I hope HN readers and OP realize the difference between "30 German companies trial 4 day week" and "Germany trials 4 day week", hence my dislike for the clickbait title which I hope would be edited to make it correct.
Also, according to FT[1] and Bloomberg[2], it seems the German government wants to get people to work more hours, not less, to combat economic slowdown and labor shortages, basically contradicting this article.
So which is it? Do you fix labor shortages and "the economy" by getting people to work longer hours or less hours?
Working here in Germany, I switched to part time at 75% (5 x 6 hours). Not having to grind another two hours per day is totally worth the pay decrease. Time is the most valuable resource we have.
The right to a part time job has been around for about twenty years i think. The current discussion is to rethink the workweek as four days, there are multiple models in talks (4x 10 hours, 4x 8 hours with less pay, etc..)
In my opinion the real problem is that the german tax system incentivises working less instead of more, as the marginal tax increases even for hours worked beyond the 40h work week -> the more you work the less you keep per hour.
4x10h 4 times per week, every week sounds horrible IMHO. I personally definitely can't be 20% more productive per day by working 2 extra hours.
This would only work if you clock in 10h on paper, but actually work much less hours from home where nobody tracks how much you actually work, but if have to actually clock in 10h per day at the office, plus commute time, I'll most likely just space out and watch the clock for the rest of those two hours. And then that extra free day per week would be to recover from the long working day at the office nullifying any advantage.
Healthcare workers often work on six-week rotations that average out to 37.5/40 h per week. The key word is average, because shifts are usually 12 hours and some weeks (one or two per six week rotation) are composed of 3 days on, 2 days off and 2 days on.
That's not something we should praise. It's probably why healthcare workers are so burned out and make so many mistakes leading to malpractice.
Maybe in certain healthcare cases, longer hours can be more tolerable when you're doing repetitive things you've already done a million times that you can do "on autopilot" without the risk of mistakes, but for mentally intensive tasks where you're constantly thinking and problem solving and need to stay sharp, there's no way I can pull 60h/week of productivity. I'm not even fully productive for the whole 40h, let alone more.
I could pull 60h weeks if I were working on my own projects being my own boss answering only to myself and working at my own pace and deadlines, but not part of the soul crushing corporate machine with constant bullshit interruptions, meetings, theatrics and management breathing down my neck.
There's a source somewhere for the greatest number of errors happening because of shift change, where e.g. a doctor's notes are incomplete and don't mark down a detail that later turned out to be important. The study found that much-longer-than-i-thought shifts were better than shorter ones, I believe e.g. 16 or even 24 hour shifts were safer than 8 hour shifts.
> In my opinion the real problem is that the german tax system incentivises working less instead of more, as the marginal tax increases even for hours worked beyond the 40h work week -> the more you work the less you keep per hour.
Unless the marginal tax goes over 100% don't you still earn more total by working more?
Yes, but they also stated that this incentivizes working less instead of working more. Generally if you earn more by working more that is incentive to work more not less so I wanted clarification.
Each additional of unit of time you work in a given period of time is one less unit of time for something else.
For example, regardless of taxes, working 8 hours can mean you have dinner with your family. Working 12 hours means more money, but missing dinner with family so the additional 4 hours would need to be compensated more than the first 8.
Taxes would be similar. If setup the tax rate so high, say 90% for the amount of income one would earn for the average wage beyond 8 hours, then there wouldn’t be much reason to give up your leisure time.
I'm not an employment expert, but I believe that in the US, jobs of more than 30 hours per week come with benefits. I don't know if that's a legal requirement or just a custom.
US employers are not technically required to offer subsidized health insurance. Although, it is usually cheaper for employers with more than 50 full time (30 hours per week) or full time equivalent employees to offer the subsidy rather than paying the “shared responsibility payment”. See #1.
> Under these provisions, certain employers (called applicable large employers or ALEs) must either offer health coverage that is “affordable” and that provides “minimum value” to their full-time employees (and offer coverage to the full-time employees’ dependents), or potentially make an employer shared responsibility payment to the IRS, if at least one of their full-time employees receives a premium tax credit for purchasing individual coverage on a Health Insurance Marketplace (Marketplace), also called the Exchange.
