An AI-generated article which summaries a pre-print release which surveyed 15 people at 15 companies about their thoughts on whether the arrangement was working for them. Of those 15, a grand total of 6 (unidentified) people at 6 (unidentified) companies (all in the same country), said they "thought" productivity had increased. Not a single data point was taken about whether it actually increased. The questions that these 15 people were asked was not disclosed.
An informal survey, of unknown content, of 15 unidentified people, with 6 of those people being in the "boosts productivity" camp. Cool beans. I guess that settles the matter once and for all.
It's 15 companies that adopted a technique and it's part of a broader constellation of experiments in this area which have been confounding the traditional logic that productivity would decrease. https://www.4dayweek.com/research
The people representing the businesses in the preprint hold titles like co-founder, CEO/founder, COO, General Manager, and CEO. The size of the business and sector are also noted. I think your framing of them as "unidentified people" is therefore off, it is certainly not the same as a journalist conveniently using "unnamed sources", this is standard academic practice.
Different companies measure different things, but they do measure and that is addressed in the paper. "revenue (DM10), profit (DM4), other financial targets (DM2, DM6), customer/client satisfaction ( DM8, DM6), story points (DM14), sprint goals (DM7), billable hours (DM12), capacity ( DM4), response rates (DM10), standard operating procedure metrics (DM9), sick leave (DM1, D M 4. DM9, DM15), lodgements (DM12), employee happiness (DM6, DM15), projects delivered on time (DM15), and net promoter score ( DM4)". There were also other benefits like hiring and retention.
So this is not what "unidentified people" "thought" about productivity, this was founders and the c-suite using their existing favoured metrics. On those metrics a large number of them reported an increase in productivity, and a larger group reported no deleterious effects on productivity. This is broadly consistent with the trends in the wider research into this area globally, which continually go against the predictions that productivity will drop. Is it universally applicable? I don't think anyone is claiming that.
I've followed this area for a while and, sorry to be impolite, it is your summary that is less accurate than the the one you accuse of being AI-generated.
Having read all of the above, I think it is fair to say that this is a study about what these people "thought." Just because their thought involves some homegrown, personally-favored metrics, doesn't change the fact that this is a qualitative survey report.
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)"
The interviews contain invaluable insights such as: “adopting the 4DWW takes work” “Productivity up, waste removed” “Management
-led/employee
-driven,” “Train for leisure,”
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
This is such an absurd thought-terminating cliche. Science suffixation seems more an indicator of the age of the field, not its scientific rigour. Are "climate science" and "computer science" not science?
On the flip side, just because it says "ology" at the end of a word does not mean it's a science.
Well, yes, but the courses I've taken for the computer science portion of my degree feel much more like math or engineering than science; experimental/empirical verification of natural facts are hardly present.
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!
My limited-research understanding is that there shouldn't be a difference between capital gains from housing versus shares, otherwise it's 'picking winners' or encouraging investment in specific directions. Having said that, the 'winner' they've picked is new house builds, which retain some tax benefits. I'm OK with that, without having skin in that game now or likely into the future.
In regards to other comments further down regarding Australia's tax rates being high, internationally Australia is on the lower end.
I believe the (seemingly very loud) naysayers about these tax changes are those who receive much more of their income via 'capital' than via 'effort', and so my sympathies are minimal to non-existent. Sure, I have capital investments that will yield lower returns, but I believe the changes make "the way it works" overall more fair to those who don't have the means to earn means passively.
Cashed up bogans may funnel more of their money into new house builds, which is productive...?
Semi-unrelated addition:
To some extent I think that 'owning ones own house' is a motivator to work harder, so as home ownership has grown increasingly out of reach, so has some amount of motivation to actually work dried up. There's an inherent 'participation in society' to owning a home that has an intangible but high value. Whether this has anything to do with Australia's decreasing productivity, I don't know.
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.
You shouldn't have to rely on shares investments to make a living or retire though.
Just because someone doesn't invest in shares, doesn't mean they are a bogan.
I'm sick of this term being thrown around at people you look down upon...
Yeah, everyone is forced to accept their own individual risk in their super and other investments (as usual, favoring the wealthy with enough spare money, time and contacts to get proper financial advice). Better if that risk was born collectively. But government funded pensions are communist or something. At least most of the super funds I see are non-profits.
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%
To pay $89,000 in taxes you'd have to be earning in the range of $350k. Do you think you're hard done by? I'd be rather annoyed if you were eligible for family support allowance in that earning range? (partially because I'd be missing out on a decent chunk of government support myself)
What am I missing about your situation that makes it remotely sympathetic?
If you live in inner Sydney, the rent alone is $1350 pw and tax is ridiculous. I basically sold my stocks to have a down payment but then that got added on top of income. If i’d have stayed in HK, i’d have paid 0% for that.
I just treat it as paying for Australian citizenship to
make me feel better and it still comes out cheaper than buying a Saint Kitts and Nevis passport. Australian passport also opens up the E3 visa to go to the USA
As an Australian with a family and 2 high-paying salaries paying a LOT of tax, none of those countries are remotely comparable to Australia.
If you hate taxes and fees, Singapore has a 60% Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty on residential property applied to foreign buyers, on top of an already insane property market. There's huge fines and government intervention into _everything_ and a massive high-stress culture.
Hong Kong is equally absurd for property and has a sword hanging over its head, that falls if China ever makes a move on Taiwan; the inevitable US and global sanctions would decimate HK.
I can get PR in Singapore through my partner, so no 60%. Company paid medical and everything so expat life and no responsibilities. And if I were ever have to have kids, you can’t hire a maid here sleeping at your apartment and you have to clean yourself which is ridiculous. In Hk, SG, Dubai you can get domestic helpers cheaply and they take care of everything
> And if I were ever have to have kids, you can’t hire a maid here sleeping at your apartment and you have to clean yourself which is ridiculous.
Not sure if serious.
If serious: This is a really weird and almost sociopathic thing to say. I really don't get where you're coming from. It's certainly not the cultural direction I'd like to see Australia moving in.
OK, just seems weird from my cultural experience, and the way I was reading your comment it sounded 'entitled' (likely due to the cultural difference).
Describing it as "pretty good value" bothers me in a number of contexts.
I'm also fine with this never becoming a thing in Australia. Not sure how out-of-touch or in-touch that makes me, but that's how I feel nonetheless.
@Loocid, thanks for saying what I was dancing around.
Its too close to slavery for my liking. Yes they are paid but 2.5k per month is very low for Singapore, they work massive hours, they rely on you for shelter, and are very likely from much poorer neighbouring countries that are trying to support family back home.
The whole power dynamic is extremely exploitable which results in a lot of abuse cases.
If you made income, and enough gain in stocks to pay that much in tax, you should be happy.
I want to know why you are keen to become an Australian citizen if you’re not enthusiastic about contributing your share.
Constructive discussion about appropriate levels of taxation is important, but let’s at least agree that the things we rely on (roads, hospitals, schools, defence, …) cost something.
I lived in Singapore and Hk before, don’t drive, work from home and countries are pretty much interchangeable. I left Germany for high taxes for a reason.
I pay private medical so don’t benefit much from tax anyway. No kids, no car, paid off my apartment. I can get much better value elsewhere right?
