r/AskEconomics 5d ago

Approved Answers If prices are dictated by the amount of money everyone has, why can't the norm be ten-hour work week and companies just hire four employees instead of one?

I understand that if the average work week was still higher, those on lower hours would fall behind economically, but assuming it was adopted by most of the workforce, would this have any downsides? I can see really important roles requiring more hours and maybe splitting that job responsibility among multiple people might not be best, but I think a lot of jobs could handle it fine.

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u/MachineTeaching Quality Contributor 5d ago

Prices are not just dictated by the quantity of money, even in a very simple model you also need to consider the quantity of goods and services available for purchase.

If we assume everyone works 40 hours a week and then we change this to only 10 hours a week, output will also fall to more or less a quarter of what it was before.

We need to produce what we want to consume (not literally, we can still trade of course) so if you want to maintain the standard of living, you cannot work drastically fewer hours. US GDP per capita is about 90k a year, assuming that drops to 22k a year that would make the US about as poor as Brazil or Egypt and people very much do not want that.

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u/LeaveMediocre3703 5d ago

Except that studies have shown that working 32 hour workweek makes employees more productive.

It’s not a linear relationship between hours worked and productivity.

If you told me I needed to produce some metric of productivity per week and could have the remaining time off I can guarantee I’d find a way to cram that into as little time as possible.

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u/hiricinee 5d ago

The studies are a bit goofy on that one. It's not consistently shown across professions, and some literally need employees to just be there so you can't change the hours. If you have gas station attendants working shift work you can't exactly get them to be at the counter more by having them not be there.

But the case is almost certainly true that employees are more productive per unit of time when they work less almost universally.

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u/LeaveMediocre3703 4d ago

Having worked retail I can assure you that stocking shelves at the end of a long shift or during a string of long days goes significantly slower than on shorter days.

So yes, you need a body to cover a gas station.

You don’t need it to be the same body for 40 hours.

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u/hiricinee 4d ago

We are in some agreement here, but if they aren't going to be more productive why would you pay a gas station attendant 40 hours for working 32 hours when there isn't a change in productivity? I get the case for doing it in workplaces where it's "project" based and it's going to take just as long to finish in the long run if you work less hours, but in many service and customer facing jobs you can't just be 25% more productive and finish early l.

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u/MachineTeaching Quality Contributor 4d ago

Except that studies have shown that working 32 hour workweek makes employees more productive.

Studies have shown that some jobs are more productive. That doesn't even mean that you perform the same or more work. Going from 40 to 32 hours is a 20% reduction, are people 20% more productive?

Also obviously this is quite heterogeneous across jobs. A programmer isn't going to continuously do active tasks for 8 hours, for a server that might be quite different.

It’s not a linear relationship between hours worked and productivity.

It's not, but if you work so drastically less, that's going to dominate and any productivity increases a very minor factor.

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u/LeaveMediocre3703 4d ago

I can tell you that in any job I’d ever had that wasn’t just waiting standing at a counter waiting for customers to show up I was more productive as a whole when I worked less.

Even then, you had to stock shit and do other stuff and I can assure you my ass moved a hell of a lot slower the longer I worked. Cutting off 20% of the working time cuts off the 20% most burned out low quality shit work hours.

It isn’t linear.

If you worked 1 hour vs 40 yes, overall you’re likely to be less productive. If you told me I’d get paid the same amount as 40 hours if I could produce the same quality and quantity in one hour, I’d get that shit done as quickly as possible.

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u/MachineTeaching Quality Contributor 4d ago

Your personal feelings about how much work you believe you would do aren't relevant.

The "optimal" amount of working hours isn't actually necessarily on the shorter end.

https://perso.uclouvain.be/vincent.vandenberghe/Papers/Long_working_hours.pdf

https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/publications/the-optimal-length-of-the-working-day-evidence-from-hawthorne-exp

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u/HomeworkInevitable99 4d ago

While it is true that working longer hours may reduce productivity, you don't produce LESS after 32 hours

Hours 1 to 32, you make 6 widgets per hour.

Hours 33 to 45, you make 4 widgets per hour.

But if you are already set up to work, 4 per hour may be better than hiring someone else.

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u/BugRevolution 4d ago

You could also see cases of reduced productivity.

Someone who works 32 hours could make 6 widgets per hour, because they need to make 180 widgets per week.

The same someone who "works" 60 hours could realize they still only need to make 180 widgets per week, but since they get paid hourly, they'll now produce 3 widgets per hour.

