
Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday? - ca98am79
http://www.vice.com/read/who-stole-the-four-hour-workday-0000406-v21n8
======
spindritf
People who don't work at all. That's the choice (maybe more like outcome) the
society went with. For what might the first time in history, the rich are
working more than the poor[1] and labour participation rates are dropping[2].

In many ways this is a superior alternative. Children don't work. They used
to. People spend a lot more time in school at the beginning of their life when
it has the potential to have the biggest impact. It's not all bad. Although
not quite living up to the dreams from 20th century either.

There's also something to be said about positional goods. A lot of people are
driven by status and they work to be ahead of others. Elizabeth Warren
believes that this explains why, despite technological progress, regular
middle class family needs two incomes where one was enough a couple decades
ago[3], they're competing for the same house, or school district. It doesn't
explain everything but it's a factor.

[1] [http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/21600989...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/21600989-why-rich-now-have-less-leisure-poor-nice-work-if-you-can-
get-out)

[2] [http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/08/18/equitable-growth-
make-...](http://equitablegrowth.org/2014/08/18/equitable-growth-make-
confused-cyclical-recovery-monday-focus-august-18-2014/)

[3] [http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-
Paren...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-
Parents/dp/0465090907)

~~~
cousin_it
I think competition is the main villain here. Zero-sum games, prisoner's
dilemmas, arms races and tragedies of the commons stole the four-hour workday
from us, and many other good things besides. A nice toy example is "20% time"
at companies like Google, which tends to evaporate as soon as your performance
evaluation compared to your peers becomes tied to your performance at your
main project.

The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First,
the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it should
reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get ahead by
cheating. I don't see any other solution.

~~~
privong
> The only solution to competition is centrally enforced precommitment. First,
> the government should actually enforce the eight-hour workday. Then it
> should reduce the workday, for all employers at once, so no one can get
> ahead by cheating. I don't see any other solution.

This would not really be a solution. All it would result in is more people
taking work home, because job evaluations would still be based on how much
progress one made on the primary project. To get ahead and get that next
promotion, many people would still feel compelled to work extra (unreported)
hours. I suspect a madate such as what you propose would simply push the long
work-days into being unreported.

This is basically what happens in graduate school (in the US, at least). I
just finished a PhD program; as part of our contrats students agreed to only
work 20 hours per week. There is no way one could finish a dissertation
working on 20 hours per week, so everyone worked longer hours. Sure, you could
complain about how many hours you worked (and some people did), but that did
not change the fact that only 10–20% of Astronomy PhDs get faculty jobs, so if
you want that faculty job, you need to put in the hours to do great research,
regardless of the mandated 20 hour limit.

~~~
bmj
Do you think there /is/ a solution to the problem? Or is this just one of the
side effects of capitalism?

I'm not trolling here...just curious. My own mind tends to go in the direction
of the parent, but, I also see how enforcement would be next to impossible.

~~~
avz
I think you're trying to solve a wrong problem. Work isn't a problem. Work is
what propelled humanity to explore, understand and conquer the world around
us. Human work is a requirement for the development of medicine, greener
technologies, safer transportation and even space exploration and
colonization.

If there are any problems about work, they are about making it more enjoyable,
making good work more widely accessible and distributing the proceeds fairly.

~~~
waps
That is the exact problem with the 4 hour workday and other forms of part-time
work. As I've heard many people describe part-time work : 40% of the pay for
80% of the work.

Until that changes, I would not expect part-time work to happen for anyone but
really high up managers where such a trade may actually make sense.

------
FD3SA
Capitalism`s greatest strength is also its greatest weakness. The profit
motive is so strong that it often ends up creating irrational scenarios such
as the economic situation we have today.

European countries seem to have struck a far better balance by harnessing the
profit motive of capitalism while preventing disasters such as for-profit
healthcare, for-profit education, for-profit government policies (for the
rich), for-profit prisons, etc.

It is fascinating how powerful cultural and institutional momentum can be. I
regularly run into very intelligent and rational Americans (particularly on
HN!) who defend American institutions (e.g. healthcare) in spite of all the
widespread data about them being massively inefficient.

In the end, we reap what we sow. The profit motive brings great riches, but to
a tiny few. The rest, sadly, often become the servants who enable the
lifestyles of these outliers. Conversely, the outliers become the American
Dream, seducing the average worker ever onwards with promises of riches and
comfort just a few lucky breaks away.

~~~
wyager
Please explain how for-profit education is a disaster. By all measures,
private schools in the US are superior to public schools, and the US's private
universities are consistently rated best in the world.