If I tell you you can pick 3 dishes
a) singapore: safe, low crime, low tax, efficient, excellent public transportation, better roads
b) hk: safe, low crime, low tax, politically getting worse, excellent public transport, better airport
c) australia: higher crime compared to the other too, high tax but bad services
I basically pay for an overpriced dish with bland taste, so why would I keep doing that?
I preferred living in Hong Kong and Singapore and do not enjoy living here honestly, but if you treat it as payment for my+partner’s backup citizenship, it seems more justifiable.
I'd assume, as an Australian, who works for a HK company and has travelled for work all their life, the long term lifestyle in Australia is probably better than those countries. I love HK and Singo but I am not sure I'd want to live there. But for working, most people here would not work in an iron lung and the socialist government pretty much supports the idea that, if you don't like to work, you shouldn't have to as long as there are a few who will work. And, that number is fewer and fewer.
I'm sorry but you pay more in tax than I make in income! This sounds like your lifestyle creep has chewed up your money stream. Despite my significantly lower income, I manage to own my house in Melbourne. With your income I could have it paid down in a few years at most.
Good job paying that off. I’m sure Australia has benefits for some but without kids, not having grown up here, paying my own insurance and not driving I don’t really see it.
I'm in a similar boat, and can relate to the on-going management and suppression of lifestyle creep in order to reach worthwhile goals. It feels like a never-ending battle, even after 20 years.
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!
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.
My understanding is that the difference is in the Capital Gains Tax, which doesn't apply to the day-to-day running of the business or its profitability or the salaries it pays.
Again, my understanding is that the (only) difference is when the business is sold, and the 50% discount to CGT is no longer applied and instead there is an inflation adjustment instead (what I don't understand here is how to get an initial valuation, and would it be essentially $0, so the entire amount is capital gains? which feels somewhat unfair)
So it will be a hit at the time the business is sold, not at any point during the running of the business. My (potentially naive) take is that the hard work that goes into running and growing a business is about the provision of the goods or services, but if it's about maximising "the exit", then that feels to me like not the kind of incentive that it should be. The 'running' of the business being more important than the selling of it.
The 50% CGT discount has set a bad precedent. It should have been lower, or should have scaled over time. It has deformed the expected reward structure.
Can a business agree to be sold in tranches over time? If such a thing helps minimise tax then I can see that becoming the norm. I know that selling a house is a big, singular chunk of money that generally needs to be 'managed' in order to pay the minimum amount of tax. Maybe fractional selling is going to become a thing.
Wouldn't paying yourself a higher salary (since it's your own business) and/or putting more into superannuation offset the 'retirement' hit of not getting a golden exit parachute?
ps. Australia uses a progressive tax system. If you earn very little money, you pay a very low tax rate (or many zero). If you earn a massive corporate salary, you pay the top rate.
The new 30% floor completely throws that out the window for capital gains. It means even if your total income for the year is low enough that your normal tax rate should be 16% or 0%, the government steps in and forces a flat 30% tax on the asset sale anyway.
So, contrary to what the government is saying, this new regime taxes the poorer even more.
My non-heavily-researched understanding is that people who make their entire, or a majority of, their annual 'earnings' from capital gains may not be all that poor.
There's a whole spectrum of examples that can be used to demonstrate fairness or lack of fairness. Can you elaborate on your example of taxing a poor person even more by forcing a flat 30% tax on capital gains? Is this person you? What does your life entail whereby you are poor whilst also living almost entirely off capital gains?
You can still get all your capital out before the 1st of July 2027, and then re-distribute into areas that have better tax incentives, like new house builds. Sounds like that might solve two problems at once.
It's not me. I actually work for a living and I receive a salary.
Many people I know with their own business plan to hopefully get out of it some day. They all make less than me but own a business of their own.
Let's say this works and those people who already have assets get taxed a bit more, when they are gone, there would then now very little incentive to work hard and start a business.
Such short term thinking will pretty much destroy the economy in the long term. You can't tax an economy to health and fairness.
On paper yes, but very few of the _actual poor_ were making capital gains on asset sales. Aus Govt figures claim 90% of people under 35 do not own shares outside of retirement funds(which get different tax treatment).
It closes the loop holes where wealthy people approaching retirement would spend a few years paying very little tax and living off capital gains instead at a ~20% tax rate.
How is the recently announced 2026 Australian Government budget relevant to this study done in 2023-2024? There is a whole bunch of other factors to Australia's productivity, not at least the drop in GDP per capita and fall in Total Factor Productivity.
I was contacted this week for a position that was openly 6 days a week. We need to end H1B in this country as soon as possible and keep the 996 schedule firmly out of the United States.
They call you lazy for not wanting to compete against the entire world in your own country.
Or it’s a way for the less fortunate (geographically) to seek a better future.
They more or less got rid of it last September, yet the job market has only worsened. Scapegoating minorities, whether it be trans people, brown people, Muslims or immigrants, doesn’t work. All it does is destroy lives.
> You give away your bias when it is the other way around.
American corporations could care less about giving anyone a better future.
archagon was attempting to paint declan_roberts comment as blaming H1B workers on working conditions, which they did not do. But H1Bs will be used to suppress wages by working more hours 996 under worse conditions (oncall, etc). This is low rhetoric. To call out how H1Bs are being used is not scapegoating nor is it racist. It makes zero difference where they come from. The cause is corporate greed, the effect is more H1Bs.
Why not both? It is a feedback loop. When the US allowed railroad/mine workers from China, it is true that Chinese labor wanted a better future and that capitalists want to use Chinese labor to suppress American wages. For instance, look at the animosity towards Chinese workers in Wyoming by European workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Springs_massacre
The top comment seems to insinuate the 996 (or any overwork scheme) is being brought over because of H1B visa workers.
The responder is saying that domestic American capitalists do not need foreign influence to abuse or exploit labor. The H1B visa program has absolutely nothing to do, for example, with Walmart telling their full time employees how to apply for government assistance programs because they refuse to pay a livable wage.
I don't see how that's relevant to the discussion. The parent's point is that companies in America do not need to import cruelty or an acceptance thereof, they are more than capable and more than willing to do it themselves.
I brought up Walmart as an example, it was never intended to be a 1:1 analog with H1Bs.
Chinese tech companies' 996 policies, and large Chinese tech companies in general, are newer than that ethic in the US. What I hear about 995.5 (every other Saturday off) from my friend at Xiaohongshu in Beijing sounds remarkably consistent with what I heard from my Google friends 20-25 years ago, from working hours to on-site amenities that kept you at work. You're spotting a correlation, but I think causality probably goes in the US -> China direction on this.
In the early to mid 90s, I worked at a Silicon Valley based software startup. We had something called "The Century Club". You made the club if you'd done 3 consecutive months in the last year without working less than 100 hours in any week of those months (averaging 100 hours was not good enough). More engineers were in the club than not. We were told that making the club was not mandatory, but nobody in the club was ever fired and most not in the club were eventually fired.
The next startup I was at had a similar culture without the cute name. I remember my most exhausting stretch there was coming in on a Saturday morning, for a database migration that had to happen outside business hours, and working straight through without sleep (other than nodding off at the keyboard) until Monday afternoon. Our CEO was kind enough to bring us food. Even in regular times there, I would go exercise from 10-11 PM, and more often than not I'd go back to the office after.
