We should’ve gotten a 4-day work week decades ago. Now it should be a 3-day work week at most and I’m being generous. The capitalists are always screeching about the low birth rate, but if people were working 3 days a week and making a decent living off that time, it would help the birth rate because then a household with two working parents could be scheduled on different days and alternate staying home with the child, plus have a shared day off every week.
Anyway, that’s just a selling point to make to the capitalists. Whether or not it helps with the birth rate doesn’t matter as much as the fact that we’re owed shorter work weeks thanks to all the blood, sweat, and tears that labor has put into making the world as wealthy as it is now. What’s the point of all this work if not to improve our standard of living? Technology making our lives better is hitting diminishing returns and now it’s often not making our lives better or it’s even making our lives worse.
The argument for a 4 day work week is that studies have shown it maintains the same level of productivity as a 5 day workweek, but it makes people happier, so it doesn’t slow down the economy, but actually improves it. What’s the argument for a 3 day work week?
Because people deserve more time to be people. Not everything has to serve the Holy Economy.
Sure, I agree with that. However, we also need to consider what a “net decrease in productivity” actually means for the population as a whole, and whether it’s something we want to accept as a trade-off for more free time. Briefly, we can collectively choose to work four, three, or even two days a week, despite seeing a decrease in overall productivity. However, a decrease in productivity means that stuff like clothes, transport, food, IT services, and pretty much everything you can think of that someone has to produce becomes more scarce.
You basically need to answer the question of “would you prefer two days off per week with current access to goods and services, or have more days off with reduced access to goods and services”. Of course, there may come along technological innovations that change this in some ways, and there are studies showing that a lot of people can be sufficiently productive on a four-day work week. On a society level, I still think the point stands as an overall tradeoff we need to consider when talking about whether we should reduce the work-week.
My point is that it’s not just a “capitalists are bad, and we’re owed more free time” thing. If we produce less, then goods and services become scarcer for everyone. I would say the distribution of wealth in society, and how it’s shifted the past 20-50 years is more concerning than the fact that we’re working the same hours as we were 20-50 years ago.
However, a decrease in productivity means that stuff like clothes, transport, food, IT services, and pretty much everything you can think of that someone has to produce becomes more scarce.
Would not having 30 dresses make you unhappier, if you have time to spend doing things you enjoy instead of consumption being the only thing you have to show for all the time you spend at work?
How much transportation is actually what we need for living and how much is induced by being forced to go to work?
Food has the amazing ability to just grow with limited human intervention, so there is no reason to assume a reduction in food availability. Also with more free time people could tend to a small garden for some of their food more easily.
IT services… You are on a platform run by volunteers in their free time. More free time would mean more of such services available.
Capitalism has outpaced “intrinsic” consumption since at least a hundred years in the industrialized nations. Most consumption is induced by advertisment and social pressure manipulating us to consume more, so we work more, so we consume more, so the rich can extract more wealth in every cycle for themselves. You cannot separate wealth distribution, scarcity and work time from each other.
For the average people i’d wager the available goods and services wouldn’t change much, as the people who make goods and services exclusive to the super rich like yachts would be producing other goods instead.
Briefly, we can collectively choose to work four, three, or even two days a week, despite seeing a decrease in overall productivity.
Or we can collectively choose to never shorten the work week while productivity continues to outpace wages forever. Which is what republicans and centrist democrats both want.
You seem to agree with my last point, which was that
the distribution of wealth in society, and how it’s shifted the past 20-50 years is more concerning
That is: The major problem we have today is that the increase in production we’ve seen the past 20-50 years has primarily benefited the wealthy. This needs to change. Once we have decent wealth distribution, we can make an informed decision on whether we want to reduce our total productivity in order to have more free time.
Once we have decent wealth distribution, we can make an informed decision on whether we want to reduce our total productivity in order to have more free time.
And since that will have its own set of prerequisites that centrists will work with republicans to block, we’ll keep on as we are, with productivity outpacing wages forever.
Most jobs I’ve ever had haven’t been about creating anything used directly by a normal person, they’ve been about optimizing things in ways that squeeze maximum profit for billionaires. I don’t think I’m alone, especially in the developed world.
A 3 day work week maintains the same level of productivity and makes people happier.
What’s the argument for a 2 day work week?
My reading of their argument is that when the 5 day a week, 40 hour work week began there was a specific level of productivity. As technology increased the output increased. If we believe that recent increases make it so that we only need to work 4 days to maintain our current output, we should be owed 3 days because by the same logic long ago we should’ve dropped to 4.
