take 2-3 weeks off a year you have to protect your personal time.
I don't know how to change that feeling though (short of moving out of the US). I believe I could work 6-8 hrs / day and no one would care but I can't stop feeling guilty at home
(EDIT: It's about the feeling of guild, people. It's embedded inside the Protestant Culture, alongside with working hard. As mentioned in Wikipedia link)
Sheesh; why the downvotes? It's a very appropriate comment as the 'Protestant work ethic' is the canonical name for, and most likely significant source of, the exact feeling the GP described.
There are plenty of Protestants in Europe (obviously) and many of them are more conservative than the US as regards work & society - eg it's typical in small towns not to find any shops open on Sunday in the Netherlands or Germany, and IIRC Germany had pretty stringent laws against Sunday working until quite recently. Some of this is related to trade union history, but on the other hand if you're a registered member of a church your tithes (religious tax for the upkeep of the church) will be automatically subtracted from your paycheck by law.
'Protestant work ethic' is something I've only heard talked about in America, usually couched in the form of an indirect put-down of non-protestants. Northern Europeans are more likely to view predominantly Catholic countries like France, Spain, Italy as stereotypically lazy, but this is usually ascribed to the Mediterranean climate.
My father was raised Protestant, I went to a Protestant elementary school and was raised half secular, half Protestant and I generally recognize it very much in myself, my father and quite a few people in our surroundings (mixed religion area.)
The thing is that it's not necessarily so much about working hours here. It's the general feeling that every moment should be intentful, purposeful and, like our churches, generally without frills.
In a way it feels less like 'work hard' and more like 'don't endulge yourself' to me.
You know what happened to most of the people throughout the history of Northern Europe who weren't good at planning ahead by building great shelters and collecting food for long, cold winters?
They didn't contribute very much to the genetic and cultural pool that exists in those areas today.
I have the same experience in Switzerland. I moved from the u.s. (s.f., boston, dc, socal) and despite working less we get a lot more done than in the u.s.
We have an 8.5 hour workday in Switzerland which we strictly stick to - we get comp time if you work over. In the u.s. we were pretty regularly working 10 hour days and 12 wasn't unusual, but we were wasting so much time.
A good example is meetings - most people get to the meeting 5 minutes before the start time. As soon as enough people arrive (usually 5 minutes before the start time or right at the start time) the meeting starts. If the meeting doesn't start by 10 minutes after because someone is missing it's cancelled. There's no smalltalk at the beginning, no socializing, no standing around stuffing your face...
Our company was bought by an American company and some of the Swiss staff transferred to the u.s. for awhile. Meetings were one of the most confusing changes for them - they'd be waiting in the conference room with no one showing up, then a few stragglers 10 minutes after the start time, and then every stands around talking about non-work stuff like they were at a high-school mixer. One colleague asked to have them start the meeting the first few time but eventually gave up and just started doing it the American way.
And yet people complain about the pointlessness of meetings despite not doing anything to make them more efficient (cf start and end on time, avoid chit-chat, stick to the agenda, send actions quickly afterwards etc). It only takes a small about of self-discipline to get there but everyone has to exercise it.
I'm lucky to have learned from some excellent meeting-chairs but have only been able to reproduce the efficiency when I formed and ran my own team. Never pulled it off when joining someone else's.
The #1 thing to make meetings more efficient is not to have them. Very many meetings, IME, are held for purposes for which a face-to-face meeting is not an efficient tool, and for which decentralized, asynchronous mechanisms like email would serve better.
That means they're unproductive. On the other hand, if you force a venue change, you're just going to get hyper aggressive git commit messages or something equally stupid to show "who's boss". The only solution I'm aware of is to select employees for hire based on likelihood of not being "into" primate dominance rituals, at least not at work. This is pretty hard to figure out at the interview stage and once a company is eventually infected, its plague dynamics time, and much like a bad flu season, work grinds to a halt.
I don't think that's necessarily even a subconscious purpose, but most human group face-to-face interactions end up involving some elements of such rituals, and in the case of meetings they are particularly dominant when the "rich interaction" that is enabled by face-to-face communication isn't used specifically for something else.
The simple two-part question to identify when a meeting is worthwhile and what the scope of the meeting should be (and what should be in other channels): Is simultaneous, interactive, many-to-many communication necessary, and why, specifically, is it necessary? (A followup, to make sure that people are ready to have the meeting -- another common problem that makes meetings a waste of time and results in inappropriate things being done in the meeting venue -- is to ask: "what needs to happen first so that people are ready to engage in that many-to-many interaction"?)
Lots of meetings, IME, are held by one person to gather information from many people or to distribute information from one person to many people -- these kind of one-to-many or many-to-one scenarios are the easiest thing to see doesn't require a meeting (many-to-one being the more inefficient.) There's even some cases of many-to-many communication where there isn't any real need for interactivity. And plenty of cases where a meeting that is held for a many-to-many interactive purpose spends much of its time doing top-down, one-to-many communication for much of the meeting because something that ought to have been distributed to be reviewed by participants to be ready for a productive meeting was instead distributed for the first time in the meeting, wasting most of the meeting time.
If two people can't figure out stuff they should ask third to join them. Then you are having worthwhile meeting. Meeting that are not about figuring out stuff or about figuring out stuff that can be figured by two people are not worthwhile except socially. But if you need social meeting why pretend you are doing work?
I hate meetings. A co-worker and I play a game whenever we are in charge of a meeting- see if we can end it early. It's amazing when an hour long meeting can be finished in 20 minutes. Unfortunately, there are a few people that like to drag the meeting out (unprepared, asking unrelated questions, making people wait for XYZ event that could be sent as an email later).
In my experience how late you were for a meeting was a proxy for your status in the company. The longer you kept others waiting for you, the higher your status.
This reminds me of my last remote job. Every day, we would have. Standup meeting. These are supposed to be 15 minutes, but typically would last well over an hour. On top of this, we would have: planning (4 hour meeting), review (3 hour), retrospective (3 or 4 hours), and the boss decided we weren't having enough meetings..so he added a soical meeting every Friday for an hour. We were all remote and this was a way for us to so somehow become closer as a team.
at one point, I was paid for more time in meetings than work. The only way this didn't happen was when we were putting out fires because mysteriously, we weren't making project goals and upper management was putting pressure on my boss.
I currently work for a fully remote company and it's completely the opposite.
We do one weekly status meeting which is usually 20-30 mins. Then project planning/troubleshooting/teambuilding meetings as needed usually around 2-4 hours per MONTH.
EVERYTHING else is discussed/solved very efficiently via IM.
I hope to never work for a company with meetingitus again, big waste of time and resources.
> "though the United States is an outlier here, working both long and hard"
The article conflates productivity with 'working hard'. Productivity is a measure of how much value is produced ('money is made') per hour of work.
A bulldozer operator working an 8 hour day to move a few tons of dirt is more productive than a worker who needs many 12 hour work days to move the same amount of dirt with a shovel and wheelbarrow. A trader at a bank who moves millions of shares with a phone call and a few mouse clicks is more productive than the bulldozer operator. Does this mean the banker works hardest and the guy with the shovel the least hard?
A high productivity per hour in a country means fewer ditches are dug using shovels, and more credit default swaps are sold. It doesn't mean people are working harder. It also doesn't necessarily mean the shovel digging country is organizing its economy less efficiently. Where the cost of labor is a few dollar per day, investing in a bulldozer might never pay off. Hiring 100 guys with shovels and wheelbarrows could be more efficient than hiring one guy with a bulldozer.
I fear you're also conflating two things: money made and actual value produced.
Suppose the trader is selling credit default swaps and helping cause a big financial crash, or the bulldozer operator is destroying acres of forest to clear the way for a tobacco plantation. What they do may be very valuable to the people paying them (and hence, if they're lucky, lucrative for them personally) but have substantially negative net value by any reasonable measure.
So "amount of hard work" is at two removes from what (I think) really matters, namely amount of actual value produced.
> I fear you're also conflating two things: money made and actual value produced.
The problem is that the definition of "actual value" turns out to be devilishly difficult to pin down. There's no objective measure for it. Value is subjective.
This is one of the central riddles of economics. But it's also why exchanges happen at all.