A decade later I was at Amazon. Our entire group of ~100 engineers was required by our VP to work weekends, in the office, for months at a time when approaching ship dates. The VP would send an email every Friday during this period to remind us to be there. Of course he wasn't there.
Those were all pretty counterproductive, but didn't seem that unusual. The difference in the US back then was that even asking about such things during an interview would often result in no offer because the candidate didn't have a "good" work ethic. Things have gotten a lot better in the US in the last 10-15 years, but a lot of that came from competition for talent. The more that competition eases, the more likely it is that we'll go backwards on this.
Relating back to the article... For the last 3 years of my career (I retired a few years ago), I worked 4-day weeks, and it was all remote. This is just as anecdotal as the article, but I felt I got far more done, with higher quality, than at any point in my career. It was such a revelation.
I guess you had bad luck working for teams that worked long hours. But as another datapoint, I worked at Google for more than a decade around that time period, for several different teams. Google did have a lot of amenities and people would say that it was to keep you at work, but I didn't see much evidence of that. It didn't keep anyone I knew from going home when they wanted. Being single, I'd stay for dinner or even come in on a weekend to do my laundry. But some weekdays I'd either work from home or get in around 11. Or maybe go for a bike ride at lunch. Nobody kept track. I have little idea how many hours I worked, but there was plenty of time while waiting on compiles to check Memegen and Hacker News. It wasn't a high-stress job.
It's a big company, though, so other teams might be different.
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, I don't want mean for myself, I mean as an experiment at the other end of the four-day work week spectrum.
Though for myself, I like having time to think about ideas in between when I collaborate with folk on them, so I have a lot of optimism about the success of the experiment. :)
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.
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".
Table 1 has "Duration", but the units are unlabelled, if it's weeks, it's less than a year, months is probably better for seeing performance changes.
It's an interesting qualitative study, I'd certainly like a four day work week with no change in comp.
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.
If you look at Australian IT companies they're management and consultant heavy. Roles like architects, review boards, program managers etc., exceed actual engineering roles. In such a set up it takes forever to get any real work done.
Then Australian real wages have also declined. So there is already low motivation to work beyond the minimum expectation.
Australia also has strong social security, at least until now, and there are plenty of odd jobs due to the real estate and tourism industries, so there is little pressure to survive unless you owe too much credit.
Automation and technology adoption also lags behind. For example, people still wait thirty minutes on a call to get an appointment with a doctor instead of making an online booking.
For all of these reasons productivity has been low and declining. An extra day off work is a strong stimulus for squeezing what gets done into the rest of the days.
In my opinion this is an extreme, just as the work yourself to death culture in India and China is. On a scale of a few decades economies where people worked agressively harder have grown tremendously but at the expense of the long-term wellbeing of the people. Places like Australia that were well off and felt little pressure to compete have sustained good quality of life but at the expense of having no competetitve edge anymore.
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
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.
I haven’t had a solid schedule since Covid, work just happens whenever and I weave my personal life into it. Sometimes it’s late nights and a weekend, sometimes I take off a random Wednesday and do errands.
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 today?
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. Reduced go forward labor supply reduction means labor power.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
As a fellow Australian, this is likely an early window on what the next 5 to 10 years will yield with our recent mass immigration. Economically speaking we could well see a race to the bottom in wages whilst we continue to experience exceptional housing pressure.
The car wash example is interesting, as something I’ve seen and experienced but never thought about in that way.
I wonder how it truly factors into productivity, though. How is productivity measured, and does that measurement capture what is true?
You mention automated car washes as a baseline. I never used those in the past because I figured they’d be rubbish or would scratch the car or whatever. So I’d occasionally wash the car myself, and that’s it. Now that we have manual car washes available, I use them from time to time. They clearly (I assert) do a better job than anything automated. And they do it inside and out.
So I find the comparison interesting, but in need of elaboration.
Cheap labour is one part of it, but also if you were a wealthy foreigner looking to get residency/citizenship, there are a few visa classes for 'business owners' who met certain job creation/investment thresholds. Car washes were a popular vehicle for this.
It's a tautology, if productivity is measured as GDP per worker. Productivity, so defined, is down because each worker is moving money around less, although there may be more workers. Which is the same thing as them being paid less. Question is, if they accept that, and cars still get washed, does it matter?
> Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US
Good.
Developed countries should not aim to emulate the US. To get the same productivity you’d have to lower the standard of living of all the employees to the same level as those in the US.
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?
It's kind of understandable then that parts of the younger generations aren't motivated to continue that system? (Not just in the West, also in China, see "lying flat")
The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that country’s demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are even willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.
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.
Well the short version is that Robert Rubin and company sold our industries for parts years and years ago. And now we have to rebuild the industrial base from scratch
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.
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.
Has the promise been kept? Is industry on-shoring in any significant sense? Or just making photo ops for Trump and fam, then slow walking the implementation until it's quietly canceled or scaled back to a token 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.
Yeah so what, if they do, we either didn’t want them, or they _actually won’t_ despite the squealing, or they will go, and if their segment of the market is useful, will get snapped up by new/local versions which do respect local constraints from the get-go.
All of these are better outcomes than not doing anything because “what if”.
> We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society
Aren't poverty rates being reduced basically everywhere and people getting richer across all deciles? The truth is that even if 90% tax rate was enforceable it would not change much - many problems plaguing societies right now are due to bad legislation and NIMBYs, with housing being the prime example. Somehow people want at same time: more houses, cheaper housing and as little new housing development as possible.
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.
An employee-owned co-op results in extremely high risk concentration. If your co-op experiences a downturn, you are likely to lose your job and see the value of your share of the co-op decrease.
There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.
- Thomas Sowell
You still need free market economics. If consumers have enough choices then the company with comfortable employees that refuse to invest profits into their operation will lose to the better organized competitor prioritizing a balance between the two.
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.
For a relatively short period it was true. Now majority works hard, lives from paycheck to paycheck and can not even own a house. Most results of what they produce goes to feed ever growing appetites of Musks
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?
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".
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.
All the more reason people would prefer to work for a co-op, no? I really don't know why there aren't more co-ops, and am inferring they just don't work all that well. But if there are any regulations or something preventing them from succeeding, I'd love to know about it.
Also, I guess it's worth noting I've been "exempt" all my life (not subject to 40 hours a week), so that particular labor win I guess didn't really cross my mind.
If everyone has 40 hours a week + overtime and you have a coop that pays competitively for 24 hours a week and no overtime you won't get as much market share, can be outcompeted. It has to be done on a large scale, historically as a matter of policy. This was true for tons of different reductions in the workday and other labor rights improvements in the past.
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.
More specifically than Unions, it was the threat of violence (in extreme cases) and work stoppage by workers against the ownership class.
E.g. the Russian Revolution (one of the main workers' requests in the events leading up to the Revolution was the 40 hour work week and fair treatment).
The unions were just a symptom to mediate the threat of violence in exchange for a larger share of the added value generated by the worker.
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.