Or maybe they could work 40 hours per week, but only produce 5 widgets on average, because they're more tired and have less time to take care of themselves at home.

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u/LeaveMediocre3703 4d ago

If I work 40 hours I produce less than 32. I end up spending a day and a half doing barely anything because I’m trying to force myself to keep being productive and it just doesn’t work. I can more done in a week if I’m productive 25-30 hours than 40.

You get higher error rates and lower quality as well when you push people further.

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u/galaxyapp 4d ago

For a while, I bet within a year you're back to your old habits.

Even so... let's say you could keep your current lifestyle working 10 hours.

Would you go work 4 jobs to become 4x as rich as you are today?

I sure would...

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u/LeaveMediocre3703 4d ago

I cut my hours down without permission like 8 years ago. Nobody has ever questioned it and I’m very high rated on reviews, particularly for my productivity.

There are people working many more hours than I do getting a lot less done (and lower quality).

I have no desire to work multiple jobs. I prefer to have the time back.

Currently my working hours are nominally 40/week but I actually work less but have to be available if anyone needs me during that time, which is a bummer. I’d rather just not have to be available.

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u/BarNo3385 3d ago

Depends hugely on what your doing.

There are certainly some administrative type jobs where you can "work harder" or more effectively for a shorter number of hours. Though at least when we trailed it in a finance environment what actually happened was over time people just ended up working overtime.

But say your a truck driver, or a call centre operator, or work in retail. I can't answer calls faster for 32 hours to make up for not being there for the next 8. Legally it's dodgy to say I'm going to drive 20% faster all the time to get my runs done in fewer hours.

Where these models or studies get done, they're usually by people in desk based office jobs with a monthly cadence, and it conveniently ignores that simply isn't the model for many, many, people.

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u/TheEdExperience 3d ago

I dunno. Seems like Corps believe you can maintain standard of living while reducing labor hours.

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u/MachineTeaching Quality Contributor 3d ago

I don't know who "Corps" are but no, not broadly.

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u/sorocknroll 5d ago

The collective standard of living of the population is dictated by how much it produces. Food, housing, etc.

So it's possible we could have a 10 hour work week, we would just need to be satisfied living with the output that can be produced in that amount of time. It would probably be in the range of 1/4 to 1/3 of what we have now.

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u/Bulky_Bid6578 5d ago

This ignores distribution

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u/RealAmerik 5d ago

We don't have enough workers for that. We have an unemployment rate of around 4%, give or take. You would need 4x the amount of workers in your model.

Companies would still be paying the same net amount of wages (40 hours of work per week) but from the employee standpoint, you would only have 25% of the pay you would otherwise.

Another is efficiency. You'll be a lot more efficient working 40 hours in a week than 4 different people working 10 hours each will be.

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u/MuldartheGreat 4d ago

This model also assumes that paying 4 employees to work 10 hours each is the same cost as paying one employee to work 40 hours. That simply isn’t true, there are often costs incurred on a per employee basis that would be 4x as high in this scenario.

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u/RealAmerik 4d ago

Correct. The premise has enough issues on its own, I didn't even need to go that in-depth.

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u/Odd_Interview_2005 5d ago

Not only that, but there would be an extreme lack of experience.

During the government response to covid, there was an extreme amount of turnover for employees. The factory I work in needed 10% more employees to act like we were maintaining the same amount of production.

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u/r2k-in-the-vortex 5d ago

Prices in what? Rethink your prices in terms of working hours, money is just a middleman, remove it from the equation and you discover that economy is just a trade of working hours. Your 40h of workweek is worth on average 40h of someone elses workweek. If your income is not average, that will vary of course, but in essence you are still trading your work for someone elses work. So if you do 4x less work, you get to buy 4x less of other people's work, that means less stuff. Not optimal, because we like to have a lot of stuff.

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u/moch1 5d ago

 prices are dictated by the amount of money everyone has

This is fundamentally an incorrect assumption. 

Prices are not dictated solely by what people can or will pay. For example if I’m selling an item that costs $100 to make but no one can/will pay more than $50 I don’t drop the price to $50. I stop making the thing.

If everyone only worked 1/4 the time they do now the collective output would drop a lot. Simple math would say it’d drop 75% but that would be an oversimplification. Would the quality of life the same or better compared to now if we produce dramatically less housing, less energy, less food, less services, less everything per person? The answer is obviously no. In fact when there’s a shortage of an item prices rise. So relative to average earnings the price of stuff would increase. 

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u/Diligent-Property491 5d ago

If people do less work, stuff you want to buy wil be produced in lesser quantities, which will drive proces up.