I would assume that there’s a balance to this. At some point the reduction of hours will result in a loss in productivity. You can do 5 days of work in 4 days if you’re better rested and more focused, but this might be less true in 3 days. I mean if studies show that there’s isn’t a dip productivity and that it improves well being, then sure, that would be great but I think it’s likely than a 4 day work week.
when the 5 day a week, 40 hour work week began there was a specific level of productivity. As technology increased the output increased.
Exactly, so following this argument, we can choose between living at our current (increased) productivity level (40 hour weeks), or trading off the technological advancements for more spare time at the cost of going back to the productivity level we had previously.
I won’t argue for which of these two is “correct”, I think the tradeoff between free time vs. more access to goods and services is considered very differently by different people. However, I do think that a major problem we’re facing today is that the increased productivity we’ve had the past 50 years due to technological advances has benefited the wealthy far too much, at the expense of everyone else.
I think it’s more fruitful to first try to take care of the wealth distribution, such that we can actually see the quality of life our current productivity level can give everyone. Then we can make an informed choice regarding whether we want to reduce the productivity in exchange for more free time.
I think the argument would be that the productivity gains that have happened since the 5 day work week was implemented means that if we want that same level of productivity then a 3 day work week would get that. It would be less productive then currently but the argument would be that a lot of that productivity is just going towards the profits of the companies through having to hire less people. Instead if you wanted to maintain current productivity with a 3 day work week you’d have to hire more people which is good with the amount of wealth transfer and inequality that’s been happening.
Edit: not to mention how bad the job market has been recently as well.
studiespilot projects, and successful ones. Productivity is even higher.https://autonomy.work/portfolio/uk4dwpilotresults/
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230319-four-day-workweek-trial-the-firms-where-it-didnt-work
https://www.sap.com/israel/blogs/the-four-day-workweek-paradox
Imagine being rich as fuck because you’re working 6 days a week instead of still barely making ends meet.
We should already be on a fucking 3 day with increased pay with how much productivity has gone up, instead we’re just getting ass raped harder and harder while rich assholes keep getting richer and richer with no end in sight.
No, you don’t undestand 😡
One day I’ll be a billionaire too and I can be the one that ass rapes others 😎
Tap for spoiler
/s
I read the following sentence a day ago and it’s stuck with me:
We europeans shouldn’t laugh at the suffering of the American people, just because we get fucked in the ass with slightly more lube.
12.2% of US workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. In Europe the lowest rate is Greece at 14.2%, but most other countries are much, much higher. Right-wing Hungary is at 21.8%. Bend-over-backwards-for-US-tech-companies Ireland is at 34%. The home of the bankers, Switzerland, is at 45%. No other European country is below 50%, and the biggest economies France is at 98%, Germany is at 80% and Italy is at 100%.
Europeans may not be fully satisfied with the balance of power between corporations and workers. But, it is doing so much better than the US.
Wait until automated freight delivery services (from trains and trucks down to little carrier bots) kill about a third of the jobs that exist.
In ten years people would be working less than twelve hours a week, but rich and powerful people will not give up a jot or penny of wealth and power.
Look at the rust belt to see our futures.
Is that a Reynolds reference?
You can’t resist technology, it will ALWAYS win. Economies always strive to be more efficient, and people will always gravitate towards the convenience of efficiency. Because of this, new technologies get adopted all the time, and economies evolve with them.
Think about computers for a second. How many jobs have they created that didn’t exist 50 years ago? There were no online retailers or social media managers or youtubers or software engineers back then. These are all new jobs that were created recently, and they dominate our economy. Even traditional jobs that didn’t use computers before like an accountant, lawyer, or doctor do now because these are powerful tools.
But it’s not just computers, the same thing happened with the television, the radio, the telegraph, cars, trains, even light bulbs. Before, electric street lamps became a thing, cities used to hire lamplighters who would go around the streets lighting and extinguishing gas lamps. When electric street lamps started being adopted a lot of people complained about how this new technology is going to automate away jobs and hurt the economy… but it didn’t.
Instead, the economy specialized and people created new businesses and took on new jobs. The same thing will happen here. It’s simply going be the next major thing to evolve the economy, and we will adopt it and adapt to it just like the many different technologies before it.
There has been a study done in 1970 called The Limits to Growth that predicted that exponential economic growth would come to a halt necessarily, because you cannot have infinite growth in a finite system. It took many decades more than predicted, but I suspect that we’re actually at this point now.