Ultimately, the concept of "actual value" can be defined as one of two things: money (for things that have value for an individual) and laws (for things that have value for the society, e.g. externalities). Simply said, the society values certain things (short-term profit, growth, cars, cheap food, human lives) more than others (long-term stability, the environment, clean air, rainforest, empty space). These sentiments change, but they change slowly, because we live in a democracy (and because people value social/cultural stability and safety).
As far as the financial crisis is concerned, it's easy to say after the fact. Was Einstein's research net-negatively-valuable, because it resulted in the atomic bomb, or was it net-negatively-valuable, because it ended the war? Whenever there is innovation, there is a risk of the innovation resulting in something "bad". That doesn't mean that the value of research is negative. People are simply short-sighted and/or not smart enough to foresee bad consequences. Btw, I'm sure you're doing the same thing - consuming cheap electronic devices produced using non-recyclable rare resources by workers whose raising wages will (1) significantly increase pollution and (2) significantly increase their quality of life. Is that "good" or "bad"?
Economists have long accepted that individuals and society have vary different short term costs and bennifits for the same activity. Abstractly it's the basis for having governments in the first place. But that's a long way from saying laws directly account for all known externality's.
For the avoidance of doubt, I wasn't attempting to say that traders and bulldozer drivers are bad people or that their jobs are bad in themselves. Sometimes traders bring about financial crises, but more often they keep the markets doing their (important) job efficiently. Sometimes bulldozer operators destroy beautiful or valuable things for someone's short-term gain, but more often they clear things out of the way so that newer better things can take their place. And, yes, sometimes people do things with terrible consequences even though they're sincerely and skilfully attempting to do the best they can -- though in the case of those credit default swaps that might be a difficult position to argue.
My point was narrower: Unless you choose to define the value of an activity to be what someone gets paid for doing it, you will find that those two things diverge, sometimes badly. So measures of productivity (e.g., GDP) that just count how much people get paid are, at best, going to do a very imperfect job of capturing anyone's idea of what's worth while. Most likely there will be large systematic disagreements.
They probably chose a poor word ("hard") for high productivity, but apart from that the point is sound: The US works a long longer hours with fewer holidays than many European countries.
And there's good reason to believe that the results/hour coefficient is lower for each individual worker regardless, when the "hour" part of the equation is higher.
In general, the poor work both 'harder' (physically) and longer hours than the rich. It's just the way it is. Time off is a luxury.
The supposedly lazy Greeks and Italians work far more hours per year than the supposedly industrious Germans and Dutch, but not as much as sweatshop workers in Bangladesh.
In most (all?) Scandinavian countries, time off is not a luxury. It is a right, awarded to every working man and woman, guarded by law and regulations.
Which is actually quite ironic - when you are freezing for eight months a year, time off is not a luxury at all - it is a life-and-death matter. You'd think that we'd have developed a much greater culture for very hard work than the Americans, but things have for some reason gone the other direction.
In my opinion, Scandinavia's good social policies comes from generations of dying of cold and hunger if you didn't occasionally get help from your neighbor. There is a spirit of cooperation with no expectation of being paid back, which has grown into the current system. External commentators will sometimes say that a system like this only works when you have a very homogenous society, but many of these cultures were quite isolated until the modern age, e.g. nestled in a tiny community in a valley somewhere, with only rare journeys outside. The equality principles have as far as I know only existed since the 1960s. (Note that I am speaking from a Norwegian perspective).
A lot of people forget that large parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland were dirt poor as late as the 1930s. These are very harsh climates to live in if you don't have trade and modern technology.
So Scandinavian eugenics programs don't count as "crap politics"? Look, every part of the world currently has something wrong with it. I was just as shocked to find this as everyone reading this:
I had a boss once who had done the same role in SV and in a subsidiary of BT (which still has a lot of civil service type rules extra privilege holidays)
His comment when asked was he got as much work out of the teams in the usa who had 2 weeks annual leave as he did in the uk with the team having 5 weeks holiday.
> Productivity is a measure of how much value is produced ('money is made') per hour of work. [..] A trader at a bank who moves millions of shares with a phone call and a few mouse clicks is more productive than the bulldozer operator. [..] A high productivity per hour in a country means fewer ditches are dug using shovels, and more credit default swaps are sold.
When you say "value is produced", you seem to be conflating two concepts, how much value is captured by an individual/firm, and how much value is created for the whole economy.
When bankers make lots of money for themselves and their employers, are they creating wealth for the economy, or are they merely participating in a zero-sum game where their gain is someone else's loss? I expect it's a combination of the two.
If someone gave me the chance of a 30-hour work week, I would rather work 4 days of 7,5 hours than 5 days of 6 hours. Just the hassle of getting up early, dressing up for work, commuting etc. isn't really worth it when I'm only going to work 6 hours anyway. I'd rather take an extra day off.
This is a fairly common thing here in the Netherlands actually, four day work week. Most of my colleagues I know who does this to have some extra time with their family/kids.
Usually it's a split in the middle of the week or something, for example my manager doesn't work tuesday's, it's his "papadag" as he then spends time with his kids and don't have to send them off to day-care or get a nanny.
Another colleague of mine dropped his contract from 40 hours a week down to 32 hours so he would have an extra day to work on his music career and an upcoming album.
Obviously these arrangements will affect your salary as you work less.
For single parents going from 40 to 32 hours per week can be a net-neutral operation from a money perspective. The various tax breaks will increase with just about the same as your net salary drops. In rare cases you'll even end up with net a bit more than before. Going from 32 to 24 might still be the same, below that the balance shifts and you end up with less.
I just ran the numbers with one of my employees in NL and we came to this exact conclusion so she decided to work one day less. In countries with a strong social net the equation is not always as simple as time*hourly rate, your situation should be taken into account as well.
As a single parent, in a country where you get subsidies for things like rent, child care, health insurance and so on, yes, it can work out like that. So what works for my employee would not work for me (because our social situation is different).
> obviously these arrangements will affect your salary
I don't really find this obvious or self-evident. One of my very biggest complaints about the economic climate today is that all of the productivity gains go to the owners, and very little to workers. If I as a worker am producing more, it follows that I should be working less, or paid more (which amounts to the same thing.) to do otherwise eliminates jobs that would otherwise need to be done, and takes advantage of workers.
Because it's easier to blame others than blame oneself. They'd rather coast through life constantly blaming their woes on others' successes (whether just, stolen, or inherited). I take it as an opportunity to motivate myself. Nothing wrong with jealousy, as long as you use it as a motivator instead of a mental air-bag.
Because of the obvious barriers to entry to reach a point where you are exploiting workers? Or because some people probably would prefer not to exploit others for profit?
Your point would make some sense if all owners of companies bootstrapped them from startups, when in reality they were likely just someone who was otherwise wealthy and became owners once it was already a successful company when the original owners already cashed out (or passed on, depending on the age of the company).
> One of my very biggest complaints about the economic climate today is that all of the productivity gains go to the owners, and very little to workers.
The solution to this is to become an owner. Now, creating and operating a company is probably harder than working for it, for it it weren't, why wouldn't people just become owners if it pays better?
"One of my very biggest complaints about the economic climate today is that all of the productivity gains go to the owners, and very little to workers."
You are an owner, of yourself and the mental/physical capital that that encompasses. If you feel the way you do, then you're obviously not happy with the way you're selling yourself and your knowledge.
If the market works, then the worker should get gains too. However, these examples were of reducing total hours worked and presumably also reducing total productivity to some degree.
A family of that we know has a job sharing between the parents. This is an interesting arrangement as they are sharing the same job.
I think the dad does 3 days and the mum does 2 days. They have found it worked for them and they can share the joy of looking after their kids on a weekly basis. They still do the 8hr/day for 5day/week. In this way, they are having vatertag and muttertag every week.
I had a few meetings in the Netherlands when I was there on business, and was very impressed with the flexibility and number of people working less than 5 days. I worked 4 days a week for a year when we had a child, and that was somewhat unusual (for a man in Australia).
I'd much prefer increased flexibility over less hours.
Everybody has papadagen where I work too. However I've always wondered how much getting one is decided by the difficulty of securing daycare for all children and the costs it has.
