
Sweden reveals results from pilot of 30-hour work week - uxhacker
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-03/swedish-six-hour-workday-trial-runs-into-trouble-too-expensive
======
fetbaffe
This pilot was actually not 6-hour workday, but 30 hour workweek. Yes, it is
true that the politicians that decided it called it for 6-hour workday, but in
reality is was 30 hour workweek and nothing else, because of how the facility
works with scheduling and so on (regulations etc).

Nurses worked between 5 to 7 hours on day shifts resulting in a 30 hour
workweek. Night shifts was 6 to 8 hours.

I think it is important to stress this fact that it was about workweek and not
workday. Almost all media reporting on this (Swedish as well) misses this
fact. You have to read the report to get that.

Personally I rather work more one day and less the other. It is the
flexibility over a week that is more interesting than over a day.

report after 18 months 2016-10-11

[https://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/files/104/75...](https://sverigesradio.se/diverse/appdata/isidor/files/104/757fe9ed-702f-401a-b275-c3c45fcfae99.pdf)

~~~
marzell
Seeing as how even the PDF you link says in the first sentence "6-hour
workday" ("6 timmars arbetsdag"), I can see why there is some confusion about
the specific details.

~~~
fetbaffe
Yes, that does not really help. That shows that it is important for
journalists to read the fine print.

In Sweden, 6-hour workday is a well known political slogan, probably why that
was used.

------
mhurron
They're abandoning it because of an obvious requirement? Did someone not
realize that in a 24 hour operation that consists of physical activities,
cutting hours would require more people to carry the same workload?

~~~
bogomipz
Yeah this sentence was a bit of an anticlimax:

"Preliminary results concluded that it achieved all of these aims, but the
city had to employ an extra 17 staff, costing 12m kroner (£1.4m), Bloomberg
reported."

Am I missing something because that seems painfully obvious without even
having to to undertake the experiment no?

That being said I absolutely love that the Swedish government was willing to
entertain such an idea and undertake such an experiment.

~~~
failrate
My interpretation is that the cost could be calculated beforehand but not the
benefit. If the outcome was a dramatically improved care and well-being of
patients that saw much shorter hospital stays OR an unanticipated reduction in
the need for staff as a knock on effect of shorter workdays, then the benefit
might have been considered worth the cost.

~~~
bogomipz
I see. That certainly makes much more sense. Thanks.

------
ArlenBales
My utopian society workweek is 4 days/8 hours.

That extra day off would do far more for people than one or two less hours
every day. So 4x8=32 hours, vs 6x5=30 hours. I would even bargain for 4 days/9
hours, or 4x9=36 hours.

That third day is huge. It's the difference from having only enough time for
some leisurely weekend activities, to having enough time to take a mini-3-day-
vacation every week (short flights, etc.).

~~~
alkonaut
I'd much rather do 5x6h, I suppose the difference might be if you have small
children.

~~~
ArlenBales
You're probably right, if I did have kids I would prefer 5x6h until I shed
that responsibility (they leave the house once adults).

But as someone without kids, being able to take short flights or trips every
week over 3 days would be awesome.

I guess ideally, since 5x6h and 4x8h are only two hours apart, a utopian
workplace would offer its employees either option -- the people who chose 4x8h
would make 2h more wages weekly.

~~~
alkonaut
I do 40 flexible hours already, so I do a couple of hours in the evening or on
the weekend, just to get a 6-7h typical day, to fit the schedule with school
pickup etc.

If I wanted, I could work 4x10 (With some sweet talking to a manager perhaps).
I'd very much prefer to have 30, 32 or 35h to distribute over the week though,
it would make the planning a lot easier. In that case I'd do e.g. 5x6 now that
my small children needs early pickup, but I'd go to 4x8 when I have larger
children who can bike home from school, so we can go on a weekend trip with
friday off.

------
JamesBarney
I imagine the optimal working day depends on the work one is doing. I used to
work 8 hour shifts at Circuit City and leave with plenty of energy. But 8
hours of solid coding leaves me exhausted.

I'm more curious to see the results of Amazon's 30 hr work week because I
believe that includes developers.

~~~
mordocai
And truthfully, it is going to depend on the person to at least some extent as
well.

IMO, anything that doesn't include being at work as part of your actual job
duties should have no number of required work hours. You either get enough
work done or you don't. If you aren't getting the expected amount of work
done, then you'll eventually get fired. If you can out perform everyone else
on the team and work 8 hours a week, so be it(just don't expect to get any
brownie points when it comes raise time unless you put in more time).

Things like retail/food service are obviously things that require being at
work certain hours so talking about shortening hours for that time of work is
productive. For creative work/management/executive work though, I think we
should move to a more flexible approach.

