Big-brained business psychology friends (hi , , ): I'm curious - what are the best arguments *against* a 4-day work week?
(Beyond the traditionalist ones that have been so thoroughly debunked by studies & trials?)
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I actually am against it. It perpetuates the fiction that work can be regulated to a set tempo band. Pay people for time or outcomes or some mix, not for a duty cycle. Outside of acute-risk scenarios, treat people as adults who know their limits.
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Ie pilots and surgeons need regulated limits because they might kill people otherwise. Everybody else… if they choose to work 100h one week and 20 the next, let them decide. Pay for outcomes or time, not how they balance work and leisure.
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It’s a ridiculous fiction anyway. For jobs driven by urgency, limits on duty cycle are really an indirect way to negotiate overtime opportunity. If you turn 40 into 32, that’s really 8 more hours overtime if work demand patterns don’t change.
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Let’s say it’s 1 job that really calls for an average 40h week effort, but half of weeks it is 50h, half it is 30h. Let’s say overtime is 2x. So worker gets 10h of regular-paid idleness every other week, and 10h overtime ever other week.
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If nominal weekly salary is X for 40h they’re actually working 45h on average and getting paid for 50, so 1.25x. Now do 4-day week/32h… if work doesn’t change, they’re now getting 13h OT, not 5. 32+26=58h, or 1.45x, an effective 16% pay raise.
Just give them the damn raise.
These theaters of time management are a obfuscating artifact of a history of management-union negotiation, not the reality of work. Clean up the optics. Pay people for the work, let them decide how hard. If you can’t staff up jobs, pay more. If a job is oversubscribed cut pay.
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If there’s too much work and not enough people willing to do it at the price you can pay, either invent robots to do it, or let the work go undone so society recalibrates the worth of the work appropriately and allocates more resources to it.
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