Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
Work from home is a soft four-day week
Picture a factory line you could rebuild in your backyard. If you still had to stand on it ten hours a day, working from home would mean little beyond lunch at home and no commute.
People are attached to working from home because their jobs fill 40 hours with meetings or standby time, but contain only two or three hours of actual work per day.
The fact that companies can keep paying people to work from home or put in four days a week suggests less labor time is needed than before, and output remains just as productive. A related view holds that anything that can be automated should be, and that people will keep inventing new things to do because wants and desires have no ceiling.
How did the four-day week trials turn out?
A 2022 pilot in the United Kingdom, organized by 4 Day Week Global with researchers at Cambridge and Boston College, involved 61 companies and about 2,900 workers. Employees worked four days a week at the same pay for six months. At the end, 56 of the 61 companies said they would continue the schedule. Many reported that revenue stayed about level during the trial.
How did the standard workweek get to five days?
Henry Ford adopted a five-day, 40-hour week at his factories in 1926. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 set a maximum of 44 hours a week, which fell to 40 hours in 1940. Before the 1900s, six-day weeks of ten hours or more were common in factories. The weekend as most workers know it is under a century old.
What did Keynes predict about working hours?
In his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a century people would work about fifteen hours a week. He expected technology and rising wealth to deliver this. He also wrote that human desires might be insatiable, which could keep people working. Average weekly hours in wealthy countries have fallen since 1930, though not to anywhere near fifteen.