When I was living in France, I thought it was a great idea.
As a white collar (so not being bound to the 9 to 5 and sometimes pulling in 36h shifts...), the system worked as such:
I would work 5 days a week, and get an extra day off of my choice every fortnight.
The results were really great for me and people I knew:
I no longer needed to take days off to deal with paperwork, and other administrative tasks, I could finally get an appointment with my banker.
I could afford to go to the day market to buy fresh produce.
I knew of married couples that would alternate theirs to be on days where the kids didn't have school (traditionally wednesdays) so they didn't have to source someone to watch over the kids on a traditionally very busy day for childcare.
Obviously the system is not perfect, but surely as work gets "easier" the way forward would be to reduce hours worked, not increase them...
What you are describing is not the 35h system, but the "RTT" (the extra days off coming for the accumulated extra time per day).
There are a lot of private companies in France where the 35h do not implies those extra days off. For example, in some companies, they say the employees "can" take 15min break time every half day, but 80% of employees work during this so called break so effectively doing working 37.5h per week, paid 35h. (And lot of extra work hours are not even paid either for blue or white collars).
But yes people I know who benefit from RTT are generally truly happy with them, for all the reasons you cited.
Because of Robots- the whole world may move to a 3 day work week. Here is Larry Page on that.
“If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy—housing, security, opportunities for your kids—anthropologists have been identifying these things. It’s not that hard for us to provide those things,” he said. “The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I’m guessing less than 1% at the moment. So the idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true.”
“You just reduce work time,” Page said. “Most people, if I ask them, ‘Would you like an extra week of vacation?’ They raise their hands, 100% of the people. ‘Two weeks vacation, or a four-day work week?’ Everyone will raise their hand. Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the workweek. And then, if you add slightly less employment, you can adjust and people will still have jobs.”
The problem with that is that the best jobs (such as google) are competitive. Even if two people competing for the same job only want to work 30 hours per week, they both know that they can make themselves more attractive to the employer by offering to work more hours than the other person. This is especially true for immigrant groups competing with domestic labour.
The state could regulate the working week to 30 hours, but this will impact GDP and thus the state's ability to provide public services via taxation and also the ability of poor people to get out of poverty by outworking the more wealthy.
The solution to that would be to make the per-person overhead costs (taxes, administration, health plan, etc.) for a job as close to zero as possible. A basic income would help with that.
Then there are still practical disadvantages (more communication needed, etc.), but these may be outweighed by the advantages (more different people on the same job may mean more creativity, etc.)
What does it mean to "outwork" someone? If I have two jobs, one at a fast food restaurant and the other harvesting vegetables, can I outwork someone living off of $50 million in inherited wealth?
Can I outwork someone working half-time as a business consultant and making $150K/year?
Also, GDP is a proxy, and not an end point. As Paul Samuelson pointed out, if a man marries his maid, then, all else being equal, GDP would fall. By this reasoning, getting married would have the same negative social consequences you pointed out.
By outwork I mean work for more hours or be willing to. If a rich person with a degree from an elite university has a higher expected per hour productivity than a poor person with no degree then the poor person can sometimes compete for the same job as the rich person by being willing to work for more hours. Or the poor person might be able to get a different job that the rich person would not consider because the hours are too long.
I don't think getting married would have the same effect unless one party gives up work or reduces the number of hours that they worked after being married, this doesn't tend to happen anymore.
> I don't think getting married would have the same effect unless one party gives up work or reduces the number of hours that they worked after being married, this doesn't tend to happen anymore.
Dalke's point is that GDP is an imperfect measure. In his example, the maid's work counts towards GDP (because she is being paid a salary) but the homemaker's work does not count (even though it may be identical in nature and extent.)
The taxable income of the couple would go down only if the maid continues the same work that she did before the marriage but for free rather than getting a different job, but this is quite a specific case that is outside of the norm.
You wrote "this will impact GDP and thus the state's ability to ...", as if that were a bad thing, or at least something to be avoided.
If so, then your logic says that this "outside of the norm" case is also a bad thing for the country, or at least something to be avoided.
Most would disagree with you. For that matter, my own g'grandmother worked as a maid for a man, who she later married. I don't see why you get to call my family history "outside of the norm" simply because it disagrees with your view of economics.
I notice that you have switched from "poor people" to "poor person with no degree", and from "richer [than poor]" to "rich".
My example was of someone who did not work at all, and has $50 million in inherited money. By definition, anyone who works will be able to outwork someone who never works. How does a poor person "outwork" that multimillionaire?
Classically speaking, I structured this as a worker against an owner of capital. You have responded, it seems, by arguing that capital is irrelevant, and then reclassified "work" to "access to better paying jobs".
I believe you also imply that going to an elite university is an independent factor from poverty. It may be that someone poor cannot take the 4 years off for such studies, and must instead help support the family and take care of an ailing parent. Therefore, these are correlated, with the implication that being rich helps make your children rich.
Your original premise was that working hard is the primary factor, and ignore other systemic biases.
I think you have misunderstood my overall argument, my claim is not that a poor person is likely to earn a higher income than a rich person by working more hours, but that all people regardless of wealth are limited to 24 hour days which they must divide into "work" and "not work".
A poor person can increase their value to an employer by being willing to forgo more "not work" hours than their competition. If the standard is a 40 hour week then they can offer to work a 50 hour week for example. The only people who they cannot compete with are those already working at full capacity (say a 100 hour work week).
They can realise this extra work either as extra wages or by being willing to work more hours for the same wage. This can be used offset other disadvantages that they may have such as a lack of a degree, lack of experience or lack of connections. If a law was passed that restricted the number of hours that people are allowed to work to a maximum then you remove a negotiation lever that some poorer people might want to use.
As far as the maid example goes, it is an outlier because the overwhelming majority of women (at least in the west) who are in salaried employment before they are married continue in salaried employment after marriage. Historically (as was the case perhaps in your great grandmother's time) this was not necessarily the case.
Embedded in that is the premise that increasing the number of working hours is a good thing. If the law insists upon a maximum of 30 hours per week, then the number of hours that one is willing to work is no longer a way to distinguish between employees.
This thread started with the observation, quoting bato, "as work gets "easier" the way forward would be to reduce hours worked, not increase them".