~~~
scarecrowbob
So here's a question that I continually ask myself as I work at my remote,
salaried 6-hour-a-day developer job that I've been doing for the last year:

how do I know how much work is enough?

If I gauge by productivity, that's cool... I'll just be really fast and get my
stuff done and then go play banjo or whatever.

But then when folks hand me a crufty WordPress site that is misbehaving and it
could be anything between "visit the route that resets the route cache" and
"debug three or four broken and unfamiliar JavaScript libraries and their
interaction with terrible PHP code" there is a problem, because to my boss
those could be the same amount of work.

When I am doing green field work, or working with very nice, clean technology
that I understand well, it's easy enough for me to have expectations about how
much to do, even (or perhaps especially) when I am dealing with a large,
multi-month effort where there is a lot of fluidity in hitting specific goals.

But how do I say "oh, I worked enough today" if I don't have an hourly
commitment? I agreed to a certain period of my time specifically because
sometimes I look up and have worked 8-10 hours.

I'm the only programmer on my team, by the way, so there aren't a lot of
metrics we can pull from about performance.

This is a real question I think about a lot, and I'd be happy for an answer:
how do you set a workload expectation with no reference to how much effort or
time I am expending when time estimation is difficult?

~~~
kcorbitt
Absolutely. I don't fully understand workplace cultures (including my own)
that claim to care more about "getting your work done" than "hours in a
chair." The problem is that output is in many cases a very crude measure of
effort. And not just because some people are vastly more productive than
others, but also because it's often the case that when reading a bug report,
you don't know if the fix will take 3 or 3000 lines of code until it's
actually done.

Of course, over time your output averages out, and if you work about as hard
as someone at about your skill level you'll have similar outcomes. This works
ok for yardsticking at engineer-heavy organizations. Doesn't solve the problem
for a solo developer like you though.

~~~
pkaye
Good points... It all depends on who sets the milestones for "getting the work
done".

If a sales guy commit more features to the customers than reasonable, do you
need to put in more hours to "getting the work done"? Does he need to stick
around late till your are done to penalize him also? If a sales guy doesn't
make a sale as aniticipated does he need to stick around until he makes a sale
and "gets his work done"?

------
fnordsensei
It doesn't seem like the best type of business to experiment on. It would make
more sense in a business where hours worked more obviously is not the same as
productivity.

When I read about this in The Guardian way back when, they mentioned three
other cases:

 _Brath_

For Maria Bråth, boss of internet startup Brath, the six-hour working day the
company introduced when it was formed three years ago gives it a competitive
advantage because it attracts better staff and keeps them. “They are the most
valuable thing we have,” she says – an offer of more pay elsewhere would not
make up for the shorter hours they have at Brath.

The company, which has 22 staff in offices in Stockholm and Örnsköldsvik,
produces as much, if not more, than its competitors do in eight-hour days, she
says. “It has a lot to do with the fact that we are very creative – we
couldn’t keep it up for eight hours.”

 _Toyota_

At Toyota service centres in Gothenburg, working hours have been shorter for
more than a decade. Employees moved to a six-hour day 13 years ago and have
never looked back. Customers were unhappy with long waiting times, while staff
were stressed and making mistakes, according to Martin Banck, the managing
director, whose idea it was to cut the time worked by his mechanics. From a
7am to 4pm working day the service centre switched to two six-hour shifts with
full pay, one starting at 6am and the other at noon, with fewer and shorter
breaks. There are 36 mechanics on the scheme.

“Staff feel better, there is low turnover and it is easier to recruit new
people,” Banck says. “They have a shorter travel time to work, there is more
efficient use of the machines and lower capital costs – everyone is happy.”
Profits have risen by 25%, he adds.

 _Filimundus_

Linus Feldt, boss of Stockholm app developer Filimundus, says the six-hour
working day his business began a year ago is about motivation and focus,
rather than staff simply cramming in the same amount of work they used to do
in eight hours.

“Today I believe that time is more valuable than money,” Feldt says. “And it
is a strong motivational factor to be able to go home two hours earlier. You
still want to do a good job and be productive during six hours, so I think you
focus more and are more efficient.”