What are you talking about? Minimum wage has nowadays a lot wider coverage and many unions have absurd privileges and compensations (e.g. docking unions) for which entire society has to pay. Even recently NYC hotel keepers have managed to negotiate 6 figure salary. There's lots of doomerism that doesn't really hold up when confronted with actual evidence lately.
Grandiose, ideological declarations like this are antithetical to HN’s ethos of curiosity. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here.
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
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...
I think its pretty naive to thing that it'd work this way. It's really bad idea. If someone has company that debuts on stock market, and stock price increases let's say 100x times, who is he funneling the funds from? I'd say it's not funneling but creation of wealth, economy is not zero-sum game.
US had tax brackets in the 90%s for decades. It was part of a golden era for workers, for that and a variety of other reasons like strong unions.
Of course the rich tried to work around it. But culturally they also understood that paying a lot of taxes was considered their duty to society, especially in times of crisis.
This is a lazy idea that keeps getting trotted out. The 90% tax bracket only existed on paper, with an effective rate closer to 40%. Economists have shown that tax revenue remained remarkably unchanged, while having negative consequences for investment and productive use of capital. Instead, the relative prosperity of workers during that time came from a lack of global industrial competition and a massive post-war manufacturing monopoly. Without a completely sealed, loophole-free tax system and total global compliance, implementing a 90% tax rate today would simply result in widespread tax avoidance, capital flight, and a reduction in domestic investment. The rich do not make the bulk of their wealth through a salary (many taking $0 / year) like they did back then, but rather through stock options, etc.
If someone has a company doing an IPO, it’s extremely unlikely that the company was so small that one person did all the work. Why is it a given that one person should retain nearly all of the proceeds of the sale? To answer your question, that person is funneling funds from investors who are expecting returns derived from the labor provided by the undercompensated employees.
Ok, let's follow that logic. If IPO makes CEO much, much richer but generally also makes company and workers better off (but to smaller degree), does IPO make workers more undercompensated? Nobody lost anything for the CEO to gain. Also is "funneling" (that's an interesting choice of word) investors money into company stock a bad thing? Why would it be? I'd say it's a very, very good thing and it's in almost always 100% voluntary to buy stocks.
>If IPO makes CEO much, much richer but generally also makes company and workers better off (but to smaller degree), does IPO make workers more undercompensated?
Yes, obviously. The bulk of work of the company is done by the workers. That is to say, most of the value is generated by the labor of the workers. If a commensurate share of the profit is not returned to the employees, they’ve clearly been undercompensated.
Presumably there's some level of progressive taxation where the top rate is between 0% and 100% that most helps the median person.
The problem is that people with power are largely incentivized to push this rate lower than the optimal-for-the-median-person rate in order to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
You would get some version of the Soviet Union. Where all the rich people would be connected to government rather than industry. And industry would become enfeebled and unable to produce efficiently, and the average person would be much poorer than people currently are in the USA.
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.
> 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.
Services and goods where lots of human labor is required get much more expensive with larger cost of labor. E.g. fast-food, food delivery. And there's nothing wrong with that of course - I'd rather pay 2x more for delivery than have people working on wages that are not enough to even feed them.
If labor costs are so high and such a large portion of production then how can companies afford to funnel so much money to executives? Hundreds and even thousands of times more than their cheapest workers? Often to the tune of millions and now billions?
Surely there is more slack in the system than the Epstein class wants to openly admit.
I would love a three day weekend every weekend. in fact I'd even "pay" for that (My father used his LSL one day a week every week.. a genius idea imho).
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?
Someone doesn’t understand why we have nice things. “Increased productivity”, the thing you don’t give a shit about, is the only reason you’re not living in the dirt and dying of a tooth infection before 35.
If you wanted to live with a QoL of the 1940s you could do so today working 2 days a week. Of course you’d have no air conditioning, shitty food, no running water, etc etc.
You don’t have to LIKE corps but you should at least understand your world before calling for the guys with guns to get involved.
With all these comparisons to the industrial revolution, I do wonder if employers are salivating at the thought of getting 12x6, per human. Perhaps more if one sees the AI as a productivity boast.
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.
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
> 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.
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 (10~90% 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".
An AI-generated article which summaries a pre-print release which surveyed 15 people at 15 companies about their thoughts on whether the arrangement was working for them. Of those 15, a grand total of 6 (unidentified) people at 6 (unidentified) companies (all in the same country), said they "thought" productivity had increased. Not a single data point was taken about whether it actually increased. The questions that these 15 people were asked was not disclosed.
An informal survey, of unknown content, of 15 unidentified people, with 6 of those people being in the "boosts productivity" camp. Cool beans. I guess that settles the matter once and for all.
It's 15 companies that adopted a technique and it's part of a broader constellation of experiments in this area which have been confounding the traditional logic that productivity would decrease. https://www.4dayweek.com/research
The people representing the businesses in the preprint hold titles like co-founder, CEO/founder, COO, General Manager, and CEO. The size of the business and sector are also noted. I think your framing of them as "unidentified people" is therefore off, it is certainly not the same as a journalist conveniently using "unnamed sources", this is standard academic practice.
Different companies measure different things, but they do measure and that is addressed in the paper. "revenue (DM10), profit (DM4), other financial targets (DM2, DM6), customer/client satisfaction ( DM8, DM6), story points (DM14), sprint goals (DM7), billable hours (DM12), capacity ( DM4), response rates (DM10), standard operating procedure metrics (DM9), sick leave (DM1, D M 4. DM9, DM15), lodgements (DM12), employee happiness (DM6, DM15), projects delivered on time (DM15), and net promoter score ( DM4)". There were also other benefits like hiring and retention.
So this is not what "unidentified people" "thought" about productivity, this was founders and the c-suite using their existing favoured metrics. On those metrics a large number of them reported an increase in productivity, and a larger group reported no deleterious effects on productivity. This is broadly consistent with the trends in the wider research into this area globally, which continually go against the predictions that productivity will drop. Is it universally applicable? I don't think anyone is claiming that.
I've followed this area for a while and, sorry to be impolite, it is your summary that is less accurate than the the one you accuse of being AI-generated.
Having read all of the above, I think it is fair to say that this is a study about what these people "thought." Just because their thought involves some homegrown, personally-favored metrics, doesn't change the fact that this is a qualitative survey report.
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)"
The interviews contain invaluable insights such as: “adopting the 4DWW takes work” “Productivity up, waste removed” “Management -led/employee -driven,” “Train for leisure,”
I stand by my statement.
> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.
This is such an absurd thought-terminating cliche. Science suffixation seems more an indicator of the age of the field, not its scientific rigour. Are "climate science" and "computer science" not science?
On the flip side, just because it says "ology" at the end of a word does not mean it's a science.
Well, yes, but the courses I've taken for the computer science portion of my degree feel much more like math or engineering than science; experimental/empirical verification of natural facts are hardly present.
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.
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
My limited-research understanding is that there shouldn't be a difference between capital gains from housing versus shares, otherwise it's 'picking winners' or encouraging investment in specific directions. Having said that, the 'winner' they've picked is new house builds, which retain some tax benefits. I'm OK with that, without having skin in that game now or likely into the future.
In regards to other comments further down regarding Australia's tax rates being high, internationally Australia is on the lower end.