If you build into your analysis the assumption that working more is better, then of course you'll end up with that conclusion that working more is better.
You believe there is a negotiation lever by not having a cap in the law. To start with, I would rather have strong unions able to negotiate the cap as appropriate for the given trade. Failing that though, the US has laws limiting the number of hours to work, such as the Libby Zion Law in New York, which limits the amount of resident physicians' work, and hours-of-service rules for truck drivers.
Regarding the maid example, I believe you are suggesting that it's rare enough that it can be ignored for purposes of economic analysis. My suggestion is quite different - your justification says that we should not do things that reduce the GDP. I question the primacy of that argument. We make policy decisions to have our country more in the way we want it to be. GDP is easy to measure. That doesn't mean it's the right metric, or even a good rough gauge.
If we wanted a country where people had more time for personal enrichment, then we would have a lower GDP. So what? Studying French poetry of the 1800s or building sand castles on the beach or watching football games are cheap.
And if you're worried about the poor needing to catch up to the rich, then increase taxes.
Imagine that you are hiring for a programming position and have two available candidates. One has a degree from Stanford and three years experience at google, while the other has only fast food experience and has been a self taught programmer for a year. They both want the same salary for the job. All else being equal most people are going to employ the Stanford grad who is more likely to already be relatively wealthy than the self taught programmer.
If the Stanford grad has a limit to the amount of hours they are willing to work then the self taught programmer can offer to work for a higher number of hours, possibly making them a more attractive hire than the Stanford grad.
Once you place a cap on the number of hours that can be worked this gives the Stanford grad the advantage unless the self taught person is willing to significantly lower their salary requirement. Thus an opportunity for economic mobility is lost.
If you pursue policies that emphasise personal enrichment time over freedom to work then you are likely to hurt those who have the most need for the latter over the former, these are most likely to be poorer people. You also reduce the amount of public services that can be provided (or at least the growth thereof) because you need both labour and capital (from taxation) to provide these services.
It might not be a positive thing for google employees to have more time to spend studying french poetry rather than paying extra tax to support education programmes, drug rehabilitation programmes etc.
My main concern is your statement "... and also the ability of poor people to get out of poverty by outworking the more wealthy."
Your setup implies that the person from Stanford is rich, and the self-taught programmer is poor, no? When in truth the first could be $50K in student debt and the second in the black.
In any case, are they both equally qualified for the job? I assume they aren't. How is it that the lessor qualified candidate can still fill the position, simply by working twice as much? If after a few years, when the candidate has enough on-the-job experience to be equal to a new Stanford grad, will Google support reducing the hours worked to 30/week for the same pay?
If the answer is "no", then it sounds like you've set things up to exploit the poor for their willingness to work more. If the answer is "yes", then Google is working as a career trainer, which is quite noble of them, but atypical.
As I understand your description, you are also opposed to the existing 40 hour work week. You see the opportunity for additional work as a way for the underclass to achieve financial success. Historically the 40 hour work week law was demanded by labor because what you see as competition for a person to get ahead ends up as a race for everyone to get to the bottom.
I'm not sure I follow. The same reasoning kinda' applies now: I can work more than 40 hours per week to look like a better applicant, but this becomes both counterproductive and untenable at a certain point. (There are a finite number of hours in a week.) Sure, there are times when you have to put in overtime, like when a big release is about to come out or there's a critical bug, but largely you should be able to finish your work in the allocated time. If this is consistently not the case, then you (the 'royal you') are either understaffed, ill managed, or incompetent. (Again, I don't mean to call you personally incompetent, I mean 'you' as a member of the workforce.)
I think with the insistence that 30 hours is full time we'll see fewer worthless meetings and less overhead, since time is now a scarce commodity. Think about it: that ten hours is a two-hour meeting every day. If I say, "I will work 60 hours a week every week," to my new employer, they'll look at each other with great incredulity. There isn't necessarily 60 hours of productive mental time each week. Given, I'm neither the smartest nor the most focused person in the world, but I think I could only do 20 hours of hard, focused mental work each week at my last job. The remaining 20 hours was mindless email, bug reports, writing documentation, or drawing XML diagrams which spelled profane words when zoomed out enough.
There will always be people who want or need to work more than the standard. That's okay. What reducing the work week means to me, though, is fewer people filling in their days with useless padding. If you're done after 30 hours, that's okay -- go home!
They might not, but that doesn't mean we should make concessions to them. I agree that it's important to consider the practical aspects of a law's use, but we shouldn't avoid making laws because some groups will ignore them. In fact, in this case I think it adds even more incentive to drive down the work week time because then all the people working 40-hour weeks will be contributing over the minimum.
Whomever develops and owns that automation is going to have to give it away (similar to what Elon did with the Tesla patents) if Page wants to move towards that model.
We've already seen wages stagnate for 30+ years because of productivity's decoupling from human capital (with productivity now captured through technology, which would encompass software, robotics, and other various automations): http://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/producti...
Wages where? Certainly not in China. Perhaps American wages are stagnating because they are getting closer to the average while at the same time the average wage is skyrocketing.
I call that the "Mitochondria Theory of Economics".
There is a very, very tiny proportion of the population, certainly less than 10%, and possibly as small as 1%, that does essentially all the work required to support the entire species. They are systematically encysted into vesicles and surrounded by giant masses of inert cytoplasm and various organelles that depend on them completely.
The people that drive these economic mitochondria are often completely unaware that the entire burden of Earth's civilization rests upon their shoulders. They only see the needs of their own cell, and the other mitochondria in it, if any.
The entire remainder of the economy exists to distribute the output of the productive workers out to the nonproductive people. Much of that transport network consists of creating an artificial need with advertising and then fulfilling it with retail goods and services.
Reducing weekly hours would simply slow the distribution network, and possibly decrease the overall output of the mitochondria.
The problem is that the entire system is completely built upon the concept that people need to look like they are important to the function of the cell in order to acquire the resources and energy produced by the mitochondria. So everyone has to pretend that they are useful and important, as hard as they possibly can. And the worst possible thing in the world would be to let the mitochondria catch on that they could be independent organisms, and that they don't actually need the cells to survive.
