Sixty-one companies in the United Kingdom joined a pilot program in June 2022 in which they reduced their employees' workweek to four days—with no reduction in salary—and eight months later, 91% of them say they have no plans to go back to a five-day week.
What's the materialist reasoning here? It seems everyone knows a four day workweek is better, and yet it never goes anywhere. Is 4 days in the office just not cruel enough?
My friend work went back to 4 days in the office even after a company wide vote had like 70% wanting to stay hybrid.
The reasoning given was legit just “the boomers owners and PMC feel lonely and useless at home”
I feel like it’s mostly that.
I guess so, but even they have to see the fact that it will help their bottom line right? Happier employees with no loss of productivity means less churn.
Capitalism prioritizes power over efficiency
There's been studies going to back to at least the 90s suggesting that a 6-hour workday is more productive than 8, but no bosses have tried that either.
Makes sense the average producive work hours in an 8-hour day is like 4-5 from memory. The other hours are wasted. I suppose for stuff like essential work there would be argument that someone needs to be available over opening hours, but that'd be solvable with alternating shifts and hiring to fill the remainder.
In terms of three-day weeks, as a bonus, if you alternated the day off between a Monday and Friday week-on-week, you'd get fortnightly four-day weekends.
They did not care and even said as such lol
Also a big thing was them spending so much on buildings and wanting to get the full use from them.
They unironically admitted that the low-rung workers also serve as babysitters for grown adults who are too dull to come up with anything to do on their own.
I joked about it before, and I will do so again. Underneath the thin veneer of some sort of honor culture, the American workplace is adult day care.
I saw a thing about how a four day workweek makes worker's lives so much better that they start focusing on things outside of work and that's Bad.
Every CHUD rag about walkable cities or 4 day work weeks being oppression always bring me back to this clip.
That clip lives rent free in my mind and will forever. Foundational Marxist text right there.
If doing nothing but working and then going to bed to get ready to work, only to eventually get murdered by a thrill-seeking nazi that will get off scot-free is "freedom", I think I'll make my chances in a totalitarian dystopia like....Iceland.
The materialist reason is bosses like bullying people:shrug-outta-hecks: