“ The real villain, from this point of view, is the man who saves.”
Amen Bertie. It’s accumulation of capital that is the problem. Same with Keynes’s prediction.
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Great 80s band name!
Think of what this could do to reduce transportation CO2 emissions and traffic fatalities/injuries. Studies on transportation gridlock show that in most places, a 10% reduction of cars on the road during peak times pretty much erases traffic jams.
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And yet my brother believes bike lanes are the cause of traffic congestion. Who is right I wonder?
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I’d consider 4 10-hour days an abuse of the 4 day work week concept, by lowering the productivity on the four remaining days by making them too long.
I’ve done many different setups; 5-day week, 4-day week, 3 day week, 4, 6, 8, 10 & 12 hour days applied variously for varying lengths of time.
I worked as an independent contractor for years in an industry that only used the IC classification as a labour abuse. They were often surprised to learn that I could and would come and go as I saw fit, but I knew my rights, and always brought (or took) client firms wherever I went. So they usually complained, and learned, and shut up (or sought constructive dismissal, which would prompt me to leave, take my clients, and part with some jokes about how they were so stupid that they weren’t aware that there’s no such need/thing with IC’s, another indicator they only used the classification as abuse.)
Anyway, I worked when I wanted. My anecdotal conclusions mirror some empirical, 6 hour workdays are more productive than 8, 8 more productive than 10. 4 hours a day was a wash for me, it might work for lots of people but for me 6 was where it was at. This was true for 4-day weeks & 5-day weeks.
3-day weeks… I often enjoyed work and 3-days wasn’t enough, for other workers it might be.
Since I was commission based and not hourly, productivity was hella more important than time spent. For hourly peoples, they’d need to knuckle up and beat a better wage out of the employer to be sure both get all the advantages of the shortened schedule.
Hourly labour would also need to see work done in many jurisdictions around legislated benefits, as in when do they kick in, full-time vs part-time as currently described. Employers already abuse the fuck out of these designations, and they’d see that as silver-lining if they couldn’t recognize or realize the benefits of the shorter work week.
Can you imagine how CEOs would chortle if they could disguise elimination of full-time positions for exclusively part-time positions as a social progression instead of a relinquishment of responsibility on their part? That’s what would happen if you just change the one thing, you get jacked by the short-term profit seekers.
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I can easily imagine that, considering how the idea of a household being sustained (and often very well) by one 40 hour per week “breadwinner,” instead of the the current at least two, has been stolen from us. By greedy CEOs and such.
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The “in the office” part is the other thing that too many managers/business owners refuse to give up. If work is getting done without them watching it being done, did it really happen? 
If any change like a reduced work week or remote employment is offered, workers need to get that in writing, because there’s nothing given that TPTB won’t take back, if they can:
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This version of the present, much like the future, is unevenly distributed.
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So many Lumburghs.
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Absolutely, and we’ll probably never achieve equity in many of these areas (not that we should stop trying of course). The show (and the researchers) were looking at the overall trends, and although the worst off are still worse off, everyone’s situation has improved dramatically since the start of the industrial revolution.
Again, not to say we shouldn’t stop fighting for equality and justice in all these areas. That remains as important as ever.
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There’s weird sunk cost fallacies happening here too, because a lot of businesses (especially tech companies) have spent a fortune on fancy offices. For tech companies, this has been a prime area of competition for talent in a seller’s market of employees. However now these fancy offices are huge boat anchors of cost overhead that they own or are in long leases for. The poster child for this “problem” is Apple. They literally just finished their multi-billion-dollar UFO campus when COVID hit. Aside from some of the specialized hardware engineering teams, almost nobody at that company actually needs to be in an office to do their job. However, (as my friends who work there have told me) the company is leaning on everyone hard to come back to the office, and has even started requiring it again. All this for no reason that anyone can discern beyond “we spent billions on this fancy-ass UFO so we need you all to commute two hours a day to it to justify it”.
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If a manager can see you at a desk, work must be getting done. Even if it is just posting on BB. 
My very old, generally very risk adverse (definitely not tech) company is dealing with more remote work wonderfully. Of course, they already had a successful remote work process before too. Part of that very old company, is a very large building (or two or more). The solution they’re working on is converting some space to hotel space for hybrid workers (2 days a week or less), and then consolidating the remaining 3+ day a week employees into less space. I’m assuming the goal is turn some floors or buildings into mostly empty wastelands where they can turn the heat down and the air conditioning to hotter. Put them in a permanent “weekend mode extreme” until some future date when the space is needed.
PS: We have less than 34 days a year, more than 34 but less then 4 days a week, and 4 or more days a week employees. Mostly self choice, assuming the work can be done remotely. Even then, those hybrid employees automatically also get a few weeks full remote a year too. While I don’t know definitely, I suspect the 34 is tied to tax withholding. Since full time remote people pay taxes on the remote location not the office location.
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in the us, you’re only considered full time above 30 hours. so a lot of hourly employers try to stop workers from getting more than that, because that’s when benefits kick in. that’s one of the reasons people have to swing multiple jobs
so yeah: if the full time hour cap dropped without some other laws changing, people at hourly jobs would probably be getting screwed over even more
( single payer healthcare would help relieve a lot of that dynamic i think )
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Sounds great for the ‘corporate’ sector but what about the ‘service’ sector where businesses are open 7 days a week and some 24 hours a day?
Hire more employees.
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But that would bring down unemployment. What would happen to all the workers in the Departments of Unemployment Assistance around the country then? /s
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