Unlike biological cell mitochondria, economic mitochondria have actually been becoming stronger, faster, and more efficient during our recorded history. This bothers the mitochondria not at all. But it stresses the hell out of the cell's resource distribution systems, as the median useless organelle becomes further away from its vital resources.
Reducing working hours is not a viable solution, because it does nothing to address the fundamental problem with our resource distribution system. It is still completely built upon pretending to be important, with the best actors and those closest to the real economic producers getting the most resources.
Would it be so hard to admit that the majority of humanity is just useless cytoplasm, and put some of the massive and increasing output of the mitochondria into a vascular system to distribute resources evenly throughout the cell, rather than relying upon diffusion and fakery? And it turns out that yes, it actually is rather difficult. Pretending to be important has been so critical to survival for so long that admitting one's uselessness is tantamount to suicide.
A friend of mine is a chemical engineer at Chevron and he gets every other Friday off. This is in the US. Technically he's supposed to be working 9 to 6 instead of 9 to 5 to make up for it (which amounts to an extra 8-9 hours over the 9 working days from the two week period), but I think in practice it's still pretty lenient.
That said, this sort of arrangement seems to be extremely rare in the US, and I think even among oil companies it's fairly rare for desk jobs.
> That said, this sort of arrangement seems to be extremely rare in the US
No, this is pretty common in government and government contracting. It's called an RDO: "regular day off"... more commonly known outside the US as a "rostered day off".
When I was a contractor we had even more flexible arrangements: we could work whatever hours we wanted, as long as they added up to 80 every two weeks. Eventually this got abused enough it was cut down so you could shift at most 10 hours between week 1 and week 2, but you could still, say, work just four 10-hour days every week.
Or "CWS Day" - Compressed Work Schedule. Four 9-hour days and one 8-hour day one week and four 9-hour days the second week for a total of 80-hours for a two week pay period.
We used to have offices in New Jersey, just outside New York City, and they had four 10-hour days each week. (Supposedly a state law?)
I do four tens and a little known feature is by missing rush hours I still spend 40 hrs in the office but I spend MUCH less time away from home, I spend much less time in my car. five eights is an hour each way in the car ten times a week thats 50 hours away from home. for tens is 20 minutes each way eight times a week thats about 43 hours a week away from home. Its like getting a free day off every week! Also I burn much less than 4/5 the gas because no stop and go!
This sounds like such a good idea. One of the main problems I have working 9-5 is scheduling things like doctor and dentist appointments, bank visits, government paperwork, etc. I have to take a vacation or sick day just to get normal things done.
I interviewed at a Raytheon office in Rhode Island as a college grad in 1999 and they did this too then. Not sure if it's still in place or if it's a companywide thing.
i think thats a great point - that said most french ppl i know pull about 45h a week in the tech industry and are "manager" level (but arent actually managers)
The 35 hours law was implemented very differently for blue collar vs white collar workers.
For white collar workers (including software/it people), the law was implemented with a certain number of extra days/weeks of vacation per year, above the standard 5. And each company had it different.
So if one talks about the 35 hours law in France about software/it workers, please do not start counting weekly hours. Ask about how many weeks of vacation instead.
Accordingly, when I moved from France to the US, for the same company, i lost a few weeks of vacation, but boy, the days were WAY shorter.
Correct, 5 weeks. I got up to 4 weeks in the US eventually.
The strangest thing for me in the US is how many people are convinced they cannot take 2 weeks at a time, and how many are leaving days on the table each year.
Context: worked in a high-tech company, no longer a start-up, but still growing very well. In the US, almost everybody had left at 6.30, most people at 6.00 pm. In France, as a white collar, you are expected to work until 7.30 pm minimum, often 8.00 pm, and I was.
Still today, my friends in France say that when they try to leave at 6.00 pm for whatever reason, they get jokes like "you're taking half a day off today?"
Start time was about 9.00 am on both sides. Lunch break was outside the office in France, at usually 45 minutes long. Usually a bit longer on Fridays, maybe 1:15/1:30 when no pressure. Shorter in the US, at my desk. Maybe just a company thing. The longer lunch with colleagues in France was much more efficient at fixing issues than the 20 minutes at my desk, since we talked shop a lot even though we relaxed.
Bullshit work, unnecessary meetings was about the same both sides.
Once again, I have to point to the Results-Only Work Environment — http://gorowe.com/pages/rowe-standards. ROWE isn't the only way of doing this sort of thing, but it's a good approach.
Companies hire people to produce results, not to sit in an office for a certain number of hours. Given this, stop trying to manage where and when people work, and start focusing on whether they are delivering results.
This endless parade of articles about work hours is reminiscent of people discussing the threadcount of the Emperor's clothes.
Forgive me if I am missing something that is obvious about ROWE, but what is to stop management from shifting the goalposts in a ROWE ? By continuously requiring more from their workforce they are receiving more hours of work from them while being able to say "We do not force set hours, we only require reasonable results from our employees" ?
Unless you've had a remarkable work experience, you'll find that bad management shifts the goalposts in a 40-hour work environment too. "Work harder, work faster, work smarter!" This behavior is independent of the environment. The advantage of ROWE is that it removes a lot off waste (hours tracking, telecommuting paperwork, microaggressions about hours worked, etc.) and lets people actually focus on the work.
If you have executives that want to destroy the company by crushing the workforce then, yeah, no environment will stop them.
So what's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload when there's no limit to how many hours you work? The usefulness of a set limit of hours is that it protects the employee from work overload.
What's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload and telling you to get it done in 40 hours — or you're fired and they'll find someone else to do it?
I do not mean this at all flippantly. I've worked places (and I'm sure others have as well) where the amount of work assigned is undoable in the amount of time available. People burn out, people deliver poor quality, people quit.
A ROWE is not meant as a mechanism to protect employees from destructive bosses. And, for knowledge workers whose work cannot be mechanically reduced to hours, neither is a 40-hour week.
A ROWE is about removing waste in the work process so that people can focus on the work they're hired to do, not on outdated ritualistic traditions about work that no longer apply.
> What's preventing management from imposing huge amounts of workload and telling you to get it done in 40 hours — or you're fired and they'll find someone else to do it?