Basically, but just working 30+ hours per week does not mean an employer will offer subsidized health insurance. Small employers (franchised businesses, "mom and pop" businesses) will often times not offer any subsidized health insurance to any employee, since they do not meet the 50 FTE requirement to be subject to the shared responsibility payment.
Sure, but the idea usually is to work less hours for the same pay, if productivity allows for it. And many sectors have seen increased productivity, but the benefits went to shareholders instead of workers. Not advocating for communism or for seizing the means of production.
the idea is that if your productivity increases and you do 5 days of work in just 4 days you will be eaten alive by other companies based in countries where they are just as productive but decide to keep working 5 days instead.
Definitely. That's why this doesn't really work for stuff like mass market manufacturing where your productive output is proportional to how long workers spend on the assembly line, but more for the companies that are in the innovation and knowledge work business and have secured a lucrative niche, where no competitiveness is lost due to fewer hours, but that's a relatively small percentage of the total employment.
There’s a lot more there in the mix for customers oursourcing their business than a mere productivity measure. What stops them from outsourcing your business, the Fridays in the office?
My company has been trying 4 day weeks twice a month since 2022 without salary decrease, the trial have been mostly conclusive, and we'll probably move forward and have 4 day weeks all weeks at some point. That's the stated goal anyway. The main difficulty is probably the fact that customers don't have 4 days and expect support all week. A partial answer to this is people have been able to pick 2 additional days off each month no questions asked, and not everybody like the same days off so it has been working out.
Studies show productivity is kept at the same level when companies switch to 4 day week, but people are happier and feel more rested (which is why there are more productive, there's probably also the fact you don't have to worry about life stuff as much at work since you can do many things that need to be done during the week during the off day). Since we produce the same amount, I don't see why the full salary should not be kept.
Of course it is. Too many people with free time will just get bored and stray away from the path of the righteous so that would be a direct way to hell.
(too many people actually believe that, see the discussions about unconditional basic income)
We can even relax this to: let's stop at whatever amount of work that is necessary and not more.
A good start would be to stop producing so much junk.
(edit: downvoters: interested in what you think, please develop. I think we produce a big amount of useless stuff, and that keeps many human beings pointlessly busy - what's the positive here?)
Signaling to attract a desired mate. Or whatever other reason (at least some) humans are attracted to power.
What amount of work is necessary? Apartment life without personal car? Townhouses with a 1 car garage? Detached single family homes with 2 car driveway with 2 Toyotas? Or is it 1 Toyota and 1 Lexus? A flight to a tropical destination once ever 3 years? Or every year?
I didn't mean the amount of work an individual needs to do to get enough money to fund their life or for something else, I meant the amount of necessary work the human population needs to do, collectively.
As a first step, we could as the human species decide that such or such thing is not useful, or even harmful, and stop producing it. Or reduce production of the stuff we are producing in too big quantities. That would reduce the amount of work we do.
Not saying it's easy, it might require huge changes, but seen from outside we probably look very silly.
There's a fast food place I discovered recently, they serve your meal in a disposable box. That could be changed to use reusable plates instead. Okay, that can be hard because then the place needs to handle washing the dishes.
They also give disposable glasses if one asks. I can avoid this by bringing my own bottle, in my country nobody would see an issue with this, tap water is free in restaurants by law. If many people do this, that less of these glasses to produce in the first place.
And above all they also unconditionally give you both disposable chopsticks and a disposable fork without asking. I would guess almost half of this stuff is produced to be immediately thrown without even being used a single time. Those could be made reusable too, but there's even a first step that would also cost less time to the restaurant, so double win: let people take what they need. quadruple win, because that's also less waste to handle, and so less effort to take care of the Earth when we inevitably need to do it.
And the disposable cutlery, or wrapping (for groceries, for instance), is only the tip of the iceberg. Think also useless/harmful software, software that is made over and over because nothing is open source and shared. Think cheaply made and/or unrepairable stuff that breaks too early and you need to replace entirely. And again, all the work needed to handle this waste.
There are a lot of low hanging fruits. But how we as a species are organized right now does not handle this very well, does not incentivize it, actually doesn't even care that much and actually incentivizes the contrary and externalizes waste and pollution, mostly.
