Glancing through the study, I'm curious about both sample bias, and the lack of formal measurement. I'm not an expert in this type of thing, not even an amateur. I'm poking holes to see what's left.
"Participants were identified via media reports featuring Australian firms trialling the 100:80:100 model, in addition to companies listed on recruitment sites that specialise in 4DWW jobs. In other instances, eligible organisations were recommended by the participants themselves."
I'd expect organisations with positive results will be the ones recommended by other participants - "talk to these people, it worked for them too!"
I'm also interested in whether or not organisations converted all staff to 100:80:100, or if it was optional. Is the performance driven by peer pressure?
Finally, the participants' measures of productivity will have significant lag time in them, so it depends on trial's length, e.g. "revenue", "profit", "csat", "projects delivered on time", "net promoter score".
It's an interesting qualitative study, I'd certainly like a four day work week with no change in comp.
Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since the advent of the 5 day work week. We, as a species, should be minimizing work to 3 or 4 days a week with equal overall pay. Corporations should be fined heavily for contacting an employee after working hours. On call should require corporations to pay hefty overtime. This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal. Employee owned co-ops are more humane.
Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US, largely due to the availability of cheap labour (attributed by economists to foreign students)[2].
I heard one economist on the ABC give the example of carwashes[2]. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, car washes in Australia were largely automated and hand-wash car washes were relatively uncommon. However, the abundance of cheap labour has since led to a proliferation of hand-wash car washes.
That's almost how it was in Yugoslavia. Companies where "owned by society", but workers had voting rights. Whenever there was a vote to decide whether extra profit should be used for capital investments and/or operational improvements or assigned to salaries budget, everyone voted to increase their salaries.
Not every employ should be a co-owner, or at least not everyone should have voting rights.
So then all the productivity improvements are nothing more than boosting the hashrate of your crypto miner? You have to do it to not fall behind, but once everyone has done it, we all end up back in the same spot where we started?
This has the same energy as "if we tax the billionaires, they'll leave". That statement and yours are wrong. Why? Because if it was profitable, they would've done it already. Pretty much any employer would use you as fertilizer if there was an uptick in the stock price.
But let's say it's true. Great. Punish them with tariffs. They also have diminished political power because they're no longer a local employer.
We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society that will soon mint its first trillionaire. This is beyond even French revolution levels of wealth inequality.
Hey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.
You're just going to Galapagos your economy. Consumers won't put up with high prices and inferior goods. Unless you want to restrict internet/information access so your consumers don't know what they are missing out on.
Nah, I live in the UK, prices are higher than eu, public service is much worse, but public are voting for the party with members that brought this about.
The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that countrie’s demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.
This will never happen for the simple reason that there are some countries whose members are poor and so they are rightfully ready to work harder and longer for opportunities.
A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?
> A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?
I thought about this a lot. Some of it is expectation wrapped up in the American Dream. You work hard, and get those rewards. But that isn’t true because life isn’t fair and capitalism isn’t particularly humane or ethical.
Some of it is perceived. The people who strike gold without hard work expect to keep striking more gold, and when the yield shrinks you’re appalled because that’s not how things should be.
US is a deeply individualistic society, now more so than ever. We don’t always sacrifice for the common good, because they’re supposed to work hard just like me.
The argument (maybe in a sibling comment) was that, if the US switched to a 4-day workweek, companies would simply offshore their work to poorer countries who work 5 days, so my question is, then why isn't the current workweek 7 days?
There are Americans working 24/7, though. Surely you have heard of people working multiple menial full time jobs? Jobs are being offshored and cheaper immigrants are being imported who can be paid less. What more evidence do you need?
People should realise that they will be the ones paying for it. Prices will increase a lot. People need to be aware of that. Personally I'm okay with that trade-off. Also corporations - when checks and balances work properly, which is frequently not the case unfortunately - are great and net benefit for humanity.
I wonder what would happen to costs if we had a 90%+ tax rate on the ultra wealthy... maybe if all these record profits were instead funneled back into society everyone would be better off AND prices would drop... a system like this would be good for society it seems... we should come up with a good name for that system, tho...
Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost.
Most things we buy are priced according to what the consumer is willing to pay for it, and the balance sheet of the companies that sell most of the things we buy show there’s a lot of wiggle room there.
Lot of shoulds, oughts, etc. How about this: do whatever you want. Nothing is stopping you from setting up a 3 day workweek co-op. More power to any group that wants to. There are a number out there already. But it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".