The thing is, under such a system, you get fired and that's the end of it, and the employer suffers for it as well as you. They can't push people to spend more than their 40 hours - they have to find somebody else who's willing to put up with it for 40 hours a week, or explicitly require more.
In the ROWE system, employers can collectively gradually push their employees to work more and more. 10 years down the line, everyone could have 50 or 60 hours worth of work to do a week, and no recourse, because every employer has gradually done the same thing - after all, if they can get more work out of you, they will.
A lack of recourse would only be the case if, as you say, 'every employer has gradually done the same thing'.
In an ideal world, all employees are able to be mobile, and would gravitate quickly away from bad employers, incentivising employers to not be bad (basically), and/or removing those employers / organisations from the environment.
I respect we don't live in an ideal world, but equally we don't live in a 100% evil - but somewhere in between the two extremes. So in practice you would see the same things that happen now - employers that aren't evil are able to obtain and retain better employees, in part because they don't engage in the kinds of activities you're describing.
I agree, and actually in a lot of countries you couldn't just get fired. Your employer would have to prove you really are slacking off, which would be hard if they're giving you more than 40h worth of work per week.
They'll think they do, but they won't really. Research is showing clearly that 60 hours a week is not sustainable longer than a couple months. Afterwards, you get less efficient than if you only worked 40 hours. http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
I'm sure you don't mean it this way, but you should know that culturally, using people's names when replying to them the way you're doing often comes across as condescending.
The employee could quit and go work somewhere better. A manager knows the value of employees, if the place where I'm working now starts to shift the goalpost, then I'll walk and they'll lose whatever value I provided. It would take long for a manager to end up with an office of incompetent people because all the good ones would have left. Why do you think Google provides all those perks? Because they have to compete for labor just like everyone else. We aren't slaves despite some popular opinion suggesting it.
Hours tracking is hard to get out from under. In Canada, for example, tech companies get an annual tax rebate for R&D-related expenditures, under the government SR&ED program. One of the requirements for making the claim on any personnel expenses is signed timesheets.
Individual time sheets that allocate time to SR&ED and non-SR&ED work are a good source of supporting information. Time sheets can be used to show the reasonableness of an SR&ED labour claim. Time sheet codes may be based on business projects that do not align to SR&ED projects. In such cases, other evidence may be required to support the SR&ED labour allocation.
So there are alternative means of proving SR&ED labour allocation.
I think there still needs to be a cap, probably around the 35-40 hour mark. Likewise, eliminating PTO generally seems to be a bad idea that can be abused by managers to keep their employees from actually taking PTO. I agree that leaving these issues to be implicitly resolved between employers and employees is a recipe that invites abuse, but if maximum work hours and minimum PTO are specified, ROWE is a pretty good policy.
One thing is that "work week" mean different things in different contexts. One point of reference are full-time employees, that are paid a certain yearly salary. They typically work around 11 months a year (give or take a week or two), and are paid once every 12 months (with various takes on how vacation is paid for). The hourly wage is only a number used when calculating compensation for extra hours/overtime etc -- and compensation is based on more or less doing the same, every day, all year.
So what happens when people cannot, or don't want to work "full time"? In retail, "results" typically would mean you're at your post, servicing customers. In engineering, it doesn't really matter as long as the milestones are met.
You might need a reasonable yardstick against which to measure performance, if you want people to be able to adjust how much and when they work. I don't think there is a "one-size-fits-all" solution (well, beyond: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" -- which I think is a fine idea, but it demands some restructuring. Not perhaps only feasible under communism, one might view the idea of Japanese "employee-for-life" as another realization of the same idea).
All that said, counting hours, for most jobs (ie: those that aren't on the way to be automated away, anyway), is probably the worst possible measure of productivity -- and if one thinks compensation should be tied to productivity -- it is probably the worst possible basis on which to base compensation.
The benefit of measuring hours, lies in the simplicity. If people only work when at work, if they mostly work when at work, then hours at work should correlate with values produced, for that worker. You'd still need to price those hours (8 hours of amateur work, vs 1 hour of someone that's good at their job -- could readily be of the same value).
I'd kind of agree/disagree-ish. As I've commented on another HN thread about this, YMMV, but I've made peace with the fact they're paying for 37 hours access a week to my brain as much as the specific outputs I produce. I don't sit with people with my skillset, so I can help others (what's often referred to here as "interruptions"). Regardless of how much productive time I get out of that (c. 25, maybe), I'm there for questions to be asked of me, and to help others - and that's as much of my role as rolling out code.
How would that apply to the woman in the article, Ahlem Saifi? She works at the airport and at a market. A Results-Only Work Environment might work for some knowledge workers, but I don't think it would apply to the majority of the workforce.
The same it applies anywhere. You want results from people in the restaurant business, hospitality industry, or retail environments, right?
A Results-Only Work Environment isn't a Remote-Only Work Environment. You work where and when you want, as long as your work gets done. If you need to be in the restaurant during certain hours to achieve your results, then that's where you are.
The focus is first and foremost on the results, and everything follows from that.
So a Results-Only Work Environment works because it focuses on results. Got it. That may work fine for programmers, but when knowledge worker theory meets the reality of a mass workforce, you're resorting to a circular argument. The GP cited businesses that need employees available at all hours when the business is open. That's the only way to get results. So in the context of a 35 hours work week, I don't see it as applicable. Convenience stores, restaurants, and hospitality businesses would just end up hiring more part time workers.
I would encourage you to read the book "Maverick" which examines a lot of this in detail. It's interesting the environments they've applied these types of structures to. Including line-manufacturing.
Disagree. It only really works for workers that are actively producing. For jobs that are reactionary (mainly service jobs where customers come to them and they are expected to deal with them) it doesn't really work. You need someone in the store or answering the phones during certain hours.
"in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with productivity per hour about 13 percent higher than the eurozone average. And a welter of loopholes lets many French employers outmaneuver the law."
What concerns me from a public policy perspective is that people vote on politicians and platforms based on some simple, plain-language representation of what they stand for. "35-hour work weeks for all!" is pretty catchy, and I might could be behind it.
But then when the policy is implemented, it's done so in such a convoluted and byzantine fashion that I am not longer able as a voter to determine whether it was a good idea or not.
