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Human productivity alone warranted a 4-day workweek. With AI benefits added in, we should be going down to 3.
Nah, the top 0.1% will just pocket 90% of the fruits of that extra productivity and the top 10% the remaining 10%.
The rest will either be fired or asked to do the part of the work those who were fired did for the same pay.
2 day work week. Standard hours for a work week are just like the minimum wage. They’ve been stagnant for decades and haven’t adjusted according to company profits and worker productivity increases.
2 days. Why would you ask for 4? That puts you in a shitty bargaining position.
Interesting that the article never cites or states how much AI has improved productivity - but rather focuses on the 4-day work week. Kinda strange to only look at the end outcome and ignore the cause of expecting that outcome.
We should’ve gotten a 4-day work week decades ago. Now it should be a 3-day work week at most and I’m being generous. The capitalists are always screeching about the low birth rate, but if people were working 3 days a week and making a decent living off that time, it would help the birth rate because then a household with two working parents could be scheduled on different days and alternate staying home with the child, plus have a shared day off every week.
Anyway, that’s just a selling point to make to the capitalists. Whether or not it helps with the birth rate doesn’t matter as much as the fact that we’re owed shorter work weeks thanks to all the blood, sweat, and tears that labor has put into making the world as wealthy as it is now. What’s the point of all this work if not to improve our standard of living? Technology making our lives better is hitting diminishing returns and now it’s often not making our lives better or it’s even making our lives worse.
Imagine being rich as fuck because you’re working 6 days a week instead of still barely making ends meet.
The argument for a 4 day work week is that studies have shown it maintains the same level of productivity as a 5 day workweek, but it makes people happier, so it doesn’t slow down the economy, but actually improves it. What’s the argument for a 3 day work week?
A 3 day work week maintains the same level of productivity and makes people happier.
What’s the argument for a 2 day work week?
It means if you want more labor than can be accommodated within a 2 day work week, you should hire more people.
Because people deserve more time to be people. Not everything has to serve the Holy Economy.
Sure, I agree with that. However, we also need to consider what a “net decrease in productivity” actually means for the population as a whole, and whether it’s something we want to accept as a trade-off for more free time. Briefly, we can collectively choose to work four, three, or even two days a week, despite seeing a decrease in overall productivity. However, a decrease in productivity means that stuff like clothes, transport, food, IT services, and pretty much everything you can think of that someone has to produce becomes more scarce.
You basically need to answer the question of “would you prefer two days off per week with current access to goods and services, or have more days off with reduced access to goods and services”. Of course, there may come along technological innovations that change this in some ways, and there are studies showing that a lot of people can be sufficiently productive on a four-day work week. On a society level, I still think the point stands as an overall tradeoff we need to consider when talking about whether we should reduce the work-week.
My point is that it’s not just a “capitalists are bad, and we’re owed more free time” thing. If we produce less, then goods and services become scarcer for everyone. I would say the distribution of wealth in society, and how it’s shifted the past 20-50 years is more concerning than the fact that we’re working the same hours as we were 20-50 years ago.
Briefly, we can collectively choose to work four, three, or even two days a week, despite seeing a decrease in overall productivity.
Or we can collectively choose to never shorten the work week while productivity continues to outpace wages forever. Which is what republicans and centrist democrats both want.
You seem to agree with my last point, which was that
the distribution of wealth in society, and how it’s shifted the past 20-50 years is more concerning
That is: The major problem we have today is that the increase in production we’ve seen the past 20-50 years has primarily benefited the wealthy. This needs to change. Once we have decent wealth distribution, we can make an informed decision on whether we want to reduce our total productivity in order to have more free time.
Once we have decent wealth distribution, we can make an informed decision on whether we want to reduce our total productivity in order to have more free time.
And since that will have its own set of prerequisites that centrists will work with republicans to block, we’ll keep on as we are, with productivity outpacing wages forever.
Most jobs I’ve ever had haven’t been about creating anything used directly by a normal person, they’ve been about optimizing things in ways that squeeze maximum profit for billionaires. I don’t think I’m alone, especially in the developed world.
Sure, I agree with that. However, we also need to consider what a “net decrease in productivity” actually means for the population as a whole, and whether it’s something we want to accept as a trade-off for more free time.
Skill issue. You know turns exist, right? Just hire two turns of people who work 3 days a week, and bam! You cover 6 weeks of work. Heck, you are hiring more people so you are creating more employment!
And that’s all even before machines and AI completely replace the need for that work, anyway.
My reading of their argument is that when the 5 day a week, 40 hour work week began there was a specific level of productivity. As technology increased the output increased. If we believe that recent increases make it so that we only need to work 4 days to maintain our current output, we should be owed 3 days because by the same logic long ago we should’ve dropped to 4.
when the 5 day a week, 40 hour work week began there was a specific level of productivity. As technology increased the output increased.