You also can't generalize about e.g. for-profit healthcare based on the
American situation, because the regulatory environment is so extreme as to
have to created a government-controlled crony-capitalistic oligopoly. The for-
profit healthcare in less regulated countries like Mexico is inexpensive and
amazing.

~~~
adventured
I can only assume the parent is blaming the spiraling cost of education on
Capitalism, when in fact it's the perpetually increasing federal loan
guarantees spurring massive inflation that is the root of the cause.

The spiral in healthcare was also caused by the government taking over the
industry in the late 1960s. No coincidence both industries began to skyrocket
in cost at exactly the same time, shortly after Nixon ended the gold standard,
and the Fed acquired free reign to generate immense inflation and aggressively
tamper with interest rates (spurring the cheap consumer debt boom of the past
40 years).

Everyone recognizes that healthcare and education became very expensive
recently. Nobody seems to ask what changed in the last few decades to cause
that. They act like Capitalism didn't exist in 1960.

~~~
was_hellbanned
_The spiral in healthcare was also caused by the government taking over the
industry in the late 1960s._

I'm guessing that you're referring to the introduction of Medicare and
Medicaid in 1965, which is hardly "taking over the industry".

------
programminggeek
Poor negotiation and group think stole the 4 hour workday.

I've seen companies where you can have 2 devs working on the same project, one
making say $30,000-40,000 and one making like $60,000-70,000. They do the same
work, but have wildly different valuations because of their ability to
negotiate.

If people negotiated higher rates and fewer hours, that is entirely possible
to achieve and eventually could be the norm, but most people don't negotiate
for anything. They think an extra $2,000/yr. is a big win, but then turn
around and work an extra 10 hours a week at a job they hate.

The value in unions was that they would negotiate harder than individuals
will. They perhaps outlive their usefulness and aren't great as an entity that
should last forever because demanding more money every year doesn't always
work if the company isn't having a good year, but the point still stands that
lack of negotiating power is a problem.

C levels executives make outsized amounts of money because of 2 things - the
higher you get in an organization, the better you probably are at negotiating
(otherwise you wouldn't make it to the top), and many have agents that
negotiate on their behalf (just like pro athletes).

I'm not an expert at negotiation, but I do know that the people who know how
to negotiate well can get wins that the average person can't comprehend. A lot
of people could negotiate their way into a 4 hour workday if they tried, they
just don't know how.

~~~
spiritplumber
It puzzles me how Americans don't want to discuss how much they make with
coworkers.

~~~
programminggeek
Well, bosses have been known to threaten to fire workers if they are found to
be discussing how much money they work. People act as if it would be
impossible to work at a company where people could know what other people
make.

Yet, public school teachers have a pay schedule that is pretty cut and dry,
government workers' salaries are public record, etc. Somehow people manage to
work those jobs without any kind of mutiny due to freely available
information. I'm sure there are other companies where this works out just
fine.

Mostly, companies take advantage of the information asymmetry to pay as little
as they possibly have to. It works for them as long as people don't find out
their getting screwed. If people find out, they negotiate better. Ultimately,
that probably leads to people getting paid better or getting a better paying
job.

If companies just took care of the employees well to begin with, it wouldn't
matter if people knew how much other people were getting paid. At the end of
the day, it's a problem of greed, and that's an unsolvable problem as long as
humans are involved.

------
chris_va
This is not well thought out: "If everyone worked fewer hours, for instance,
there would be more jobs for the unemployed to fill. The economy wouldn’t be
able to produce quite as much, which means it wouldn’t be able to pollute as
much, either; rich countries where people work fewer hours tend to have lower
carbon footprints."

The economy is not a zero sum system, almost by definition. Working less will
not mean more jobs are available. In fact, lower economic output may reduce
the number of jobs available significantly.

Also, correlation does not imply causation. Modern societies with lower carbon
footprints are those with smaller industrial/shipping industries and good
public transit. That probably correlates pretty well with reduced working
hours, but selling this a ecological alternative is a bit of a stretch.

------
mrjj
I prefer to think about USA as no-vacation-nation. Just because it's good to
think that there a lot of guys working 24/7 and if you don't do so, you are
retired.

You can't do the smart work more than 4 hours a day, right, maybe it's just
beyond energy exchange capacity in our brain that support extra concentration.

But everyone have a lot of a dumb work, documentation, settling professional
conflicts in mail, pinging standstill tasks, routine refactorings or other
forms of small product polishing, whatever.

I'm not sure that the 4 of "smart work" is including all those 20% of work
giving 80% of value, its sounds funny but sometimes you have too much energy
to do very valuable routine.

If you have predisposition to depression (as i do) you can liberate your own
time and just waste it to extension your depression experience. Wow it's
really worth it.