I believe the (seemingly very loud) naysayers about these tax changes are those who receive much more of their income via 'capital' than via 'effort', and so my sympathies are minimal to non-existent. Sure, I have capital investments that will yield lower returns, but I believe the changes make "the way it works" overall more fair to those who don't have the means to earn means passively.
Cashed up bogans may funnel more of their money into new house builds, which is productive...?
Semi-unrelated addition: To some extent I think that 'owning ones own house' is a motivator to work harder, so as home ownership has grown increasingly out of reach, so has some amount of motivation to actually work dried up. There's an inherent 'participation in society' to owning a home that has an intangible but high value. Whether this has anything to do with Australia's decreasing productivity, I don't know.
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.
You shouldn't have to rely on shares investments to make a living or retire though.
Just because someone doesn't invest in shares, doesn't mean they are a bogan. I'm sick of this term being thrown around at people you look down upon...
Yeah, everyone is forced to accept their own individual risk in their super and other investments (as usual, favoring the wealthy with enough spare money, time and contacts to get proper financial advice). Better if that risk was born collectively. But government funded pensions are communist or something. At least most of the super funds I see are non-profits.
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%
You're breaking my heart.
To pay $89,000 in taxes you'd have to be earning in the range of $350k. Do you think you're hard done by? I'd be rather annoyed if you were eligible for family support allowance in that earning range? (partially because I'd be missing out on a decent chunk of government support myself)
What am I missing about your situation that makes it remotely sympathetic?
If you live in inner Sydney, the rent alone is $1350 pw and tax is ridiculous. I basically sold my stocks to have a down payment but then that got added on top of income. If i’d have stayed in HK, i’d have paid 0% for that.
I just treat it as paying for Australian citizenship to make me feel better and it still comes out cheaper than buying a Saint Kitts and Nevis passport. Australian passport also opens up the E3 visa to go to the USA
You don't "have" to live in Sydney though. This is something immigrants like yourself fail to understand.
It's a privilege to come into this country, its a privilege to live in Sydney. If you don't like it, you can leave.
I make less (even before tax) than you PAID in tax, yet you still want handouts.
> It's a privilege to come into this country, its a privilege to live in Sydney. If you don't like it, you can leave.
I hate to put it like this, but that's exactly what the poster is doing.
Alas for some people, their lifestyle will expand to fill their income. They could earn 10x as much, and it probably still wouldn't be enough.
He doesn't like and he does say he will leave, after getting the Australian passport first for opening doors.
they are greedy and don't want to pay their fair share.
people that count their tax dollars are usually very selfish to begin with.
i generally think the gov can do better with how money is spent though.
As an Australian with a family and 2 high-paying salaries paying a LOT of tax, none of those countries are remotely comparable to Australia.
If you hate taxes and fees, Singapore has a 60% Additional Buyer's Stamp Duty on residential property applied to foreign buyers, on top of an already insane property market. There's huge fines and government intervention into _everything_ and a massive high-stress culture.
Hong Kong is equally absurd for property and has a sword hanging over its head, that falls if China ever makes a move on Taiwan; the inevitable US and global sanctions would decimate HK.
Dubai is just a comical option.
I can get PR in Singapore through my partner, so no 60%. Company paid medical and everything so expat life and no responsibilities. And if I were ever have to have kids, you can’t hire a maid here sleeping at your apartment and you have to clean yourself which is ridiculous. In Hk, SG, Dubai you can get domestic helpers cheaply and they take care of everything
> And if I were ever have to have kids, you can’t hire a maid here sleeping at your apartment and you have to clean yourself which is ridiculous.
Not sure if serious.
If serious: This is a really weird and almost sociopathic thing to say. I really don't get where you're coming from. It's certainly not the cultural direction I'd like to see Australia moving in.
You realize this is the standard in Asia right? They only cost like 2.5k a month which is pretty good value
https://www.life.gov.sg/guides/domestic-helper
https://www.immd.gov.hk/eng/services/visas/foreign_domestic_...
OK, just seems weird from my cultural experience, and the way I was reading your comment it sounded 'entitled' (likely due to the cultural difference).
Describing it as "pretty good value" bothers me in a number of contexts.
I'm also fine with this never becoming a thing in Australia. Not sure how out-of-touch or in-touch that makes me, but that's how I feel nonetheless.
@Loocid, thanks for saying what I was dancing around.
Its too close to slavery for my liking. Yes they are paid but 2.5k per month is very low for Singapore, they work massive hours, they rely on you for shelter, and are very likely from much poorer neighbouring countries that are trying to support family back home.
The whole power dynamic is extremely exploitable which results in a lot of abuse cases.
They would be much worse off if they stay in their own country and they even get 1 day rest per week.
Yes exactly, which is why the system is so ripe for abuse. A third of live in maids in Singapore report abuse by their employers.
I don't consider taking someone out of a shit situation into a slightly less shit situation for your huge benefit all that benevolent personally.
If you made income, and enough gain in stocks to pay that much in tax, you should be happy.
I want to know why you are keen to become an Australian citizen if you’re not enthusiastic about contributing your share.
Constructive discussion about appropriate levels of taxation is important, but let’s at least agree that the things we rely on (roads, hospitals, schools, defence, …) cost something.
I lived in Singapore and Hk before, don’t drive, work from home and countries are pretty much interchangeable. I left Germany for high taxes for a reason.
I pay private medical so don’t benefit much from tax anyway. No kids, no car, paid off my apartment. I can get much better value elsewhere right?
If I tell you you can pick 3 dishes
a) singapore: safe, low crime, low tax, efficient, excellent public transportation, better roads b) hk: safe, low crime, low tax, politically getting worse, excellent public transport, better airport c) australia: higher crime compared to the other too, high tax but bad services
I basically pay for an overpriced dish with bland taste, so why would I keep doing that?
I don't think they realize that they are in the top 1% of earners on the planet with numbers like that.
It is always funny to see how many think they are hard done even though by the numbers they are the winners by a wide margin.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out!
Why are you not leaving right now?
I could as a German but my partner has a weaker passport so I’m just waiting till she got her australian passport
Australian govt needs to tighten the rules to discourage people who want to take advantage of Australia but don't want to contribute in return.
so you take but you don't want to give?
perhaps try a different perspective of, "it's good i live in a place where we contribute for a common good"
Taxes are a financial loss.
I preferred living in Hong Kong and Singapore and do not enjoy living here honestly, but if you treat it as payment for my+partner’s backup citizenship, it seems more justifiable.
> Taxes are a financial loss.
What a miserable, selfish view of the world you have
I'd assume, as an Australian, who works for a HK company and has travelled for work all their life, the long term lifestyle in Australia is probably better than those countries. I love HK and Singo but I am not sure I'd want to live there. But for working, most people here would not work in an iron lung and the socialist government pretty much supports the idea that, if you don't like to work, you shouldn't have to as long as there are a few who will work. And, that number is fewer and fewer.
I'm sorry but you pay more in tax than I make in income! This sounds like your lifestyle creep has chewed up your money stream. Despite my significantly lower income, I manage to own my house in Melbourne. With your income I could have it paid down in a few years at most.
Good job paying that off. I’m sure Australia has benefits for some but without kids, not having grown up here, paying my own insurance and not driving I don’t really see it.