Source: [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-
up-...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/efficiency-up-turnover-
down-sweden-experiments-with-six-hour-working-day)

------
trynewideas
In the Bloomberg story, but not in the Independent story:

"Still, the added hiring by the municipality has helped the coffers of the
national government by reducing unemployment costs by 4.7 million kronor
during the first 18 months of the trial due to new jobs, according to the
interim report."

------
loup-vaillant
Something in those numbers doesn't add up. I gather they maintained the
salaries. Good. They had to hire more people, at a cost of 12 million kronor.
This mechanically reduced unemployment, and saved the state 4.7 million
kronor. Shall I deduce the unemployed people were paid 40% less than the
salary they got? Something is wrong there: in France, unemployment insurance
maintains 75% of the base salary. Saving only 40% looks quite low.

I need a more detailed analysis. If generalised, this would significantly
reduce unemployment. We could thus lower the unemployment insurance rates.
I've seen predictions this basically balances out: we can sustain the current
effective salaries at no cost.

The way this is presented here, this theory appears to be false. Does it? I'm
sure we can draw a more definite answer, but this article is not enough.

~~~
Klockan
It could be their first job, they could have been long-term unemployed (you
don't get aids forever) or they could have had jobs with lower salaries
before.

~~~
lapinrigolo
So far we haven't been able to cure aids.

~~~
yazaddaruvala
I think the parent meant: "you don't receive aid, forever"

------
stinos
_the costs outweigh the benefits_

Well, if you put a low enough price on people's happiness, health, and quality
of work, then yes I guess.

Anyway: I hope the people involved in the pilot and happily doing 6 hours
shifts now, won't take it too hard if the pilot should be stopped and they're
back to 8 hour shifts.

~~~
giarc
The trial was for 68 employees and cost $1.7 million USD (they had to hire
additional staff). Imagine you took that $1.7m and spent it on those 68
employees. $25,000/employee would go a long way to increasing happiness with
perks etc.

~~~
rogerdpack
Yes I suppose the real question is would those employees "elect" for a 6 hour
day with a 25% pay cut, or not...that would give you something of a feeling
for whether the benefits out weight cost, as it were...

~~~
giarc
As mentioned elsewhere in this message, it depends on the job really. Nursing
staff in a nursing home might benefit more from shorter shifts. Someone that
is sitting at a desk taking phone calls or entering data might benefit from a
bit longer of a day.

I'm more in the latter camp and my colleagues and I have been talking about
doing 4x 9.5 hour days and just rotating who gets Friday's off vs the rest of
the week. I could easily come a bit earlier, leave a bit later and get tons of
benefits from 3 day weekends.

------
jahaja
The main reason this _very_ small scale experiment seems to be scrapped early
is not because of costs, but politics. Right-wing politicians have seemingly
wanted to end it as soon as possible for quite some time now - and obviously
voted against the proposal from the start as well. And at this time and age,
employee satisfaction and health benefits doesn't hold up against screams
about costs.

~~~
CaptSpify
Source on that?

~~~
jahaja
Only in Swedish unfortunately:
[http://www.gp.se/nyheter/g%C3%B6teborg/sextimmarsprojektet-s...](http://www.gp.se/nyheter/g%C3%B6teborg/sextimmarsprojektet-
skrotas-i-f%C3%B6rtid-1.5343)

It seems like the experiment was concluded as planned in the end but they
still tried to end it early.

------
qntty
I'd like to see more experiments with a 4-day/8-hour work week.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/396527/case-32-hour-...](https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/396527/case-32-hour-
workweek/)

~~~
cylinder
Agree. Six hours a day seems foolish. All that time getting ready for work,
commuting, etc only to spend six hours at work. I'm a much bigger believer in
just being closed on Fridays if possible

~~~
DCoder
Somewhat on topic: I work 4-days/10-hours: 2 morning hours from home, commute
to the office clears my head, 8 hours in the office, and Friday is free.

Pros:

\- three-day weekends all year long

\- 20% less commute time

\- magically enforces the "Read-only Friday" rule

\- if I have to handle an emergency on Friday, it means overtime pay

\- Friday is good for running errands

Cons:

\- clients/coworkers still work on Fridays, so I can't ignore my email
entirely

\- occasional meetings happen on Friday

This is probably not a good schedule for everyone, but I have been working it
for 2 years now and I like it a lot. Although none of my coworkers are
following this example...

