Finland's Prime Minister Suggests a Four-Day Workweek and Six-Hour Days
inc.comThis is partly untrue.
PM Marin has proposed this idea as "utopia" in August 2019. When she presented this vision, she was not yet PM.
Additionally, she proposed 6 hour work-day OR 4 work-day week, not AND.
It is kind of weird that here in Finland this was "nice idea, but probably problematic to implement" when this was on the news in August. And now it pops out in not-so-respected news media like this.
When I was a nerdy teenager I imagined that by a date like 2020 humankind would have cured cancer, built a base on the Moon or Mars, eradicated infectious diseases and taken control over climate and weather. It turns out that in the real world progress is a lot slower than in the imagination of a sci-fi-imbued teenager. It turns out that solving problems takes work. A lot of it.
If people work less, especially if engineers, scientists, doctors etc work less, then technological progress will be taking place slower than it is currently. The disappointment of my teenage self with 2030 will then be even greater than that with 2020.
I'm genuinely puzzled by the general anti-work sentiment I perceive on HN (maybe my perception is simply incorrect). I'd expect that most folks here work as engineers or in a similar field that rewards with interesting and meaningful problems and that a substantial fraction had once been sci-fi-imbued teenagers like myself and possibly feel the same disappointment with the pace of technological progress.
I'm very worried that the anti-work movement is (inadvertently?) pushing on the breaks of technological progress :-(
but what percentage of the workforce is actually working in jobs related to solving these problems?
i'd argue that the "anti-work" sentiment here is more to do with lack of fulfillment due to an epidemic of bullshit jobs, rather than not wanting to work.
Well up until recently I spent 9-10 hours a day programming machines that turned mountains into countertops and fireplace and such for rich people. Every day I kind of made the world worse to make some rich people happy. I mean there was one day we took a slab of 10 million year old fossils cut from the bottom of the ocean and made it into a counter. This arguably does not improve the world.
4 day weeks or 6 hour days would have been pretty awesome, I could have likely been more productive in life things.
My new job is also nothing world changing, though probably marginally more beneficial to more people and less environmentally damaging, but the lack of 6, nine hour day weeks makes it more appealing in many ways.
Though, I'm kind of torn, because I find the actual work less fulfilling and enjoyable, but having time is nice.
do you think its possible to find a job so full-filling it does not feel like a job?
in my years of money work, i contributed to pollution, sugar addiction, advertising, the financial crisis, general environmental destruction, etc. i would have done more good sitting on my hands.
Do you think working more would get us to that place? Purely from an hourly perspective, we're already working 'more'. Way more than the technological progress would allow us to focus on the problems that you mentioned. The problem IMO is who benefits from the extra value produced by that work. Unfortunately it's not society.
The anti-work movement is not 'anti-work' in general. It's anti-meaningless degrading work which allows me to make ends meet while enabling a small number of people to become unbelievably rich.
This book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs outlines some of the issues you mentioned. Technological advancement allowed for a lot of jobs to disappear which should theoretically allow us to have more leisure time or time invested in other directions. However, we need to keep 'the machine' going, so..
Most people in Silicon Valley working long hours are not toiling for missions remotely related to those utopian visions.
Maybe. I'd suggest that it can difficult to tell exactly what advancement brings us closer to "Utopia." Everyone easily accpets the idea that basic research can have long term effects in unpredictable ways. I'd suggest that some trivial commercial advancements can do the same thing.
>possibly feel the same disappointment with the pace of technological progress.
If anything, people should be disappointed at the technological progress that has received priority over others.
Personally I'm aghast at the pace of "technological progress" due to the direction it is going in.
Some people believe that we'd be more efficient if we work 30 hours a week instead of 40+.
If this were really true, you’d expect to see most people with full freedom to set their own hours gravitate towards that 30-hour mark.
Professors working 30-hour weeks would write more papers than their harder-working colleagues. Business owners would show up for 30 hours a week and go home. Fruit pickers, paid by the bucket, would pick more fruit in 30 hours than their colleagues could pick in 50. Professional athletes who spent less time training would beat their harder-working competitors.