More completely the 8 hour work day movement. Loosely, 8hrs each for work, sleep, and everything else with everything else often being called recreation. Add in a 5 day work week and 40hrs. There's monument in Melbourne commemorating stonemasons winning an 8 hour work day in 1856 but they were working 6 days a week.
This is absurdly ahistorical. Corporations take as much as they can. If there were no law limiting work to 40 hours / week, they would demand far more - as they had before massive workers' protests forced the current limits.
Labor has been completely defeated in the US. Capital sets the terms and has captured the political class. You know this but are using deflection to put blame on individuals who don’t actually hold power. Management can offshore anytime workers present a challenge.
I like to feel that I'm spending my time productively, yeah. Not all of my time, mind you. People generally like to feel their work impacting their environment. Many consider it the most fulfilling part of their lives. Working purely for compensation is a great way to kill most positive energy for a solid half of your waking hours most days. People react differently, of course. For some the knowledge that they're making money alone provides the psychological reward, others find enjoyment in the moment-to-moment of things, even if they're not part of a meaningful goal, and yet others offset the meaninglessness of their work with a fulfilling home life or hobbies.
On the whole though, I'd say yes, people do care about productivity so long as they feel it's connected to their world and oriented in the right-ish direction.
I work remotely at companies until they fire me for doing the minimum. I still get paid for the two to three weeks, so I couldn't care less because the money goes towards my hobbies.
a good number do, I've been surprised by how many low level fast food managers actually care about how well the store's performing due to owner pressure despite seeing little to no wage improvement regardless
This all sounds great until you've actually had your own small business and experienced things from the other side.
Employees are expensive, good employees are hard to find, and sometimes things need to be fixed outside 9-5 to avoid having an angry client on your hands.
You should hire people to cover those hours outside of the 9-5 then. Or do you expect your employees to slave away for your benefit without getting anything but the bare minimum from you?
Here in NL lots of people do 32 hour weeks (legally your employer cannot deny you this if you ask for it), and I've literally never seen it be an issue productivity/team-wise, and people's QoL raises dramatically having an entire extra day free to themselves.
What a hollow dismissal of based on acrobatic leaps of semantics.
The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.
If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.
I did read it, thus my comment. Did you actually read the methods? This is what you're defending:
"Methods
This study took a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews with n=15 industry leaders" .. "Participants were identified via media reports " .. "A total of n=15 key informants participated in this study" .. "Recent research into appropriate sample sizes for qualitative research found saturation typically
occurs between 9 and 17 interviews and the researchers agreed that no fresh insights or themes
arose after the twelfth interview in this study (Hennink & Kaiser, 2022)"
Edit: It’s becoming ever more increasingly common on HN to get downvotes for innocuous respectful posts. If you’re downvoting, I’d genuinely appreciate if you explained what is it that you find offensive about this post. You’re not going to hurt my feelings, I sincerely want to understand what it is that you see as transgressive so I can learn from it. Thank you. Another example which baffled me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹
I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²:
> Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³:
> Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science.
That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”?
¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context.
Worth watching the clip so you can hear the argument directly. IMO his point is that peer review is not what makes something science. Nor are studies, publishing papers nor p-values, even gathering and reproducing data is not what makes science science.
Australia also has a 60 year productivity low and a government that is boosting taxes on capital gains on shares/business to basically a worldwide high. So take our experiments with a grain of salt!
The tax is already bad here, even without it. I paid $89,000 taxes just for the last financial year because stock gains are added up on top of the income and my partner doesn’t work and there’s no family support allowance here.
I can apply Australian citizenship next year but I will leave ASAP after becoming a citizen for Singapore, Dubai or Hong Kong where the tax is < 20%
Yeah, housing tax changes were needed, but seems weird to also do Shares.
NZ, like always is lagging behind AU, and also needs house tax changes. The housing situation in NZ dire.
NZ is even worse than Australia on the housing tax vs shares tax front. No housing taxes. Yet they have what is effectively an annual wealth tax on shares (FIF) even on their pitiful retirement savings schemes. This discourages saving in shares and encourages putting money in real estate.
What's your point about increased capital gains? Taxing income based on ownership should be higher than income via actual labor. It's insane that's not the case in most places.
So you're saying that four-day-workweek companies saw no decline in their productivity, in contrast to the Australian average productivity which went down overall‽
That means the four-day-workweek is even better than we thought it was!