Would they still get one if the daycare was cheaper and with plenty of room for everyone or would they prefer the salary increase?
On the other hand, I have a friend who would rather work 7 days a week at a little over 4 hours/day, so I think it really is up to our individual preferences (though I'm sure there's some kind of nonuniform distribution!)
I agree entirely. I don't care about saving an hour and a half a day, that doesn't help me much as I lose so much time commuting and getting ready/winding down each day.
Being able to work 4 days instead? A god-send. I couldn't think of anything I'd like more. Thankfully, my current job gets me part of the way there -- I work 4 days in the office and one day at home (where I do just as much work but either condensed or spread out during the day depending on the current project workload).
I suspect this is better for employers though. Honestly I don't think I can code effectively for more than 6 hours a day anyway - when working 8 hours the extra 2 hours will be spent either on meetings and other overhead or on slowing down so I don't burn out.
Yes, but the article is about 6-hour days, not mix-and-match-hour days.
It will be interesting to see what differs from 8-hour days, both in free time, shopping, traffic, and more.
Imagine that the 6-hour day is successful, and we can make shifts. Some people go to work from 8 - 2, others from 12-6. That could lighten some traffic jams I venture.
Not only traffic jams. Everything will be open until 6, and if you get off at 2 you no longer need to take time off to visit dentist/tax office/bank/etc.
It won't make any difference from the employers perspective other than that they'll have to do a better job of sharing the knowledge required to do the work across more employees. This is a good thing anyway. The number of fte's remains the same. The number of people fulfilling those fte's goes up but payroll will remain roughly unaffected.
I agree with you, but living in the U.S., I'd take four 10 hour days over five 8 hour days for the same reasons. Working for someone else pretty much takes up the whole day.
Yeah, 3 day weekends are awesome. I had a 36-hour contract at my previous employer, which meant if I worked 8 hours a day I could take fridays off every two weeks.
I'm Dutch and I work 4 days a week. My productivity in my startup is the same. This is what researchers say about our average number of hours per week:
For example, Dutch workers are on par with American workers in terms of productivity per hour. They pay higher taxes and earn less than Americans. But on average, they work roughly 11 weeks less than their American counterparts each year, have access to government-funded health care, pay little or nothing for a college education, and have far more leisure time than the American.
When UNICEF recently ranked 21 industrialized nations by well-being for children, Netherlands was on top and the United States was near the bottom, in 20th place.
> For example, Dutch workers are on par with American workers in terms of productivity per hour.
If it's productivity per hour, doesn't that mean that the total productivity of Americans per week (or year) would be higher? Because as you're saying it, then Americans work 40h a week, and you work 30h a week, yet Americans are able to maintain the same level of productivity per hour.
So can you clarify whether it's really same productivity per hour, or whether you meant same productivity say..per week, or month, or year. Because if it's per week, then the Dutch productivity would have to be higher per hour than the American productivity, in order to be the same "per week".
I'm not the grandparent poster but, in this context, productivity is usually defined as $/hour worked or GDP/total hours worked (so "productivity per hour" is arguably redundant).
gp is saying that:
* Netherlands' productivity ($/hour) is on par with US'
* during 1 year, the Dutch work less hours per capita
* so GDP/capita is lower in Netherlands
* but that's OK, because Europe
Without getting too much into it, it's always dangerous comparing different countries. I'm not trying to discredit you, but at times it can be apples and oranges because the amount of variables is incredible.
For example, consider when somebody asks, "Well, $country has light rail that's cheap, punctual, and goes everywhere. Why doesn't the U.S. have it?"
They ignore that the U.S. is the fourth largest country in the world by land area. The state of Oregon has roughly the same land area as the United Kingdom. While light rail may be something that's very good to have, it can be otherwise impractical for a country as large as the U.S.
Light rail is typically used for compact urban areas. The US has lots of compact urban areas. And some of them do have light rail.
The land area argument is often trotted out by Americans ignoring that there are many other countries with even lower population density, and ignoring that population density varies greatly by area and average population density for the US as a whole is only relevant if we're asking questions about the US as a whole.
Your overall point that it's dangerous to compare is fair enough, though.
(I'm just tired of the population density argument being trotted out, coming from Norway, with a population density well under half that of the US that's a poster child for why average population density is irrelevant - things like rail etc. works well in Norway only because the main population centres covers only a tiny portion of the land mass; and that's largely true for the US too)
I understand for urban areas. I was thinking about the country as a whole. Think of the middle of the U.S. -- huge dollar amounts spent on the infrastructure for not many people using it. But I understand your point. I'd be lying if I said I didn't support or never used light rail myself.
Which means that as a country the people will have to either fall into bankruptcy, dramatically cut their quality of living, or work a lot more. All that leisure time came at a very high cost.
The WSJ article specifically mentions that this relates to secured debt (mortgages), not credit card debt. Interest rates are fully tax deductible in the Netherlands, which incentivizes higher mortgage debt than in many other countries. Many people own homes, and the ones that do borrow the majority of the market value when buying.
Housing prices did fall recently (and are now headed back up), but they did not tank as they did in the US. Similarly, the rules on mortgages were on the whole much stricter than in the US; this, combined with the relatively low unemployment rate, resulted in a foreclosure rate which is the lowest in Europe.
The housing market during the crisis, and to some extent now, looks a lot like people stuck in the place where they live. They can make the mortgage payments just fine, but their hopes of swapping that starter house for a larger one have been put on hold until either they build up more equity or the housing market improves.
^this; In part it's a culture thing that one buys a house when one gets married and the like, but the tax rules (deductible mortgage interest) and whatnot give people an incentive to never finish paying off their mortgages.
Another factor (IIRC) is that before the crisis, housing prices just went steadily upwards, doubling or even tripling their values during a lifetime (probably less if you take inflation into consideration). This caused a lot of people to extend their mortgage or take a second or even third mortgage on the gained value of their house, which was used to add to the house or buy a car or things like that.
First of all, household debt is household debt, it is not disingenuous, it's exactly what it sounds like. And it obviously does not only include mortgage debt.
Second, who said anything about the United States? Why is that always the knee-jerk reaction? Mortgage debt is included in the US calculation anyway, so what's the point exactly? The US doesn't get a special calculation for household debt that is different from the Netherlands. Non-the-less I wasn't comparing the two. Let's compare the Netherlands to the rest of Europe who they are in theory most similar to: their individual debt is drastically higher than basically all of Europe.
Third, having eg 100% of your home consumed by debt, means you do not own equity in your home. That's household debt, and it should count just as much as credit card debt should: you have to pay for it, it's going to come out of your future earnings one way or another, and if you do not pay for it there will be serious financial consequences. And when the number is 250%+, you can bet that is coming home to roost sooner rather than later.
My point stands: to deal with that extreme level of household debt (and that's assuming there isn't another crisis any time soon that tips a dangerous situation into an untenable situation) will require a dramatic change to how the people of the Netherlands live. Most likely part of that equation will have to be working more. My argument is that a social trade-off has been made between work, leisure and debt, and to the extent that compromise has been made, in the future it will have to be reversed.
It does by no means follow that the current level of household debt must lead to any dramatic changes.
A high household debt implies that there's relatively less money left over for domestic consumption, compared to similar countries with less debt. Low domestic consumption is a drag on employment. That means that new jobs must come from the export sector, but with the current worldwide stagnation, that does not look hopeful.
I fear another decade of very slow growth, not a sudden collapse: unemployment is stable, mortgage requirements have been fairly strict, so people who can pay their mortgage this month, can pay it the next.
For the day off does the entire company not work or do different people take different days off. My reasoning is because if you are working supporting a 24x5 or 24x7 platform then you need full time cover.
Friday is by far the most popular day to take off. Many offices are nearly empty on Friday. I'm currently alternating weekly between Fridays and Wednesdays, with my wife taking the opposite day, because we both agree Wednesday's free afternoon would be a great time to do things with our son, but it's also a day with important stuff happening at work. Before that, I had Mondays off.
Jobs that need full time cover tend to have a schedule for their employees. And when it's 24x5 or 24x7, you're going to need a schedule anyway, because a regular 40 hour work week doesn't cover that either.
Different people take different days off to ensure continuity.