It's an idea that's only recently begun gathering research:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/294545
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13318990
https://www.brinknews.com/working-fewer-hours-makes-you-more...
> Professors working 30-hour weeks
This is gated by the fact that teaching even a single class well is almost a 40-hour a week job by itself.
Most people probably aren’t willing to sacrifice themselves for the possible slight advancement of mankind. Especially laborers who are the ones most affected by work time limits.
In doubt it. Most jobs are operations or a function that is mostly hours applied to complete tasks, not product development.
Reducing working hours would likely improve output and employment.
what have you done to move progress along? i'd bet dollars to donuts you have been too busy earning money doing useless shit like advertising, finance, or entertainment, a net negative for everyone, and jerking off to mainstream media on your own time. no offense. i did it too for about 15 years.
on the other hand, it gives motivated people enough free time to tackle difficult problems that they're interested in.
A six hour day is plenty if you actually work and if you have a bit of discipline. Most people don't. They spend much of their day just goofing off - wasting their own time and often the time of their coworkers.
I bet most of you reading this do not spend 8-10-12 or whatever number of hours you claim to be at work actually working productively. You goof off often as much as half the time. Possibly more if you work for someone else.
_Work_ when you are at work.
If you are not actually working or if you are tired and unfocused: go home. If you are disciplined about this you will outperform those who spend more hours at work _easily_.
>They spend much of their day just goofing off - wasting their own time and often the time of their coworkers.
This is why a world where everyone is an independent contractor feels...right.
I don't know how you could implement it properly, but from a high level it works: work when you want to, take holidays when you want to, move around. There's no such thing as "businesses will take advantage of workers though!" because everyone is a business. Screw enough people and no one will work with you.
Of course, for this to work you'd need a universal safety net or UBI...
I've been an independent contractor a few periods of my life and if you bill by the hour, that changes the dynamics a bit. You become focused on hours and not what you produce. Doing stuff for fixed price is risky too since it requires you to nail estimates pretty well to avoid ending up with a low effective hourly rate (or screwing your customer).
My solution was to charge by the day. You pay me a fixed price for every day I work on your project. Some days I may work 4 hours, other days I may work 15 hours. But it provides me with more flexibility and, at least in my experience, it is easier to end up with a fair price (as long as you don't try to take advantage of the customer).
I actually stumbled across this solution. My initial motivation was to reduce the amount of pointless accounting work. But I eventually discovered that this had other benefits.
I have a team of programmers working for me (full time, fixed salary) and they all manage their own time and their own projects. If they need to take a week off because they feel tired, they just need to let me know. And I trust them to act responsibly. As long as we deliver what we have promised, I don't care if people take more time off than their contractually stipulated paid vacation. The only time I may step in is if they do not take time off. (Actually, in Norway, you can get in trouble if your people don't take at least some minimum amount of time off.)
And I think the results speak for themselves. I'd be hard pressed to find a team that is more productive in my company. We easily outpace other teams by a factor of 2-3 in terms of productivity within a company of about 25-30k employees.
There are, of course, multiple reasons for the high productivity - not only the fact that I don't interfere with how individuals manage their time. I think one important reason is that I often hire people who are older than the average developer. My people are probably 40 years or above on average. One of my most productive people is in his mid 50s. I think the reason the holder people on my team are faster is because they're more experienced, and in particular, they have more experience in attacking problems that they have never been exposed to before. (And that's what 90% of the work we do consists of).
I wonder what a plausible model for productivity by hours work is, and whether it varies by occupation.
Especially for piecemeal labor, after getting to the point where you maintain your baseline level of skill (say, 10 hours/week?), it seems like each marginal hour will have less productivity than the previous. It probably never drops to negative, unless we're talking 80 hour weeks.
It's less clear to me that the same is true of so-called knowledge workers. Or, at least, the baseline is much higher. My bet would be that an engineer who only works 10 hours/week is going to be less productive, on an hourly basis, than one who works 20 hours/week. I'm not sure what the inflection point would be, though.
I think a better model would be having a year or two of relatively long workweeks (40 hours a week) to be followed by a year or two of vacation and education, instead of 20 hours/week consistently.
