
The Thirty-Hour Week (1936) - perfunctory
https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1936011700
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sunshinelackof
I won't speak for other countries, but in The US leisure and general
livability are commodities now, not a part of life. The talk about shorter
work weeks feel to me like they're rooted in growing fears that these
commodities are pricing out many in the "professionals class." This isn't
meant with snark, but it's an uncomfortable conversation for everyone. As we
stand today there are plenty of people, fully employed, who don't even have a
savings let alone time for leisure. I don't think we working professionals
will ever see anything meaningful change in working time until we can have the
larger conversation about why we work, why we value it, and who should benefit
from it.

~~~
kaffeeringe
Nothing will simply come. It will come, when you try and get it. Are you in a
union?

~~~
himeexcelanta
I’d offer a (friendly) counter point. Trusting in the benevolence of a union
is very similar to trusting in the benevolence of your employer to watch your
back. Both employers and unions ultimately devolve into parochialism. Both
ultimately are interested in preserving their existing power structures and
NOT in helping the worker. I’d say that the best way to “try and get it” is to
make your skills valuable enough where you have more work offered than you you
have time for in the day. At that point, raise prices!

~~~
toomuchtodo
"The floggings will continue until morale improves."

Unions brought us the weekend and labor rights. Rugged individualism and
hustle did not.

~~~
souprock
Religion brought us the weekend, and ordinary politics ("vote for me
because...") brought us labor rights. Unions brought us dues and a bunch of
people standing around waiting for an electrician to plug in a power cord.

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nbrempel
I love that this topic has been getting attention lately. I’m a huge proponent
of the 30 hour week/4 day week.

I’ve been working on a job board just for this:
[https://jobs.30hourjobs.com](https://jobs.30hourjobs.com)

Please let me know what you think!

~~~
souprock
I have verified that yes, 30 hours is acceptable where I work. It's been done,
along with 32, and possibly shorter. Most of the benefits are pro-rated, but
we'd still cover the health insurance fully. You could still work more and get
paid for those extra hours, but the benefits would be according to how many
hours you signed up to work.

Examples: If you sign up for 30 hours but work 50 hours, you get 75% benefits
and 125% pay. If you sign up for 32 hours but work 38 hours, you get 80%
benefits and 95% pay.

The job post in the "Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2019)" item today:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20088647](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20088647)

~~~
nbrempel
Hey souprock, thanks for sharing!

Please do post that job on the above linked job board (it's free)! It should
get you at least a few good eyeballs and the community of people who care
about the thirty hour week will appreciate it as well.

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Circuits
Honestly... my company is wasting a lot of money renting out this building for
our offices. We could all EASILY be working from home and while I can't say
for certain I am fairly confident all of us could get the same amount of work
done in half the time. I get 90% of my work done before lunch and the other
10% done the first hour after getting back from lunch...

Personally, if they allowed me to work from home, I believe I would get a heck
of a lot more done. Currently I know I have to work roughly 40 hours then as
soon as the day is over I forget about work. However, if I was simply expected
to get the same work done regardless of my hours I would work a few hours
every weekend. I would stay up late when a problem interests me... concepts
like this seem to evade employers. If I wasn't more productive (pretty sure I
would be) I would at least be just as productive and a heck of a lot more
comfortable in life.

~~~
dcolkitt
> Personally, if they allowed me to work from home, I would get a heck of a
> lot more done.

I pretty much felt the way you did, until I had kids. Now the problem if I
work at home is a toddler who constantly visits the home office with the goal
in mind of sitting on dad's lap and watching Peppa Pig on his computer.

I know also a lot of people also psychologically feel more motivated and
disciplined having a separate place for work outside the home. (Just look at
how many college kids go to the library to study.)

So, I think even in the fully remote world, you'd still have to have an office
like solution for a not insignificant percentage of workers.

~~~
kirrent
You're absolutely right about needing an office like solution for a lot of
people, but that doesn't necessarily mean your organisation's office. Co-
working spaces allow you to have an office closer to you, often allow fairly
flexible pricing based on your specific needs, and you have choice on which
office environment you want. I only hope that it becomes more normal for
companies to shrink their central offices and subsidise remote employees using
those spaces instead.

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zw123456
Where I work I get 6 weeks of vacation and 10 floating holidays. It's actually
pretty difficult to use up that much vacation if you try to take it in big
chunks, and I am sort of averse to travel (because a former job I had required
so much that now I am sick of it even for personal "fun"). So now I take
almost every Friday off or Monday. If you work it out with holidays you
basically work 4 days a week. Since I have been doing this for several years
now I have found that I am actually a lot more productive than when I work 5
days a week and take several weeks in a row off. For me, the 4 day work week
makes me happier and I get more done.

~~~
YUMad
Why did you go with Mon/Fri instead of Wednesday?

~~~
hnzix
Everyone goes on about Wednesdays but I honestly find Monday the absolute best
day to take off. If you are working on personal projects, it gives you three
full days to spin up to top speed.

Fridays just feel like the weekend started a bit early (due to the rhythm of
office life I think), and Wednesdays doesn't give you the same runway for
personal projects.

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RaceWon
A lifetime ago (1978) when I got into the Plumbers Union, (as I was teaching
myself to be a racer, and future world champion; before I realized I could not
learn a new racetrack, and get into a rhythm in 8 laps like say a Senna could
--which really was why I walked away from that), we worked 35 Hour weeks.
8am-3:30pm: Plus we had two breaks; morning coffee and a soda at 2pm, and we
also usually took 45 minutes for lunch, instead of the unpaid 30 minutes the
contract stipulated.

