The 4-day work week is long overdue. Keynes promised us a 15-hour work week thanks to productivity gains, but those productivity gains have mostly been eaten up by excessive corporate profit-taking. Lots of people are overworked and underpaid.<p>I've been working a 4-day week for well over a decade (also because I've got kids, but I did this well before I had kids), and I strongly recommend it for everybody.
Terribly written article and headline.<p>Germany isn't 45 German companies that will try it.<p>There's no labor shortage in Germany, what there is, are proper salaries.<p>One example are childcare workers in Kindergartens (Kita). Salaries are low and regulated, so nobody wants to do it. Increase the salary and you will have many workers lining up.<p>Germany has managed to grow for decades, from absolute destruction post WW2 without raises that accompany that amount of growth.<p>Tech workers in Germany are paid peanuts in comparison to Americans.<p>The situation isn't worse because some American companies offer good salaries, pushing the market up.
I feel like the discourse on worker rights / work-life balance and demographic issues are more decoupled than they should be. Low birth-rates are provably related to the ability of parents to spend time with their children.<p>This combined with other initiatives might help Europe recover from the serious imminent demographic collapse.
Sounds good to me. Endgame: maybe have enough time for work AND leisure reading AND cooking AND household chores AND exercise AND volunteering AND civic involvement AND ... well, the list goes on. Also kids!<p>People working 40+ hours a week just robotically wall off entire areas of ways to spend their time rewardingly. My 0,02€.
I find it interesting when employees ask for this without reducing pay. They then think it’s a 20% reduction as it’s 20% less work. But then you factor the overhead including normal overhead like benefits, HR, office space and additional overhead like management (a manager can only many so many people so now we need two managers for a group) and your at around a 40% reduction in pay to support one less day of output.
If this becomes a common thing in the US I'd be worried about stoking the flames of class warfare between white collar and blue collar workers. Many of those blue collar jobs (public facing especially) cannot be compressed into a 4 day work week. Lots of blue collar workers are already furious about things like working from home, 'email jobs', flexible schedules, etc. On top of that many white collar workers already enjoy an unofficial 4 day work week with offices being ghost towns on Friday afternoons. So are we talking about realistically a 3 day work week with an extra 'will respond to e-mail emergencies' on the 4th day?