Another approach would be decreasing the retirement age. I'm less a fan of this, as too many people end up depressed and lost after they leave the workforce. Plus, it's a raw deal for people who die before they retire.
How is a lowered retirement age a raw deal for people who die before they retire?
Not the poster nor am I endorsing this, just explaining it. Everyone who works full time would benefit from a shorter work week. Only people who live to retire benefit from a lower retirement age. So if you're considering the two policies as alternatives, then one is definitely a raw deal for people who die early. Given relatively few people die after starting to work full time but before retirement age, I don't think that's the issue with this proposal.
Ah, ok, I understand this. Yes, as an alternative to other policies to make people's lives of mandatory toil better, I see the raw deal for some of doing nothing other than lowering retirement age. (Of course, I'm a "Why not both?" guy.)
I'm possibly going to go against the grain here but I'll speak my truth...6 hours honestly feels like too little time and isn't necessarily something to celebrate.
If I only worked for 6 hours and 4 days I'd lose my mind. I've tried it and I didn't like it one bit. May be that's just me but I enjoy my work so much I wish there were 25 hours.
You seriously enjoy your work so much that you don't have anything you would rather be doing? Not even a side project? You must be working on the coolest thing ever.
I work for myself as a mobile and wed dev so I have my clients who pay my bills and several apps I'm working on in parallel.
The number of hours you volunteer to put into working for yourself is, frankly, completely irrelevant to the issue of hours demanded by a boss from their employees, who surely have things in their life they'd rather be doing with their time. Using the former as a way to argue that the latter should be kept high is an uncharitable mentality.
If you are a programmer and your boss demands hours from you rather than results, your boss has no idea what she/he is doing.
If you've run a business you'd know that the hours demanded by a boss are far less than those required to be successful as an enterprise owner. I've been in both worlds and it isn't easier because you own the business.
It's all work at the end of the day and it is not easy. It's hard but we get to choose the direction our life takes while weighing the costs, benefits and risks involved.
> It's hard but we get to choose ...
This is the crux of a state mandated shorter work week.
In Australia, the default is between 35 and 40 hours, 5 days a week.
Some people work more hours, some fewer. A proposal to change the standard wouldn't affect that arrangement.
People who enjoy working longer hours, say for a pursuit they enjoy or endorse, or like you to build up their own wealth at a much faster rate, likely wouldn't be affected by such a policy change.
I do hope you're not suggesting that your personal preferences should inform proposed policy changes like this?
> I work for myself as a mobile and wed dev
This issues is about proletarian labor (rented by a capitalist in an employment relation) not petit bourgeois labor (applied to one’s own capital in an independent business.)
Servile and self-directed labor aren't the same thing.
Couldn't you work 6 hours "for the man", and then work on a project of your own choosing, for whatever reason you wanted? (a side project, the next unicorn, some spare cash, something OSS, something for charity, or just because)
It's exactly what I do, but I suspect that the spirit of this 6 hour initiative isn't necessarily in line with what you're alluding to but rather the idea that working less hours is better for all of us. Correct me if I'm wrong about this.
I think perhaps you're reading too much into what was a non-sarcastic comment? I genuinely mean I haven't come across a widespread (or existent) official 6-hour working day in Scandinavia.
In Norway at least, it's true that lots of people finish work relatively early - but only because they start work really early (6-7am)!
Gah, sorry, I replied to the wrong comment, and can't delete it now!
Gotcha!
I had searched for the sarcasm in previous comments in our thread to no avail!
I wasn’t alive when the work week was shortened to 5 days from 6 but it is my understanding that the conversation this sort of a proposal Sparks is the exact same as that proposal back then did. It’s kind of amusing.
” Perhaps following the lead of other Scandinavian countries, where a six-hour workday is common.” Not in Sweden. 40h per week here means fulltime.
I've worked primarily with Norwegians for most of my working like, but have also worked in projects in Sweden, Denmark and Finland - I've never come across this mythical 6-hour workday?
I don't know where they got that idea from, both in Denmark and Norway it isn't like that at all in most places. The grass is greener I guess.