Depression is just negation of any actions. When external factors is punching
your arse its hard to negate. When not, welcome to slow way down.

~~~
afarrell
How is documentation dumb work? Explaining technical concepts clearly is hard.

~~~
mrjj
Sorry, i don't want to injure any of the technical writers. They are the only
guys keeping big projects from informational collapse. Moreover, they are some
kind of project detectives, collecting clues about how this pile of __*
actually works.

But if you are making something, you have to make some pieces of human-
readable information about it and the poor quality is significantly better
that no internal documentation at all. That the way developer or manager can
help real technical writer.

Also you can express your thoughts in short notes, schema drafts, checklists,
documenting your mindflow. It's very usable and nearly impossible to delegate.
You can steer at the lines and rectangles or lists, looking for missing points
or removing redundant. Not hackworking, just harmonizing the details because
it's odd to have time to polish shoes and no time to polish work.

------
cheepin
Maybe the stuff we want to buy has gotten increasingly expensive. College,
phone and internet, all on a stagnating wage.

~~~
mahyarm
Depends on the place. Phone & internet is not it, but college, rent, cars &
health care are.

~~~
stanmancan
I guess it does depend highly on lcoation. I live in Vancouver, Canada. For my
fiancee and I, our cell phone bill comes to about $150/m and internet is $40.
That alone is $1,200 a year.

Cars are another expense that's gone up substantially over the last 20 years.
We pay $140/m in insurance and at $1.40/L gas, at least $150/m in gas. That's
$3,500 a year not including servicing (minimum $100 every ~3 months) or car
payments ($280/m). All in, just owning a car costs us about $7,200 a year.

~~~
jarek
A year ago in Vancouver, I was paying $28 a month for cell, $30 for wired
broadband internet, and $81 for a transit pass ($91 now).

But if you want to spend a lot of money, cars and Canadian telecoms definitely
make it easy.

~~~
stanmancan
Transit is alright in Vancouver, but not sufficient for a small family. I live
in North Delta and work downtown Vancouver. I have a 7 year old daughter that
needs to be dropped off at school, and picked up from her Grandma's in Surrey.
I also coach her soccer team and play myself. For the individual transit alone
is typically sufficient, but as soon as you have certain responsibilities a
car quickly moves into the 'necessity' column.

~~~
jarek
> but as soon as you have certain responsibilities

True, kids in suburbs aren't cheap

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RankingMember
This could be done, but it'd need to be some kind of modern take on the old
labor movement. People want 4 hour workdays, but they don't believe it'll
change. Set up a site to allow people to specify their employer and
essentially "opt-in", expressing their support for a 4-hour workday, but make
it anonymous insofar as you'll only see a number of people at your workplace
that share the same sentiment. There'd need to be some unique key to confirm
that each person can only opt-in once. Compare the opt-in number to the number
of employees reported on a company's tax paperwork, have the site get popular
(whole project in itself unless there's good grassroots support), and suddenly
you've got a nice obvious display of support within various companies for the
4-hour workday. Making it harder to ignore the will of the masses (or at least
verifying that such a will exists) is a good start, I think.

------
sp332
Universal basic income is the case that gives the rich, ruling class the
maximum power over everyone else. Everyone gets dependent on government money,
and it takes an act of Congress to increase the baseline pay.

~~~
Kiro
If everyone would receive X money then X would be the new 0.

~~~
fennecfoxen
... No. That's not how those numbers are related. Consider a case where I give
every US citizen $500/mo, and a software engineer makes an additional
$5000/mo. Then 11 unemployed persons have the same spending power as a
software engineer, which is _markedly different_ from 0...

~~~
Kiro
Wouldn't it lead to massive inflation making those $500 practically worthless?
The engineer's nominal salary would rise meaning you would need a magnitude
more unemployed persons to have the same spending power.

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spiritplumber
People "need jobs" to be able to "afford" things, so we have a lot of people
basically generating work for each other, as per Parkinson's Laws.

------
avz
> “If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on something
> useful,” Benjamin Franklin assumed, “that labor would produce sufficient to
> procure all the necessaries and comforts of life.”

True, but I hope we aspire to more than necessities and comforts of life. If
we worked more and directed the effort, Armstrong might be a name of a town
240,000 miles away.

------
qwerta
Four-hour workday is simple: do not marry and do not have a children.

~~~
dijit
and work part-time?

~~~
RankingMember
and have no hobbies?

~~~
protonfish
And don't get sick.

~~~
goodcanadian
And where do I find the employer who will let me work only 4 hours a day?

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emo_tards_on_hn
The guy next to me stole it. And some pens from my desk too. If you see him,
tell him to please return them. Thanks.

------
Shivetya
so many people wanting stuff combined with far too many wanting someone else
to pay for it.