I also found out that during the off day I'm processing the stuff that has happened on the job and this helps me in my focus and deciding what the next steps are. Considering this, my productivity and effectivity both went up.
I don't know of any companies that completely shut down. People take a fixed day off but it's a different day for everyone.
As you might conjecture this can lead to some friction where people only meet between Tuesday and Thursday. This leads to slight inefficiencies but in my experience these are small in well managed teams.
>The Swedish town of Kiruna actually gave up its six-hour working days in 2005 after finding that the increased intensity of work was not a positive. "People have seen there that the intensity of the job increases significantly, with negative effects on health as a consequence,"
Could that be because we are used to fit our work in 8 hours and work accordingly? Doing 100% of your work in 75% of the time does sound more intense.
It might be interesting to see how the stress changes as people get used to a 6h day.
This was the big problem in France when they passed the 35h work week with no pay loss. Workers were suddenly expected to do the same output in 4h less, and this increased stress levels quite a bit -- or so I've been told by friends who live there.
It may be true in some fields, but it's not my experience. A lot of workers in France work more than 35 hours. In particular, most qualified workers (in the software industry for instance) don't have a fixed schedule and overtime isn't paid. To compensate for the 4 hours (going from 39h to 35h) they have more vacation days. It amounts to about 10 days annually depending on the company. Besides, some people are pressured not to take those day off. Several friends of mine work long hours (> 10) and don't take more that 4-5 weeks vacation a year (which is good compared to the US or Asia, but far from the promised 35 hours a week).
As far as I know, the 40->37 hour shift in Denmark didn't produce similar negative consequences. It's a slightly smaller change (7.5% rather than 12.5% reduction in working hours), but I'm not sure that's the main reason. Perhaps something about how Danish workplaces are structured compared to French ones?
The thing is, for myself, and I imagine any others, there are periods when I always have at least one "urgent" task, and I struggle to find the time to get that done. Then there are other times, when there isn't much to do. Averaged out it could probably all be achieved in 6 hours easily, but the changing priorities probably messes that up.
That's because they did it wrong. The idea is that you should only work for 6 hours/day, with the same pay you had before, at the same pace. The 25% lost productivity would be compensated for by hiring from Swedens 10-15% pool of unemployed and underemployed people.
As we move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, it becomes more about managing our energy as individuals, not how many hours we're putting on the clock
And once again the Netherlands shows up on the bottom of that list, so I'll say it once more: we have a high participation of women in the work force, but most of those only work part-time, often in stereotypically "women's jobs" (receptionist, secretary, kindergarten).
Makes the stats look much more progressive than reality, even though 32/36 hour work weeks are common.
Even so, just the reactions from Dutch people here on HN show that a lot of them are working 4 days a week. I do it too. My brother does it. Many of my neighbours do it. A 4 day work week is particularly popular with parents.
More precisely: you build it up at a rate relative to your income, which is probably 4/5 of what it'd otherwise be. But if that 4/5 is enough for you, the retirement funds will probably be too.
I too work 4 days a week, and wouldn't have it any other way. I have had to reject at least one very interesting job offer for it, though. Even when employers know full well that a 4 day work week makes sense, some of them still have trouble accepting it. It makes for weird conversations where they totally agree with me, and still cannot do it.
Why does government set N hours at all? It's must be up to business! E.g., if I have a software company, I want my employees to work 20 hours a week. Isn't it obviously better way for everyone?
When it was left up to business, we had 14 hour+ days. It took many decades of extensive strikes and demonstrations, during which dozens of workers were killed, before the 8 hour day became the norm.
The US union that is now the AFL-CIO leadership in pushing for the 8 hour day led directly to making May 1st the international day for labor demonstrations, in part in commemoration of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre.
If you want your employers to be able work less, nothing is stopping you most places. But experience is that not having an upper bound caused employers to take massive advantage.
You seem to know a lot about this and it's something I've always been interested in:
When laws were passed to mandate 8 hour work days, what % of companies had 8 hour work days already? 10%? 20%? 80%?
Nowadays we know that total productivity is higher if you have 8 hour work days, even though you work less total hours, because your productivity per hour is much higher. Was something like this known at the time? Or was the push to 8 hour work days only so that people could spend time with their family? What kinds of arguments were used?
Is a good read on the subject and the referenced links are even better (as usual). The 12 hour workday had to be fought for... that tells you something about what %age of employers had 8 hour workdays already, left to their own devices that percentage would be very close to 0. Each and every reduction in hours had to be fought for somehow.
When I was an employer in Canada and we had the standard NL holiday/compensation package our employees were so happy, and other companies nearby cautioned me not to be too open about it lest it 'would spread' and their employees would demand similar. Employers do not tend to be on the same side as their employees in arguments like these (though they should be: happy employee = loyal employee).
Pretty much nobody had 8 hour work days. One of the earliest known instances of someone demanding, and getting, an 8 hour workday was a English-born settler in New Zealand, who worked as a carpenter. In 1840, he negotiated an 8 hour working day for some building work, and he started arguing for it with other workers:
Prior to the 1890's, it took decades to even get down to the 12, and then 10 hour workday.
I don't remember specifically when there started being actual research into the productivity effects of shorter work days, but it definitively was not known at the outset - at the outset, it was driven by workers rights movements.
The 8-hour workday predates the modern idea of time and motion studies, so it's a bit hard to get those kinds of statistics in a meaningful context around productivity.
But for the sake of argument, the percentage would be very low, probably pretty much limited to professionals that could work their own hours. Most people were working poor, for whom the workday was 10-16 hours long, six days per week (in the Western world).
To give you an idea of the significant lenghth of prior work hours, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day has a pair of phrases: "Women and children in England were granted the ten-hour day in 1847. French workers won the 12-hour day after the February revolution of 1848."
"Nowadays we know that total productivity is higher if you have 8 hour work days,"
We know? Surely on a planet with 7 billion people, some of them can maintain their work efficiency for more than 8 hours. What about the Steve Jobs and John Carmack's of the world? I don't see them being 9-5 people.
As a Lyft driver, I am more productive the more hours I work (I top out at 12 hours which I only do on weekends). So the 8 hour rule doesn't apply for everyone.
I think your thesis holds, but I don't think it's clear that your example does (though it certainly still could). Depending on just how much chance of accident goes up over time, and just how great a "productivity" hit we apply for an accident, it is absolutely the case that your productivity falls at some point and it's conceivably the case that it's before 12 (or even 8) hours - though for all I know it's at 15.
I'm sure the fatigue that sets in after (say) 15 hours would be a serious factor in accident risk. I mean truckers are required to stay under a certain work day/week and get enough sleep for safety reasons. Sure if they drove 24 hours straight they would get there faster and in theory be more productive but there are serious safety concerns both with the driver and with the truck (less time for maintenance or inspection)
agreed. My typical pattern on weekend nights is to sleep for 10 hours (yes 10 hours), do what I need to during the day for about two hours, and then get on the road, I'm usually taking anywhere from 1-2 hours of break doing other things that involve momevent (e.g. exercise, social dancing) within that 12 hours, as well, depending on availability.
During the week (when i work more protracted hours) I'm sleeping about 8 hours at least, and I'm also not beholden to an alarm, so I get as much sleep as my body needs. I think I'm probably one of the most well rested people I know, despite pulling twelve hour 'shifts' three days a week.
Obviously I'm more tired after I do the 12 hour shifts than during the week, but I haven't felt so tired that I was at risk of falling asleep on the road (which happened from time to time when I was in grad school).
Yes, also relevant might be the difference between what is safe as a one-off (maybe you really can drive 20 hours safely in a day, if you're well rested beforehand) and what you can do sustainably day after day.
In principle, this is stuff that insurance companies should be on top of...
That seems to have a peculiar and unlikely assumption that they would have produced less by working fewer hours, while almost all human experiences show those at the top of their profession rarely if ever got there by merely punching a timeclock more than the next tier down.
I will never be a world class ballet dancer or world class basketball player simply by putting in a little more time than the next guy.
Plus, in certain fields, even if you are experiencing diminishing returns, you can still squeeze more value out of those additional hours than someone else can.
Imagine one Friday your company calls the law firm you have on retainer. The guy handling your case has already put in 50 hours this week and is only operating at 80% capacity. You are still going to get better work out of him than his coworker, because your guy has everything about your case stored in his head without reading any notes.
