Belgium approves four-day week

https://www.euronews.com/next/2022/02/15/belgium-approves-four-day-week-and-gives-employees-the-right-to-ignore-their-bosses

by achow • 4 years ago

165 85 4 years ago

euronews.com

philmcp• 4 years ago

"In practice this means maintaining a 38-hour working week, with an additional day off compensating for longer work days."

Unfortunately it's a compressed 4 day week, instead of a "proper" 4 day work week (i.e. 4 x 8 hour days, e.g. https://4dayweek.io)

A step in the right direction however

krickkrack5• 4 years ago

As an employer there are plenty of jobs that I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to work 20% less, as long as they cost me 20% less.

jd115• 4 years ago

That's literally missing the entire point of it. You already have this now - always had it. There's nothing new or interesting about what you're "proposing".

What IS new and interesting is getting employees who work 20% less, AND THEREFORE are 20% more productive (and presumably 20% happier), at the same cost.

bloqs2• 4 years ago

I think you have misunderstood the reason behind the move towards the 4 day workweek across Europe.

It's literally more productive for less hours.

ThalesX• 4 years ago

Is it really a good use of an agile employer's time to come up with linear compensation schemas for the workers? I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to use the bathroom given it costs me a couple percentage points less...

onion2k2• 4 years ago

As an employer there are plenty of jobs that I would be perfectly fine allowing the employee to work 20% less, as long as they cost me 20% less.

The point of the 4 day week is to decouple the link between output and time. Most employers aren't paying people for 5 * 8 hours of their time. They're paying them for "however much of X work you can do in 40 hours". But, and this is the key point, if tech has moved forward to enable people to do "40 hours of X work" in 32 hours then people could work a 4 day week for the same money that they're earning now.

For a large number of jobs that absolutely is the case, and people sit around wasting 8 hours a week doing very little because they can get all their work done in less time. Rather than them wasting the time, which doesn't benefit you at all, why not just work 4 days? People get more time for themselves, so they're happier, and you benefit from happier, more motivated staff. Everyone wins.

HWR_14• 4 years ago

Given how many people are working 10x5 right now, it seems like it is a "proper" 4 day week in your parlance.

marlowe221• 4 years ago

Yeah... compressed 4 day weeks do nothing for you if you're a parent. My kids get out of school/daycare at 3:30 pm. That's hard enough to deal with working 8x5 days, especially post-COVID when after school care of any kind is basically unobtainium a this point.

I literally cannot work 9 or 10 hour days.

sam_lowry_• 4 years ago

You probably have a partner and can arrange for shifts. Part of the deal is about flexible working hours. But yes, it is nowhere as bold as the French 35-hour work week.

hatchnyc2• 4 years ago

It seems that with these types of changes, I mean with more and more of the workforce working on schedules that don’t overlap, it is going to become more and more important for business software to run autonomously without anyone there to babysit it, but it seems to me we have been moving in precisely the opposite direction for some time now.

Specifically “doing agile” seems to encourage this, I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster, with some hand wavy plans to fix it in some future sprint.

RamblingCTO3• 4 years ago

How on earth is this related to "agile" software/product development?

I always see lots of supporting infrastructure being skimped on so a new feature can be delivered faster

That's bad management and has nothing to do with agile. Reserve time for bug fixes (or have fire fighting capabilities) and refactoring, include time for tech tickets. ALWAYS. Plan workload jointly with developers, talk to them regularly. It's that easy.

wccrawford• 4 years ago

They did put "doing agile" in scare quotes to suggest it isn't really true agile development. They're claiming it, but not actually doing it right.

hatchnyc2• 4 years ago

Right, nobody who has a bad experience with agile is doing it right. I am very familiar with this line of argument.

Fact remains though that back when everything was waterfall (proudly) and we shipped physical media to clients, when a bug often meant flying a support engineer out to the customer’s office, software was generally delivered more completed and vetted, and the QA group wasn’t allowed to report to the same org as developers because it was considered a conflict of interest. Now some software companies don’t even have a QA organization, we are inventing new organizational and technical structures to ensure that the developers are perpetually on call to resolve issues, and there is definitely a school of thought that says delivery of a complete product is an anti-pattern because after all every feature is just an experiment that you are testing on your users. But whatever, two different times, two different needs, two different practices, and to my point now we seem to be entering a new post-COVID era where just as waterfall doesn’t scale to a continuous delivery paradigm, “you build it, you run it” as practiced today is going to struggle with an “always on” business which has no “after hours” due to more flexible working schedules.

Are there companies today that run true 24/7? Sure, plenty, but they tend to be larger and have the staff to cover this. A great deal of business software today is still very fragile operationally and has deployment, management, and maintenance tied to the 9-5, M-F business schedule. I think it is going to have to evolve.

harles2• 4 years ago

38 hours (the estimated work week) is exactly half of the 996 week (76 hours) of some companies in China. I don’t think that’s healthy, but if I had to bet, I’d pick the 76 hour workers outcompeting their 38 hour counterparts.

amelius• 4 years ago

A race to the bottom it is.

bla3• 4 years ago

Depends on the type of work, surely. If it's menial tasks and labor is plenty, you can afford your workforce continuously burning out, since it's fast to train and easy to replace. It's exploitative, but as long as it makes the market happy...