So we then begin all these partisan debates over the slogan, when in fact the slogan was never really tried. This is a defect of centralized, complex governments: it really has nothing to do with your political stance or what you support or oppose. I could say the same thing about Strategic Defense Strategy in the U.S. If something is explained on way, supported by the public in one way, but implemented in such a way to confuse what's really going on? The system fails.
I think the saddest result of this is watching very intelligent and passionate people debate various positions and policies, none of which ever have any chance to actually be implemented in anything near the terms in which they describe. So it's like watching smart people debate the relative merits of their own imaginary castles.
As a programmer, I like it when I code something and it doesn't work. The computer language causes me to express my desires exactly, I must transcribe them faithfully, and even then, sometimes I get it wrong. The feedback loop is quick and honest.
I think the free market does an absolutely wonderful job of creating amazing conditions for workers that are in high demand. For top tier programmers (which are highly over-represented in this forum) working in tech hubs, you can look forward to lots of work perks, smart managers, career progression, and excellent pay.
Working long hours in an interesting job with a manager who supports you is usually not that big a burden. Labour regulations aren't really designed for this community. You have to take into account the people who lack the education or aptitude to work a challenging job - and those people will be ruthlessly crushed and exploited unless the government steps in and provides a floor.
Those are pretty terrible (and I've heard that at least MS finally got rid of stack ranking) but compared to the kind of shit that an employee at a fast food chain has to go through, it's a blissful paradise.
"""Last month, she was scheduled to work until 11 p.m. on Friday, July 4; report again just hours later, at 4 a.m. on Saturday; and start again at 5 a.m. on Sunday."""
Yes, they could do, but then they might have to have another employee or some other such that means they make a little less profit, so fuck the workers, if they don't want the job there's some other sucker who'll thank me for the chance to be exploited.
That makes sense. I was thinking that this sounds more like a problem with corporate culture, rather than a problem with optimization. If you have a culture that doesn't value your workers, any effective optimization method will lead to outcomes like this.
There is no explanation in this article for what makes the 35 hour week bad, except for weasel words like these: "And critics say the rule is a reason that France’s unemployment rate is more than double Germany’s rate of 5 percent.". The 35 hour rule has little to do with the difference between Germany's and France's unemployment rates. This article is pretty frustrating, it's such a hotchpotch of arguments.
Then the article goes on to talk about the underemployed, which is a separate problem.
> All told, French workers put in an average of 39.5 hours a week, just under the eurozone average of 40.9 hours a week, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
For comparison, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the average for Americans in non-farm employment work an average of 34.5 hours per week:
Which is way less than the amount worked by anyone I know or have ever worked with in engineering and corporate jobs. I don't know if this number is so low because of under-employed or part time labor, but I doubt it given the breakdown over the various industries in that table on the bls.gove site.
To an outsider, this is what the US workday looks like:
* 3 hours driving for no reason
* 4 hours working
* 6-7 hours fucking around pretending that you're being productive
I'm sure there's a lot of fucking around in French (and other European) offices as well, but Americans seem particularly adept at spending long hours at the office while actually working very little.
Source: every American I've questioned in depth about their workday. Mainly in Silicon Valley, haven't had the chance to talk to too many others.
Source2: A recent-ish poll on HN where the "I actually work 2 hours a day" option won
A quick google search suggests that the average commute is 25 minutes, and about 0.2% of the population has a megacommute of over 1.5 hours. For comparison 4.3% work from home.
That's the feedback I got from a German co-worker when I was working in Silicon Valley. In Germany they just work 8 hours. But it's all heads down working. In the US we screw around (talking, surfing the web, etc) much more.
But I know from experience that workers in Spain screw around A LOT as well during the work day (and lord the long lunches at sit down restaurants!). So all Europe is not the same.
Can you expand on this? Do you mean to say that much of American GDP comes from things like natural resources where American employees have the fortune of working to extract? What other factors besides employee productivity and natural resources would contribute to GDP?
It's a little disingenuous to compare the US and Germany. While there are large variations in Germany too (and one could look at the individual states there as well) -- it would make more sense to compare US states, rather than all of US. Or: one might compare the whole of EU (or possibly, some older subset of EU) with all of the US.
[edit: On the other hand, as the US leads by a pretty significant margin, there must be other factors at work. While Germany isn't top among the EU, the US is top of the world on that list, anyway. I'm a little surprised the US is even ahead of Norway -- given the pretty big GDP boost Norway gets from oil, and our low population.]
The unadjusted GDP for Norway in 2013 dollars is around $100k, and for the US around $53k.
Purchasing power is depressed in Norway compared to the US primarily because salary structure is one of the flattest in the world, which means salaries in service jobs are amongst the highest in the world, and consequently prices are amongst the highest in the world.
Finance is another factor, both the trade (with the two largest stock exchanges based in the US) and having historical wealth and wealthy immigrants investing in the US.
A lot of it is just higher buying power. For example, you can sell SaaS for more in the US than you can in Europe because Americans are simply able/willing to pay more.
High GDP is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy in a consumerism oriented economy. If everyone makes more, everyone can make even more, which results in even more spending and then even more money making and ... you get the idea.
Doesn't matter if things cost more in the US - the numbers given are adjusted for purchasing power. They represent the fact that in the US, a given worker produces a larger basket of goods.
Here's another way of boosting the PPP numbers: Distribute salary extremely unevenly, and push large portions of your population into near poverty, and thus drive down the costs of providing essential products and services.
I don't know how the US does in pure productivity, but you can't get productivity rankings from GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity alone.
That's a cultural and management problem. If working long hours makes you "look committed" or otherwise puts you on fast track for promotions etc., that is a problem. It leads to people arriving early and leaving late, and basically not working efficiently because we all know it's simply not sustainable to do 10 or 12 hours in most jobs requiring any thougt work. Obviously, cutting down on the hours without also fixing the cultural and productivity issues may be a bad idea.
I was told this as well by a CTO at BT who had worked in the UK and in SV and he commented that he got as much work from the UK as he did USA (2 weeks leave) and remember british telecom is an ex Civil Sevice orgaisation (think the laundry files level of T&C and beurocracy)
The 40 hour work week was meant for labor work, not thinking jobs. Applying that workweek to devs has to stop. One can only think and plan for maybe 3 to 4 hours a day.