Exactly, so following this argument, we can choose between living at our current (increased) productivity level (40 hour weeks), or trading off the technological advancements for more spare time at the cost of going back to the productivity level we had previously.
I won’t argue for which of these two is “correct”, I think the tradeoff between free time vs. more access to goods and services is considered very differently by different people. However, I do think that a major problem we’re facing today is that the increased productivity we’ve had the past 50 years due to technological advances has benefited the wealthy far too much, at the expense of everyone else.
I think it’s more fruitful to first try to take care of the wealth distribution, such that we can actually see the quality of life our current productivity level can give everyone. Then we can make an informed choice regarding whether we want to reduce the productivity in exchange for more free time.
I would assume that there’s a balance to this. At some point the reduction of hours will result in a loss in productivity. You can do 5 days of work in 4 days if you’re better rested and more focused, but this might be less true in 3 days. I mean if studies show that there’s isn’t a dip productivity and that it improves well being, then sure, that would be great but I think it’s likely than a 4 day work week.
studiespilot projects, and successful ones. Productivity is even higher.https://autonomy.work/portfolio/uk4dwpilotresults/
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20230319-four-day-workweek-trial-the-firms-where-it-didnt-work
https://www.sap.com/israel/blogs/the-four-day-workweek-paradox
I think the argument would be that the productivity gains that have happened since the 5 day work week was implemented means that if we want that same level of productivity then a 3 day work week would get that. It would be less productive then currently but the argument would be that a lot of that productivity is just going towards the profits of the companies through having to hire less people. Instead if you wanted to maintain current productivity with a 3 day work week you’d have to hire more people which is good with the amount of wealth transfer and inequality that’s been happening.
Edit: not to mention how bad the job market has been recently as well.
I would argue that having more hired staff on rotation would be more productive, even with fewer workdays by any one person. By having more people who have experience with a given task, should any one of them become unable to work, someone else can pick up the slack until things have returned to normal.
When a company relies on linchpin personnel, the loss of a person could be devastating, since the company will have to find a capable replacement to hire. That means interviews, introductory payment packages, hoping that delays don’t cause further damage, establishing the new hire in the workplace, and so on.
100% agree but companies are of course against it because hiring people is expensive. Since if you have two people working 3 day work weeks they’ll still need to be paid the same amount as working 5 days since they still need to make enough to make a living. It also gives benefits to people working since it means you can go on vacation without a bunch of work piling up since you’re the only person who can do it.
We as a species could have built a leisure society decades ago. The raw energy input of fossil fuels could have been wisely parceled out by a council of benevolent dictators, while we live under the domes and chase Jessica 7 on a monorail.
George Jetson’s work week was one hour a day, two days a week. That’s what we were promised we’d get once everything was automated, not that Spacely Space Sprockets would make us work 60 hours a week and pocket all the extra productivity for themselves.
We should’ve gotten a 4-day work week decades ago
Then you should have burned down Chicago decades ago.
The 5 day work week didn’t just happen because workers deserved it. It happened because they went to war.
Bernie says a lot.
But can’t say the word GENOCIDEHe does, I saw an interview with him yesterday
that would be the first time, others have claimed it other times, turned out to be wrong.
So source?Around 3 minutes in and a couple minutes in from there they continue talking about Gaza and starving children https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mXBfF6MlgQ
Edit: Aaaah, I understand. I haven’t heard Bernie sanders call it genocide, only criticise it.
And that’s for a reason.
Carefully chooses his vocabulary.
He also invariably blames ‘the Netanyahoo government’.
Creating the wrong impression only he is to blame so after he’s gone people should go back to business as usual.
He’s a snake.
Also I didn’t get a notification for your answer for some reason, discovered it by accident.
Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
—Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1935
Let’s make anything over 32 hours double pay.
4 days is kinda outdated, like how the $15 minimum is so long overdue it’s moot. 24 hours. 3 days working vs 4 days living. We deserve to live more than we work.
Absolutely agree. They wanna complain about entitlement. They think they’re entitled to 3/4 of all of our lives.
Manager: You’re right! AI Makes me as productive as half my team, so I’m firing half of them AND working a 4 day work week!
Manager in two weeks:
Please come back, I can’t do all this myself!
Heck. This should have happened in the 80’s.
1880s. Industrial revolution.
I assume /s but seriously the 40 hour work week was 1940 so the eighties was four decades later. It was more than enough time and plenty of technological efficiency had come to pass. We should be doing round 3 at this point at least. I mean we are not that far from it being a century since.
It did, for a select few. Less than four days, even. You just had to be one of the finance sector aristocrats who laid claim to enough passive rents.
