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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Understood - if jobs where human efficiency *isn't* the deciding factor on that tempo? (Thinking of my days working in a Yorkshire pottery.) Yet heavily-shared case studies usually focus on jobs where people can hone their own productivity?
(New to this. Apologies if dumb!)
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Guess I'm making a presumption here though, that "efficiency" is "cutting ther slack" (managerial looking-down attitude) rather than "doing better-quality work that should be worth more" (worker-championing looking-up attitude.)
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These conversations only apply to jobs where efficiency is a meaningful lens, but the disingenuous dodge in many cases is that slack is a function of demand, not effort. A burger joint has rush hours, slow hours where they catch up on prep/maintenance, and pure idle periods.