On the other hand, if someone was on some type of monitoring duty, where usually nothing happens but if something does happen it's very important that he make the right call (ie guard duty, nuclear power plant operator) I would want to split his work over many people.
Sometimes two 30-hour workers perform better than one 60-hour worker, and sometimes they perform worse.
If Steve Jobs would have worked less, he may not have been removed from the Apple Board. If he had spent more time with his family, maybe the Lisa wouldn't have had the connotations that it had.
These are not conclusive, but they do point us in a direction.
I would love to see a society with genuine capitalism. One where when banks don't have enough money they fail. Where inefficient businesses are not kept afloat by "emergency low interest rates" for the best part of a decade. When a supermarket doesn't pay a living wage, then the state doesn't give them enough to make up the difference.
That's easy, look to the past. There have been times these things didn't get done, right? The economy was unstable. People's lifetime savings were lost, millions struck into poverty, and generally massive suffering.
That's a meaningless statement without defining which form of capitalism and which form of socialism you are referring to.
I'm a marxist, and I hate many forms of socialism. Karl Marx hated many forms of socialism. He even devoted a chapter of the Communist Manifesto to ripping apart forms of socialism he didn't like.
The thing is, socialism is all over America and people actually like it. I'm guessing even you. For example, the military, public roads, the police, public libraries, public schools, fire departments, postal service, garbage collection, public landfills, the FBI, the polio vaccine (Dr. Salk could have sold his vaccine in the free market and made millions and millions of dollars. Instead he gave it to the federal government to begin eradicating polio.), museums, public parks, sewers, the GI bill, public beaches, snow removal, street lights, Amtrak, NPR, USDA, FDA, the Census, and on and on.
This exact "implementation" of socialism doesn't prove it does better job than capitalism would. FYI I'm Russian and you can imagine what communism was (it was hell). No need to remove socialism completely, just keep taxes less and let people work. Look at Singapore.
In this case, it's exactly as you say: the employer has decided to reduce its employees' working hours. It just happens that the employer is also the government. The experiment in Göteborg discussed in this article involves only municipal employees: the city is experimenting with moving its employees to 6-hour work days, and seeing what effect there is on productivity, morale, and other such measures. There's no requirement that other employers follow suit.
I believe even the 40-hour week is not statutory. At least in Denmark (maybe the same in Sweden?), the basic parameters of employment (maximum working hours, overtime pay, minimum wages, etc.), are negotiated between the employer's confederation and the union confederation, rather than set by statute. However, since the unionization rate is over 90% and the basic parameters are set through overall framework agreements (applying to all workplaces covered by the confederations, not separate company-by-company negotiations), these negotiated agreements de-facto set the conditions at almost all workplaces.
The Danish switch in 1992 from 40-hour to 37-hour weeks, for example, was entirely through union negotiations, not done by legislation.
In the EU, all countries are bound by the Working Time Directive unless they have exemptions (I think only the UK has any major exemptions), which does not make the 40-hour week statutory, but does set an upper limit (with some exceptions) at 48 hours/week.
No, because business and employees are not in equal barguaining position. Business always have an advantage and in unregulated markets they are more than happy to take advantage of their power position.
On the other hand, you can see these regulations as a collective bargaining between employees and business. Individual employees have no negotiating power against any corporation, but they all together can elect a government that will have an upper hand there, so it's just market behaviours.
And no, what you said about 20 hours work week doesn't work like that. I believe that many employers would be happy to pay only 20 effective hours a week for a software engineers, but sorry, my workday consist of some time needed to concentrate, get in the flow, release some stress, let the brain work in the hammock time, and you also need to pay for this, since you won't get these effective 20 hours a week without these other 20 hours. It just doesn't work like that. Maybe I would agree to be paid only for 20 effective hours a week, but my rate in that case will easily go double.
If you've got a winner-take-all system, and a small minority is willing to work much longer than everyone else, you end up with a situation where most people work a lot longer than they would prefer to, because the penalty for working 20% less isn't 20% less income, it's a dramatic drop in income. It's just a specific instance of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_to_the_bottom.
Work hour limits are a reasonable solution in a democratic society where the majority doesn't want to be beholden to the work habits of the minority. Although, such a society should expect that some of those long-working folks will emigrate to countries like the U.S. where they can get outsized rewards for working longer than other people.
In theory you have a point, but historically speaking, individual businesses have been quite reluctant to allow shorter hours than what prevails in society. Progress on this metric almost always comes from societal movements and government intervention.
In the US there is no minimum as far as how many hours an employed person can work; in the US it's called part-time labor, but this also causes huge problems with underemployment and poverty wages.
You seem not to understand the depth of that statement.
It's not that one company would have excess hours; all of them would. So, you would be free to find a new position. . . at another company with a 60 hour work week.
Look at the history of the labor movement. Those in power tended to abuse those that weren't; long hours, unsafe conditions, etc. Now, unless you work in a coal mine or foundry, we can count out unsafe work conditions.
This is so senseless i dont know how to respond. It is like saying legal guns will increase the crime rate because they can kill. Companies compete to get specialists (look at how many perks average startup or google offers). Low skilled jobs? Who cares about them.
You know, I spent all night pondering your statement, and I came to the conclusion that you're either incredibly sheltered and immature, or a complete ass.
First off, it's not the same. There is no, or very low incentive for gun owners to commit crimes; especially when compared to the possible consequences.
If there are no protections for workers, though, there is every incentive for businesses to abuse their employees. History proves this statement true. That is, of course, unless I'm just not aware of a number of businesses who willingly limited their abuse before the labor movement.
And yes, the average startup and google and other tech sector businesses offer good perks. . . . That is not normal for a majority of careers, you know that, right?
And this, "Low skilled jobs? Who cares about them." Is either one of the most terrible statements I've read on HN, or one of the best trolls I've seen; boy, oh boy, did it get me worked up.
That is a terrible way to live. Do you understand how much of your life relies on low skilled jobs? Do you buy your food from a grocery store? Do you shop for clothes? Do you purchase anything that you don't personally create? At some point, low-skilled workers interacted with the goods you purchase.
The attitude that the only reason people work low-skill jobs is because they aren't smart or capable enough for anything else is very, very immature and incredibly ignorant. Specifically, your attitude that they apparently deserve to be treated worse and (in the context of our conversation) deserve to be abused by their employer because of their low-skilled jobs is awful, just simply awful. You should be ashamed.
And it's not just about abuse of power - 60-hour-workweek companites would simply rather quickly outcompete those that had 40 hour weeks, except in rare cases.
I hope we start seeing more things like this, especially in the US. Does 6 hours a day maximize happiness / productivity? I don't know. Does 8 hours? It's the custom, but I don't know. I think it's almost impossible that 8 hours is the best number across every industry => vertical => company. I'd love to see more experimentation
8 hours for work, 8 for leisure, 8 for sleep and 2 rest days a week seems reasonable, at least mathematically speaking. If it were up to me, I'd include commuting time in those 8 work hours as well, making the number no more than 7 hours.
Not really. Eight hours for sleep covers almost everyone's biological requirements. It's hard to decide in what proportion to split the remaining 16. So split it 50-50 unless someone can propose something better!
That's a bafflingly unfounded and useless "suggestion!" Enormous amounts of people have been working 8 hour shifts for decades -- instead of just guessing that the status quo is probably optimal, why not ask a variety of people if they think two hours more of family/leisure/commute/exercise/learning time would be of any benefit?
Sounds pretty arbitrary. It seems to me that a huge number of jobs are all about providing entertainment for people who are too knackered from work to take part in an intellectually and/or physically satisfying hobby. If we could distribute the real jobs evenly how many hours would we _need_ to work to maintain our lifestyle?
> It seems to me that a huge number of jobs are all about providing entertainment for people who are too knackered from work to take part in an intellectually and/or physically satisfying hobby.
This is something I've been trying to say for years now. Thanks for putting it in words so succinctly.
I'll need at least 12 hours of sleep :). But seriously, I think including commute time would be smart, except that it could lead to discrimination / resentment against the commuters
No, it's the result of nearly a century of unions fighting tooth and nail.