------
fetbaffe
Problem for Göteborg is lack of money. Göteborgs economy is one of the worst
in Sweden, about 50 billion SEK in debt. City took money from other areas to
fund this pilot. This is always going to the problem in a well regulated
budget like for a city. Therefore they ended it.

These kind of nursing jobs in public sector is low wage and high work load, no
regulation on formal training, but usually some sort of grammar school
education. 97% who works with it are women.

What the public employer want to do here is to use the number of work hours,
instead of high salary, to attract young people. Thats the long term scheme.

Wages in public sector in Sweden is falling behind private sector more and
more. You can get more paid to clean someones apartment than a newly educated
registered nurse with proper training from a university gets when signing up
for work in the public sector.

Lots of young Swedes go to Norway and work there instead and get much better
pay.

------
jinfiesto
This was a bad industry in which to pilot this. There are obviously hard time
requirements in terms of when such a facility has to be staffed. Obviously,
cutting everone's hours means that other people will have to be hired to pick
up the slack. It's hard to believe that no one saw this coming. I'd be more
interested in seeing the impact of a 6-hour working day on a business that
doesn't function in this way.

------
falcolas
So, 1.5 million US dollars over two years (less, if you account for the saved
unemployment costs. ref. trynewideas comment), for happier employees and
better care. I personally have a hard time seeing this as any form of
indication that it's "spiraling out of control".

I agree with other commenters, this smells of politics more than economics.

~~~
giarc
$1.5 million for 68 employees at a nursing home.

I work in a healthcare system with 120,000 employees. Let's say we reduced
hours to 6. Using the Swedish numbers, that would cost our organization $2.6
billion dollars, or roughly 10% of annual budget.

~~~
falcolas
The costs are not trivial, I agree. But neither are the stated benefits. I
personally value those benefits, even at a 10% premium.

~~~
tdb7893
I personally would be willing to have a 10% pay cut to work only 6 hours a day

~~~
falcolas
Unfortunately, at least in the US, going down to 6 hours a day makes you a
part time employee, at which point you lose a lot more than even 25% of your
pay. Frequently benefits are pared down to the point of extinction, including
health, vacation and holidays.

~~~
tdb7893
what's stopping you from being a salaried employee that just happens to work
30 hours a week?

~~~
falcolas
Employer expectations of 40-50 hours of work a week, with corrective action as
the stick that enforces it.

~~~
tdb7893
Yeah, that's true. My point is that nothing is stopping companies from
offering 30 hour work weeks and also benefits.

------
alistairSH
I'm mostly amazed that their nurses are only working 8-hour shifts. In the US,
it's common to work 12-hour shifts (but only 3 days/week).

~~~
giarc
This was in a nursing home, so depending on the level of care, there might
only be 1 nurse on staff overnight. They could still be doing 8 hour shifts.

------
xolb
If this experiment shows that the costs are too high reducing working hours, I
wonder how UBI could be cost effective.

~~~
twblalock
UBI can't be cost-effective as a living wage. Living wage UBI would cost more
than the entire current US government budget.

Some UBI proposals aim to replace all of the current welfare systems with one
UBI system that costs the same. (That wouldn't be what happens, but let's
consider it for the sake of argument.) Those proposals have to limit UBI
benefits to an amount that is below a living wage in order to stay within the
budget of the current welfare system, assuming everyone receives the same
amount of money (that's the definition of UBI, and any system that gives
different amounts to different people is not universal or basic.)

Plus, the government's budget would have to shrink if tax receipts drop, which
they would clearly do if lots of people chose to live off UBI instead of
working. So even the non-living-wage UBI proposals are probably unrealistic.

UBI seems like a good idea at first, but it seems less attractive the more you
look at it.

------
wlll
My own really short story, I (sysadmin/ops/programmer) currently work remotely
about 4 hours per day, and I'm way more productive than when I worked 8.