You forgot endless coffees, ceaseless yabbering on mobile phones, thousands of telephone meetings and still pointless face to face meetings with external companies so the sales people can pretend to be busy and get out of the office awhile.
If you work in IT, 35h/week is something you will never see in France. You will hardly see tech people leave the office before 8pm, 7pm at best. If you leave before, people are going to point a finger at you "taking the afternoon off".
Engineers typically have a "cadre" status meaning that they can work 10 hours a day. That doesn't include remote work after getting back home.
When I moved to the US, what struck me is that work days are way shorter. Most engineers were gone by 5:30pm.
People actually have spare time after work.
Sure, there are less vacation days, but at the end of the day, the work-life balance is way way way better in the US.
How do we always end up back where we started? It's been shown over and over that the majority of office jobs are not productive beyond 6 hours/day. Hiring more people to "fill in the gaps" is a misunderstanding.
The problem is that for office jobs in France, the 35h week never became the 7h day. It just became the same 40h week as before, except you get an extra 12 days holiday a year - so not necessarily more productive.
Or, in most companies, you don't get any extra day off at all, but you're allowed to take two 15 min breaks per day. Which doesn't make a difference in practice.
I've never seen that for "cadres" - it's always a day rate ("forfait jour"). Maybe it was for non-cadre office workers? Like call centers or something like that?
"in reality, France’s 35-hour week has become largely symbolic, as employees across the country pull longer hours and work more intensely, with productivity per hour about 13 percent higher than the eurozone average. And a welter of loopholes lets many French employers outmaneuver the law."
So then, what's all the hubbub? Why bother changing something that's obviously ineffective?
You're onto something there. The hubbub is all due to a kind of hobby of English-speaking media (=their wealthy owners?) to whack France & its world leadership in lowering the nationwide definition of "full time" amid proliferating worksaving technology - God forbid we should switch from the standard layoff response thus disempowering employees & weakening wages and markets, to trimming hours across the board and maintaining employment and wages and markets = no more complaints about "slow growth" = upsizing despite constant downsizing. As for "ineffective," in 1997 the 35 hours was voted in because official unemployment (UE) reached 12.6%. After the workweek went from 39 to 35 in the next four years, UE was down to 8.6% in 2001 before the US-led recession hit France. Hmm, 4 hrs cut, 4% UE cut. Isn't that what the USA got 1938-40? 44hr workweek in 1938, UE 19.0%; 42hrs in 1939, UE 17.2%; 40hrs in 1940, UE 14.6%. Hmm, 4 hrs cut, 4% unemployment cut again. See Roediger & Foner's history of the US workweek, Our Own Time. The objection to workweek reduction is that it's effective, so it must be slandered energetically - those who talk most about freedom are most scared of it, and financially secure free time is the most basic freedom, without which the other freedoms are either inaccessible or meaningless. Deets on timesizingdotcom.
What should "no longer be put on a pedestal" is Work. Work is not a virtue. It is a necessary means to an end. When we go beyond that necessity we become servants to the Economy, rather than having an economy that serves us.
I don't really understand why this isn't more of a political thing. a 3 day workweek seems like a total magic silver bullet to me that solves a tonne of issues:
* Happiness index should go way up.
* The generation that is heading for retirement around now doesn't really know what to do with their time. If you actually work the full 40 hours a week, and you have a family, then, especially a few years ago, you simply didn't really need a hobby. You could zone out and watch some TV on saturday, work on the home on sunday, and monday is another workday. The problem is: these people end up miserable in their retirement because they don't know what to do with themselves. With only 24 hours of work a week, you WILL find a hobby.
* People spend more money when not working, and when money is being spent, the economy is much healthier.
* Convenience goes way up; with a 24 hour workweek, work is forced into moving away from a rigid work schedule: You can no longer declare that monday-friday, 9am-5pm are work times and all other times are off-work. That means that people are expected to not work during times which are still considered normal 'work hours'. This leads to expansion of work hours, thus, more convenience (things being open from 8am to 8pm or longer, monday to saturday). This is more relevant for europe; in the US, most things are already open a lot, many things even 24/7. This also means that things that are usually only open on workdays, such as the DMV or a bank or a doctor's appointment can be visited by people without requiring awkward arrangements at work to make time.
* Unemployment is solved overnight, because you instantly multiply the job market by about 1.4 (okay, it's not that much, but more than enough to stave off unemployment for a long long time).
* It in fact moves the work market dynamic back to a seller's market, which is GREAT: Right now things like automated delivery trucks aren't advancing nearly as fast as it could simply because unemployment is already an issue and nobody wants to deal with thousands of unemployed truck drivers. Automation (which is something we should hopefully strive for; what satisfaction is there in doing a job a machine could easily do?) SHOULD be something we encourage; in practice, it isn't.
* Good for gender equality, in the sense that it is much simpler to share child raising duties if the normal workweek is just 24 hours. You can now have a real career without having your kid be raised by your spouse or a live-in nanny.
* Good for job mobility, because you now have far more time to think about what you wish to be doing, and more time to do research and even interview for jobs you are curious about. If people start moving towards jobs they like, the theory is that they'll be more productive in that job, so it's good for everybody and great for population happiness.
* Traffic jams are cleared instantaneously, and in general this moves work environments towards accepting that colleagues aren't either 'all present' or 'all gone', so even if traffic picks back up, workflows will adapt much faster to accepting that people arrive and leave in staggered fashion.
Sure, moving towards an actual 3-hour workweek, especially in a different way vs. the move from 6 to 5 in the past (where EVERYONE got the same day off: Saturday) is a long process, but it's so obviously worth doing!
I'm afraid this is a very rosy way of looking at things:
* You can't simultanously work less and spend more. Working three days a week means consuming more leisure, but fewer goods. Spending would not go up.
* The lump of labour fallacy means that this doesn't have an unambiguously positive affect on empoyment.
I personally support flexibility working hours (then again, I would, because I earn enough that I don't need to work full time). But we shouldn't assume there are no trade offs at stake.