The 8 hour working day was first promoted by Robert Owen in 1817, using the slogan "Eight hours labour, Eight hours recreation, Eight hours rest".
It was picked up by various unions and other organizations towards the middle of the century, such as the first International - the International Working Mens Association, where people like Marx and Bakunin were leading forces. But in most places they met fierce opposition, and many places it took decades of strikes and demonstrations and campaigning to push it through.
Currently there is not much discussion about a general reduction of the work day to 6 hours in Sweden.
If anything politicians are pushing for more work (though not longer days). Lower sick pay, later retirement and conversion of part time jobs to full time have been implemented or proposed.
(Also, it is not Volvo Cars that is downsizing, it is Volvo Group).
MP just decided to go into the election with a 35 hour work day proposal. I also believe V and F! are in support of a work hour reduction to varying degrees.
So there is definitely a push to reduce the work day (Though possibly not to 6 hours).
I wonder how much the length of the work week is related to cultural belief in upward mobility, either for yourself or for your children.
When I was a kid, my own family - mostly blue-collar, unionized workers - would've only supported a reduction in the work week if that meant they could start getting overtime sooner. They didn't have to, because they were unionized, but they worked as much as they could. They'd happily work holidays like Christmas because it meant they got triple-time. If you gave them a six-hour day at the same rate of pay, they'd celebrate - and then go looking for a part-time job. They did this because they wanted a better life for themselves and their children - not too many six-year-old working class kids had a TRS-80 in their bedroom, but I did.
If they didn't believe a better life for themselves or their children was particularly possible, perhaps they would've wanted to work less - but that cultural trait was such a big part of their lives, they would've been entirely different people without it. I have a hard time even picturing it.
Because of this, when I read articles like the one linked, they seem so strange - I'm not judging, not at all, but it really highlights how different cultures are wired completely differently.
Father-son income elasticity is higher in the US than in most of Europe. This means that the income of the son more strongly follows the income of the father.
The difference you speak of may be due to the fact that making lots of money more strongly determines whether your son will too.
I wonder how many hours people work naturally if you don't need the money and quite enjoy what you do. Say you're building some software project because you want to do it. I wouldn't mind betting most people would work more than 36 hours a week. I daresay you could make an argument that people should not be forced to work much longer than that just to make ends meet.
I wonder if the government workers, who will still work 8 hours a day will have a loss of productivity due to a conscious attempt to help the move to six-hour workdays.
The problem is not six or eight hours working day, the problem is funding. What I understand the red-green ruling alliance has not put away any funding for this reform, so as usual Göteborg flush their public economy down the toilet and which of course hurts the smaller cities in the same region where they share public programs with Göteborg. Same old story with this city.
And is going to be required to hire more employees because of regulations on how many available workers per shift on typical government job.
Göteborg has of 2013 a debt of 37,5 billion SEK. On top of that it has 13,5 billions SEK in unfunded penions debts.
There is a reason why Göteborg, or Röteborg (Rottenburg) in "folkmun", has one of the highest taxes in Sweden - poor management.
San Francsico local 6 proposed a 10hr/4 day work week; Sat-
Mon off. The electricians voted it down. My dad never understood why. As a kid, neither did I understand why anyone wouldn't want hours like this. By the way, getting
to the job site is 60% of the hassle, the rest is boring
construction. I honestly think all jobs would benefit from just
getting rid of Mondays? Two days off is just not enough
time; unless you have no life and live through your job.
The problem is many of us do not even remotely like our job,
or our felllow workers. We hate coming in and seeing the
the same people--especially the one's who haven't realized
this is no dress rehearsal. We were born and we die--it's
a simple equation. A great line I heard out of a movie, 'Give me a hair cut that says I go to a job I hate, only to
adorn my spoild wife with consumer crap, and keep my ungrateful kids adorned in expensive jeans for the next thirty years; until I get the courage to blow my head off
with a shotgun.' Extreme statement, but rang true with me.
Oh yea, to every girlfriend who claimed to love their job--
Great--get your MBA. Put on the pants suit. Climb the ladder. It's my turn to stay home and take care of the
spawn. Me and the kids want electronic toys. It's O.K. if
your working late, or go to china for Apple. Just send us the checks! We'll be fine. (In all honestly, I think people(especially Americans) want what they can't have, and
don't know when they are offered a good deal.)
A 6-hour workday would be 30 hours/week. If we're going to reduce the working week, then instead of spreading that over 5 days, why not work a 4-day week (7.5 hours/day)? That would reduce commuting congestion by 20%, and make everyone who doesn't like spending an hour a day in a traffic jam happy.
The purpose is not to diminish time wasted by commuting.
In many European cities and regions one does not commute for hours every day. For instance, my brother lives in a 2000 year-old city and walks to work -- it takes him 2 minutes. When I lived in London it took me 15-20 minutes to get to work, with the tube. In a Swiss city before that, 15 minutes driving. And for my job before that, 4 minutes biking.
The Swedish average commute is under 25 minutes (excluding the top 5% who travel an hour or more). [1] My friends' commute in Stockholm includes the walk to drop off kids at the local school. Is Göteborg worse than the rest of the country?
It's not hours that can be the case as in other countries, but I would not describe it as 2 minutes either. 25 minutes sounds reasonable.
Of course it's depends how lucky you are. When I lived in Stockholm for a short while, I had an 50 minutes commute from the outer parts of Stockholm (still within city limits) to the city, first by buss then subway.
In Göteborg, if you need to pass Göta älv (Göta river) in rush hour, good luck with that. It is the main bottleneck in Göteborg with only two bridges and one tunnel, all of the jammed.
Sure buses have their own lane so that runs faster, but the nightmarish slow tram is just painful, half the speed of a subway.
I normally spend 30-50 minutes travelling to work and about the same time going home. That's about 60-100 minutes per day.
> Is there something wrong with your public transport system?
There's actually a bus stop almost outside my front door, and Edinburgh has a reasonable bus service. However if I was to take the bus to the train station, then take the train and be picked up the other end it would take me about 90 min, which is longer.
An hour a day is only 30 min journey time and I suspect many people in the UK spend longer than that travelling to work. I certainly have in the past.
Most US communities, besides a few metro areas, are planned and built with regard to the automobile as the sole form of transporation. If there is any public transport system at all, it usually consists of buses which are often late, infrequent (30 minutes to an hour wait between buses for smaller communities), and travel very slowly on average (since they often make frequent stops to pick up passengers).
Why isn't public transportation better than it is a lot of places? I'd attribute it to lack of funding by local governments due to politicians who don't consider public transport to be important at all (most of them would be embarrassed to ever be seen riding in a bus rather than a mercedes or something). It is considered transportation for the lower classes (who should be embarrassed they aren't wealthy!), and thus isn't reevaluated or improved at all.
I default to America as that's where I live. I don't think much of our public transport. Sure where I live they probably don't need more than just the buses we have but I had never seen a passenger train (just cargo, as far as I know) until I went abroad. The ease of getting around was amazing and I could totally see not owning a car there.
I'm sure there is just as good public transport here but it doesn't seem to be the way we are built.
Anywhere that has hour long traffic daily should probably be big enough to have better public transport so I'll give you that...
Some cities (even some small ones) have EXCELLENT public transport but some places have zero public transport. And with widespread suburban sprawl it gets worse since you generally need a car to live in suburbia.
I live in Green Bay, WI. Not huge like Madison/Milwaukee but a decent size (IMO). Maybe I have just been really unlucky or oblivious. I only just found out last year that every year, for a long time now, ships come and port here, like galleons and stuff] for a few days as part of some event. So I could see me just not spotting one if it did happen.
Not sure why a train would actually come through here though.
So what is the optimal work day for productivity? Many folks here believe it's a (proven?) fact that less than 40 is actually more productive. However, surely 40 is more productive than 0. So, what is the magic number?
Personally, I don't think this is that simple. Heck, humans just aren't that simple. I think some people and some professions are more productive above 40 and others are more productive under 40. That's why I'm in favor of a system that leaves this as a point of negotiation between the employee and employer. Just like there is no one-size fits all salary for, say, a java developer with 5 years experience (how fast is he? how buggy is his code? can he work independently? etc), why would expect to find a one size fits all for work day length?