Hopkins, J., Bardoel, E.A. & Djurkovic, N. The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of the 100:80:100 model. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07536-x
I believe these results, as my experience of Australian workplaces has been ubiquity of people whose presence is net negative to the workplace, even after discounting their salary.
Most Australian companies would be better off simply paying (0~90% of) its employees to stay at home.
I do wonder to what extent this is due to the Great Feminization - it is now routine to find workplaces that have "upgraded" their wokeness from reminders that sexual and physical violence is not OK, to policies like "disparaging remarks are not tolerated" or "you must respect your colleagues at all times".
Take all that AI productivity and found a one-day work week company. One day of focused collaboration each week, let bots and brains chew on stuff in the interim.
Given the gargantuan amount of data showing productivity relative to wage gains, or productivity relative to time worked, or productivity relative to physical office proximity, and the absolute staunch refusal of business to listen to any of it, I can only assume one thing:
The point was never productivity, it was about humiliation and control.
If it were about productivity, workers would be paid substantially more to reflect the immense productivity gains we’ve created through automation; we are not.
If it were about effective time management or efficiency, we would be on four-day, 32 hour work weeks to reflect the real productive output of labor; we are not.
Just like how RTO excuses of “mentoring Juniors” and “improving team cohesion” went out the door for mass layoffs, despite data showing that a flexible schedule adapting to the needs of the team rather than whims of leadership have better outcomes and higher productivity; we now pay higher commute costs, fuel costs, energy costs, and opportunity costs so real estate investments don’t invert.
It’s all bullshit and lies, and this is one more study to add to the Alexandria-esque library of research proving that there is no single good way of working, and the insistence of refusing to change how we work is ultimately costing us more than if we just learned to adapt.
Working based on time i.e. 5 days a week is already problematic. We all see the pay by the hour workers like pool cleaners, vendor machine stocking people etc spending lots of time dragging out their work as they get paid by the hour. It makes perfect sense from their perspective and yes not everyone drags the work.
Fixing the work week to just 5 days have similar issues. Some weeks will be less work and other weeks more work but you spend the same five days there. So the what you learn that matters is to spend 5 days physically there and perform a minimum workload so you don't get fired. You drag the weeks with less work and pick up inefficient habits as a result. That is what a 5 day working week teaches. Again there will be exceptions.
Now assuming this study is correct I am not surprised with the results. You just incentivized workers to get the same amount of output done with the condition that you gain 1 day off. Off course workers will find better and quicker ways of working to get that day off.
Even if we did a 4 working day week the problem of working based on time either fixed or paid by the hour remains. The incentivisation is the problem.
Agree. The problem is the incentivization. If a painter paints a roof in 5 hours but could do it in 1 hour just to get paid for the 5 hours its not the worker at fault but the system. If the painter got paid for the 5 hours but only did 1 hour of work then everyone wins. The painter can have more time off work or work more for more money, their choice.
Likewise the office worker working 40 hours per week, five days a week. If on some days the worker can come home early because they completed what actually needs to be done then that is better for the worker. But instead companies have a fixed 40 hours + overtime expectation. On the weeks with less work, people do busy work but instead could be using that time doing what they want.
The actual problem is that workers want to make the most money possible with the least effort possible. Until we have a system where people do work that they want to do, perverse incentives will always be an issue.
You really missed the opportunity here. You were meant to bill for the review, assessment, report production, and risks judged when coming up with that 25%.
what consulting company on earth pays 100% of their revenue to employee salary — I've worked at a number of them and it's not unusual for my pay to be half of the hourly rate charged
I remember one business class anecdote, where the conclusion of changing workplace conditions (light, music, etc. both ways) was that productivity studies increase productivity ...
Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.
Only if you do bad science experiments without a control group, otherwise you'd see the control group productivity boost as they'd also be under the same scrutiny. I didn't read the study methodology, so I'm not comparing to that, only responding to your comment in isolation.
Because if we did we’d have universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing, and every single one of those things makes it harder for abusive jobs to control their employees.
We're all in competition with each other. One person works 4 days, another person still working 5 days puts them out of business. Reality is more complicated but in the end there is no way around this basic fact.
Labor law changes reduce the work week, as was done previously. How many people work six days a week for no additional pay beyond five days?
With population declines locked in almost globally (About 71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size), working age population decline, reducing labor supply, is also locked in.
> universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing
My my, seems like we gots ourselves a socialist o’er here. We don’t take kindly to your kind ’round these parts. What’s yer idea? Improve folks lives? Treat others with respect and dignity and give e’ryone meaning? Are ya cuckoo in tha head? Git him, boys.
Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?
I see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.
In a perfect free market, like a spherical chicken in a vacuum. Maybe.
Problem is there's no such thing, monopoly powers, government subsidies, inter-company issues, contracts.
All these things can mean that a less functional, more wasteful and less productive organisation performs (in the sense of the metric that companies care about , line go up) better than a 4 day week startup.
> Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?
Eventually, but what's the typical lifecycle of a company? And if e.g. Treehouse succeeds or fails, was that because of their 4 day work week or because of any of the hundreds of other reasons a company might succeed or fail?
In what metric do they get ahead? I think this is the key. What many visualise as getting ahead primarily seems to be fund raising or having a higher monetary value. Especially in startups where the largest mouth, the biggest blagger, or the quickest to mention a buzz word gets you more funding. Being closer to your end goal, with an adoptable product that improves society, is really the only metric that matters.
Think of it like a sprint versus a marathon. If you run at full speed you can get farther than someone keeping a steady pace in the same amount of time, but you’re going to tire yourself out and become slower. You’ll lose in the long run despite looking very “productive” at the start.
Similarly, have you ever been “in the zone” and worked non-stop on a fun project, being super-productive for a full week or even multiple weeks, but then “crashed” (or even burned out) and your output got worse?
New companies are on a race against the clock. At the beginning everything is a cost, you’re constantly losing money. So you plough through to survive until you become stable. Then you need to scale back and take it slower to allow yourself to recuperate and keep going.
Also, keep in mind that small companies can often be very productive simply by having fewer employees and “red tape”. You can have an idea, send a message to someone else, get an immediate OK and get going. When a company gets too big and has lots of processes to keep things running, a lot of effort is wasted on even getting started.
How does that differentiate from a boss or a company philosophy stating a 5 or 6 day week is better? With no reliable metric on better, other than ancedotal evidence. It's not as if it's repeatable experimentation.
Now do 3, 2, 1, and perhaps 0 days... but seriously, this probably just resulted in employees squeezing out some of the slack time they would otherwise have with an extra day.
> What success looks like differs by industry, and a rigid, one-size-fits-all measurement would have made the findings less applicable to the real world [...] Burnout emerged as a major theme in the findings.
This is the actual problem to discuss, not the days per week.
Stressors vary a lot by industry and experience level. A senior manager in IT may do more than 40 hours a week plus be on-call with almost no stress as long as their projects are doing well. Meanwhile, there may be no sane amount of overtime pay that will convince a young guy doing roofing in his first year, and he's highly stressed out either way.
Anyone spinning this as a political issue is plain ignorant.
98 comments:
Glancing through the study, I'm curious about both sample bias, and the lack of formal measurement. I'm not an expert in this type of thing, not even an amateur. I'm poking holes to see what's left.
"Participants were identified via media reports featuring Australian firms trialling the 100:80:100 model, in addition to companies listed on recruitment sites that specialise in 4DWW jobs. In other instances, eligible organisations were recommended by the participants themselves."
I'd expect organisations with positive results will be the ones recommended by other participants - "talk to these people, it worked for them too!"
I'm also interested in whether or not organisations converted all staff to 100:80:100, or if it was optional. Is the performance driven by peer pressure?
Finally, the participants' measures of productivity will have significant lag time in them, so it depends on trial's length, e.g. "revenue", "profit", "csat", "projects delivered on time", "net promoter score".
It's an interesting qualitative study, I'd certainly like a four day work week with no change in comp.
Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since the advent of the 5 day work week. We, as a species, should be minimizing work to 3 or 4 days a week with equal overall pay. Corporations should be fined heavily for contacting an employee after working hours. On call should require corporations to pay hefty overtime. This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal. Employee owned co-ops are more humane.
Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US, largely due to the availability of cheap labour (attributed by economists to foreign students)[2].
I heard one economist on the ABC give the example of carwashes[2]. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, car washes in Australia were largely automated and hand-wash car washes were relatively uncommon. However, the abundance of cheap labour has since led to a proliferation of hand-wash car washes.
1. https://files.littlebird.com.au/SCR-20260525-ietj.png
2. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/the-pr...
> Employee owned co-ops are more humane
Speaking as someone born in Yugoslavia.