Considering that we have a lot of people dedicated to "bullshit" jobs like advertising , social media curation and other stuff which doesn't really produce anything, maybe OP has a point.
If advertising wouldn't produce anything, it wouldn't exist. Your statement is quite common, but actually advertising performance is much more measurable than developer performance. Advertising is about to enable the right product to find its buyer. It is also financing the whole internet economy much more than the services the end-consumer think they use.
Around social media I won't comment. Probably many companies are trying to get a footprint there. Nowadays more and more people are expecting Twitter support for example. Nothing wrong with this, I expect controlling will know how to limit expenses in this area to a reasonnable amount.
If 'full time' is redefined as 35 hours, then everybody at least has the same pay...plus new people are hired to fill in the gap. Or maybe not - its France. Maybe folks just go home those hours they weren't working anyway, and somebody fresh comes in.
How does your bank create free money when you make a loan ?
The argument "where does the extra money comes from?" is looking at it the wrong way. The right question is: does it stimulate the economy?
Currently, people do not spend, and accumulate as much as they can, because they are being told there is a crisis (not for the richest). In Western Europe, governments generally agree to make "reforms" destroying all social advantages inherited from the reconstruction after WWII. In France in particular, the biggest investor if the "local communities" (cities, departments, regions), but the national governement now lowers the money affected to them, leading to less investment from these public investors, killing a lot of jobs.
So we don't care where money would come from. What we need is somethin that gives people confidence in their future, like a stable job. If you have a job but feel threatned in it every day because your boss can replace you with the "reserve army of labour", you tend to let your social advantages go away, and earn less. Collectively, this profits to the richest who drain huge parts of the economy to use it in bubble speculations - which also profits them even when the bubble explodes.
Besides, we had to transit in a few decades from a social model where women did not work to a model where women now are an active force. Couple that with huge productivity improvements... and we don't need a full time job for everyone, for everyone to live correctly.
So where does the money come from ? Last of the question to ask. First question : what do we want to do with our society, what do we want to do collectively to stop having the poor constantly fighting each other ?
I know, that sounds weird. I did not study economy in university, so apologies if I'm covering well trodden ground or not using the right terminology, but, reasoning it out:
Something like an excellent michelin-star level experience in a a restaurant is some serious luxury and it shows: People pay through the nose for it. And yet, you don't really need more capital (if that is the right word) to make this a reality for far more people: You CAN have everyone work far less and yet have far more people eat like this, simply because a very large part of the resources required to make this dining experience happen, is manpower. I know I said that unemployment is vastly reduced so you'd expect the costs of this experience to go way up, given that i.e. the kitchen cleanup staff, currently paid next to nothing, would become far more expensive, _BUT_, that just means that in the short term this restaurant (A) has a much bigger % of the total running costs dedicated to salary now, and (B) because everyone is still spending a larger % of the fewer dollars they made, is richer and looking to invest in the future.
Add to this the fact that society is busy embracing the idea that nobody should work a minute longer than absolutely necessary, and no longer obsessed with trying to ensure work exists for all able-bodied adults, and... robots!
I reread what I've written and it comes across as rather dramatic, but efficient cleaning machines already exist, and a couple of high-caliber restaurants already have them. They are just expensive, and in the current climate, not worth it because you can get any sap working nights and overtime for the change in your couch cushions right now. But not in this new model. And _THAT_ is eventually how everyone works less and yet gets more luxury: More efficiency.
Everywhere I look, I see rampant opportunities for orders of magnitude improvements in efficiency, and yet at the same time a society and workforce model that actively resists the change. We can automate deliveries easily, but, there's resistance. Tesla and google auto-drive cars are being bound by laws, some no doubt because of honest questions about their safety, but a lot of them, I bet, due to some lobbying by various interested parties. Manufacture of goods could be far more efficient, but there's simply no drive to invest in any of it. Everyone drives a car, and yet even in places where you could feasibly move to a society where almost nobody owns a car and all you got is a very expansive public transit system and a couple of ZIP-car / greenwheels / etc style locations... that change is not happening. It would be more convenient for all and cost far less (i.e.: big society wins by way of orders-of-magnitude improvement in efficiency), and it should be possible in dense urban areas like Paris, the greater metropolitan triangle of Rotterdam-The Hague-Amsterdam, London (which is probably the closest to the ideal due to the congestion charge), etc.
Also, a lot of expensive hobbies exist, but there are even more cheap hobbies, which provide just about as much happiness for far less cost. The internet leads the way in this: The very act of writing this response is effectively a hobby, and it costs basically nothing.
> Something like an excellent michelin-star level experience in a a restaurant is some serious luxury and it shows: People pay through the nose for it.
Because it's rare and cannot be copied that easily. A lot of special talent is needed for this. Not only in cooking, but also in perfect management.
What you are describing in this post is usually driven by growth, especially productivity improvement. This happens continously accross the world, but at a "limited" pace, not 1.4. So things like 35 hours produce suddenly a bump that may be hard to digest, especially for company owners. Efficiency improvement means new market, means investment opportunities, so whatever is possible will be done.
Car sharing is another thing... People like to own cars. This is cultural, not economics, so just changing a policy won't change it. The question is rather what would be more appealing than a car? Currently mobile devices and computers seem to take over that role, but let's see how it develops.
35 hours, in France, is just the legal threshold over which hours are counted as extra (and thus are paid more). No one in France is forced to work 35 hours "only".
Besides, we are talking about employees, which means a hierarchical subordination. No employee that I know of chooses how much time he works: it's the boss who chooses.
This arbitrariness (from the boss) is no better that another arbitrariness (a supposedly fixed time fixed by 'we the people', of which the government is only an executive representation).
The only country that has a statistically significant # of people working consistently over 40 hours a week, are in the US. These people eventually work themselves to an early grave, and often end up costing society a lot in the form of requiring expensive healthcare because of their unhealthy lifestyle.