It seems that 40 hours is basically optimal for turn of the 20th century factory work. I've seen several references[0] that the optimum for knowledge work is 35 hours, but I'd LOVE a detailed citation.
While you are correct that people vary, many managers seem extremely ignorant of 200 years of research on this topic and start from grossly wrong initial conditions (e.g., "40 hours is the bare minimum and should be considered slacking: a professional works until the job is done and we really expect 50 hours; we prefer passionate people, which starts at around 55 hours"). It would be far better for almost everyone if the typical standard expectation were based on a typical standard human, not on outliers (e.g., people who carry the DEC2 mutation and need only 6 hours sleep).
Look at it another way: the 75% of the workforce who is average would stop burning themselves out to the point of negative productivity, and supermen like yourself would be truly recognized for your outstanding contributions, rather than just "meh, meets expectations".
"An average worker needs to work a mere 11 hours per week to produce as much as one working 40 hours per week in 1950. (The data here is from the US, but productivity increases in Europe and Japan have been of the same magnitude.) The conclusion is inescapable: if productivity means anything at all, a worker should be able to earn the same standard of living as a 1950 worker in only 11 hours per week."
Thanks; I'm familiar with that. Regardless of how total output compares with days of yore, this is now: I'd like to see research demonstrating that, over time, knowledge workers on a 35 hour schedule outproduce those on a 40 hour schedule.
The French have the highest GDP per capita per hour worked (right up there with the Dutch), while working close to the fewest hours. Is that not a sign of productivity?
Productivity is not the only concern, individual preference should also be accounted for. Someone might want to sacrifice 10 hours a week for 20 % less pay for instance (productivity vs hours worked is more than likely not linear). People should be more free to negotiate such arrangements. Basic income could give them the leverage needed to have a stronger negotiating position - right now employers usually have a way stronger hand.
Seriously want to move to Europe now. As a U.S. citizen and web developer, how hard is this to do? Can I just get a remote job here and then move? What are the VISA issues?
My biggest concern is that my salary won't be enough to pay my ~$1k/month student loan debt.
It is not the duty of the lawmaker but of the contracting parties (= employer and employee) to define the amount of work hours per day.
There are many variables in the process:
- Demand for money of the employee (poor father of five vs. rich single)
- Demand for work of the employer (company needs a helping hand vs company needs to recruit a new team)
- Scale effect of product (does one additional hour or man lead to one additional unit produced?, compare laying bricks vs programming)
These variables are unknown to the lawmaker for each specific instance, so any a-priori determination of the amount of work hours per week cannot be optimal.
There are pretty severe network effects in place, though, as well as obvious imbalance of power (the wage worker is, almost by definition, relatively poor, indebted, etc). Working hours have always been a big part of labor politics. The individual contractual perspective is not the whole story.
But I agree with the imbalance of power, at least in the common case. However, the more specific and difficult your job is, the more the power leans towards the employee.
Still, I believe any kind of power inequality will manifest itself somewhere whether you fix working hours or not.
Almost every time I've talked to someone about reducing their working hours, the most serious reason not to has been something like "but everyone else is working 8 hours."
It's not like the "invisible hand" simply discovered the optimum life arrangement for all workers everywhere.
> It is not the duty of the lawmaker but of the contracting parties (= employer and employee) to define the amount of work hours per day.
Who mentioned lawmakers? I only see two contracting parties here: the municipal government in Gothenburg, and a group of its employees.
This idea that there's a short and slippery slope between 'City municipality experiments to find the most efficient working day for its employees' and 'GOVERNMENT BANS ANYONE WORKING MORE THAN SIX HOURS' is, ISTM, dubious.
Usually the employee has a much weaker negotiating position due to the threat of finding himself without a job. Basic income could lead to a "freer" and thus more efficient job market (free markets are efficient, right?).
I found the Netherlands numbers strange, but then worked on a Dutch project. They were very industrious, and planned things well in advance, including avoiding work on Fridays or during their sacred vacations. If you can pull off 1400 hours in a year, god bless!
Some workers are pretty interchangeable. If Sarah can assemble parts at the same rate as Sven, then the employer shouldn't care who does it, right? However, for specialized positions or ones that are knowledge-based, this doesn't work. Sarah is a lawyer who's been working on a case for the past 3 months, so it will take her much less time to complete the next step than Sven, who has been working on something else. So in that case, the employer would be pretty unhappy about Sarah wanting to work 30 hours a week, even if Sven is willing to pick up the extra 10.
Software developers with the same skills working on the same product are generally closer to the former than the latter, but it depends.
The other thing is that there are many fixed costs associated with hiring an employee. They need a desk and office space and computer, they need health insurance/unemployment, you need HR to manage all of this. So it ends up being much more expensive (and complicated) to have two part time employees than one fulltime one. If most benefits were decoupled from employment, a lot (but not all) of these costs go away.
Germany seems to be unrealistically low in the diagram. It is very untypical for people here to work less than 40 hours per week and lunch hour is not included in the work time (means you actually stay 45 hours at work in a usual contract).
Yeah but these shouldn't be considered in such kind of statistics, right? Doesn't make sense to compare part-time workers and full-time workers when a country wants to limit their numbers of full-time hours.
The list of countries is so strange to look at with so many countries that have low GDP / capita or recent depressions / austerity forced on them and . . . The US near the top
I work from home, and I find if I eliminate distraction and go zone-in coding, then six hours are a lot more productive then 8 hours of fooling around.
In other words, government workers. People not truly beholden to anyone. An entity that cannot lose money can make stupid decisions and generally get by with them because apathy of the public is an exploitable resource.
So the title is wholly misleading. I guess politicians of a certain style in Sweden need to lock in the public employee vote?
Call me when innovation starts and not grand standing and vote buying
Ignorant comment, trying to apply one's own bias or perspective of government work in his country to that in a completely different (social/cultural/economic) entity..
Imagine if your Stanford grads picked government work to better their local society rather then a profit-driven startup then you begin to see another viewpoint
The innovative US economy will make it all irrelevant anyway by introducing more and more work from home jobs. Work from home is almost common in the US and basically non-existent in Europe. I wouldn't trade Swedish 6-hour workday with my American-based 8-hour while working from my coach at home. Somehow socialists are always one step behind Mother Nature, i.e. free markets.
The "innovative US economy" had to be forced by socialist unions to cut the working day to roughly 8 days. It took decades of strikes, demonstrations and bloodshed to reach that goal.
You know why people demonstrate and celebrate workers right on May 1st? Because then largely socialist and anarchist US unions decided, led by the AFL, in 1888 to restart demonstrations for the 8 hour working day with a major demonstration on May 1st 1890 in part in honour of those who died during the Haymarket Massacre. In 1889, the AFL approached the socialist Second International to suggest coordinated demonstrations internationally, and the Second International agreed.
So when you enjoy your "American-based 8-hour" working day, remember it came to be thanks to socialist unions.
Capitalism allows for the concept of unions, and in no way inherently outlaws or stops labor from unionizing. It was in fact Capitalist unions, in a Capitalist system, that you're referring to.
And in fact it was one of the so called Capitalist robber barons, Henry Ford, who had the greatest impact on shifting to the 40 hour work week. He proved it could work and blazed the path for all other industrialists to follow (either by choice or by Ford stealing their labor via better terms).
It was in fact to a large extent socialist unions, or unions with a large contingent of socialist and anarchist memembers.
Even the traditionally a-political AFL sent representatives to the socialist Second International.
And crediting Ford for the 40 hour work week is just pure, unadulterated bullshit. By the time Ford cut the work week for his staff, large segments of the work force already had achieved it, and provided the evidence needed that a shift to the 8 hour work week was economically feasible.
I appreciate Unions and I strongly believe that capitalism works well only in connection with democracy. Sure if people who just didn't try hard enough at school and end up at bad jobs vote for 6 or even 2-hour day work, let them have it! I don't care, I'm paid per hour I want to put as many hours as possible.
The point was that your supposedly amazing free market was not what led to the 8-hour day. It took bloodshed and illegal strikes; demonstrations and decades of fighting for legislation.