Oh and the Electricians--shit they really lived large: they would barbeque
every Friday... and Inside the building in the winter. They could give a fuck
less if the job super didn't want then too.

The work got done, and I have to tell you there was no substitute for Union
Trades; the apprenticeship programs were second to none and guys gave a shit
about the product they produced.

~~~
westmeal
I don't think anybody can drive like Senna could. Do you still race from time
to time?

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Animats
We just need to get back down to the 40 hour week. With time and a half for
overtime.

~~~
harlanji
My angle is that software developers do not meet the requirements for exempt
workers in spirit; namely, creative and self-directed solutions (perhaps
distinct from software engineers). Work for a new/rebooted development org
could be structured this way. It’d probably look like a deplorable plan on
paper to money people.

~~~
YjSe2GMQ
I'm confused. I simply don't work over 40 hours a week (average), don't want
to lower my per-hour salary. Increased compensation for overtime would be the
only thing to make me work over 40 hours, I think that's fair. Genuine
question: why can't you go home early?

~~~
Tcepsa
Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer; everything in this comment is my opinion and/or
based on things that I have found on the internet or vaguely remembered from
legal notices posted around my workplace. EDIT: Also this is only about things
in the USA--I do not know how it works elsewhere.

Short answer: You can't go home early because if you don't put in the time
your employer requires of you they can fire you!

Longer answer: The 40 hour work week is set forth in the Fair Labor Standards
Act (FLSA). All that the FLSA says is that depending on what kind of work you
do, your employer may or may not be required to compensate you for overtime.
_Your employer is allowed to set your work hour requirements_ , but if you are
considered "non-exempt" from the FLSA, then if you work more than 40 hours
your employer is required to provide time-and-a-half compensation for the
extra hours worked. Many positions in tech are, I think, generally "exempt"
from the FLSA's overtime rule (software dev types, at least--I'm less sure
about ops/IT services folks) and therefore _employers are not required by law
to compensate software developers for overtime_.

The FLSA does not address whether or not an employer _can_ require you to work
more or less or exactly 40 hours per week; it's all about what obligations
they take on if you are non-exempt and they _do_ require you to work more than
40 hours per week.

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sgt101
In the context of sharing jobs in the great depression.

There was a shanty town in central park.

Bit like now, in SF?

~~~
bdcravens
To be fair, even though HN would have you believe SF is the center of the
universe, it's an edge case, in many ways. The Great Depression had a far
greater impact than just NYC.

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warp_factor
My theory is that 90% of people don't do more than 20 hours worth of work per
week anyways. We just all got used to be very inefficient at what we do.

~~~
lawn
I have recently gone down to work 60%.

Yet my output isn't very different from what I used to produce, so your theory
seems to match my experience.

~~~
marvin
How did you manage this? I currently work 80%, but I don't see a super-viable
pathway to go down to 60%. You work three days a week or what? (Mostly four
days a week in my case, with some additional days taken as holiday).

~~~
lawn
I work 5 hours per day, with 4 hours on Fridays. We did it so I can work on a
side-project (writing a book) and so our boy don't have too long days at
kindergarten.

We do live in a small village where our cost of living is quite low. I also
work remotely and keep a fairly good salary comparatively, so it all works out
well.

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maerF0x0
30 hrs a week was a way to deal with mass unemployment, which the US is not
currently facing.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130327020843/http://eh.net/enc...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130327020843/http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us)

~~~
tty2300
Only if you get less done. I feel that for a lot of jobs we could work 30
hours and get no less done.

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desireco42
I think this, with ability to not commute to work would be ideal work time for
knowledge workers.

------
bdcravens
What % of the US work force owned personal transportation in 1936?

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I'm a bit confused - are you saying the debt load has increased because of
that transportation? Because I'll be honest with you, next to my mortgage I
don't even think about my 10 year old, completely paid off, car.

~~~
bdcravens
Not addressing debt. Addressing the fact that the work day is far longer when
it takes longer to get to work, so a six hour workday comparison from 1936
isn't an apples-to-apples comparison.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
Are you talking rural or urban environments? By that point in time the
streetcar was popular, and public transportation was plentiful. You used to
live near to where you worked - cars enabled us to not live close. I can't
find any actual statistics, but given the awareness of our commuting times, I
think commutes have gotten worse.

~~~
bunderbunder
Back before cars, when, if you didn't live in a very dense metropolis, your
commute to work was almost certainly done using an open-air conveyance such as
horses or feet or donkey carts?

Yeah, I can't imagine many people would choose a 45 minute each way commute.
Not unless they lived in some magical place where temperatures never drop
below 15 degrees and rain only falls on weekends.

~~~
vageli
> Back before cars, when, if you didn't live in a very dense metropolis, your
> commute to work was almost certainly done using an open-air conveyance such
> as horses or feet or donkey carts?

> Yeah, I can't imagine many people would choose a 45 minute each way commute.
> Not unless they lived in some magical place where temperatures never drop
> below 15 degrees and rain only falls on weekends.

How many people actively choose their commutes today? I know many people who
had moved somewhere for a job, bought a house with their spouse, and
subsequently changed jobs. Once you start adding things that can tie you to a
place (high-school age children, elderly parents to care for, mortgage, etc)
it becomes harder to uproot yourself for the sake of one's commute.

~~~
dahfizz
It's easy to forget how much of an echo chamber HN can be. It seems like
everyone here is a single, young, successful city dweller. It's easy to let
that totally skew your world view if you don't pay attention to it.