For highly-educated jobs where people need 6 months of onboarding and institutional knowledge matters, it's probably more efficient to reduce churn.

jonathonf• 4 years ago

it's probably more efficient to reduce churn

That would be lovely. Unfortunately, many places would rather you move job than give you a raise. It's cheaper in their accounts, and that's what (ah) counts.

chpatrick• 4 years ago

It really depends on the type of work. You can't pump out creativity and it's actually an advantage to be well-rested.

dj_mc_merlin• 4 years ago

Do you work 76 hours?

Gareth321• 4 years ago

Assembling thousands of parts on an assembly line? Probably. Anything remotely requiring critical thought? Not a chance.

melissalobos• 4 years ago

Consider this, imagine someone working every single waking minute at their job. Clearly they will not be very happy and after a time not very productive. So there exists some optimum level of productivity between 0 and 18 hours of work per day. The big question is whether it is closer to the 0 or closer to the 18. Currently there is some good evidence for it being in the 3-6 hour range(I don't have the studies on hand, maybe someone else can chip in here). Now that is of actual productive work and not "work"(where you are just visible in the office or sitting at a meeting table).

harles2• 4 years ago

I think this misses the point - the 9 to 9 point was probably just a distraction. Compare 4 day work weeks to 6 day work weeks. 50% more work days seems like a big advantage, even if workers only perform 3-6 hours of work per day.

DougN7• 4 years ago

It’s probably not the same productivity rate for each hour though. Those first 3 are perhaps most productive followed by less for the next 3, less for the next and so on. So value is still produced in the later hours. At some point it might not be worth paying the same rate as is paid for those first 3 though. Too bad all of this can’t be measured accurately (in many cases).

thesuitonym3• 4 years ago

The big question is whether it is closer to the 0 or closer to the 18.

And to be sure, there is no one-size-fits-all answer. What the number is probably depends on the task at hand--though I would argue that (all other things being equal) it's probably closer to 0 than 18 for any job.

geraldyo• 4 years ago

lol dem chinese comin for ya brother

McWobbleston2• 4 years ago

This is assuming the 38 hour worker isn't doing other productive things off the clock. I think it gets a lot less clear if any significant number of the 4 day workers are producing useful works in their new free time or helping with productive actions that aren't well suited towards a profit motive

baybal2• 4 years ago

UAE switched to 36 hours workweek in January

Loic• 4 years ago

Only for the UAE Government and Federal entities.

Do not worry, the construction workers together with all the foreigner workforce will continue working 70h+ per week.

parkerduckworth• 4 years ago

This was the hardest part about being in the country. Couldn’t enjoy the novelty of Abu Dhabi/Dubai because of the absolutely destitute conditions facing the vast majority of the “population”

sAbakumoff2• 4 years ago

I recall times when I worked at the office. Friday was a dead day. No one was interested in doing anything but waiting until 5pm. People were wandering around the office like zombies, having endless coffee-breaks and meaningless chats.

I guess that it's quite common situation for office workers, unless they are under strict surveillance and control(f.e. Amazon, EPAM).

rdsubhas• 4 years ago

Yes indeed, I can relate to. But just out of curiosity, if we get used to a 4 day week, will Thursday become the new Friday?

(genuine question plz, I have no clue either way)

sAbakumoff2• 4 years ago

Who knows, people are strange creatures. I guess we will find out as more countries embrace 4-days week. In the Netherlands, I hope that the liberal "D66" party will crush the "right-wing" incumbent in the next election, win the majority in the parliament and do something similar to that they did in Belgium.

McWobbleston2• 4 years ago

I think it will in some cases and others it won't. I feel like I would have a hard time making good progress in software if Thursday was a wasted day like Friday often is, but I imagine some people will be able to knock out good progress in 3 days and get back into it the next week

neilsense• 4 years ago

The decline of the West continues

qazwse_• 4 years ago

I was feeling grumpy this morning, but this comment made me laugh and brought a smile to my face. Thank you.

simonebrunozzi• 4 years ago

Title should be "Belgium approves four-day work week". Without the "work", it is incorrect, even if it could be guessed.

purple_ferret• 4 years ago

Big Chocolate in shambles

app4soft2• 4 years ago

Belgium approves four-day week

Without mentioning "work" or "job", the title looks like week in Belgium would consist of only 4 days now: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday.

stronglikedan• 4 years ago

Makes sense. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are the new weekend. ;-)

app4soft2• 4 years ago

Friday, Saturday, and Sunday

There are no such days in Belgium anymore.

sylware• 4 years ago

for instance: if the medical staff is at 3 'days a week', this should make them work better because with less fatigue. It means there will be a need of more medical staff, probably 2x. Then once a pandemic hits like corona, if the infrastructure was properly sized, that should help a lot to handle the blow.

Ofc, this is very foreign to all current running economy models.

PeterStuer• 4 years ago

For context, the workweek was 38 a week in Belgium already. The only difference is you can officially spread it over 4 days instead of 5.

In IT it makes a real difference as it wiil change from a de facto 50h to 40h. ( You work 50 h but are only allowed to put 38h on the official time-sheet)

Belgium approves four-day week

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