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How the Six-Hour Workday Actually Saves Money (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: In February, after almost two years worth of six-hour workdays, nurses at the Svartedalens elderly care facility in Gothenburg, Sweden went back to eight hour shifts -- despite recently published research showing the benefits of the shortened workdays. The City of Gothenburg didn't extend the experiment in part because funding ran out. It cost about 12 million krona ($1.3 million) to hire the 17 extra staff members needed to fill the gaps created by shorter work hours. The city had only budgeted for two years, and legislators said it would be too expensive to implement the project across the entire municipality. So, for now, the project has come to an end. Yet, there are longer term savings the study didn't take into account. Working shorter hours resulted in healthier workers, researcher Bengt Lorentzon found in a new paper. "They were less tired, less sick, had more energy coming home and more time to do activities," said Lorentzon. Specifically, the nurses took fewer sick days than they did when working longer, eight hour days. They also took fewer sick days than nurses in the control group. In fact, they took fewer sick days than nurses across the entire city of Gothenburg.
Insurance premiums are a factor of how many insurance claims are made. If the number of claims made goes down, premiums will also go down.
If you born as Japanese, you have to work 8hours(base)+3~7hours(overwork without pay), 6 days per week.
While other countries' visa requirement are hard to pass, most of us are stuck here to become a "robot" for employer.
This is a city in Sweden, so it's safe to assume that health insurance comes from the national health insurance program, the city would not be buying private coverage for their employees. Thus, even if it the 6 hour days save money overall for the government at all levels, it costs the city money they don't have.
This is only half correct. First, in Sweden, employees salaries are paid by the employer (i.e. the city) for the first 14 days of every sickness period. Secondly, while Sweden has a national health care system, it's largely financed on the local level and by local taxes.
Stephan
The problem is even reduced productivity past 40 hours is basically free to the employer because they've already met their costs at that point, so your marginal output past 40 hours is now free to them.
Maybe you've already worked more than 40 hours recently, because you've misunderstood what I said: after 40 hours, each hour that you work has a net negative impact on your productivity. i.e. you accomplish less working 45 hours than working 40, because you spend more time fixing the errors that you made than you spend working productively. Your marginal output is negative, so it doesn't matter to your employer that they're not having to pay anything for it. If you work 45 hours, but spend 10 of those fixing mistakes that you made because you weren't concentrating well, then it doesn't matter to your employer if your costs are the same as someone working 40 hours: if they only spend 4 hours fixing mistakes then you're not cheaper.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ironically at my last job, this exact thing was answered by my boss: "This is why you hire contractors. Firing one takes nothing. You tell the contract agency that you want the failed worker out, they get you another one. Total outlay I have as a manager? $0. It is up to the other people to get the new guy up to speed." Management doesn't really care about the cost of onboarding a new person, since it doesn't show up in the balance sheets.
There is a reason why being an actual -employee- in the US is so difficult, while it is easy to get hired on with Volt, Accenture, K-Force, and so on is the only way to make a living for a lot of people.