Indeed, I'd value a day off in the week more than just fewer hours per work day. In fact, personally, I'd work longer hours on the days I do work in order to compensate--that's how much I'd value a four day work week.
At least in the US, having, say, a Friday off means you can easily run to the bank or do other personal business that is much easier to do during the week than the weekend.
One company I worked had 9-hour workdays, and then every other Friday we had off. It was pretty nice, but it was also before kids came into the picture. Now a 6-hour workday sounds amazing.
Yes, our wok started off with very flexible holidays and working hours. i was quite happy to put in a couple of hours extra per week to get things finished.
Bureaucracy has kicked in, and now the flexible working hours are less flexible as are the holidays. If someone insists that I be in by an exact time, I'll make sure I leave exactly 8 hour later these days.
The California state government has been running this experiment for a while (sort of). They require all their workers to take a day off out of each 10 work days (so a 5 day week and then a 4 day).
However, they don't get to choose the day. It is assigned to them. The state is doing it to cut down on traffic and commuting, as well as facilities costs.
However, so far they say they haven't lost any productivity by doing this program. Of course:
1) They want it to work because the taxpayers are watching
2) A lot of folks work from home on their "day off"
My point is these are all tough experiments to run due to human nature and not wanting to be perceived as working less than your peers.
> The California state government has been running this experiment for a while (sort of).
No, they haven't.
> They require all their workers to take a day off out of each 10 work days (so a 5 day week and then a 4 day).
No, they don't. Some California state workers have the option to take a "9/8/80" schedule (an 80-hour, two-week schedule with 8 nine-hour workdays and 1 eight-hour workday, and 1 weekday off) or a "4/10/40" schedule (a 40-hour, one-week schedule with 4 ten-hour workdays and one weekday off). [1] But these, like the baseline 5-days @ 8 hours/day schedule, are all 40-hour/week (averaged over each two-week period, in the case of 9/8/80) schedules, not reduced schedules like a 4-day, 8-hour/day schedule.
Additionally, most permanent full-time state workers have the option of an additional leave day per month with a 5-percent reduction in pay. [2]
And, recently, there were several years where most employees experienced furloughs varying between 1 to 3 days per month with accompanying pay reductions as part of a cost 'cutting' (large, cost deferring) measure. [3]
"So the inventor's real genius was not to build a chess-playing machine. It was to be the first to notice that, in the modern world, there is more mastery available than you might think; that exceptional talent is usually available, and will often work cheap."
It's funny how the recipe to fix the economy, that our current leaders are pushing, is by trying to raise productivity and competitiveness, by giving corporations the flexibility to increase working hours without extra compensation for employees. Then raise the retirement age at 67 while unemployment in under 30s is in a peak. Yeah, all those counter-intuitive measures they keep preaching for on the media all the time.
Scarcity of a resource is the most profitable opportunity for those who own it. Scarcity of jobs is an opportunity for profit to some people.
Developed countries have in fact lower birth than death rates. In those countries, population is increasing only by immigration.
What stops population growth is political and economical stability, empowerment of women, and education. E.g. check this video http://vimeo.com/m/2905893 to see what research on the matter has to say.
> I want to see the exchange as work for time, because I work much more effectively than many other people. An hourly-rate job is simply not attractive to me, because the hourly-rate will not effectively capture my value.
Why not? If you provide better value per hour than others, you should also get higher hourly rate. If you just work more hours without more compensation, then you're just cheap.
It is money for time. I'm renting my skills by the hour. If my skills are poor for the job is another issue. And a lot of managers can't distinguish real work from long hours work.
Excessive overtime is the way you make a highly skilled professional useless in the long term. No time to rest, no time for recreation, no time to play and experiment with new things, no time to study more stuff. In a fast paced industry this is death in a couple of years.
I agree with the author. We work to make a living, not live to work.
However, he thinks that in Europe there are more human conditions. Well, this is rapidly changing towards the american system. E.g. the bail out for Greece was offered with the exchange of passing new employment rules. Some of them are enabling employers to demand for more work time without extra compensation, or to fire much more easily without specific reasons. Another nice change, not yet implemented but soon to be, the employee will not get the full monthly salary if he had any sick days.
Furthermore, the public pension funds and health care is being demolished. Soon the only option will be to get in a insurance plan offered by your company (big companies have already started to offer such plans). So except if you're one of the very few top talented people, soon you'll be very depended on your job and will be forced to accept to work more working hours without any additional benefit.
Romania has already moved that way, and Italy will follow soon. And the rest of Europe after that.
This mentality that you must sacrifice your life for the benefit of your company, it is just absurd. If the law was enforcing less working hours and bigger compensations for overtime, there wouldn't be any competitiveness excuse. And the developed world should enforce the same work rules to the developing countries.
It's absurd, especially if you think about how much the unemployment rates have risen and how much the technology today automates tasks so no humans are needed, and the production of material goods is so high that most products are never sold and end in the recycle bin. It screams about lowering the working hours and the retirement limits instead of raising them.
I have begun to wonder why we don't have a regulatory authority, something along the lines of a national central bank but for working hours, dedicated to regulating the work-week. When unemployment and overemployment are low, work hours are kept stable. When there is a chronic over-demand in the economy, the work-week is lengthened. When there is a chronic over-supply in the economy, the work-week is shortened.
First World economies right now have an oversupply problem. Marx predicted the crises of capitalism due to overproduction and under-demand. We don't need a complete socialist revolution to deal with this issue (though I'm somewhat in favor of one), we just need to fine-tune the working week to productivity levels.
Your father not handling the situations properly is irrelevant to what the article debates. The key detail here is that French parents aren't actually trying to discipline their kids, they're trying to educate them. They're teaching them to be polite and respect the people around them, they educate them how to behave and interact with other people and this is high priority principle for them. Although it isn't possible to have all the parents of a nation to always be right and always handle things correctly, having the above principle, it does make an overall better adaption of kids to society.
Something similar happened to me too. It was a self confidence boost and learned how to be more careful and how to deal with problems without panic. Accidents will happen anyway sooner or later, it's better to have small accidents early and learn from them than make big irreversible mistakes later.