Workplaces mostly exist nowadays to grow the economy. It takes rather little work to maintain the world nowadays. That is why we’re facing a declining demand in human labor.
Since the labor market is a free market, it is regulated by Supply and Demand. That means, if supply is high, prices drop; if demand is high, prices rise. On the labor market, that means that a declining demand for human labor leads to lower prices for that labor, a.k.a. wages.
That is the crisis that the US is currently facing: Declining wages, a.k.a. inflation, a.k.a. Cost of Living crisis.
That crisis cannot be tackled by technology alone. We need socialism, i.e. the basic decency to treat humans well because humans deserve to be treated well; independent of economic output.
That is what i’m advocating for: UBI (Universal Basic Income), which means that everybody gets enough resources to live.
However, that UBI has to be financed somehow. Printing new money doesn’t work because it leads to hyperinflation. So, the money must be collected through taxes. It is straightforward that only the rich can pay these taxes, because they are the only one who has a lot of money to actually give.
To end this article, i’d like to point out that further economic growth is not possible inside Earth’s limited space, but it is possible in outer space, because there’s infinite space above. Humans just have to go there.
The problem comes when those technological innovations increase productivity which companies use solely to increase their bottom line. These innovations should be benefitting workers directly.
Outside of that a lot of your argument rests on the idea that there will always be new better jobs for humans to move into. However even the examples you gave aren’t great. How is someone doing manufacturing or transportation or extinguishing the street lights going to suddenly become a computer programmer? Especially considering how atleast in the US you’d have to pay to go to college to do that. And even then we’ve started to see in recent years a lot of these new “high demand” jobs getting saturated. As time goes on and companies use productivity gains to purely to benefit their profits they’re gonna lay off more people and new jobs from new technologies aren’t going to be able to keep up.
Nobody is arguing that technology won’t progress. Even Marx defends that as a precondition for socialism/communism.
The question is the following. Tomorrow a ground breaking technology is developed that makes literally everyone twice as productive. (Please let’s ignore the technical aspect of this. I’m simplifying for the sake of the argument, but this is happening at some paces everywhere).
Now you have 3 options:
- Everyone can just work half the time for the same productivity. I.e. the economy can sustain itself with people just working less (which is a MAJOR quality of life increase).
- Everyone works the same amount of time but their salaries double.
- Everyone works the same amount of time. Their salaries increase a small %, perhaps keeping up with inflation, perhaps a tiny bit more than that, sometimes even not keeping up with inflation. The added productivity results in increased wealth aggregation at the top.
Number 1 is what people are talking about in this thread.
Number 2 won’t happen because salaries aren’t actually tied to productivity. Productivity just sets a higher limit on salary that in any case is never reached. The salaries are actually determined by competition between workers.
Number 3. Has been happening since the seventies and will continue to happen.
I agree that we’ve been doing number 3 for decades. Sooner or later that has to lead to a revolution though right?
But we’re talking about different things though. I don’t disagree with the notion that the work week should decrease or that people should get more based on their production. We’re in total agreement here. I’m arguing that automation is going to bring about the apocalypse like the person I replied to implied because history shows us that this wasn’t the case when similar situations arose in the past. Technology does progress, the economy does evolve, old jobs and industries do die out, and people do lose their jobs because of it. But what is also true at the same time is that new jobs and industries do get created because of the new technology, and the people who lose their jobs do adapt and end up getting new roles that utilize their skill sets. People who get laid off don’t become forever useless, people aren’t that rigid.
Yes new jobs will be created but more and more wealth is concentrated at the top
It’s not the apocalypse but it’s also not not bad in many ways.
Technological progress should only be a good thing but in a capitalist society like ours it has a lot of downsides too (for the majority of the population ofc)
But this isn’t an issue of technology or economic progress, but of politics. These are two different discussions. Jobs being automated away isn’t new nor is it going away. It’s simply a part of the evolution of economies. The issues we have stem from a flawed political system that’s not doing it’s job.
For our system to work as intended, we need to have a robust democratically elected government that proactively regulates the economy on the behalf of the people to protect consumers, the environment, and the health of the economy. This is one of the fingers of the invisible hand. A government is supposed to break up monopolies, ban deceptive and predatory practices, protect consumers from harmful products, make sure that businesses don’t pollute the environment, protect workers from exploitation, and so on. In other capitalist countries like Sweden, Germany, and Ireland they have this, we don’t… at least not anymore.