That's almost how it was in Yugoslavia. Companies where "owned by society", but workers had voting rights. Whenever there was a vote to decide whether extra profit should be used for capital investments and/or operational improvements or assigned to salaries budget, everyone voted to increase their salaries.
Not every employ should be a co-owner, or at least not everyone should have voting rights.
Did you know that public market shareholders almost always vote for stock buybacks
That would be ok in a non-globalized world. In our world, any country that implements those laws will see a lot more offshoring.
So then all the productivity improvements are nothing more than boosting the hashrate of your crypto miner? You have to do it to not fall behind, but once everyone has done it, we all end up back in the same spot where we started?
Unironically, yes. One saving grace is in some ways, such as medicine and technology, more will be available to you, but not for less effort.
This has the same energy as "if we tax the billionaires, they'll leave". That statement and yours are wrong. Why? Because if it was profitable, they would've done it already. Pretty much any employer would use you as fertilizer if there was an uptick in the stock price.
But let's say it's true. Great. Punish them with tariffs. They also have diminished political power because they're no longer a local employer.
We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society that will soon mint its first trillionaire. This is beyond even French revolution levels of wealth inequality.
Hey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.
Not if that country also legislates heavy penalties for companies that produce their goods in countries with worse labor laws.
You're just going to Galapagos your economy. Consumers won't put up with high prices and inferior goods. Unless you want to restrict internet/information access so your consumers don't know what they are missing out on.
I dunno. Consumers put up with a lot. Why can't I buy a cheap Chinese EV again?
Nah, I live in the UK, prices are higher than eu, public service is much worse, but public are voting for the party with members that brought this about.
Humans are weird.
The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that countrie’s demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.
This will never happen for the simple reason that there are some countries whose members are poor and so they are rightfully ready to work harder and longer for opportunities.
A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?
Trillions of dollars spend on wars which don't need to exist doesn't help.
> A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?
I thought about this a lot. Some of it is expectation wrapped up in the American Dream. You work hard, and get those rewards. But that isn’t true because life isn’t fair and capitalism isn’t particularly humane or ethical.
Some of it is perceived. The people who strike gold without hard work expect to keep striking more gold, and when the yield shrinks you’re appalled because that’s not how things should be.
US is a deeply individualistic society, now more so than ever. We don’t always sacrifice for the common good, because they’re supposed to work hard just like me.
Anyway if you read all that, thank you.
But, if there exist poorer countries, why is there a five-day work week instead of a seven-day one? Why aren't we all just working 24/7?
In most poor countries workers are doing 10 hours per day 6 days a week. With a significant number of them doing 7 days a week.
The argument (maybe in a sibling comment) was that, if the US switched to a 4-day workweek, companies would simply offshore their work to poorer countries who work 5 days, so my question is, then why isn't the current workweek 7 days?
There are Americans working 24/7, though. Surely you have heard of people working multiple menial full time jobs? Jobs are being offshored and cheaper immigrants are being imported who can be paid less. What more evidence do you need?
on the whole, most americans are not being compensated for the amount of value their work produces
People should realise that they will be the ones paying for it. Prices will increase a lot. People need to be aware of that. Personally I'm okay with that trade-off. Also corporations - when checks and balances work properly, which is frequently not the case unfortunately - are great and net benefit for humanity.
I wonder what would happen to costs if we had a 90%+ tax rate on the ultra wealthy... maybe if all these record profits were instead funneled back into society everyone would be better off AND prices would drop... a system like this would be good for society it seems... we should come up with a good name for that system, tho...
>> Prices will increase a lot.
Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost.
Most things we buy are priced according to what the consumer is willing to pay for it, and the balance sheet of the companies that sell most of the things we buy show there’s a lot of wiggle room there.
Lot of shoulds, oughts, etc. How about this: do whatever you want. Nothing is stopping you from setting up a 3 day workweek co-op. More power to any group that wants to. There are a number out there already. But it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".
How did the 40-hour workweek come about?
(Certainly not "naturally")
Labor unions and henry ford
Unions.
More completely the 8 hour work day movement. Loosely, 8hrs each for work, sleep, and everything else with everything else often being called recreation. Add in a 5 day work week and 40hrs. There's monument in Melbourne commemorating stonemasons winning an 8 hour work day in 1856 but they were working 6 days a week.
This is absurdly ahistorical. Corporations take as much as they can. If there were no law limiting work to 40 hours / week, they would demand far more - as they had before massive workers' protests forced the current limits.