Please note that in communistic states people worked regularly over 8 hours long after 8-hours work week was legislated in the USA. My point is that system evolution via democratic process is much better than bloody revolution that left-wing quite often has on its mouth.
What does "communistic states" have to do with anything? They were/are kleptocratic oligarchies that are so stratified that they have even worse class systems than capitalist states.
> My point is that system evolution via democratic process is much better than bloody revolution that left-wing quite often has on its mouth.
It was not evolution via democratic process that gave us the 8 hour day. It was not bloody revolution either, but plenty of blood has been shed during the fight for decent working conditions. People were outright killed. People were arrested. People were intimidated; blacklisted.
The current system is only as good as it is because our forefathers were brave enough to stand up and fight even when they had to break the law, and even when they in many cases risked their life to fight the conditions of the time.
And they had to: Plenty of people died because of the disproportionate powers of employees to dictate conditions. Such as the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, where 146 people died when the factory burned because the employees kept the doors locked during working hours to prevent unauthorized breaks(!):
>Plenty of people died because of the disproportionate powers of employees to dictate conditions.
This is extremely important and often overlooked. Those pesky government regulations save lives. The idea that dangerous conditions and unsafe product won't happen in the free market because that's "bad for business" is a pipe dream.
Most of us weren't alive when regulations for safety wasn't a "thing" and can't appreciate them.
My grandad worked 14 hours+ shifts in 1950s and 1960s in communistic Poland in a steel mill. Anybody who would refuse would end up in jail or even worse - gulag - for treason.
As bad as capitalism is it will never, ever be as bad as communism can be.
Obvious lie. What in the history of the human kind was worse than Cambodia, Cultural Revolution in China or North Korea today? Nazi Germany? Still had 'socialists' in their party name...
I thought you must have bigger houses? no? I mean how can you claim to have better standard of living and live happier life in a small house without any space?
The average house sizes are more culturally rooted than dependent on standard of living. For example, by measuring size of apartments/houses and cars/capita you'd find Manhattan to be the poorest (lowest standard of living) part of the US which is of course nonsense. We don't have urban sprawl in order to accommodate cheap/large houses, but it's by choice, mostly.
Standard of living and various happiness indices include so much more than could be fitted into the term purchasing power (which is higher in the US than in most of the world).
My standard of living is very dependent on 5-6 weeks paid holiday, 6-12 months paid paternity leave and so on. In my income bracket I could afford those things just by saving, that is, I pay more for them through taxes than I receive back, but I'm still strongly for them. Among other things because only through normalizing long paternal leaves did it become acceptable to employers to interrupt your career 6-12 months 1-3 times in a career, without being classed as "not motivated" or passed over for promotions etc.
It's always a tough choice between a huge house in sprawlville on one side of spectrum and a tiny apartment in the centre of the (non-urban-flighted, alive and walkable) city.
And of course everything in between.
You can't say that in "better standard of living", home size matters and home location doesn't. Europeans have less sprawl but smaller houses, that's just it.
It shouldn't really be a tough choice. The "suburbia" dream is flawed on so many levels that it isn't even funny. Yet people are clinging on to it like leeches because they've been told it will make them happy.
That's not really fair. Just because the suburbia dream is flawed for you, doesn't mean it is for everyone else. I really do know folks who love living in a subdivision, being on the community board, watering the lawn in khaki shorts, the whole nine yards. They love all of it.
Different strokes for different folks, Benji. Not everyone wants to live in the city where everything is so tight and expensive. Not everyone wants to live in the country where everything is so god damned far away.
Some want to live relatively close to their work, have large sized yards like you would in rural areas, but still have access to shopping and amenities similar to cities.
Well, on the other hand it's very hard to make the whole large urban core interesting and alive. Urban core is always smaller to fit everybody, hence unrealistic prices (think SF).
And urban city outskirts aren't so much fun (still small apartments but not much life; crime is sometimes a problem too). Not much better than suburbia.
"Work from home is almost common in the US and basically non-existent in Europe."
It is not non-existent in Sweden.
"Somehow socialists are always one step behind Mother Nature, i.e. free markets."
The free market has nothing to do with "Mother Nature" (animals and plants don't trade at all). Sweden has a free market economy, much like the US. Not exactly sure what is meant by socialists here. Anyone who advocates shorter working hours?
Work from home for 1 day a week is pretty common in Netherland. I've had coworkers who were only in the office for three days a week because they had one day off and one work from home day.
Personally I've become less of a fan of working from home, because you see the people you work with less. Particularly the daily standup in Scrum emphasizes the problem with people working from other locations. But if you don't work in a team, working from home is a great option.
On socialism, Sweden is generally seen as a really nice mix between the good part of capitalism (free market), and the good parts of socialism (equality, workers' rights).
The innovative Scandinavian economy has resulted in the highest general happiness for its citizens. Maybe you should consider why you actually work - is it because work is the best thing that every happened to you, or something you do so you can afford to take the rest of your time off and hangout with friends and/or family?
So why in Norway they vote extreme right? Here is your dirty secret about Breiviks and Scandinavia: we can pay high taxes as long as it goes to us. But the very second it goes to Muslims, immigrants, etc. we are not socialist anymore. We are more like national socialists ;-) You see scnadinavian socialism seems to work only in national states. Once you have high immigration and you pay for immigrants, nobody wants it anymore. Now get this: in the US 70% of population are immigrants, or their children, or their grand-children. Obviously, you can see why Norwegians don't want to pay high taxes to benefit of immigrants. Why it is so difficult to comprehend that in the US it wouldn't work too?
They/we don't. The "Progress Party", which is the furthest right party represented in parliament, got 16.3%. Down from 22.9%. They're for the most part to the left of the Republican Party. That they were invited into a coalition government for the first time was shocking to us, as it means it's the closest we've gotten to "American conditions" - a traditional slur in Norway, as most people, including a substantial majority still, do not want most of what the Progress Party wants.
You'll note that despite getting into a coalition with the conservative party (which got 26.8%, up from 17.2%), they have been unable to get through more than a few token tax cuts. Why? Because the centre-point in parliament is to the left of either one of them. They have to lean on the Liberal Party (Venstre), which is social-liberalists that'd fit in roughly on the left of the Democratic Party, or the Christian Democrats, which are social-conservative centrists, to get a slight majority.
Similarly, they've gotten through a few minor token changes to immigration policies, but have to give up on most of their policies because no other party in parliament agree with them on immigration.
About 50% of parliament is made up of the social democrat Labour Party, the Socialist Left party, and the slightly left of centre Centre Party who ruled for the preceding 8 years.
Norwegian "tradition" is that right wing governments sits for less than one period, up to almost two. No right wing government has survived a second election.
There's no extreme right in Norway (at least not in the parliament). The so-called "extreme right" progress party are left of the US Democrats in all(?) matters.
With only 16% of the votes they also lost 1/4th their seats from the previous election, which was won by a labor/left coalition.
I wouldn't say that working from home is particularly common in the United States. It exists, but it's a very small minority of jobs. There are more if you include "occasional work-from-home": some companies will let you work from home one day a week, and come into the office the rest. The web-tech startup scene is probably the place fully working from home is most prevalent, and even there it's not a very large proportion of jobs.
> Work from home is almost common in the US and basically non-existent in Europe.
1) I live in the US and only one person I know works from home but she is a very special case (her employer made an exception). When I mention I have the option of working from home once in a while (and I mean once in a while, like a few times a year) everyone is like "REALLY!? THAT SOUNDS AMAZING!"
In very broad terms, the Dutch are more likely to plan and stick to those plans. Personal time and time off are valued, so you need to be efficient in your working hours. You can't really expect someone to respond to your emails after working hours. Having to work in the weekends at all is a sign of bad project management, and should be exceptional. Meetings have agendas which are sent out ahead of time.
Americans are generally more optimistic, which makes for worse time management and planning, which leads to overtime and stress. Being seen at work somehow equals working, and internal guilt for not working efficiently while at work leads to more weekend work. There's a big focus how much you've 'worked' this week. Interruption is common for things which could be structured.
To be honest, it's been pretty difficult to adjust, but the payoff is huge. Actual free time after work, real weekends, and longer vacations are all possible because people plan... whereas friends back home are often unable to plan vacations because they/their boss don't know how busy they'll be in 5 months.