German industry pushes to restore 40-hour working week without extra pay(www.ft.com)
5 pointsby alephnerd5 hours ago3 comments
  • aanet3 hours ago
    I hope the German workers (can) negotiate to keep the 35 hour/week arrangement.

    (I'm not German, nor do I work there).

    and I hope somehow we are able to bring a less than 40 hour/week arrangement in the US.

    Workers in the US work, by far, the most of any other country. And yet, only a relative few are able to afford quality medical care, and decent quality of life. (The workers in the tech sectors like Bay area, NYC, etc. are, IMHO, an outlier with respect to pay packages compared to the rest of the country.)

    It's a devil's bargain: you either work your a* off, 60-80 hours/week, and hope to get paid $$$$ one day; or you work "reasonable" hours and get paid for a shitty qualify of life.

    • pipodeclown3 hours ago
      US workers most definately do not work the most of any country. Maybe relative to some rich western europeans you do but globally you are very much in the 'rich countries where the average working hours are quite low' category. There are even more than a few european countries with average working hours per worker that are higher than in the US.
    • yorwba2 hours ago
      You can also work fewer hours in the US if you make it your top priority and accept lower pay. That's how German manufacturing unions did it: They had the option to ask for less work or more pay, and they kept picking less work. Some collective bargaining agreements let each individual worker choose whether they want to work less or earn more. It's all tradeoffs.
      • alephnerd2 hours ago
        Yeah, but Chinese, Vietnamese, and Indian employees work longer hours and get paid less.

        Even ignore Asia - Poles, Czechs, and other CEE residents work longer hours than Germans yet are similarly as productive (based on GDP per capita) and have caught up developmentally.

  • OroPla4 hours ago
    Shouldn't AI help us push this down to 30h for everyone? Who in their right mind wants to work more? Most of the 40h week is wasted with doing pointless things anyway.
    • jjk166an hour ago
      Productivity per capita has already 5Xed since the 40 hour workweek was implemented. The resources required to comfortably raise a family in a suburban home can be generated with only a few hundred hours of labor per year. Everything they had then is easier to produce now, and the things we've gained since like consumer electronics require barely any human labor at all to produce.
    • SvenLan hour ago
      That’s not how this works. Let’s assume there is a correlation between productivity gain due to AI usage and outcome per working hour. No manager/CEO would say “hey, due to AI my workers get the same work done in 30h for which they needed 40h before - let’s cut their working hours down to 30h with same salary”.

      No, that’s not happening. Shareholder value has to increase so keep working 40h and produce more outcome.

      • jjk16640 minutes ago
        > No manager/CEO would say “hey, due to AI my workers get the same work done in 30h for which they needed 40h before - let’s cut their working hours down to 30h with same salary”.

        Why not? The moment anyone offers this option, they get their pick of employees who will both churn less and be better rested for their work time, increasing productivity, whereas their greedy competitors get the people with no better options and burn them out. Despite people's despair, the current situation is extremely unstable.