~~~
guntars
Do you mind expanding on why that is? I hear this often and I'd like it to be
true, but I find it hard to believe.

~~~
wlll
I suspect it's a number of reasons.

\- I work to my own schedule. There's no artificial start time. If I feel like
I've got something to contribute at any point I sit down and do so. If I feel
inspired or get in the zone I'll do 6 or eight hours, if I don't I'll do none,
or just a couple of hours.

\- Conversely, if I don't feel up to it, uninspired, tired, whatever, I can
stop. Taking a break/nap and coming back to something is incredibly valuable.

\- I'm so much less stressed than when I was working an 8 hour job. Way more
relaxed, so my mental state overall is way better.

\- If I sit down and program/operate for 4 hours I spend the rest of the day
effectively letting my brain churn on problems. I'm still thinking about the
problems that I am working on, I have way more "shower moments".

6 months ago I worked an 8 hour per day job (from home still) and my own
personal observation is that I'm way more effective in 4 hours now than I was
in 8 at my old job. I _feel_ productive.

This might not work for other people obviously, maybe I just need/like a
larger proportion of my time to be thinking time over implementation time.

~~~
guntars
I agree, working 4 hours a day will feel more effective than the last 4 hours
of an 8 hour day, but the question is whether it's actually twice as
effective. And perhaps it's so for very high level tasks, but I'm pretty sure
for some things you just need to clock in the hours, like closing 100 tiny
bugs because you're launching in a few days.

~~~
wlll
I agree, though a lot of the time what I need to do requires just thinking
about stuff, sometimes I need to plough on and just _do_ stuff. 6 hours of
coding something, writing, whatever. When that happens I just do the work.

I'm lucky in that I can work the hours I need to work. Last week I did days
that lasted 4, 6, 1.25, 1.75 and 4 hours (the 1.x days I had other stuff on).

------
Vaebn
To be honest I think thats not a nearly throughout economic analysis.

To begin with, as noted in the article by having to pay more people, it
removed some from unemployment. That as noted in the article basically halved
the cost of the extra cost.

But hold on. Someone removed from unemployment doesn't just sit and look
pretty. Unemployment benefits are usually nothing to write home about compared
to an actual wage and where previously one could just subsist they newly
employed individual could now Consume much more strongly. Consume in this case
means buying tomatoes, buying starbucks, buying cinemas tickets, buying
dresses and whatever. All this stuff moves the economy.

The question is then, has the economic impact of all this economy moving been
taken into account?

------
BurningFrog
Note that "Sweden" did not conduct any 6 hour day experiment.

This was done in one municipal workplace with a few dozen employees.

[http://www.snopes.com/sweden-6-hour-
workday/](http://www.snopes.com/sweden-6-hour-workday/)

------
dang
Url changed from [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/sweden-
six-h...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/sweden-six-hour-
working-day-too-expensive-scrapped-experiment-cothenburg-pilot-
scheme-a7508581.html), which points to this.

Submitters: please don't submit an article that's clearly lifted from another
publicly available source. Submit the latter instead. This is in the site
guidelines:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html).

------
baldfat
What a waste of a study. If they the end result is that they didn't realize
the cost up front. I think this is just a poorly written click bait title.

100% they knew the cost. The outcome was :

>The take away was largely positive, with nurses at the home feeling
healthier, which reduced sick-leave, and patient care improving.

While we are headed to super automation and the reduction of workforce (And a
stagnant or growing GDP) it is either free money for the non-workers or
reduced work hours. It's Jetson's again.

------
acd
If you did the study in the IT-industry. What would the result be if you would
measure code commits and code quality for a large sample of programmers with
[4,6,8] working hours?

~~~
jmcomets
In general it's difficult to measure the productivity of developers, since the
a single commit can mean years of maintenance. Measuring the code quality is
equally hard: linting and code conventions will only get you so far, designs
need to be reviewed by humans.

In short: [http://nesma.org/2015/01/programmer-productivity-is-waste-
of...](http://nesma.org/2015/01/programmer-productivity-is-waste-of-time)

------
kuprel
Maybe instead of automation taking away jobs, people will end up working less
hours. This was a reduction of hours without automation, so 17 nurses had to
be hired

~~~
anoplus
You absolutely nailed it.

------
alexellisuk
This felt like click bait, it's about a Swedish nursing home - I was assuming
this was related to office / tech work as it was high up on HN. It does sound
ridiculous that reducing hours mean hiring 17 other staff - I've heard of tech
companies being able to handle a few less hours per working week and
benefiting from it.

------
basicplus2
Everyone in the job market needs be on such a roster or it won't work, thus it
is not a failure in itself.

If every business was required by law to have a tea lady (or man) per every 50
employees it would not make any business uncompetitive, and would be
sustainable, and it would reduce unemployment, and I'd get a cuppa.

------
CodeSheikh
I would take a 10 hours day, 4 work days and a three days long weekend over a
6 hours workday routine.

Edit 1: 9-6 is 9 hours -_-

~~~
pessimizer
Would you take it if the 10 hour day was 8am-7pm with an unpaid hour for
lunch, and the 6 hour day was 9am-4pm (with something approaching a 25% pay
reduction.)