Well done, good planning, good self-discipline!
I'm in a similar boat, and can relate to the on-going management and suppression of lifestyle creep in order to reach worthwhile goals. It feels like a never-ending battle, even after 20 years.
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
The ghost of David Graeber would agree.
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.
If you start a business and grow it from hard work, you will now be taxed more. It's not just passive gains, it's all gain.
My understanding is that the difference is in the Capital Gains Tax, which doesn't apply to the day-to-day running of the business or its profitability or the salaries it pays.
Again, my understanding is that the (only) difference is when the business is sold, and the 50% discount to CGT is no longer applied and instead there is an inflation adjustment instead (what I don't understand here is how to get an initial valuation, and would it be essentially $0, so the entire amount is capital gains? which feels somewhat unfair)
So it will be a hit at the time the business is sold, not at any point during the running of the business. My (potentially naive) take is that the hard work that goes into running and growing a business is about the provision of the goods or services, but if it's about maximising "the exit", then that feels to me like not the kind of incentive that it should be. The 'running' of the business being more important than the selling of it.
The 50% CGT discount has set a bad precedent. It should have been lower, or should have scaled over time. It has deformed the expected reward structure.
Can a business agree to be sold in tranches over time? If such a thing helps minimise tax then I can see that becoming the norm. I know that selling a house is a big, singular chunk of money that generally needs to be 'managed' in order to pay the minimum amount of tax. Maybe fractional selling is going to become a thing.
Wouldn't paying yourself a higher salary (since it's your own business) and/or putting more into superannuation offset the 'retirement' hit of not getting a golden exit parachute?
ps. Australia uses a progressive tax system. If you earn very little money, you pay a very low tax rate (or many zero). If you earn a massive corporate salary, you pay the top rate.
The new 30% floor completely throws that out the window for capital gains. It means even if your total income for the year is low enough that your normal tax rate should be 16% or 0%, the government steps in and forces a flat 30% tax on the asset sale anyway.
So, contrary to what the government is saying, this new regime taxes the poorer even more.
My non-heavily-researched understanding is that people who make their entire, or a majority of, their annual 'earnings' from capital gains may not be all that poor.
There's a whole spectrum of examples that can be used to demonstrate fairness or lack of fairness. Can you elaborate on your example of taxing a poor person even more by forcing a flat 30% tax on capital gains? Is this person you? What does your life entail whereby you are poor whilst also living almost entirely off capital gains?
You can still get all your capital out before the 1st of July 2027, and then re-distribute into areas that have better tax incentives, like new house builds. Sounds like that might solve two problems at once.
It's not me. I actually work for a living and I receive a salary. Many people I know with their own business plan to hopefully get out of it some day. They all make less than me but own a business of their own.
Let's say this works and those people who already have assets get taxed a bit more, when they are gone, there would then now very little incentive to work hard and start a business.
Such short term thinking will pretty much destroy the economy in the long term. You can't tax an economy to health and fairness.
On paper yes, but very few of the _actual poor_ were making capital gains on asset sales. Aus Govt figures claim 90% of people under 35 do not own shares outside of retirement funds(which get different tax treatment).
It closes the loop holes where wealthy people approaching retirement would spend a few years paying very little tax and living off capital gains instead at a ~20% tax rate.
How is the recently announced 2026 Australian Government budget relevant to this study done in 2023-2024? There is a whole bunch of other factors to Australia's productivity, not at least the drop in GDP per capita and fall in Total Factor Productivity.
I was contacted this week for a position that was openly 6 days a week. We need to end H1B in this country as soon as possible and keep the 996 schedule firmly out of the United States.
They call you lazy for not wanting to compete against the entire world in your own country.
My company currently has roles open for "5-6 days per week in the office" - we used to be 100% remote! It's awful.
Quite a leap to attribute corporate greed to H1B.
Think again: this is entirely homegrown.
You give away your bias when it is the other way around.
The H1B is a byproduct and a tool of corporate greed.
Or it’s a way for the less fortunate (geographically) to seek a better future.
They more or less got rid of it last September, yet the job market has only worsened. Scapegoating minorities, whether it be trans people, brown people, Muslims or immigrants, doesn’t work. All it does is destroy lives.
> You give away your bias when it is the other way around.
How so?
American corporations could care less about giving anyone a better future.
archagon was attempting to paint declan_roberts comment as blaming H1B workers on working conditions, which they did not do. But H1Bs will be used to suppress wages by working more hours 996 under worse conditions (oncall, etc). This is low rhetoric. To call out how H1Bs are being used is not scapegoating nor is it racist. It makes zero difference where they come from. The cause is corporate greed, the effect is more H1Bs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/amazon-h-1b-hiring-faces-1230...
https://americanbazaaronline.com/2026/05/20/amazons-33181-h-...
Amazon has cut, what 30k+ folks while increasing their H1B allocation.
No country is ever going to be able to create a functional local software economy if every good engineer get sucked out of the country.
In many ways the current system is cruel to every international company which forces their local wages to compete with the United States.
Why not both? It is a feedback loop. When the US allowed railroad/mine workers from China, it is true that Chinese labor wanted a better future and that capitalists want to use Chinese labor to suppress American wages. For instance, look at the animosity towards Chinese workers in Wyoming by European workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Springs_massacre
Is there not a connection between the two?
You'll have to spell out what you're suggesting here. "Think again" only works on LLMs, and then only sometimes.
The top comment seems to insinuate the 996 (or any overwork scheme) is being brought over because of H1B visa workers.
The responder is saying that domestic American capitalists do not need foreign influence to abuse or exploit labor. The H1B visa program has absolutely nothing to do, for example, with Walmart telling their full time employees how to apply for government assistance programs because they refuse to pay a livable wage.
Software talent doesn't compete against Walmart greeters. That's the connection you're missing for h1b.
I don't see how that's relevant to the discussion. The parent's point is that companies in America do not need to import cruelty or an acceptance thereof, they are more than capable and more than willing to do it themselves.
I brought up Walmart as an example, it was never intended to be a 1:1 analog with H1Bs.
Chinese tech companies' 996 policies, and large Chinese tech companies in general, are newer than that ethic in the US. What I hear about 995.5 (every other Saturday off) from my friend at Xiaohongshu in Beijing sounds remarkably consistent with what I heard from my Google friends 20-25 years ago, from working hours to on-site amenities that kept you at work. You're spotting a correlation, but I think causality probably goes in the US -> China direction on this.
In the early to mid 90s, I worked at a Silicon Valley based software startup. We had something called "The Century Club". You made the club if you'd done 3 consecutive months in the last year without working less than 100 hours in any week of those months (averaging 100 hours was not good enough). More engineers were in the club than not. We were told that making the club was not mandatory, but nobody in the club was ever fired and most not in the club were eventually fired.
The next startup I was at had a similar culture without the cute name. I remember my most exhausting stretch there was coming in on a Saturday morning, for a database migration that had to happen outside business hours, and working straight through without sleep (other than nodding off at the keyboard) until Monday afternoon. Our CEO was kind enough to bring us food. Even in regular times there, I would go exercise from 10-11 PM, and more often than not I'd go back to the office after.