So yes, that's a pitch for degrowth, that may sound extreme to some, but it should just go without saying. And I'm not even touching the idea that we could (and probably should) lower our comfort, that's free degrowth without hurting comfort!
What I'm proposing here actually improves our comfort, because we have less work to do so more free time, more time with our loved ones, more time doing what you decide to do! It can even be what you do for work, why not, if you like doing this. And maybe more time for boredom and deep thinking, which need more of.
All that junk is making us work more. It's so meaningless to spend so much cumulative time producing pointless things. What a giant waste of time.
> Do you have any evidence that this is the case for everyone at every company no matter what?
Of course not, you are asking for the impossible.
But we have evidences that 4 day weeks boost productivity at least in some settings. If you are interested in the topic, look up "4 day week productivity" on a web search engine, or "4 day week" / "4 day workweek" on HN [1,2] if you want previous discussions about this. The topic is not new here. You'll find many posts where companies think it works.
I love it when people post studies just because it agrees with their worldview. For full disclosure, I support the 4 day week but I know to be objective. None of those links contain references to proper RCT with control groups or a variety of office roles so there is really no evidence for it. Trial plus survey is a better term as it carries no scientific connotations.
You are not really going to get your average companies to participate in those kind of studies anyway. Those companies want warm bodies and it has nothing to do with empirical evidence
Only if the expectations for quality of life, and other external factors such as supply of resources to maintain those expectations of quality of life, remain the same.
Examples of increases in quality of life include things like living into one’s 80s and 90s using dialysis and heart surgeries and new medicines.
Examples of changes in supply of resources include things like energy, labor, and a hospitable natural environment.
All of these things are constantly in flux, and automation sometimes outpaces them, and sometimes does not.
I never claimed free time was not a major component of quality of life. The insinuation was that maintaining or increasing some components of quality of life, such as labor and resource intensive healthcare, could come at a cost of other components of quality of life, such as free time (and those gains/costs are not necessarily experienced by the same person).
Exactly. Imagine how will your quality of life be if all doctors, teachers, nurses, delivery workers, plumbers, service workers, also worked only 4 days/week. There would be an even worse labor shortage across the entire economy of biblical proportions.
It's easy to see how it benefits you when only you're working 4 days/week but the rest of society on which your first world lifestyle depends, keeps working 5 days/week, being at your disposal for the same amount of time, while your enjoying more time off than the rest.
Need a doctor? Sorry, you'll have to wait more time now because now all are working 4 days/week. Need to go grocery shopping? Sorry, everything is closed today. Need a plumber? Sorry, most are off today as well.
There's no free lunch here. Moving the entire society to 4 days/week would require massive shifts economically and socially.
So why now advocate for 6 or 7 day work week then? Because time off is worth a lot. And going from a 5 day work week to a 4 day work week is a 20% reduction of work days but a whopping 50% increase in weekend days.
Meanwhile the number of doctors and plumbers etc. is not a fixed constant but driven by demand. There are plenty of qualified people currently doing useless work or unemployed who could fill those roles with the right incentives.
It is, but someone still has to work to keep society going in those "time off days". Doctors can't treat the same amount of patients in 4 days as in 5. Teachers can't squeeze the curriculum in 4 days. Customer support can't squeeze everyone in 4 days. Etc.
So how will you increase the number of doctors and other staff to work in the days the existing staff are off?
You can't just magic more workers out of thin air, especially now when we're already in a labor shortage in many fields like healthcare with everyone already working 5 days/week and with fertility declining in the west.
Part time has gotten quite common in Germany. I work 20 hrs a day and that pays my bills.
Given that there is a shortage of workers, companies here increasingly have to compete for workers by means of improving working conditions and worker freedoms.
Paying rent and living expenses in Germany on only 20h work? Can I ask in which city? Can't be a big one I presume like Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, etc. where rent is expensive.
Or you earn a FAANG wage where 50% of that is 100% of a regular full time wage.
Could be the 30 most influential companies in Germany.
It's like when FAANG comes up with a new cool shinny tool (MapReduce, React, Tensorflow). Even if not everyone is using it, your will see articles saying "The tech industry now uses [insert shinny tool]" even if most of the companies are running [insert old tool].