9-6 is 8 hours + lunch, aka a standard work day.

~~~
CodeSheikh
We do 9-5 or 8-4 and everyone "kind of" take lunch during those 8 hours and
managers don't throw a fit about it. Unlike my last employer, where managers
were sticklers about covering lunch hour or favored eat your lunch at desk
kinda deal. I would be totally fine with a 8am-7pm -- disciplined 10 hours
day. I don't have a family, but i can see people appreciating and spending a
three day weekend with their kids. Also for young people, this can take the
concept of "seekender" to more literal levels.

------
saverio-murgia
Here on HN I always read people saying that you are more productive working 5
to 6 hours a day instead of 8. According to the people claiming that, the
people who got a 25% cut in working hours should have performed better thus
accomplishing the same amount of work. That obviously did not happen.

~~~
herrkanin
I think it's different with physically intensive jobs, such as nurses in the
trial, and mentally intensive jobs, such as programming etc. The latter may
very well end up being equally or more productive, while physically intensive
jobs probably would end up with reduced productivity.

------
vesinisa
I am under the impression that 6-hour days are widely adopted in France.
Anyone know more of it?

~~~
donmatito
This is completely false. French workers (at mid-management level and above -
not hourly workers) work long hours. Longer than German and Nordic countries,
for example, where leaving at 5pm is the norm and leaving later is more a sign
of poor work planning than of dedication.

I think workday hours are similar to American employees, but work less in the
weekends and have more vacations.

~~~
dijit
This is not my experience. I work for a French multinational games company and
I'm situated in Sweden.

It's astonishingly common for my French counterparts to "arrive" at there
computer at 10:30 each day and head out the door shortly before 17:00. Not to
mention the 1.5hour or so lunch they tend to take.

This is a sample of maybe 20 people, and maybe it's a culture of the company
more than the country, but I've noticed they like to shake hands with
everybody on the floor before starting their day, and they also like to take a
coffee first and have a chat. For me though, I operate "remote" and when they
are not available on Lync/Skype then they may as well be not working because
they're.. not.. working.

it is a stark contrast to my team who are jacked in before 9, and save for a
few hourly strolls to the canteen and lunchtime do not leave until 18:00.
(unless something breaks then we stay, which is common in crunch times.)

~~~
gambiting
I think I work for the same French multinational games company ;-)

I do work with people from both our Swedish and French studios and I can
definitely confirm what you said, both ways.

------
christofosho
I'm wondering why they didn't begin with 7 hours, if it should have been
expected that more money would have been spent. I feel the world is so wrapped
in money that we are stuck choosing money over wellbeing...

~~~
clay_to_n
Probably so the shifts could be organized better. If the nursing home runs 24
hours, it's easier to move from 8 hour shifts to 6 than to find a way for some
people to be on 7 hour shifts.

------
rocky1138
The article is light on details. What "costs" are they talking about?

~~~
tunnuz
They needed to employ 17 extra people on top of the 68 employees taking part
in the pilot, in order to guarantee the level of service. Which to me is a win
(17 people got a job) but it is clearly a cost increase that the employer was
not ready to accept.

------
tu7001
I think it's not a good business example to test cutting hours. Taking care of
somebody 6 hours instead of 8 leaves a 2 hours shortage, which therefore must
be covered.

------
maceo
The headline reads: "the costs outweigh the benefits."

Except there's no mention of the greatest benefit: improved quality of life
for all participants.

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douche
I still miss the days when I was working in a power plant and worked a 40-hour
week, over four days. Especially since the schedule was arranged so that the
off-days were staggered to produce a four-day weekend every other week.

The only downside was, ironically, on holiday weeks, because the holiday pay
was only 8 hours, which resulted in still having to work four shorter days,
and often screwing up a long-weekend cycle.

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mikaeluman
Wow. The sad state of journalism... and of critique from readers at this site.

Obviously bumping salaries by 1/4 is not reasonable.

In order for costs not to outweigh benefits that clinic would need to be some
kind of utopia...

