IMO the need isn't for 6 hour workdays but for some regular outside of work time available during the work week.
I work an 8:30-5:30 job and this ensures that everything I need to do outside of work during normal business hours builds up to consume my weekend. I know several people who work for business with half-day Fridays and that's when they get all of their outside-of-work things done ensuring that their weekends are actually free for doing the things that they want to do.
If you have kids this is an even bigger deal. If you don't, you're free for whatever every evening. If you have kids, your after work time is committed until they get to sleep every night. Having that work-day time when your kids are in school becomes HUUUUUUUGE.
I also know people who work for CVS doing 12 hour shifts with a limit of 80 hours over the course of two weeks. This leads to a lot of full days off every 2 week period...and they love it.
It's less about the "X hour workday" and more about the "X hours of free time during regular working hours"
I had nearly the opposite of this in Japan where even leaving the office premises was a hassle and required manager approval (security gates at every entrance logging your movement -- this was after a security breach where an employee stole 30,000 design documents and became a national headline).
As you might imagine his was terrible and required you to Often use PTO just to go to the bank or the municipal office for some registration work. Also it just makes you feel less than human when you're controlled so thoroughly.
I've worked a half-day Friday schedule (in a factory situation where productivity is much more easily measured) and while the hours were _great_ for the workers, it played havoc with productivity and output. Most people basically slowed way down on Fridays because they knew that a) there wasn't much time to do anything so why not wait b) everyone else was slow so it would take even longer. Ideally in this situation, you would get more out of your workers on Mo-Thu but that didn't happen.
Instead, they went with a 9/80 schedule and it worked out great for management and the workforce.
“A "9/80 schedule" means that on 4 days per week you work 9 hours, and on the 5th you either work 8 hours or you have a day off. So for example, you may work 9-hour days Monday through Thursday, and on Fridays, you either work an 8-hour day or take the day off. 9/80 means that you work 80 hours over 9 days, instead of the traditional 10.”
I suspect this is a little confusing to any day care that doesn't also operate 9/80. I did 4/10s for my kids entire day care "career" and that was enough to really confuse them a couple times.
Another fun day care problem is some bill by week and make the employees watch the clock like hawks to make sure no one is getting more than their fair share, while others bill by the hour and don't care if you're late, in fact they enjoy the extra money. Both sides sometimes insist the other side doesn't exist and their way is the only correct way to run a day care. Obviously 9/80 or 4/40 or anything more exotic than 9-5 M-F is going to need some care in selecting the correct day care billing model
(Note strange, yet honestly serious possible startup topic: brokering parents with day cares WRT weird schedule constraints and location constraints)
I think it's partly that a lot of 8-hour-day jobs bleed towards 9 hours, but (explicit) 9 hour days are less likely to bleed up to 10. But even at stated hours, it's got a lot of advantages. Free weekdays are incredibly useful, and the ability to schedule around 3 day weekends (or 4 day weekends on holidays) is a huge hit with people who want to take any kind of short trips.
Swedes typically do 9h days because we take long, unpaid lunches. White collar workers in cities normally do ah hour at noon -1pm. The 9h day is a bummer, but with flexible hours at least I can normally do a 2h lunch if I need to go to the dentist or sort something else out.
Half days off is a brilliant idea, because it makes it easy to know when to schedule kids appointments withe doctor etc.
No, an 8h workday excludes lunch, so typical hours in Sweden are 7-16 or 8-17. If I take a 2h lunch I might work 8-18. There is no such thing as 8-5 that makes no sense in Sweden :)
Interestingly, while lunch isn't counted towards the 8h, the workday normally does allow for coffee breaks ("fika") on paid time totaling 15-60minutes depending on what business.
I think it depends on the trade. I'm in the process of leaving a IT job that forces you to take a unpaid "lunch" but expects you to be available to them during that time. Its a way to cheat and fill the schedule in some cases.
The latter is perfectly reasonable in some (many?) circumstances.
Break-fix work needing to be done on-call/24x7 while requiring in-office presence for design and new feature development (a fundamentally different type of work, typically requiring a higher level of collaboration) seems perfectly reasonable to me.
> The latter is perfectly reasonable in some (many?) circumstances.
I live in a northern climate and when it snows can either spend 1 hour stuck in traffic or just work from home (and possibly come in after traffic has cleared).
My previous employer was adamant about being in the building from 0830 to 1700 even if it was a blizzard. My current employer lets the employees manage whether they need to come in or not (any day not just during bad weather). I'm sure you can guess which one has happier and more productive employees!
I'm facing a Nor'easter, 12+" of snow, etc, here tomorrow and will be working from home for the day. To me, that's perfectly natural and anything less flexible would be insanity/inanity.
