Four Day Work Week

[elte]

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-09-op...ealth.html

  Besides the health issues, employers and workers also need to consider the effect that compressing hours into a four-day period has on workers' mental health, stress levels and fatigue.  

I'd prefer a three day work week at 8 hours still, reducing the work week to 24 hours, with a day off between each work day and the weekend staying like it is now.

[C C]

As robots and AI expand more and more beyond just taking over grunt work, there's probably going to be no choice but fewer days or hours. Even globalization's exploitation of super-cheap human labor in 3rd-world countries is slowly inching to where it can't compete with the local installation of smart machines.

[Yazata]

Right now, the owners of robots are the ones that benefit from the machines' labors, the workers they displace don't receive any significant benefit. So if robots and AIs expand more and more, they will need to be taxed very heavily and the proceeds distributed in a national income scheme. But their owners will have to keep some of the fruits of the machines' labor, to make it worthwhile to invest in robots in the first place.

I see growing problems associated with a population that no longer works and is supported by some kind of government hand-outs. Historically, a person's sense of worth has been closely associated with the work they did. People identified with their profession: "I'm a surgeon", "I'm a teacher". If somebody spends most of their time doing nothing, what are they? What meaning will they find in their lives?

If robots replace human labor, that's going to create an existential crisis for the human beings that have been replaced.

It's easy to say that everyone will be an artist or a scientist or a philosopher, but is that realistic?

[scheherazade]

The article speaks to compressing 40 hours into 4 days instead of 5 and that can have detrimental effects on health and how to incorporate family and community time.
Only one company was looking at reduced hours and that would be with a commensurate pay adjustment.

Proponents of such "compressed" work schedules − those in which employees work longer hours for fewer days of the week – point to gains in productivity that result from decreased overhead costs, such as not having to keep the lights on when nobody is working. Additional cost savings can be obtained from reducing total weekly commuting time.

A variety of business have tested the four-day concept, including Amazon, Google, Deloitte and a host of smaller firms. Amazon announced in late August that it is experimenting with an even shorter workweek of 30 hours for select employees, who would earn 75 percent of their full-time salary, should they choose to opt in.

It is entirely possible that increased automation could result in there being fewer hours of work available per individual but that will require a complete restructuring of our current economy as the costs of living have not been decreasing for all of the improvements made by technology. The costs associated with recreation are likewise high and there are fewer individuals who seem capable of spending time without also spending money in the doing.