People have known it since at least 1999 when Office Space was released. If you're not slacking off at work, especially if you're salaried, you're being exploited even more than usual.
How is this a surprise? The detachment people have from the reality “on the ground” is infuriating. Try working a job you hate for shit pay for 71% of your entire fucking week and then just bounce into a weekend (assuming you even get two days off in a row) with all the energy to “do stuff”.
I’m glad for you!! That’s great. I’m fortunate as well. I work 4 days (10 hours) so I typically have three days off and my boss usually gives me at least two in a row.
Even with that, I still often burn one day off just recovering. This oligarchy late stage capitalism is bullshit.
I almost feel like this is basically Fridays at my place of work. Since it’s not formalized that means I don’t have to worry about anyone looking to adjust my salary or PTO or whatever corporate america would do to validate the savings of a 4 day work week. Selfishly I like where it’s at, but I do think overall the 4 day work week would benefit us all as long as pay doesn’t decrease
Yeah, I don’t see 4 days work weeks to continually be “no fuck around time” I see it as maybe improved performance for a few months but eventually people go back to “Fuck around” or “coffee runs” or everything that is counted.
You think corporations in the US won’t put a twist on it? I can see them making it a 4 10s week. They just hate people and want them to suffer as much as possible.
Heh… Nobody working on Friday has been a joke since I was a kid. Turns out, it’s not a joke!
Of course, the reason why nobody works on Friday always seemed to be anticipation of the weekend, so I would imagine going to a 4 day work week, eventually, would lead to the same thing. Except it’ll be Thursday. 🤔
Maybe at a cushy white collar office job. I work at a hospital. There is no down time when you are on the clock, that’s true for nurses, doctors, housekeeping, pharmacy, lab, food service - I’d imagine the same is also true for all sort of service industry workers, and also factory workers, farmers, construction, and so so many others. Let’s stop pretending that everyone just sits in front of a computer all day.
I just posted the same thing. I used to be a bartender/ server and work in retail. You DON’T rest. Not on your own schedule at least
My work is hybrid these days and I have tasks to complete instead of just drink from the firehose of task garbage being thrown my way. I can control the ebb and flow of my workday and slack or be a champion as needed.
Oh, I work 4 9 hour day weeks too. My quality of life is better in every way and i STILL dick around certain days. You probably make a lot more than I do but it’s not worth it to get home and have zero bandwidth
To be fair, for those jobs the 5 day workweek, as it is known traditionally, has never been true. They were always either doing starnge shifts like 24 hours twice then 2 free days, repeat or working way more than 5 days a week, based on demand (which of course has been increasing since businesses hire less and less for some fuckin reason).
Those are the first jobs we need to change into 4 hours for 3 days shifts or something. It’s dangerous for everyone to work without sufficient recovery
Exactly. I definitely would not want a nurse or a doctor to operate on me when there on the last stretches of a 12 hour shift, running on 5 hours of sleep. The only question I ask any doctor, nurse or dentist before they start any procedure on me is “how many hours of sleep did you get last night”… Anything less than 6-7 hours puts me in more risk than I’d accept!
It’s criminal how you are all treated because of purposeful under-staffing. Everyone needs downtime. The human mind does not go full throttle for 8-12 hours straight, and I’m well aware you often have longer shifts than that in a hospital! If medical staff had some downtime during their shifts, patient outcomes would improve, and not just by a little bit.
I’m a doctor and intentionally set my own hours to four day work weeks whenever I can, because I run my own practice and can do that. Let’s not pretend it’s a badge of honour to grind ourselves into a twitching mess.
This is exactly my problem as well… We wanted to try a 4 day work week at my factory but they said no because we need to ship things 5 days a week… Except for the fact that we almost never ship more than 1 or 2 things in any given day and they are rarely things that need to go asap… One day wouldn’t kill them but they’re stuck in the past.
I work five days in a warehouse. If I go more than five minutes without scanning a box then it alerts the manager and they’ll come down and see what’s occurring.
So yeah. I feel like this stat is more for office sorts who (and I may be wrong here) spend a lot of time on Reddit and Facebook during the work day.
I know what you mean. I spent 10 years as a chef. But i dont fully agree.
Sure, some weeks you would work 6 or 7 days, but others only 4. And when you did work 6 or 7 you often only work a morning or an evening. If i was doing 4 days i would work 3 afd’s (all fucking day) and then one morning or evening. Sometimes your days off were split up so you get a few little breaks throughout the week.
If im working evenings i get my whole morning and afternoon to do what i want when i feel my most fresh and energetic. If i work mornings i get all afternoon and evening to do what i want. If im working afd’s i get an extra day off to to what i want. Plus early week, monday, tuesday, wednesday was always less busy so you could be cleaned up and out of the kitchen by close (10pm) and alot of the shift could be spent in prep, cleaning, organising and having a laugh with the other chefs and smoking. Lots of smoking.
I work in an office now and i realise that the two are completely different beasts.
My 9 to 5 leaves me with zero energy mentally which affects me physically by making me not want to do anything with my evenings knowing i need to be up early so in bed early. I get my weekends but i spend them doing housework or something else responsible :(
Both job types could benefit from a 4 day work week. We need time to recharge and relax. We are just humans.
Edit: just to add. Life as a chef was hard. Lack of social life, working crazy hours. Bad diet and no discernable sleeping pattern.
Like i said above. They are different but equally exhasting.
I think it’s really important to acknowledge the way an office job can completely destroy your day just due to mental exhaustion, boredom and lack of purpose (or a combination of 3). Thanks for your comment because that was an interesting perspective for someone who only ever worked “office jobs”.
The fact that you are sit in front of a computer doesn’t mean that when you are finished you have all your energy left to do what you want, because even if you are not physically tired, if you are exhausted mentally, all you want to do is being passively entertained.
We could argue at length which job is worse or more tiring, etc. Or we could simply agree on the general principle that everyone should have more time to do what we like.