The key there is (almost) no one will be in the office because it's a synchronized event. OTOH, if everyone worked from home 2x/week at random, it would be chaos trying to plan whiteboard design sessions.
Either I'm working and then I'm paid and available. Or I'm not working e.g on lunch in which case I might be available if it's urgent. If I do tend to something on my lunch (being nice) then obviously I'm working again - so I'll just go home early instead. Obviously I'm only available on lunch if I can, and want to.
It's hard to fit into a schedule with picking up kids from School though. In parts of Germany and Switzerland where that is still the norm I think it's at least partially a leftover from a time when women did that - so not very modern. A friend who worked in Germany and left to pick up kids at 5pm was sought by the manager and when he heard my friend had left to pick up kids he said "doesn't he have a wife?". Pretty traditional...
But an hour lunch is great to have lunch with your kids, something both my parents still did with my and my brother.
My kids' school only switched to a schedule where the kids eat at school two years ago, and I have a job in another city. But it was something quite a few parents managed to do until then.
When the kids don't eat school where do they eat (assuming most kids have two working parents who commute away from where they live every day)?
I saw that system in some old fashioned societies (e.g Switzerland) and while it seemed good for the kids, it seemed to mean a lot of women staid home to feed kids rather than work (if they couldn't afford a nanny that is).
I think school lunches are pretty essential for getting a high workforce participation for both men and women.
First of all, kids in Switzerland typically don't get picked up, they're supposed to go home and to school by themselves from 6y on. At least one parent usually works nearby the home and can take a 1.5 to 2h lunch break, that leaves enough to prepare and have everyone eating at the table at the same time for 30min - traditionally the whole family with both parents. A more modern version of this is to share the task friendly neighbours with same age kids, so a few days of the the week the kids eat at neighbours' houses.
In any case, lunch time is kind of a sanctuary here - deskside lunches are seen as very poor - even if people stay at work they'll go to an affordable restaurant together. I can say that this has lots of advantages, an actual real break from work really does recharge your batteries. Swiss workers are usually measures among the most productive per hour worked, and IMO a full lunch break is necessary to achieve that.
Edit: Btw women in workforce participation is 62% compared to 56% in the US, 54% in Germany and 60% in Sweden.
Yeah deskside lunches is unheard of in Sweden as well, and kids I think are about as expected to walk alone here (It's getting worse than it was when I grew up, but that I believe is pretty universal across europe and elsewhere) but having to switch jobs to work close enough to home sounds almost impossible in big cities. Those with short commutes might have 20-30 minutes, but more typical commutes in cities are 45 minutes. That's 90 minutes there and back. I'd rather just get my workday over with in 40-90 minutes less than go home to have lunch, and I don't want 4 commutes in one day (even two is too much).
Spending two hours or more on lunch would be great, but I also want to eat no later than 6 (kids go to bed 7!) so it's very hard to squeeze in with two full time jobs of 8h.
I think the system is a nice idea in theory when you have great neighbors or walking distance to work - but the probability that this is the case for a whole school class is slim. I think it feels a bit like a remnant of a housewife society and something that adds pressure for parents to stop working - which isn't a bad idea per se but it tends to add more pressure on women to do so.
Swiss cities have a separate public system where your children can go for lunch and even dinner though. Good public transport is another thing, commutes typically are 10-30min even in Zurich, so even city workers can often afford to go home. Anyways, there are ways to solve this without having lunches provided for every schoolchild. The quotes workforce participation quota shows that for a majority this is at least doable.
Well there is a service you can pay for where your kids have lunch at school and are under supervision, but it was opt-in.
Now the class eats with the teacher in half an hour and there is no option to eat at hone anymore. School finishes half an hour earlier so the commuting parents still have to pay for child care.
One of the problems was that there aren't many good people available for the job of child care for one hour at lunch time, people leave when they find something better.
More good reasons not to bother having kids. Just too much hassle; our employers and governments are doing everything they can to make raising kids a miserable chore, so why bother?
You work 40 hour weeks in Sweden? No wonder so many Swedes want to work in Norway. A lot of people's working days here are 8 hours including a half hour lunch break, 37.5 hours work a week. I generally start at 07:30 and finish at 15:30.
Of course as a salaried employee I have quite a lot of freedom to set my own hours so I sometimes work an extra half hour so that I can go home early on Friday or have some hours I can use to get things done without having to use a holiday day.
While I think fewer working hours are need overall, you are right about needing time during the work week. For example, contactors, who seem to only work during the week despite the majority of their customers having day jobs, would be a lot easier to work with if one doesn't need to use a half or full day for them.