This slippery slope goes both ways. I'll run down both slopes just as a thought exercise:
If we give you the freedom of choice to work yourself to death, then efficiency goes way down. proof? Well, let's look at the US, where minimum wage is dirt cheap and between immigrants sending money home and the simple fact that people can't make ends meet without working more than 40 hours (bad social security), it actually happens a lot. This part of the US job market is markedly less healthy than for example europe. It's simply inefficient: These conditions are causing rampant crime (SEE: factor 100, not exaggerating, higher incarceration rates, which is also due to drug policy, but bad social security and crappy entry-level job market isn't helping surely), and crime is actually more expensive. It costs society the same amount of money to throw 5 people of a 100 in jail and have the remaining 95 work like dogs, then it is to give all 100 a better education and a better social security safety net, and have 95 work normal hours and have 5 on paid low-level subsistence.
In the end, either (A) society gets to decide how much you get to work, or (B) if you are so poor that it costs society more to let you live (due to either having to incarcerate you, or paying for your acute hernia due to overworking yourself or collapsed lung because you hit a tree due to exhaustion), society takes out a gun and shoots you.
So, unless we're all willing to take the moral stance that society is justified in killing anybody that doesn't clearly prove that they are a net positive contribution to society, then 'individual freedom of choice' is a pipe dream in this aspect, and more liberal, in the sense that you're intentionally letting society pay for an individual's poor health choice.
And going down the other slope: If society gets to dictate how you should live because it ends up having to pay the bills if you live badly, then society gets to ban pork, cigarettes, alcohol, driving of any sort, all housing will be built strictly to exact code and nothing else, the state will take care of your finances, etc, etc. extreme communism.
Let's just go with: socio-economic models are a heck of a lot more complicated, and extremist positions such as 'always just let everyone do whatever, no laws!' are usually deplorably wrong or misguided. There are no easy answers.
NB: Note that few to no countries make it illegal to work over the established normal working week hours. However, they DO declare that this construes overtime and adds economic disincentives. For example, overtime is taxed more heavily, or the state sets a higher minimum wage for overtime hours, etc.
My wife had a 35 hour job. It basically meant that most people took a 1 hour lunch. Other than less fibbing about 30 minute lunches, didn't have a huge impact based in any other gig she had.
My employer allows up to flex days per two week pay period. I don't do it, but it seems to work well -- people tend to come in early and get shit done, and if they need to work on an off day, they can accrue some limited time in compensation.
There's always a few workaholics, but the place is very productive with minimal drama around death march work conditions.
2. Allow multiple ways to get around that rule by employers
3. Employers offer zero-hour contracts or don't offer full 35-hour contracts at least
4. Some employees end up working 60 hours/week to make up the difference, therefore not getting the advantages the law was intended to create
5. Note that on average people are working 39 hours/week, not 35, and only slightly behind the 40.9 hours/week average for the rest of the Eurozone
6. Insist all of this is stopping companies investing in France because somehow this makes French people look "lazy"
7. Backtrack and insist the 35-hour rule will remain in place
This a law that doesn't work, nobody follows, is bad for the image of France but in fact workers are 13% more productive than the rest of the EU, is threatened with being removed, but will be saved because the lawmakers think it does work and is being followed and isn't bad for the image of France?
Right. And this is the country of the deep thinkers and intellectuals? Uhh huh...
There is big problem with the employment in France. I spent almost a year there and this is a country where I am not going back.
I worked as an engineer in big enterprise at 35 hours a week + RTTs - meaning I am working 37.5 hours but I can take more days off. Everything sounded great before I went there and realized there is double standard - employees vs. contractors. If you are a contractor you have no rights and you are expected to work as much as your manager says. In the end I was spending more than 50-55 hours a week and the overtime I did was not paid accordingly. If I wasn't OK with this I'd be let go easily and there are no laws that protect me. I would not be fired, but I will be transferred back to the contracting company who is not obliged to pay me, if I am not working for a client.
I'd be really curious to know which contracting company you worked for.
What you are stating is not true: when you are transferred back to the contracting company (for whatever reason), if they are still your employer, this company has to pay you. Even if you don't work for a client. This is not that uncommon actually to be in that kind of situation.
However, contracting companies are well known to be really hard on their contractors (especially developers), if they saw that you would believe that you wouldn't get paid unless you work free extra hours, that doesn't surprise me that they'd use that. But it would never have happened. In France, work laws are much more in favor of the employee, they would never have gotten away with not paying you.
The ONLY case where this would be possible is if the OP was self-employed, using a contracting company to get a position with a client ("portage salarial") - In which case they are not employees and hence aren't really in a position to criticise employment practices.
The company is Astek Sud-Est. And yes, contractors are paid between contracts in normal contracting companies. In Sophia-Antipolis, where I was situated it was a common practice to put a clause in the contract that you won't be paid, even though by law should be paying you. In the end, when you are a foreigner and you barely speak the language it's rather difficult to seek your rights.
OK, so you were working for Amadeus through Astek. I think this is just a case of your service company exploiting you by trying to scare you. The clause they were talking about is that you don't get the extra 25e/day "fixed lunch and travel expenses" when you're not being pimped out. This is more a case of Astek defrauding social security (by hiding a major proportion of salary as expenses).
The clause you are talking about was removed in favor of lunch coupons. I had a clause in my contract saying that I won't be paid between contracts. Seriously. Illegal or not that's the case.
usually monday to friday but 5.5 working days for some other companies (referring to white collar job btw)
so if you just assume it's 5 day week, then it would be 25 working days approximately a month, times 12 would be 300
this year we have 10 public holidays and that's again under assumption that these holidays falls on non weekend (if fall on saturday, it's considered as gone)
Working long hours in Singapore is a mindset problem. When I was working there in 2005, it is the norm that the project managers would schedule at 6pm in the evening with the local teams.
As a white collar (so not being bound to the 9 to 5 and sometimes pulling in 36h shifts...), the system worked as such:
I would work 5 days a week, and get an extra day off of my choice every fortnight.
The results were really great for me and people I knew:
I no longer needed to take days off to deal with paperwork, and other administrative tasks, I could finally get an appointment with my banker. I could afford to go to the day market to buy fresh produce.
I knew of married couples that would alternate theirs to be on days where the kids didn't have school (traditionally wednesdays) so they didn't have to source someone to watch over the kids on a traditionally very busy day for childcare.
Obviously the system is not perfect, but surely as work gets "easier" the way forward would be to reduce hours worked, not increase them...