Nobody has six hour workday and nobody thinks anybody has that. It’s only in the imagination of the writer of this marginally factual article.
I don't think it should be assumed that less time at work is necessarily preferable. What will people do with all their additional spare time? Sure, they might spend their days learning art, history, philosophy. They might take up writing poetry, painting or learning the piano. Or, they might vegetate in front of the TV, take up drinking as a hobby, argue with strangers online and slowly decay into existential nihilism.
The devil will make work for idle hands.
That's their choice. That's their life to do with as they wish.
One can just as well "vegetate" as an employee to a boss; indeed, we know that the nature of the current work setup is such that many come home drained from work all day, sit in front of the TV, take up drinking as a hobby, argue with strangers online (see me, now), decay into nihilism, etc, all the same.
The purpose of life isn't to work; the purpose of life is the other things, the fun and play.
It's true there are innumerable variables at play here. The nature of the work is a huge factor as well. It's probably futile to try and come up with a general rule of thumb. It could be that people already have too much spare time on their hands which is not being filled with meaningful endeavour. It's also undoubtedly the case that many peoples working hours are not filled with meaningful endeavour either.
Thank you for telling me the purpose of life in a very matter-of-fact way. I think you would find a lot of people who would find your assertion extremely debatable. To be frank, I pity anyone who thinks the purpose of their life is to have fun.
Well, the devil doesn't exist, but I think I get your allusion.
If you go back a century, people in Britain, Europe, USA, Australia etc were probably working 70 hours a week.
If you asked a random selection of people in those countries now if they think we should all move back to that figure as a standard work week -- you know, to save society from itself -- I'm guessing you wouldn't get a lot of support.
That's true of course, and I'm not saying that more work is necessarily more desirable any more than I'm saying that less work is necessarily desirable. My point is that the premise of the article assumes that spending less time at work is automatically better, and I would challenge that premise.
Why? (Serious question.)
It seems to me that the common (Western) standard of ~ 40 hours a week is something we inherited a generation or two ago, and consequently is considered to be normal, average, ideal, expected, realistic, fair, reasonable, etc.
As noted, societies have previously had very different norms which have been changed without societal collapse.
Applying the scientific method to the ~40-hour assumption is something we should, as rational actors, embrace. What few experiments conducted so far suggest at least some positive outcomes, but more importantly indicate more experiments are worthwhile.
Personally, submitting to 5 x 8 hours a week, 11 months a year, repeat until I'm too old to continue (or indeed to anything else) just because that's what dad did, isn't a compelling case.
Yes, we should be working 10 or 12 hour days, you never know when the devil will leap in.
What we really need to do is enforce the separation of church and state and keep the religious arguments out of political debate.
It's not a religious argument by any means. It's a common idiom which means that "if people don't have anything to do with their time, they are more likely to get involved in trouble and criminality." (see https://www.usingenglish.com/reference/idioms/devil+finds+wo...).
but it does come from the religious / patriarchal mind set of a bygone era. I would put it to you that the devil find work for idle hands who have no money.
If this was true then why aren't the prisons full of retirees? - because they have money and so can afford to occupy their time.
It's time to remove these trite sayings from the public discourse imho they add nothing to an argument.
John Maynard Keynes published an interesting paper in 1930. "Economic possibilities for our grand children"
He also said that in the long run we are all dead so I'm not sure I'd trust him to have the best interests of our 'grandchildren' at heart.
Well he’s not wrong. We’re all dead at the end.
What is your impression of mortality?
Do you honestly believe that he meant it in a literal sense? You as well as I know that he meant it would be better to emphasize on short term plans as opposed to long term plans. It is simply a question of time preference and I'm simply saying that he would therefore not be best placed to make plans for our grandchildren. He'd be inclined optimize for the present as opposed to the future especially when we're resource constrained as we often are.
Do you honestly believe Keynes' point with this pithy aphorism was that short-term plans are always superior to long-term plans? The fuller quote is "But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.". He was pushing back on the use of a theory of long-term economic equilibrium in predicting day-to-day conditions, not expressing a preference to screw one's grandchildren over for present gains.