Labor has been completely defeated in the US. Capital sets the terms and has captured the political class. You know this but are using deflection to put blame on individuals who don’t actually hold power. Management can offshore anytime workers present a challenge.
Do workers really care about productivity? As long as I get paid that's what matters.
I like to feel that I'm spending my time productively, yeah. Not all of my time, mind you. People generally like to feel their work impacting their environment. Many consider it the most fulfilling part of their lives. Working purely for compensation is a great way to kill most positive energy for a solid half of your waking hours most days. People react differently, of course. For some the knowledge that they're making money alone provides the psychological reward, others find enjoyment in the moment-to-moment of things, even if they're not part of a meaningful goal, and yet others offset the meaninglessness of their work with a fulfilling home life or hobbies.
On the whole though, I'd say yes, people do care about productivity so long as they feel it's connected to their world and oriented in the right-ish direction.
I work remotely at companies until they fire me for doing the minimum. I still get paid for the two to three weeks, so I couldn't care less because the money goes towards my hobbies.
Do you feel like maybe we could do a better job of constructing a world where people don't feel they need to do this objectively worthless activity?
This is why we can't have nice things.
a good number do, I've been surprised by how many low level fast food managers actually care about how well the store's performing due to owner pressure despite seeing little to no wage improvement regardless
> This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal.
le reddit moment
This all sounds great until you've actually had your own small business and experienced things from the other side.
Employees are expensive, good employees are hard to find, and sometimes things need to be fixed outside 9-5 to avoid having an angry client on your hands.
You should hire people to cover those hours outside of the 9-5 then. Or do you expect your employees to slave away for your benefit without getting anything but the bare minimum from you?
Here in NL lots of people do 32 hour weeks (legally your employer cannot deny you this if you ask for it), and I've literally never seen it be an issue productivity/team-wise, and people's QoL raises dramatically having an entire extra day free to themselves.
Papers like this should be called opinion surveys.
Calling it a study is a disservice to science. As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
What a hollow dismissal of based on acrobatic leaps of semantics.
The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.
If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.
You can find the study here if you wish to critique its methods: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x
I did read it, thus my comment. Did you actually read the methods? This is what you're defending:
"Methods This study took a qualitative approach, using semi-structured interviews with n=15 industry leaders" .. "Participants were identified via media reports " .. "A total of n=15 key informants participated in this study" .. "Recent research into appropriate sample sizes for qualitative research found saturation typically occurs between 9 and 17 interviews and the researchers agreed that no fresh insights or themes arose after the twelfth interview in this study (Hennink & Kaiser, 2022)"
I stand by my statement.
Edit: It’s becoming ever more increasingly common on HN to get downvotes for innocuous respectful posts. If you’re downvoting, I’d genuinely appreciate if you explained what is it that you find offensive about this post. You’re not going to hurt my feelings, I sincerely want to understand what it is that you see as transgressive so I can learn from it. Thank you. Another example which baffled me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹
I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²:
> Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.
Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³:
> Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science.
That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”?
¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context.
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_science
³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science
I'm the one that said usually, Feynman didn't have that cop-out and he was specifically talking about social science:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
Worth watching the clip so you can hear the argument directly. IMO his point is that peer review is not what makes something science. Nor are studies, publishing papers nor p-values, even gathering and reproducing data is not what makes science science.
Australia also has a 60 year productivity low and a government that is boosting taxes on capital gains on shares/business to basically a worldwide high. So take our experiments with a grain of salt!
Tax changes that have been overdue for twenty-odd years to address house prices and attempt to level the playing field between labour and capital.
Pity they didn't also change the gas tax.
The tax is already bad here, even without it. I paid $89,000 taxes just for the last financial year because stock gains are added up on top of the income and my partner doesn’t work and there’s no family support allowance here.
I can apply Australian citizenship next year but I will leave ASAP after becoming a citizen for Singapore, Dubai or Hong Kong where the tax is < 20%
Why are you not leaving right now?
House tax changes... strong yes
Share tax changes... ugh
My hope was cashed up bogans would start betting on shares instead of housing/crypto. At least it could be funnelled into something productive
Yeah, housing tax changes were needed, but seems weird to also do Shares. NZ, like always is lagging behind AU, and also needs house tax changes. The housing situation in NZ dire.
NZ is even worse than Australia on the housing tax vs shares tax front. No housing taxes. Yet they have what is effectively an annual wealth tax on shares (FIF) even on their pitiful retirement savings schemes. This discourages saving in shares and encourages putting money in real estate.