A decade later I was at Amazon. Our entire group of ~100 engineers was required by our VP to work weekends, in the office, for months at a time when approaching ship dates. The VP would send an email every Friday during this period to remind us to be there. Of course he wasn't there.
Those were all pretty counterproductive, but didn't seem that unusual. The difference in the US back then was that even asking about such things during an interview would often result in no offer because the candidate didn't have a "good" work ethic. Things have gotten a lot better in the US in the last 10-15 years, but a lot of that came from competition for talent. The more that competition eases, the more likely it is that we'll go backwards on this.
Relating back to the article... For the last 3 years of my career (I retired a few years ago), I worked 4-day weeks, and it was all remote. This is just as anecdotal as the article, but I felt I got far more done, with higher quality, than at any point in my career. It was such a revelation.
I guess you had bad luck working for teams that worked long hours. But as another datapoint, I worked at Google for more than a decade around that time period, for several different teams. Google did have a lot of amenities and people would say that it was to keep you at work, but I didn't see much evidence of that. It didn't keep anyone I knew from going home when they wanted. Being single, I'd stay for dinner or even come in on a weekend to do my laundry. But some weekdays I'd either work from home or get in around 11. Or maybe go for a bike ride at lunch. Nobody kept track. I have little idea how many hours I worked, but there was plenty of time while waiting on compiles to check Memegen and Hacker News. It wasn't a high-stress job.
It's a big company, though, so other teams might be different.
6 am, 6 pm, 6 days a week. Why is it called 996?
The term '666 schedule' got nixed by marketing.
9a-9p 6 days a week
9AM to 9PM
Not the first study, and they all largely report the same results:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02259-6
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/19/four-day-week-...
https://www.4dayweek.com/research
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.
If I had the “lots of money” required, I’d try out a zero-day work week instead!
Oh, I don't want mean for myself, I mean as an experiment at the other end of the four-day work week spectrum.
Though for myself, I like having time to think about ideas in between when I collaborate with folk on them, so I have a lot of optimism about the success of the experiment. :)
a lot of AI is just wasteful like this.
there are a lot of parallels with crypto 'mining' a transaction and AI slopping a functional output.
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.
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".
Table 1 has "Duration", but the units are unlabelled, if it's weeks, it's less than a year, months is probably better for seeing performance changes.
It's an interesting qualitative study, I'd certainly like a four day work week with no change in comp.
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.
As someone working on a Sunday on a rainy memorial day weekend. Bring back the 5 day week!
If you look at Australian IT companies they're management and consultant heavy. Roles like architects, review boards, program managers etc., exceed actual engineering roles. In such a set up it takes forever to get any real work done.
Then Australian real wages have also declined. So there is already low motivation to work beyond the minimum expectation.
Australia also has strong social security, at least until now, and there are plenty of odd jobs due to the real estate and tourism industries, so there is little pressure to survive unless you owe too much credit.
Automation and technology adoption also lags behind. For example, people still wait thirty minutes on a call to get an appointment with a doctor instead of making an online booking.
For all of these reasons productivity has been low and declining. An extra day off work is a strong stimulus for squeezing what gets done into the rest of the days.
In my opinion this is an extreme, just as the work yourself to death culture in India and China is. On a scale of a few decades economies where people worked agressively harder have grown tremendously but at the expense of the long-term wellbeing of the people. Places like Australia that were well off and felt little pressure to compete have sustained good quality of life but at the expense of having no competetitve edge anymore.
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
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.
This is the definition of slack.
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.
I haven’t had a solid schedule since Covid, work just happens whenever and I weave my personal life into it. Sometimes it’s late nights and a weekend, sometimes I take off a random Wednesday and do errands.
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.
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 today?
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. Reduced go forward labor supply reduction means labor power.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
It doesn't, but in the case where a boss or company say it, at least we know it's bs. Do you believe something because your company or boss says so?
By inductive logic, a zero day week works best.
What a huge surprise. Every one of these studies shows the same thing.
Same as every study of open-plan offices shows that they suck.
The psychopaths in charge do not care.
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...
As a fellow Australian, this is likely an early window on what the next 5 to 10 years will yield with our recent mass immigration. Economically speaking we could well see a race to the bottom in wages whilst we continue to experience exceptional housing pressure.
The car wash example is interesting, as something I’ve seen and experienced but never thought about in that way.
I wonder how it truly factors into productivity, though. How is productivity measured, and does that measurement capture what is true?
You mention automated car washes as a baseline. I never used those in the past because I figured they’d be rubbish or would scratch the car or whatever. So I’d occasionally wash the car myself, and that’s it. Now that we have manual car washes available, I use them from time to time. They clearly (I assert) do a better job than anything automated. And they do it inside and out.
So I find the comparison interesting, but in need of elaboration.
Cheap labour is one part of it, but also if you were a wealthy foreigner looking to get residency/citizenship, there are a few visa classes for 'business owners' who met certain job creation/investment thresholds. Car washes were a popular vehicle for this.
It's a tautology, if productivity is measured as GDP per worker. Productivity, so defined, is down because each worker is moving money around less, although there may be more workers. Which is the same thing as them being paid less. Question is, if they accept that, and cars still get washed, does it matter?
> Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US
Good.
Developed countries should not aim to emulate the US. To get the same productivity you’d have to lower the standard of living of all the employees to the same level as those in the US.
No. Don’t do it.
Quality of life matters much more than profits.
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.
It's kind of understandable then that parts of the younger generations aren't motivated to continue that system? (Not just in the West, also in China, see "lying flat")
Normal people, yes. The oligarchic class gets more and more bloated as you can plainly see.
Not if that country also legislates heavy penalties for companies that produce their goods in countries with worse labor laws.
The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that country’s demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are even willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.
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?
Well the short version is that Robert Rubin and company sold our industries for parts years and years ago. And now we have to rebuild the industrial base from scratch
That should make it possible to buy a cheap Chinese EV.
You can't because they didn't sell out completely. In fact they still have some power to protect the companies from foreign products.
The result is a mishmash of protectionism and globalization.
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.
Voting for someone else would mean admitting you were wrong.
Paying high prices and losing your job are bad, but not as bad as changing your mind.
Almost like we needed some international worker's organization to put pressure on all relevant countries at the same time...
Hey don’t go talking crazy about some kind of global labor solidarity and collective bargaining
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.
Has the promise been kept? Is industry on-shoring in any significant sense? Or just making photo ops for Trump and fam, then slow walking the implementation until it's quietly canceled or scaled back to a token 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.
Fully agreed.
“Oh but businesses will leave”
Yeah so what, if they do, we either didn’t want them, or they _actually won’t_ despite the squealing, or they will go, and if their segment of the market is useful, will get snapped up by new/local versions which do respect local constraints from the get-go.
All of these are better outcomes than not doing anything because “what if”.
That only works with tariffs, which are widely considered evil apparently.
> We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society
Aren't poverty rates being reduced basically everywhere and people getting richer across all deciles? The truth is that even if 90% tax rate was enforceable it would not change much - many problems plaguing societies right now are due to bad legislation and NIMBYs, with housing being the prime example. Somehow people want at same time: more houses, cheaper housing and as little new housing development as possible.
> 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
An employee-owned co-op results in extremely high risk concentration. If your co-op experiences a downturn, you are likely to lose your job and see the value of your share of the co-op decrease.
