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Amazon Is Testing a 30-Hour, 75% Salary Workweek (washingtonpost.com)
Amazon is planning a pilot program in which a select group of workers will need to work for 30 hours a week, instead of the usual 40 to 70 hours, and make 75 percent of the salary + benefits (alternate source). From the report:Currently, the pilot program will be small, consisting of a few dozen people. These teams will work on tech products within the human resources division of the company, working Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with additional flex hours. Their salaries will be lower than 40-hour workers, but they will have the option to transition to full-time if they choose. Team members will be hired from inside and outside the company. As of now, Amazon does not have plans to alter the 40-hour workweek on a companywide level, the spokesman said.
How about making it 32 hours a week for 80% pay, and have them work Mon-Thu? Four 8-hour workdays a week would be much better than five 6-hour workdays....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Since I got as much done as when I worked 60+ hours, no one seemed to care.
All these comments are valid. I suspect that people would get as much done in a solid 30 hours of working than the do in 80 hours of burnout. There was time (70's 80's) where, because of striking coal miners causing power shortages, UK industries were forced to a 3-day work week. IIRC productivity in those 3 days was about 90% of the 5-day week. Whether that would have been sustainable we'll never know because once the strike was settled the week went back to 5 days.
There's an interesting book called Kellogg's Six Hour Day by Hunnicutt. Here's the synopsis:
"Kellogg's six-hour day was the pinnacle of a hundred-year process that cut working time virtually in half. Kellogg Management, propelled by a vision of Liberation Capitalism, insisted that six hours would revolutionize society by shifting the balance of time from work to leisure--from economic concerns to the challenge of freedom."
The employees grandfathered into the 30-hour week stayed on it until they retired in the 1980s. A 30-hour week gave employees more time for clubs, gardening, sports, family, etc. When you think about how wealthy we are in, say, energetic terms (useful work extracted from an ox vs cubic meter of natural gas), it's amazing how much time and capital we spend on destructive bullshit like sitting in traffic or paying people to do our taxes because the system is too complicated (we're paying a tax on paying taxes ffs). Just unbelievable how needlessly dumb the world is in light of automation, nuclear power, blah, blah, blah.
The ancient Greeks viewed labor as a necessary evil that got in the way of more enlightened pursuits [1]. This is not to say they condoned laziness, but TPS reports, patent lawsuits, and $ModernBullshit are not the highest forms of civilization. Why we focus on metrics like GDP -- which in no way accounts for quality, or whether the "work" should even be done -- is absolutely beyond me. In the end, complex, industrial civilization is still relatively new compared to the species' time on the planet, so we're still trying to figure this out.
[1] = https://www.jstor.org/stable/6...