What's your point about increased capital gains? Taxing income based on ownership should be higher than income via actual labor. It's insane that's not the case in most places.
So you're saying that four-day-workweek companies saw no decline in their productivity, in contrast to the Australian average productivity which went down overall‽
That means the four-day-workweek is even better than we thought it was!
As an Australian, I am not sure that most work done in this country adds to productivity
Here's the paper, with no paywall.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x
Hopkins, J., Bardoel, E.A. & Djurkovic, N. The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of the 100:80:100 model. Humanit Soc Sci Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-026-07536-x
I believe these results, as my experience of Australian workplaces has been ubiquity of people whose presence is net negative to the workplace, even after discounting their salary.
Most Australian companies would be better off simply paying (0~90% of) its employees to stay at home.
I do wonder to what extent this is due to the Great Feminization - it is now routine to find workplaces that have "upgraded" their wokeness from reminders that sexual and physical violence is not OK, to policies like "disparaging remarks are not tolerated" or "you must respect your colleagues at all times".
Four-day work weeks are for cowards.
Take all that AI productivity and found a one-day work week company. One day of focused collaboration each week, let bots and brains chew on stuff in the interim.
Oh no, I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, lol
It's a little bit snark, but I do think it would be an interesting experiment. Wish I had lots of money to try it out.
As someone working on a Sunday on a rainy memorial day weekend. Bring back the 5 day week!
Given the gargantuan amount of data showing productivity relative to wage gains, or productivity relative to time worked, or productivity relative to physical office proximity, and the absolute staunch refusal of business to listen to any of it, I can only assume one thing:
The point was never productivity, it was about humiliation and control.
If it were about productivity, workers would be paid substantially more to reflect the immense productivity gains we’ve created through automation; we are not.
If it were about effective time management or efficiency, we would be on four-day, 32 hour work weeks to reflect the real productive output of labor; we are not.
Just like how RTO excuses of “mentoring Juniors” and “improving team cohesion” went out the door for mass layoffs, despite data showing that a flexible schedule adapting to the needs of the team rather than whims of leadership have better outcomes and higher productivity; we now pay higher commute costs, fuel costs, energy costs, and opportunity costs so real estate investments don’t invert.
It’s all bullshit and lies, and this is one more study to add to the Alexandria-esque library of research proving that there is no single good way of working, and the insistence of refusing to change how we work is ultimately costing us more than if we just learned to adapt.
Working based on time i.e. 5 days a week is already problematic. We all see the pay by the hour workers like pool cleaners, vendor machine stocking people etc spending lots of time dragging out their work as they get paid by the hour. It makes perfect sense from their perspective and yes not everyone drags the work.
Fixing the work week to just 5 days have similar issues. Some weeks will be less work and other weeks more work but you spend the same five days there. So the what you learn that matters is to spend 5 days physically there and perform a minimum workload so you don't get fired. You drag the weeks with less work and pick up inefficient habits as a result. That is what a 5 day working week teaches. Again there will be exceptions.
Now assuming this study is correct I am not surprised with the results. You just incentivized workers to get the same amount of output done with the condition that you gain 1 day off. Off course workers will find better and quicker ways of working to get that day off.
Even if we did a 4 working day week the problem of working based on time either fixed or paid by the hour remains. The incentivisation is the problem.
What's the actual problem? Most people don't live for work.
Agree. The problem is the incentivization. If a painter paints a roof in 5 hours but could do it in 1 hour just to get paid for the 5 hours its not the worker at fault but the system. If the painter got paid for the 5 hours but only did 1 hour of work then everyone wins. The painter can have more time off work or work more for more money, their choice.
Likewise the office worker working 40 hours per week, five days a week. If on some days the worker can come home early because they completed what actually needs to be done then that is better for the worker. But instead companies have a fixed 40 hours + overtime expectation. On the weeks with less work, people do busy work but instead could be using that time doing what they want.
Again the problem is the incentivization.
The actual problem is that workers want to make the most money possible with the least effort possible. Until we have a system where people do work that they want to do, perverse incentives will always be an issue.
But how will a consulting company bill for the 20%?
You increase prices by 20%
Billable hour rates would need to increase by 25%.
You really missed the opportunity here. You were meant to bill for the review, assessment, report production, and risks judged when coming up with that 25%.
what consulting company on earth pays 100% of their revenue to employee salary — I've worked at a number of them and it's not unusual for my pay to be half of the hourly rate charged
Corporations really dont care about productivity. Wfh has shown we are more productive
I remember one business class anecdote, where the conclusion of changing workplace conditions (light, music, etc. both ways) was that productivity studies increase productivity ...