Instead we got trickled on.
Get ready for more. We have the golden dome coming.
The forecast is sunny with a 100% chance of golden showers
Fucking clown of an actor was the most destructive US president to the planet, we still suffer the impact all over the world. The horror we have today is the evolution of the foundation he built.
No, no, no. They’ll just make it so that each of us is expected to do more since AI is “helping” us. Success under capitalism just leads to more work. The number has to keep going up. If they get their arms twisted they may give us a day off, but they will absolutely decrease the pay. My fear is that they would also go, “Oh, well, since you’re not working 40 hours a week, even though it’s the same work, so no benefits for you 🤷🏿♀️.”
But then they couldn’t pay 1/2 as many people as they used to while still expecting the same amount of work to get done.
Oh you sweet summer child. 1/2 as many people for double the amount of work
3-day by now. 4-day was due before AI, so why would this great boost not make the difference?
3-day week, baseline annual salary across the board of $100,000, free health care for all and capital asset tax of 95% over $50 million
Who’s with me?
The people.
I’m down for that. I could be satisfied with only $50 million.
Wait until automated freight delivery services (from trains and trucks down to little carrier bots) kill about a third of the jobs that exist.
In ten years people would be working less than twelve hours a week, but rich and powerful people will not give up a jot or penny of wealth and power.
Look at the rust belt to see our futures.
Is that a Reynolds reference?
You can’t resist technology, it will ALWAYS win. Economies always strive to be more efficient, and people will always gravitate towards the convenience of efficiency. Because of this, new technologies get adopted all the time, and economies evolve with them.
Think about computers for a second. How many jobs have they created that didn’t exist 50 years ago? There were no online retailers or social media managers or youtubers or software engineers back then. These are all new jobs that were created recently, and they dominate our economy. Even traditional jobs that didn’t use computers before like an accountant, lawyer, or doctor do now because these are powerful tools.
But it’s not just computers, the same thing happened with the television, the radio, the telegraph, cars, trains, even light bulbs. Before, electric street lamps became a thing, cities used to hire lamplighters who would go around the streets lighting and extinguishing gas lamps. When electric street lamps started being adopted a lot of people complained about how this new technology is going to automate away jobs and hurt the economy… but it didn’t.
Instead, the economy specialized and people created new businesses and took on new jobs. The same thing will happen here. It’s simply going be the next major thing to evolve the economy, and we will adopt it and adapt to it just like the many different technologies before it.
Nobody is arguing that technology won’t progress. Even Marx defends that as a precondition for socialism/communism.
The question is the following. Tomorrow a ground breaking technology is developed that makes literally everyone twice as productive. (Please let’s ignore the technical aspect of this. I’m simplifying for the sake of the argument, but this is happening at some paces everywhere).
Now you have 3 options:
- Everyone can just work half the time for the same productivity. I.e. the economy can sustain itself with people just working less (which is a MAJOR quality of life increase).
- Everyone works the same amount of time but their salaries double.
- Everyone works the same amount of time. Their salaries increase a small %, perhaps keeping up with inflation, perhaps a tiny bit more than that, sometimes even not keeping up with inflation. The added productivity results in increased wealth aggregation at the top.
Number 1 is what people are talking about in this thread.
Number 2 won’t happen because salaries aren’t actually tied to productivity. Productivity just sets a higher limit on salary that in any case is never reached. The salaries are actually determined by competition between workers.
Number 3. Has been happening since the seventies and will continue to happen.
I agree that we’ve been doing number 3 for decades. Sooner or later that has to lead to a revolution though right?
Supposedly
But things need to become real bad
But we’re talking about different things though. I don’t disagree with the notion that the work week should decrease or that people should get more based on their production. We’re in total agreement here. I’m arguing that automation is going to bring about the apocalypse like the person I replied to implied because history shows us that this wasn’t the case when similar situations arose in the past. Technology does progress, the economy does evolve, old jobs and industries do die out, and people do lose their jobs because of it. But what is also true at the same time is that new jobs and industries do get created because of the new technology, and the people who lose their jobs do adapt and end up getting new roles that utilize their skill sets. People who get laid off don’t become forever useless, people aren’t that rigid.
Yes new jobs will be created but more and more wealth is concentrated at the top
It’s not the apocalypse but it’s also not not bad in many ways.
Technological progress should only be a good thing but in a capitalist society like ours it has a lot of downsides too (for the majority of the population ofc)
But this isn’t an issue of technology or economic progress, but of politics. These are two different discussions. Jobs being automated away isn’t new nor is it going away. It’s simply a part of the evolution of economies. The issues we have stem from a flawed political system that’s not doing it’s job.
