
Shorten the Workweek to Reopen Safely - jasunflower
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/safely-reopen-make-workweek-shorter/610906/
======
aphextron
We just need to make the office an optional place that people can gather when
they feel the need to. I have no problem at all working a 5 day 40 hours work
week from home. But this nonsense of everyone waking up at the same time,
sitting in traffic, and cramming into "open plan" work spaces has to go.

~~~
eweise
Sorry it won't happen. An office packed with humans is all about stroking the
CEOs ego. Its just not the same seeing your servants on a screen vs packed
together doing the boss's bidding.

~~~
abyssin
I disagree. Although offices can have their downsides, I personally can't work
remotely because I find it so cold and boring.

~~~
Jaruzel
It's all about _choice_. Employees should be able to work in the environment
that is best for their well-being. Happier employees tends to result in
increased productivity.

~~~
esyir
It's also about productivity. If the employee functions significantly worse in
a remote position, then extending that to them is going to be often a poor
decision.

~~~
JackMorgan
I feel like I'm struggling with this now: I have fought for a long time to get
my team to be fully remote. After a year of partial WFH, now we're doing it
full time. However, several people on my team seem completely incapable of
self-regulation unless someone is making them show up. They're up at 3am
working, but clearly only getting done >5% of what they'd otherwise do. A few
others are getting done at least 120% more. Seems like different strokes for
different folks is the name of the game, and some people for whatever reason
just aren't in a place in their lives where they are responsible enough to
handle the greater freedom of remote work.

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tgsovlerkhgsel
For those living (and planning to stay) in areas with high wage standards
(like most of the Western world!), keep in mind that remote work also opens
your job to competition from much cheaper places.

Great for the people in those places, but your happiness to be able to skip
the commute may quickly turn into a lot of unhappiness because you can't make
a living wage anymore.

~~~
JSavageOne
That's why we need something like a universal basic income to alleviate
peoples' dependence on a job or wage. Outsourcing has already eliminated many
peoples' jobs, that's a big reason why Trump and his anti-immigrant rhetoric
got elected.

~~~
enitihas
Universal basic income will make the issue the parent talks about more
prominent, not less. If you live in a high wage area, and everyone gets same
UBI, your life quality will not improve.

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forgot_my_pwd
How many of us don't want to commute to the office 5 days a week, but also
don't necessarily like the idea of working from home when not at the office?

My personal ideal is a dedicated office space in a location very close to my
home, like in the nearest downtown, where I would pay a certain amount per
month in return for a set of days on which I could reserve personal office
space.

The issue with working from home for me is that I feel my personal life and
work life become messy and entangled if I do too much work at home. Similar to
how good sleep hygiene involves doing as few activities other than sleeping on
your bed as possible, I feel for my mental wellbeing it's better to physically
separate my work life and home life as much as possible.

~~~
adrianN
If your work location is farther away than the nearest downtown you should
look for either a new job or a new place to live imho. Commuting more than an
hour a day is awful.

~~~
forgot_my_pwd
I live in a great town that's about an hour commute from the big city where I
work. I would never make as much money as I do now (or find as engaging work)
if I looked outside the city. I also have no interest in moving.

Granted I don't hate commuting. Since I take the bus I get a significant
amount of reading done.

------
ars
Offices are hardly the problem areas to reopen - most of them can go remote.

It's the places that can't go remote that is the problem, and those are
exactly the places where they need to be open many hours, in order for
customers to be able to come.

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throwaway122378
The article has no research or statistics that try to prove why or how this
would work and what the marginal difference is over a full workweek.

~~~
jasunflower
True. Apparently the author wrote a book about the topic, presumably that has
some good citations, but one can only guess.

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pythonbase
Applying the concept of hot racking on the offices sounds like a good way of
embracing the "new normal"

[https://twitter.com/kashaziz/status/1257012120090292226](https://twitter.com/kashaziz/status/1257012120090292226)

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daxfohl
Anybody else feeling like if we're young and healthy we should actively try to
contract this thing, self-isolate for a few weeks, and be done with it?

It feels almost like this would be the most socially responsible thing to do:
reduce the effective R0 and allow things to start getting back to normality.