I'm fortunate in that if I need to take time to deal with that or work from home I can, but I'd assume most can't do that easily.
The other thing I can't help but fixate on is that this consumption of all free time seems to nicely reduce the risk of employees starting their own business or even look for another job. Much harder to do those when you're exhausted or dealing with family.
The last place I worked at they did 4x10 week where you work 40 hours in 4 days and then have Fridays completely free. My manager adjusted it so that half the team was 4x10 for two weeks and then the other half of the team was 5x8 so there were no days where the whole team was out of the office.
It worked out pretty well, but there were some obvious flaws like someone dropping the ball a few times here and there and the rules got changed where you had to have "availability" on your day off, just in case someone had a question, or something broke that you checked in.
> If you don't, you're free for whatever every evening.
Sometimes a lot of "house chore"-y stuff requires going to places that are closed after you get home. Unless you have flexible-ish work start time (which many tech companies do), you're doing that on the weekend or waking up earlier.
Banks, most contractor/consulting stuff like dealing with a CPA or lawyer, anything medical, even just shopping at specialty stores. I remember my parents changed banks when they both returned to work because only one local bank stayed open past 5.
Having a block of "standard work time" for asynchronous tasks (e.g. writing code, building a car) makes sense, but having it collide with the schedule of e.g. buying insurance is really weird to me.
I like your CVS point. I have always thought if I could work 4 ten hour days instead of 5 eight hour days I would be much happier. I don't mind long working days and it is not often that I only work an 8 hour day, but if I got an extra full day off in exchange for those extra hours that would be ideal.
Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has a similar plan - he says we should all work just three 11 hour days per week (and change the retirement age to 75).
I think that, at least for jobs that require significant context-building spinup time at the beginning of a work period before you can start producing useful work, this is a great idea.
Normally anything billionaires advocate in changing society is horrible, but in this case I have to agree heartily. Working only 3 long days a week would work out great for me. That would give me 4 full days off, plus as a programmer there's a significant amount of "spinup time" as you put it; this just isn't the kind of work you can work on in short bursts.
However, I think the 6-hour day plan has some real merit too. I think it just depends on the job. For an engineering or programming job, I think the 11-hour day makes a lot of sense. But for some job like nursing (as in the article), or customer-service jobs where you're running around the whole shift, I think the 6-hour day (5 days a week) makes a lot of sense so workers don't get too worn out.
There was one great point in this article: setting society-wide hour counts is probably a bad plan.
11 hour days sound delightful for a lot of jobs - lots of productive time at work, with enough time off to relax and travel. They also sound hellish for some work (11 hours of manual labor is wretched) and impractical for some (11 hours waiting tables misses prime hours).
So I think that conditional is important, but it sounds like a great thing to offer where possible. I can certainly see taking it as an occasional or even permanent schedule.
That's very interesting. I wonder if you would start to run into staffing issues with this. Especially in industries like healthcare where it is already difficult to find adequate numbers of staff in certain roles like nursing.
I've known a few people working 4/10 schedules (four days, ten hours), but I think managers are often skeptical that an employee is still fully efficient 10 hours in. I know more people working 9/80 (nine hour days, alternating 4 and 5 day weeks), which is less exhausting and still allows for free days and convenient 3 day weekends.
That's probably a fair criticism, but how many people are still fully efficient 8 hours in? I think as an employer you have to accept that you are going to be getting some hours out of your employees that are not fully productive, and ask yourself if getting some productivity during those hours is better than getting none.
9/80 sounds like a good tradeoff. I had never heard of it before this thread. That's why I love HN. It's better than /r/todayilearned/
Could not agree mofe, here in I dia every stupid Govt thing requires your presence despite the "digital India" push, that too alternate working Saturdays! And on that satirday they ask you to come on Monday. There is really a need to give friday half day or something like that
Related to that, why aren't public servants at the DMV, utilities, etc., required to work on weekends and have their days off in the middle of the week?
I work an 8:30-5:30 job and this ensures that everything I need to do outside of work during normal business hours builds up to consume my weekend. I know several people who work for business with half-day Fridays and that's when they get all of their outside-of-work things done ensuring that their weekends are actually free for doing the things that they want to do.
If you have kids this is an even bigger deal. If you don't, you're free for whatever every evening. If you have kids, your after work time is committed until they get to sleep every night. Having that work-day time when your kids are in school becomes HUUUUUUUGE.
I also know people who work for CVS doing 12 hour shifts with a limit of 80 hours over the course of two weeks. This leads to a lot of full days off every 2 week period...and they love it.
It's less about the "X hour workday" and more about the "X hours of free time during regular working hours"