Splive

What I feel like I'm missing is - "how"? How systematically do you enact the 4 day week without salaries degrading over time due to natural capitalist economic mechanisms?

Lots of idealism I've seen but not an incentive system to drive behavior that way.

This. If you have disposable income and less fear of unemployment a recession can be a great time to invest. Those most impacted are more likely to be disadvantaged groups already. I really wish I understood better how the stock market is/ isn't impacted by people on the bottom half of income distribution, because as a layman it at least seems like "not that much". I wish we used better indicators in communicating the economy.

This is huge. You have the most influence over your own peer group, and young citizens showing that other young people DO care and vote is awesome.

And you can see how this plays out in corporate america as well. First there are some thought leaders like we have in this thread. But then the economics goes like employee ROI=salary+benefits+hours/life balance. So the capitalist company will likely realize that life balance carries some value (just like vacation days, flexible work hours, perks in the office, etc...) and as a result either lower the salary, or keep it the same to attract a higher tier of talent.

Over at /r/askeconomics I've consistently read comments around "why haven't wages kept up..." and how part of the answer lies in benefits. So instead of paying you more, they give you benefits that are comparable value...except you can't use them to buy bread. This seems like it would be more of the same without some mechanism driving the behavior we want.

"Shouldn't be" - yea, according to who?

If you're not getting paid per hour, you can output the same amount and just have less office hours.

You are stating one part of the equation. output = productivity over time * hours. If productivity at hour 33 = 0, then you don't receive value for that time.

But zooming out, that part of the equation is only a part when making decisions around hiring, firing, rate card choices, or any other number of strategic business choices. I'm not saying these are good arguments, but the fact that I can imagine them means someone out there will likely make the argument if we shifted to 32 hours:

• Sure they're only personally product for 32 hours, but by being available for 40 hours doesn't that facilitate productivity of others that may have questions?
• But, collaboration time!?!
• "If this were a negotiation, what are we gaining by letting people work less vs what they are themselves? Can we leverage this into..."(potentially reducing overall value to employees by removing other benefits, cutting from 2% to 1.9% base annual pay increase, they'll get creative)
• It will make us less available to our clientelle
• It won't cost us productivity, but it will cost us in operational labor determine new company policy, maintaining schedules or policy around what a 32 hour week looks like

The best organizations (and therefore having some of the highest competition for getting hired) may keep everything the same except the # of hours, but quickly the worst won't want to comply, and the average will ideally get behind it but struggle to effectively implement it. And that gradient of standards across the marketplace causes on average lower income across all white collar workers for less hours...even if higher / hour. Incentivizing working more or living on less.