I'm the farthest thing from a "reopen" protester. But I can't help thinking
that as a young and healthy individual, this is a valid option that nobody is
talking about.

~~~
SeeTheTruth
NO. You risk spreading it, young and healthy people are still dying or having
severe outcomes - we still don't know enough to predict how it will go.

And we still don't know if catching one strain once confers immunity, or for
how long. So you won't be "done with it".

If you do get sick you become a burden on an overloaded healthcare system.

The people talking about this option are rightly being shut down.

~~~
twunde
To reiterate NO! Something that's not talked about enough is that the
coronavirus is causing neurological issues[1]. The full effects aren't known,
but examples of neurological diseases are MS, Parkinson's and cerebral palsy.
That's not something to want to voluntarily get. oh, and that's not to mention
that you're likely to get lung scarring or have a long-term cough[2]. The
survivors will have major long-term complications.

[1]
[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/2764549)
[2] [https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-
covid-19-som...](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-
covid-19-some-patients-may-suffer-lasting-lung-damage)

~~~
daxfohl
But what is the plan? We can't sit around for five years until there is a
vaccine. By then we'll all have caught it anyway. Nevermind that food supply
chain will have dried up way before then and nobody will have a job anymore.
Even with my posh job at a big cloud provider, I can't imagine the public
still caring about any new feature dev if this goes on more than a year, so
bye bye "recession proof" job. I can't imagine many other jobs surviving much
more than that. That is as much of a non plan as an unmitigated reopen.

I just don't think that works. I think we're going to have to end up making
some hard choices about acceptable risk, and how we can use that to get to a
better outcome.

~~~
icelancer
>> But what is the plan?

There isn't one. Government has done little to nothing with the time they
bought with our sacrifices. Mostly this is due to the fact there isn't a lot
TO do - getting the hundreds of millions of tests that people want so some
large percentage of the country can be tested daily is impossible anytime soon
due to raw materials/resources.

Governments release plans to reopen that don't feature a single metric that
holds them accountable, much less anything resembling open source / open data
that drives their decisions. They bastardize the word "science" as something
they are theoretically being guided by. The first tenets of science are
transparency, open data, and falsifiability. No plan put forth by a state fits
these criteria.

Anyone who points this out on Hacker News is downvoted massively, as you are
undoubtedly noticing. As someone on Twitter very aptly put it, the
Slack/Zoom/WFH class is more than happy to act sanctimonious about the whole
thing while unemployment marches on to 20%.

EDIT:

>> making some hard choices about acceptable risk

People are bad at evaluating risk. Think about all the "Project Zero" slogans
out there - no deaths from not wearing a seatbelt, no cancer deaths, no XYZ,
no accepting risk of contracting COVID-19 until we get a perfect vaccine, etc.
All completely unattainable. But if you point that out or try to have a
conversation about it, someone swings down from the top rope with a story
about how their grandma died of COVID-19 or that one young person somewhere
died of it or had permanent scarring of their lungs (nevermind the statistics
showing median age of death from COVID-19 being extremely high and the
reproducibility of the lung damage being quite poor) and then you get
massively booed and sometimes doxxed/reported to your employer.

It's politically untenable to talk about risk, hence a bunch of halfcocked
"plans" of locking everyone in their houses to hide from the virus. We went
from "don't overwhelm hospitals" to justifying layoffs/furloughs in hospitals
nationwide by saying "oh you want to reopen? well volunteer your grandma to
get it first" pretty quickly.