Why not leave people work as much as they want if they agree with their employees?
Most people don’t have any leverage for these kinds of negotiations and would fairly likely get shafted if there were no laws to protect them
Do you mean they cannot ponder how much money they need to?
Just looking over her Wikipedia article it's not clear to me she's ever been involved in managing a business.
This is exactly my point. I honestly don't know how anything would ever get done with this kind of attitude. I'm not saying that we should overwork our labor force but what we have now seems fairly optimal.
>but what we have now seems fairly optimal.
Based on what? The 40 hour work week is entirely artificial and came around at a time when people had shorter commutes and could afford to feed, cloth and educate a family on a single income.
Now people are churning out 40 hours a week, mostly in dual income homes, and a vast amount of people are struggling to put food on the table, clothes on themselves and their kids and a roof over their heads even here in the developed West.
What is optimal about it is that we've all been coerced to do the same amount of hours, give or take, and therefore your competition will be putting in the same amount of hours, give or take.
Meanwhile people are taking far longer to get to their place of work, often sacrificing lunches or eating in isolation, and then dragging themselves home to do the basic chores required of keeping a home for themselves. Add in kids and most are exhausted.
So what, except for the benefit of business owners, is optimal about this situation?
I'm no socialist looking for a handout here, but as times changes and the circumstances with them, society should change and adapt with it and not cling to relics of a by-gone era that were created to optimize life in a time we can barely relate to now.
Do you manage people?
Area capitalist opposes increased rights for labor
I've been a laborer too so I'm not arguing against laborers' rights. Labor and capital are symbiotic; one without the other would not function as efficiently as they do now.
We're doing okay with what we have is all I'm saying. Perpetually being in a state of revolution doesn't help anyone especially when things are going great. 40 hours seems fair to me; 24 hours doesn't.
I'm hard pressed to believe work would get completed in such a short time. We'd all be poorer for it.
Depends on the work.
Based on experience I would rather have a happy, well-rested developer working for me who is aching to get to work in the morning and who has the brains to leave for home as soon as he or she feels tired or unfocused. If that happens at 2pm or 4pm, I don't actually care. If people are still at the office at 6pm, or if I see people are tired, unfocused or are only goofing off, I ask them to go home.
To the degree that I care about the hours they work I only care if they spend too long doing something (they're stuck and need help perhaps?) or if they work too many hours (they'll write shit code we have to fix later so I get to pay for it 2-4 times over).
Makes total sense to have a worker well rested and happy (40 hours does that sufficiently well). Your submission works if it is a task such as programming. A programmer can finish their week's tasks in 3 days or less and you'd be fine with that. That's not most programmers though.
Moreover, I have had other businesses where the time you pay for as an employer totally matters if you're to get an ROI.
If I need you for 8 hours a day and there's an amount we've agreed on as compensation, then that's exactly what I need.
It doesn't really work if for instance it is a restaurant and you need to have waiters, dishwashers and cooks round the clock as patrons visit your establishment.
If they'd rather work fewer hours and get less money, who am I to argue? I'm just saying they'll be poorer for it and contrary to what you posited, they won't be too happy about it either.
I think the reason most programmers are relatively unproductive is that they don't step away when they are not being productive. Stepping away from work when you are not performing well has (at least) two positive effects. One is that you get some rest. The other is that the change of context is good for problem solving. It helps to go home and do something else while at the back of your mind you are still trying to solve problems. I try to avoid just hanging around the office when I'm kind of half stuck or fully stuck. Because I'm not really all that productive.
Programming really isn't about hours but about the quality of those hours.
For manual labor things are of course entirely different. But I'm not talking about manual labor.
(Of course, in some companies, programming is seen as a kind of manual labor where people naively assume that hours spent working translates in some linear fashion. To quote something an executive at a large company said in a meeting: "I don't understand how there can be more productive programmers and less productive...they're just writing code, right? So any developer is interchangeable with any other, right?".)
> they don't step away when they are not being productive
I agree that taking breaks is definitely a good thing. The brain can only handle so much after all.