Conversation

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.
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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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What deeply annoys me about this conversation is the pretense that the work of keeping the world running is an independently controlled variable. When people in the developed world lie to themselves that dignified humans don’t work more than 32h, the result is sweatshops in China
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Even in the developed world it’s disingenuous. People who need more money but are forbidden to work more and there’s no overtime… simply get second jobs on the dl. These things are like medieval sumptuary laws. More about the “clothing” of work than work itself.
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Replying to and
This would be a great newsletter. Definitely shifted my mind a bit. My mindset of 4dww was it’s interesting for shaking things up but only because our work convos are stuck in cartoons of reality. Ultimately there is no labor board controlling hours anymore.
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In this case, more than evil capitalists, it’s workers in comfy jobs throwing workers in more precarious jobs under the bus. It’s always been the moral Achilles heel of the labor movement. Rent-seeking with time rather than directly money.
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Will see what I can do. Have seen a few places embrace sabbatical weeks which aligns work around 6-8 work periods. Feel like this is the way for knowledge work. Defense contractors in US have been doing 9/80 for a while. Another one to look at
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