If people were good about evaluating risk, we wouldn't have the lottery fund
education, for example.

~~~
daxfohl
We're fucked aren't we.

I'd never thought it all the way through until last night. But I don't see how
we make it though this without something on par with the Great Depression.

Right now Microsoft and Amazon have this little bump due to WFH and
stockpiling, giving tech workers reason for hope, but that'll start fading
soon and they'll go down with everyone else.

It's the whole boiling frog parable really, isn't it.

    
    
        * Some virus in China: no big deal it's China.
        * Some virus here: no big deal it'll blow over.
        * Lots of virus here: no big deal we'll WFH for a while.
        * "A while" is up and more virus: no big deal we'll keep WFH.
        * Unemployment is 6M/wk: no big deal look at AMZN/MSFT.
        * Pork processing plant shuts down: no big deal there's other food.
          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
          ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
          This should scare the shit out of everyone still living.
    

Why do we think that in two years, we'll still have enough of a supply chain
that vaccine development can continue unimpeded?

People talk about a V-shaped recovery, but I think we're very close to the
tipping point. This depends on the existence of expendable pocket money for
the public, an existing supply chain, and stable cash flow. All of this will
be gone in about two months. If we're stuck with this for two _years_? There
will be no product to buy, nobody to buy it, and no infrastructure to build
it. Home values will drop, people will default, and the whole country from NY
to SF to Dubuque will look like Detroit of 2008 or worse, cities and suburbs
alike, but there won't be a "not-Detroit" of investors to come and fix things
this time. Most of us who are young, intelligent tech workers living through a
13-year boom cycle have a hard time understanding this.

Not looking forward to this. The lone bright spot, China (assuming they're
able to keep things in check) starts hiring the brightest from around the
world, and that's how this empire ends.

~~~
icelancer
The main difference here is that the Fed is refusing to fail. They have
acquired more assets in 45 days than they did for the entirety of any single
QE period. With nominal rates in the gutter and the appetite for US debt still
high, the Fed will print, and print, and print. Asset class will get bailed
out regularly.

People think this has a major negative impact on the national debt, and while
it's somewhat concerning, it's really not that much of an issue as long as
people want our debt that we denominate in our own currency.

The problem is that populism will continue grow unchecked as the asset classes
are bailed out and their assets are propped up and backstopped by the Fed,
while the common man gets a smaller and smaller share of the bailout funds.
Politicians will quite rightly point this out and will use it as a lever in
their campaigns. If it all sounds familiar... well, the man currently in
office is an expert at that angle.

That doesn't mean we aren't fucked. I am merely saying that it's pretty
unclear what the future holds, as evidenced by the stock market's precarious
position.

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acd
Social distancing to stop the spread binary version:

Loop: 1) Work monday-friday 6 hours practise strict social distancing. Work
remote if you can. 2) Weekend rest from social distancing see friends.

Its like a binary four square wave with on / off.

Reason: If we practice good social distancing the spread time of the Covid is
five days.

~~~
jobigoud
So you are assuming people may get infected during the week end and won't be
infectious the next week end?

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GuB-42
Ok, good point, there is just one small detail: the "without cutting salaries"
part.

Employees will love it, that's for sure, but I don't think employers will get
even. You are basically giving your employees a 25% raise on their hourly
wage.

There are success stories of companies that pay their employees above market
value, either by paying them the same amount for less work, paying them more,
or giving them particularly good perks. It is the idea of quality over
quantity: by giving out preferential treatment, you get the best employees,
and keep them motivated, and their increased productivity will make up for the
higher cost. But there are success stories going the other way too: cheap,
borderline slave labor and a high turnover. Sometime a high volume of low
quality work is effective.

But in most cases, the usual market value is what works best, that's why it is
the market value.

I am not saying that working less is bad, but it is a bit unfair to have the
employer shoulder all the costs. Maybe make it half/half: 10% less pay for 20%
less work.

~~~
jasunflower
Measures like this could be packaged into preventative medical care, keeping
employees healthy at the office keeps them out of the hospital.

------
djhaskin987
If everyone started working fewer hours for the same pay you would be
effectively devaluing the dollar. You wouldn't actually be adding more value
to the economy.

Value in the economy is created by work and there is simply no substitute for
that. Shortening the work week would simply make less value in the economy,
making us all poorer and more idle.

Too much idleness I can tell you leads to stress, even more stress than too
much work. 40 hours is not too much work.

To solve the problem in the article one could still cut the workforce by half
that was present in the office simply by adding more work-from-home time for
the workers which I find to be healthy my own experience anyway. our office is
made similar overtures, saying when we go back to work lots of us. Be working
from home as a way to tackle a space issue.

~~~
nullc
You are making an unsound assumption that longer hours mean more economic
output.

In some kinds of jobs this may be true, but in others-- especially ones with
substantial intellectual or creative components-- it isn't.

In some cases studies have showed _increased_ output from reduced working
hours.