The reason for this is because there’s no accountability in our government anymore. No politician faces any consequences no matter the crime or controversy. Our public officials no longer fear the public, and this type of unchecked power allows them to be corrupt because they know they can get away with it. They have lost any incentive to do their job of holding bad actors in the country accountable and instead started doing their bidding (like endless deregulation and tax cuts for the rich). That’s the root of our issue, and blaming AI for it is just silly.
First I’m not from the US
Second, yes ofc it’s politics. Nobody is disagreeing on that.
Third even in Europe this is becoming a problem even if the inequality gap doesn’t grow as fast
You’re correct that this has always been the case in the past.
Advances in technology free people up to do other productive things.
I imagine that trend may stop some time, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
Heck. This should have happened in the 80’s.
Instead we got trickled on.
Get ready for more. We have the golden dome coming.
The forecast is sunny with a 100% chance of golden showers
Fucking clown of an actors was the most destructive US president to the planet, we still suffer the impact all over the world. The horror we have today is the evolution of the foundation he built.
1880s. Industrial revolution.
It did, for a select few. Less than four days, even. You just had to be one of the finance sector aristocrats who laid claim to enough passive rents.
“Technology is gonna work to improve us, not just the people who own the technology and the CEOs of large corporations,” Sanders said. “You are a worker, your productivity is increasing because we give you AI, right? Instead of throwing you out on the street, I’m gonna reduce your work week to 32 hours.”
0% chance this wouldn’t also come with a 20% pay cut.
40% pay cut, those server farms are expensive
Sure, but that’s not what’s being discussed. Sanders is saying people deserve a 4 day work week at full pay.
Anyone can negotiate a 4 day work week for a 20% paycut. That’s not worth public figures time to discuss.
I’ve had a difficult time negotiating this as an American mechanical engineer. There’s this bizarre norm of working long weeks even though we get paid way more than most jobs.
I just want health care and they won’t offer it at 32 hours. If I’m missing some obvious trick here, please inform me!
I just want health care […] If I’m missing some obvious trick here, please inform me!
Move out of the US?
it’s almost as if the US is a shitty place to live O:
Except even with a 20% pat cut it might still be hard to get because any amount of personal time threatens your dedication to their profits.
If productivity increases by x% they are going to fire x% of the workforce and give the saved money to themselves.
Or more realistically, they fire x+5 percent, just to see if you work slaves can’t be worked a bit harder.
Does anyone here actually see productivity improvements to their roles from using AI?
I’m a telecoms engineer and I see limited use cases in my role for AI. If I need to process data then I need something that can do math reliably. For document generation I can only reliably get it to build out a structure and even then I’ve more than likely got an existing document the I can use as a structure template.
Network design, system specification and project engineering are all so specific to the use case and have so few examples provided in public data sets that anything AI outputs is usually nonsense.
Am I missing some use cases here?
Also, if you do see productivity improvements from AI, why would you tell your employer? They want a 5 day working week but they know what they expect to be achieved in that week, so that’s what they get.
Yes.
Document that code I wrote 7 years ago, suggest any security or efficiency changes. It’s surprisingly adept at that.
Give me the changes to NixOS 25.05 configuration.nix to add wadroid. Fails with an error, paste the error back into prompt. Oh, you need these kernel modules that are no longer default as of 25.05 make this change. Different error paste it back, Make this one last change and then reboot. It works. I spent a total of 5 minutes on it. If I were just using Google and screwing around that might have been half a morning.
OBS is giving me a pixel resolution warning. AI: it’s one of your cameras or some media you’ve added in an unsupported format. Give me a quick shell script to run through all of my media directories in this tree and convert all the MP4 video that’s yuv720 to a supported format in new tree so I can swap them out in the end with no risk. 30 seconds later it’s there. Yes, I can write that but I’m not going to have it done in 30 seconds. And if one of the files errors I just shove the error right back in the AI. I don’t personally care why one in 50 images failed I just want them to be converted and I’m far enough along and Dunning Kruger scale that I honestly don’t really care about what I don’t know as long as I can learn a little more and still get the job done.
Give me a python script to go through a file full of URLs and verify the SSL key expiration dates. Have a variable for how far the future to alert and then slack me a message at 10:00 a.m. everyday which URLs and IPs are expiring earlier than that variable. Also a bunch of the IPs don’t resolve to external addresses so you’re going to have to fake the calls to check them. Here’s my slack token in the channel name.