There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell
You still need free market economics. If consumers have enough choices then the company with comfortable employees that refuse to invest profits into their operation will lose to the better organized competitor prioritizing a balance between the two.
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.
>"You work hard, and get those rewards."
For a relatively short period it was true. Now majority works hard, lives from paycheck to paycheck and can not even own a house. Most results of what they produce goes to feed ever growing appetites of Musks
Depends what your comparison is. Are you comparing with the EU, China or Ethiopia?
Seems to me, the question is more why all that supposed prosperity doesn't translate to the living quality improvements one would expect.
on the whole, most americans are not being compensated for the amount of value their work produces
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?
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".
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.
All the more reason people would prefer to work for a co-op, no? I really don't know why there aren't more co-ops, and am inferring they just don't work all that well. But if there are any regulations or something preventing them from succeeding, I'd love to know about it.
Also, I guess it's worth noting I've been "exempt" all my life (not subject to 40 hours a week), so that particular labor win I guess didn't really cross my mind.
If everyone has 40 hours a week + overtime and you have a coop that pays competitively for 24 hours a week and no overtime you won't get as much market share, can be outcompeted. It has to be done on a large scale, historically as a matter of policy. This was true for tons of different reductions in the workday and other labor rights improvements in the past.
They can't strategize and adapt very quickly, because of all the cooperating.
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.
More specifically than Unions, it was the threat of violence (in extreme cases) and work stoppage by workers against the ownership class.
E.g. the Russian Revolution (one of the main workers' requests in the events leading up to the Revolution was the 40 hour work week and fair treatment).
The unions were just a symptom to mediate the threat of violence in exchange for a larger share of the added value generated by the worker.
> it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".
Because is advantageous for employers to keep workers as close to the brink of burnout as possible as a method of control
You can ask that question in the opposite way too: Why does the weekend still exist? Why aren't people working 24/7?
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.
What are you talking about? Minimum wage has nowadays a lot wider coverage and many unions have absurd privileges and compensations (e.g. docking unions) for which entire society has to pay. Even recently NYC hotel keepers have managed to negotiate 6 figure salary. There's lots of doomerism that doesn't really hold up when confronted with actual evidence lately.
Grandiose, ideological declarations like this are antithetical to HN’s ethos of curiosity. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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?
It is meaningless, yes. It's not any more meaningful than trading crypto or betting on whether the basketball player will tie his shoe.
This is why we can't have nice things.
As long as they feel growth of productivity results to increase in their standard of living then why not?
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
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...
I think its pretty naive to thing that it'd work this way. It's really bad idea. If someone has company that debuts on stock market, and stock price increases let's say 100x times, who is he funneling the funds from? I'd say it's not funneling but creation of wealth, economy is not zero-sum game.
US had tax brackets in the 90%s for decades. It was part of a golden era for workers, for that and a variety of other reasons like strong unions.
Of course the rich tried to work around it. But culturally they also understood that paying a lot of taxes was considered their duty to society, especially in times of crisis.
This is a lazy idea that keeps getting trotted out. The 90% tax bracket only existed on paper, with an effective rate closer to 40%. Economists have shown that tax revenue remained remarkably unchanged, while having negative consequences for investment and productive use of capital. Instead, the relative prosperity of workers during that time came from a lack of global industrial competition and a massive post-war manufacturing monopoly. Without a completely sealed, loophole-free tax system and total global compliance, implementing a 90% tax rate today would simply result in widespread tax avoidance, capital flight, and a reduction in domestic investment. The rich do not make the bulk of their wealth through a salary (many taking $0 / year) like they did back then, but rather through stock options, etc.
If someone has a company doing an IPO, it’s extremely unlikely that the company was so small that one person did all the work. Why is it a given that one person should retain nearly all of the proceeds of the sale? To answer your question, that person is funneling funds from investors who are expecting returns derived from the labor provided by the undercompensated employees.
Ok, let's follow that logic. If IPO makes CEO much, much richer but generally also makes company and workers better off (but to smaller degree), does IPO make workers more undercompensated? Nobody lost anything for the CEO to gain. Also is "funneling" (that's an interesting choice of word) investors money into company stock a bad thing? Why would it be? I'd say it's a very, very good thing and it's in almost always 100% voluntary to buy stocks.
>If IPO makes CEO much, much richer but generally also makes company and workers better off (but to smaller degree), does IPO make workers more undercompensated?
Yes, obviously. The bulk of work of the company is done by the workers. That is to say, most of the value is generated by the labor of the workers. If a commensurate share of the profit is not returned to the employees, they’ve clearly been undercompensated.
Presumably there's some level of progressive taxation where the top rate is between 0% and 100% that most helps the median person.
The problem is that people with power are largely incentivized to push this rate lower than the optimal-for-the-median-person rate in order to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.
You would get some version of the Soviet Union. Where all the rich people would be connected to government rather than industry. And industry would become enfeebled and unable to produce efficiently, and the average person would be much poorer than people currently are in the USA.
Prices are already obscene, and we’re all being ripped off.
I’d much rather pay the prices corrected-for-supporting-livelihoods, than the artificially inflated prices used to line the pockets of the rich.
> I’d much rather pay the prices corrected-for-supporting-livelihoods, than the artificially inflated prices used to line the pockets of the rich.
But unless you do central planning (which doesn't work) you can't really separate these two, can you?
>> 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.
> 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.
Services and goods where lots of human labor is required get much more expensive with larger cost of labor. E.g. fast-food, food delivery. And there's nothing wrong with that of course - I'd rather pay 2x more for delivery than have people working on wages that are not enough to even feed them.
If labor costs are so high and such a large portion of production then how can companies afford to funnel so much money to executives? Hundreds and even thousands of times more than their cheapest workers? Often to the tune of millions and now billions?
Surely there is more slack in the system than the Epstein class wants to openly admit.
We need mutual disarmament
Speaking as an exhausted Australian...
I would love a three day weekend every weekend. in fact I'd even "pay" for that (My father used his LSL one day a week every week.. a genius idea imho).
But I dont see it happening any time soon.
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?
Someone doesn’t understand why we have nice things. “Increased productivity”, the thing you don’t give a shit about, is the only reason you’re not living in the dirt and dying of a tooth infection before 35.
If you wanted to live with a QoL of the 1940s you could do so today working 2 days a week. Of course you’d have no air conditioning, shitty food, no running water, etc etc.
You don’t have to LIKE corps but you should at least understand your world before calling for the guys with guns to get involved.
I'd pretty happily work e.g. a 4-day work week for the QoL of 20 years ago - but I can't actually do so, it's not a option with most employers.
Won’t we face an economic decline if we continue reducing the work week even further?
Corporations really dont care about productivity. Wfh has shown we are more productive
USA: So what I hear, is we need to work 6 days per week + AI? Correct?
With all these comparisons to the industrial revolution, I do wonder if employers are salivating at the thought of getting 12x6, per human. Perhaps more if one sees the AI as a productivity boast.
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.
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
> 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.
87.3%
AI GPT
zerogpt.com
https://i.imgur.com/9lT1VSp.jpeg
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 (10~90% 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".
Sounds like your employer would definitely be better off paying you to stay home …