A problem is that a substantial amount of people make more than enough money, and therefore they are looking at ways to have more free time. While at the same time there are not enough people to do all the work (in part due to retiring baby boomers).
There's a labor shortage so you'd think wages would go up, but if people make more per hour then that just means they're going to work less.
And migration is already at levels that gives fuel to right wing populists.
I've been working 3 day work weeks, Monday to Wednesday in batches of 2 weeks, since I have so much unspent leave. I noticed productivity during my work days is absolutely insane. I definitely get more done that when I slack my way through a 5 day week...
number6 hints at it, but fyi once you’re through your probation period (standard is 6 months) in Germany you can request a reduction in hours for a pro-rata reduction in pay and it’s quite difficult for the company to turn down the request because of it being enshrined in labour laws.
A few in my (tech) company have done this over the last while and it’s been great for me so far. Definitely wouldn’t say no to 100% salary for 80% time as in the trial but for those with developer salaries and the cost of living (where I live at least) I think most could live and save quite comfortably with the reduction, definitely recommend it.
I've been working a 4 day week (Fridays off, 100% salary) for a german consultancy and there's no way I'm going back to a 5 day week. I have never been this motivated to start work on Mondays and Sundays no longer feel dreadful as the weekend comes to a close. My sleep has improved and I have much more mental clarity because of just one additional day of rest.
I hope this experiment turns out great. But honestly, I think we should win this just because we want, not because it boosts productivity. AFAIK, when the five-day workweek became the norm, it was partly because of labor shortage and powerful unions Now labor shortage seems to be a problem too but we don't know if generative AI can solve this, and unions are declining. I wonder why unions have lost their popularity. I know some downsides of unions and companies' hard work for union busting, but I thought social media could have outweighed them.
There's something odd about the four-day week movement; they'e always unable to be honest in their headlines. Germany is not trialing a four-day work week.
>Four-day workweek: Firms in UK make the move permanent after world’s biggest trial
There you go, a bunch of honest
4 day workweek headlines I found with the most basic google search. Now you can forever dispell yourself of the idea that dishonesty is particularly prevalent in headlines about 4 day workweeks.
The first 6 words of the article clarify it, it's not like it's buried. Clickbait, yes, but hardly unusual or indicative of dishonesty in the movement.
The website ("Welcome to the Jungle") seems to be a recruitment/media company, are they some sort of grassroots movement for "four-day week" but they hide this fact?
Has anyone tried 4x10s (so 4 day work week but same pay)? I floated it with my direct coworker and we came to an agreement, but my boss had some level of skepticism so I haven't yet proceeded.
The last couple weeks I've been "quiet trialing" it, working Friday morning to finish things up and then keeping the afternoon light. It really helps me to come into Monday refreshed, raring to go like I am after a good vacation.
I think 4x10 is quite the opposite in productivity because towards the end of each day, due to being tired, productivity would drop off. But maybe it’s a matter of getting used to the new rhythm and that would work out too.
YMMV, but I often find myself in a weird state where it's easier for me to "hunker down" and do a couple more hours of work (because I'm already in the flow), but I'm too exhausted from work to do personal projects around the house...
If I'm really feeling exhausted in the afternoon, I'm really good at taking a 25 minute "power nap", my mind goes from slightly foggy to crystal clear, and if I take it well before 5pm my sleep for the night is typically not impacted at all. It's taken some training to get to the point that I can quickly shift into sleep and then snap out of it, but it's amazingly effective.
The company I work at introduced half-day Fridays. Its nice to have some time to do chores and things that are more inconvenient on a weekend, though the downside is we are more rushed to finish up our sprints.
I think the second half of a Friday, especially an end-of-sprint Friday, is quite lackadaisical anyway, so its probably a good bang-for-buck perk for the company.
You should try that when things are going well, not after purchasing power has collapsed 10s of percents over <5 years and 80% of <35yo s cannot afford to buy a flat.
Also, according to FT[1] and Bloomberg[2], it seems the German government wants to get people to work more hours, not less, to combat economic slowdown and labor shortages, basically contradicting this article.
So which is it? Do you fix labor shortages and "the economy" by getting people to work longer hours or less hours?
[1] https://archive.is/WNHe5
[2] https://archive.is/PWQvB