It's Hawthorne effect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect
Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.
Only if you do bad science experiments without a control group, otherwise you'd see the control group productivity boost as they'd also be under the same scrutiny. I didn't read the study methodology, so I'm not comparing to that, only responding to your comment in isolation.
Won’t we face an economic decline if we continue reducing the work week even further?
Basically every study shows a four day week works best. The issue is why we never go with what the study shows.
Because if we did we’d have universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing, and every single one of those things makes it harder for abusive jobs to control their employees.
Progress is a functioning of effort, time, and luck. It’s a marathon. Keep grinding. Success is proven possible.
We're all in competition with each other. One person works 4 days, another person still working 5 days puts them out of business. Reality is more complicated but in the end there is no way around this basic fact.
Labor law changes reduce the work week, as was done previously. How many people work six days a week for no additional pay beyond five days?
With population declines locked in almost globally (About 71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size), working age population decline, reducing labor supply, is also locked in.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/fertility-rate-of-world-pop...
https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680794 (US specific citations)
> universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing
My my, seems like we gots ourselves a socialist o’er here. We don’t take kindly to your kind ’round these parts. What’s yer idea? Improve folks lives? Treat others with respect and dignity and give e’ryone meaning? Are ya cuckoo in tha head? Git him, boys.
Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?
I see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.
In a perfect free market, like a spherical chicken in a vacuum. Maybe.
Problem is there's no such thing, monopoly powers, government subsidies, inter-company issues, contracts.
All these things can mean that a less functional, more wasteful and less productive organisation performs (in the sense of the metric that companies care about , line go up) better than a 4 day week startup.
> Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?
Eventually, but what's the typical lifecycle of a company? And if e.g. Treehouse succeeds or fails, was that because of their 4 day work week or because of any of the hundreds of other reasons a company might succeed or fail?
In what metric do they get ahead? I think this is the key. What many visualise as getting ahead primarily seems to be fund raising or having a higher monetary value. Especially in startups where the largest mouth, the biggest blagger, or the quickest to mention a buzz word gets you more funding. Being closer to your end goal, with an adoptable product that improves society, is really the only metric that matters.
Think of it like a sprint versus a marathon. If you run at full speed you can get farther than someone keeping a steady pace in the same amount of time, but you’re going to tire yourself out and become slower. You’ll lose in the long run despite looking very “productive” at the start.
Similarly, have you ever been “in the zone” and worked non-stop on a fun project, being super-productive for a full week or even multiple weeks, but then “crashed” (or even burned out) and your output got worse?
New companies are on a race against the clock. At the beginning everything is a cost, you’re constantly losing money. So you plough through to survive until you become stable. Then you need to scale back and take it slower to allow yourself to recuperate and keep going.
Also, keep in mind that small companies can often be very productive simply by having fewer employees and “red tape”. You can have an idea, send a message to someone else, get an immediate OK and get going. When a company gets too big and has lots of processes to keep things running, a lot of effort is wasted on even getting started.
"study"... The replication crises in science has shown that most studies are total bs. So we probably don't want to go with them.
How does that differentiate from a boss or a company philosophy stating a 5 or 6 day week is better? With no reliable metric on better, other than ancedotal evidence. It's not as if it's repeatable experimentation.
By inductive logic, a zero day week works best.
USA: So what I hear, is we need to work 6 days per week + AI? Correct?
Now do 3, 2, 1, and perhaps 0 days... but seriously, this probably just resulted in employees squeezing out some of the slack time they would otherwise have with an extra day.
3 days off is infinitely better than moments of stress induced slacking spread throughout the week, so I don't see the downside.
> What success looks like differs by industry, and a rigid, one-size-fits-all measurement would have made the findings less applicable to the real world [...] Burnout emerged as a major theme in the findings.
This is the actual problem to discuss, not the days per week.
Stressors vary a lot by industry and experience level. A senior manager in IT may do more than 40 hours a week plus be on-call with almost no stress as long as their projects are doing well. Meanwhile, there may be no sane amount of overtime pay that will convince a young guy doing roofing in his first year, and he's highly stressed out either way.
Anyone spinning this as a political issue is plain ignorant.
>scienceaim
>!!
Junk science slop blog. Nice.
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