3 minute project
It doesn’t do my job for me but it gets rid of a hell of a lot of tech debt that I’ll never get around to. I won’t give it monolithic complicated jobs because it’s not good at it. But I will absolutely tell it to make me a flask app with stubs for half a dozen features. Or give it the source for a shitty old admin web page and ask it to modernize the CSS and add session logins.
Sure, if I’m not watching it it might do something relatively stupid. But honestly it has about the same odds of catching something I did years ago that was relatively stupid and telling me to fix it.
Does anyone here actually see productivity improvements to their roles from using AI?
Unless you’re a scammer or a spammer, the answer is legitimately “No”.
My gut feeling, based on the kind of repetitive nonsense I see them produce and bang on about, is that a lot of management types see AI efficiency because the work they do is repetitive and easily aided by AI input so they assume everything can be improved by it.
Not to say I don’t see the benefits of a good manager, I just don’t think they are that common.
I do. Part of my job involves writing code and I often don’t even know where to start. When I get the first draft I’ll know which documentation to read, and then I make it actually work. Even when the LLM fails completely, writing its prompt serves as a rubber duck.
So do you frame the problem to the LLM, get it to spit out an example piece of code and then run through that initial attempt to get an idea of how to approach the problem? Kind of like prototyping the problem?
I take it you find that more efficient than traditional code planning methods? Or do you then start building flow charts/pseudo code from that prototype and confirm the logic to build more readable or efficient code?
Claude can spit out powershell scripts up to like, 400 or 500 lines without errors or with minimal, easily debugged errors. Adds things like error correction, colored text, user interaction, comments the code pretty well. Saves me hours every time I fire it up, so that I can in turn save myself dozens of hours with the scripts themselves.
But as far as I tell my boss, there is no AI use, and that’s how we’re keeping that for now/indefinitely
you see, for programming, AI achieved what SQL tried to do with database queries: programming by just telling the computer what you want and the computer figures out the how.
the catch is that human language is imprecise, so if you don’t know how to review what the AI produced, the AI might have written a script to wipe your data in the computer and you don’t even know until you run it and it is too late
The other day it spit out a five line piece of code, except, critically, it had used “archived” where it should have used “received”. Small word difference, huge functionality difference.
It absolutely does help, but we’re gonna have a couple whole new classes of copy/paste errors.
Makes me wonder what an LLM trained in lojban would accomplish.
So you’re sharing your data with third parties and relinquishing code copyright without telling your boss?
I find it useful for correcting my syntax (when it’s correct 😂) for certain networking devices. I touch so many vendors it’s not always one I can remember all the commands for.
It’s kinda become a Google replacement for me.
I have found certain areas it’s weak and I know when to quit when I’m ahead and it just agrees with me and spits out more incorrect info when I call it out.
Also when are we going to hit an AI feedback loop? 😅
I find the AI summary can be helpful when searching, but also not much more helpful than a summary of the first few search results which are mostly only loosely related paid for advertising …
I feel like AI is just going to end up replacing interns or entry level people, it can do easy tasks that would take a while by hand to do. Which based on how bad the job market seems to have been for people like me just trying to enter it somewhat makes sense.
Charmingly naive thinking the oligarchs will ever be happy with the level of production they get in return for less and less of their wealth.
3-day by now. 4-day was due before AI, so why would this great boost not make the difference?
Most of my jobs expect higher output over the same duration.
So…yeah.
Nah, the top 0.1% will just pocket 90% of the fruits of that extra productivity and the top 10% the remaining 10%.
The rest will either be fired or asked to do the part of the work those who were fired did for the same pay.
No, personal computers made us productive enough for a 4 day work week. We’re down to like 24 hours per week now. I think many would enjoy four 6-hour days, while others may prefer three 8-hour days. And a rare few might want to work two 12-hour shifts.
Honestly, there’s probably a lot of people actually working these shorter weeks to get their productive work done but just being forced to sit at a desk for the full 40. Office Space’s “15 minutes of real work each day” didn’t come from no where.
But think of the productivity if we had AI and a 7 day workweek! /s
They have AI, we have the “right to work”… for minimum wage 😞
I’m still waiting for self checkout, airport self service check-in, automated answer services for credit cards, and computerized healthcare systems to make food, airplane tickets, consumer goods, and healthcare less expensive.
And I feel like I’ve been waiting a while…
Computerisation, the paperless office etc all were supposed to generate better quality of life for workers. It was how it was sold. The reality is that staff numbers were reduced with work and competitive pressures increasing rates of stress and depression.
but then shareholders?