For our system to work as intended, we need to have a robust democratically elected government that proactively regulates the economy on the behalf of the people to protect consumers, the environment, and the health of the economy. This is one of the fingers of the invisible hand. A government is supposed to break up monopolies, ban deceptive and predatory practices, protect consumers from harmful products, make sure that businesses don’t pollute the environment, protect workers from exploitation, and so on. In other capitalist countries like Sweden, Germany, and Ireland they have this, we don’t… at least not anymore.
The reason for this is because there’s no accountability in our government anymore. No politician faces any consequences no matter the crime or controversy. Our public officials no longer fear the public, and this type of unchecked power allows them to be corrupt because they know they can get away with it. They have lost any incentive to do their job of holding bad actors in the country accountable and instead started doing their bidding (like endless deregulation and tax cuts for the rich). That’s the root of our issue, and blaming AI for it is just silly.
First I’m not from the US
Second, yes ofc it’s politics. Nobody is disagreeing on that.
Third even in Europe this is becoming a problem even if the inequality gap doesn’t grow as fast
The problem comes when those technological innovations increase productivity which companies use solely to increase their bottom line. These innovations should be benefitting workers directly.
Outside of that a lot of your argument rests on the idea that there will always be new better jobs for humans to move into. However even the examples you gave aren’t great. How is someone doing manufacturing or transportation or extinguishing the street lights going to suddenly become a computer programmer? Especially considering how atleast in the US you’d have to pay to go to college to do that. And even then we’ve started to see in recent years a lot of these new “high demand” jobs getting saturated. As time goes on and companies use productivity gains to purely to benefit their profits they’re gonna lay off more people and new jobs from new technologies aren’t going to be able to keep up.
My point isn’t based on an idea, it’s based on history. We’ve literally had the same thing happen before many, many times in the past.
Your arguments is based on the assumption that humans are static like sims characters. That they can only ever do one job, which isn’t true. You also know that it isn’t true, otherwise you wouldn’t appeal to extremes. There’s a lot in between being a truck driver and being a programmer that you’re intentionally skipping over. When people lose their jobs, they don’t automatically become eternally useless because they can’t do a highly specialized job that doesn’t utilize any of their skill sets, that’s not what history shows us. Instead, these people find other roles that use their skills.
In this case, truck drivers usually have skills like spatial awareness, logistics knowledge, mechanical aptitude, and time management. These skills are transferable, and other jobs do demand them. For example, they could work as safety inspectors or warehouse supervisors or logistics support or remote vehicle operators, field service support, and the list goes on and on. People adapt, that’s economies progress.
I don’t even understand what you’re argument is here. Should we just straight up freeze technological advancement and stop society from evolving because some people work outdated jobs? If things were left up to you, would you just not implement electric street lamps so lamplighters wouldn’t lose their jobs? You could make the some argument for people who work specialize for health insurance companies, so should we never have universal healthcare because these people might lose their jobs? It’s a ridiculous argument.
You’re correct that this has always been the case in the past.
Advances in technology free people up to do other productive things.
I imagine that trend may stop some time, but I don’t think we’re there yet.
There has been a study done in 1970 called The Limits to Growth that predicted that exponential economic growth would come to a halt necessarily, because you cannot have infinite growth in a finite system. It took many decades more than predicted, but I suspect that we’re actually at this point now.
Workplaces mostly exist nowadays to grow the economy. It takes rather little work to maintain the world nowadays. That is why we’re facing a declining demand in human labor.
Since the labor market is a free market, it is regulated by Supply and Demand. That means, if supply is high, prices drop; if demand is high, prices rise. On the labor market, that means that a declining demand for human labor leads to lower prices for that labor, a.k.a. wages.
That is the crisis that the US is currently facing: Declining wages, a.k.a. inflation, a.k.a. Cost of Living crisis.
That crisis cannot be tackled by technology alone. We need socialism, i.e. the basic decency to treat humans well because humans deserve to be treated well; independent of economic output.
That is what i’m advocating for: UBI (Universal Basic Income), which means that everybody gets enough resources to live.
However, that UBI has to be financed somehow. Printing new money doesn’t work because it leads to hyperinflation. So, the money must be collected through taxes. It is straightforward that only the rich can pay these taxes, because they are the only one who has a lot of money to actually give.
To end this article, i’d like to point out that further economic growth is not possible inside Earth’s limited space, but it is possible in outer space, because there’s infinite space above. Humans just have to go there.
I don’t disagree with anything that you said, but my point was simply to address the notion that existing jobs are irreplaceable. It is true that technology automates away jobs, but it also creates new onee. Industries and jobs that make up the economy change all the time and that’s okay. Thinking that a new technology like AI is going to doom us is, well, just doom posting.
