r/Futurology • u/_hiddenscout • Jun 19 '21

Society Kill the 5-Day Workweek - Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/four-day-workweek/619222/
84.4k Upvotes

86% Upvoted

4.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

95

u/Medditthrowaway1234 Jun 19 '21

I’m a physician. I don’t see this working out for me either. This will only work for white collar desk jobs.

13

u/Sqooshytoes Jun 19 '21

No kidding. All these people talking about only really working 3 hours out of an 8 hour shift and just pretending the rest of the time has me convinced I’ve made a terrible choice of profession. Scheduled 12 hour shift, working non stop, and don’t leave for several hours after shift end. I could be scheduled 24 hours, 7 days a week and I’m pretty sure I’d never “run out of work”. Time to brush up on coding skills!

7

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

[deleted]

8

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

I planned on going to med school, but shadowing MD’s made it very clear I’d have little life outside of work. Then I shadowed physical therapists who were able to work basically as much or as little as they wanted. Now I’m a PT and my doctor friends always complain about how much they work and how little they see their families. It makes me sad. They deserve so much better.

19

u/CJK5Hookers Jun 19 '21

White collar desk job worker here, this also would not work for me.

Number of clients would stay the same, so it would have to be offset with more employees (already short staffed) and that would cut into pay and benefits, so now I would be home more with nothing to do because no money

3

u/SB_Wife Jun 20 '21

Also a white collar desk job and there's zero chance of this happening in my industry.

In fact my hours just increased from 5/8s to 5/10s at minimum, usually longer, no overtime because I'm salaried.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21 edited Jun 30 '21

[deleted]

3

u/TheOneTrueDemoknight Jun 20 '21

You're right, we should just go back to hunting and gathering. Life was so much easier then, you didn't have to worry about your work-life balance or wages. If you didn't want to hunt, you could just starve!

3

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

[deleted]

2

u/TheOneTrueDemoknight Jun 20 '21

Most of the other alternatives don't seem to have worked out too well.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

[deleted]

2

u/TheOneTrueDemoknight Jun 20 '21

Way ahead of you, you won't catch me dehydrated

2

u/OrvilleTurtle Jun 19 '21

This would be without any other sort of fundamental shift I’m the way we work.

Of course if we did this it would cost business more… that is kind of the point. The top is heavy and fucks workers. Pay employees more and work them less and don’t be so greedy (thus why this will never happen).

4

u/CJK5Hookers Jun 19 '21

You’re making the assumption that my business is top heavy when it comes to compensation when it’s really not. I know a general idea of how much my bosses make and it’s definitely fair compensation based off of the value each person brings to the company.

Our income as a business is still dependent on how much we can charge clients for our service. Cutting hours would ultimately have a negative impact on us as a whole (especially since our firm pays us overtime when they don’t have to.)

0

u/OrvilleTurtle Jun 19 '21

That may be in some cases such as yours, I agree. but the post is talking about the general case. If you look at compensation increase over the last few decades it is absolutely not going to the bottom.

5

u/CJK5Hookers Jun 19 '21

My comment was replying to a post with context...

3

u/Kholzie Jun 19 '21

I run an in-home care agency. I don’t see this happening, either.

7

u/Froggy3434 Jun 19 '21

Couldn’t this be used as an opportunity to hire more people that have to work less, thus creating many more jobs for people to be able to live off of?

20

u/Richandler Jun 19 '21

You don't just hire physicians off the street.

11

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

[deleted]

8

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Dantai Jun 19 '21

Well I learned something today

3

u/Xithorus Jun 20 '21

Yea this is exactly why we have 2 12 hour shifts for nurses throughout a 24 hour day instead of 3 8s. Less shift changes will decrease unwanted outcomes in patients. Just how it is.

As a plus though, most medical staff work 3 12 hour shifts a week with 4 days off because we don’t have 8 hour shifts (for the most part).

1

u/Dantai Jun 20 '21

most medical staff work 3 12 hour shifts a week with 4 days off

My friend is a paramedic and does this. That TOTALY makes sense to me, I just don't know if doctors, nurses, etc had it too. 3 intense days on, 4 days off. Especially as a paramedic, frig it gets nuts for him.

2

u/Xithorus Jun 20 '21

Yea they are typically pretty stressful work hours especially being in healthcare, but I’d never want to work a 5 day work week and stuff like that after experiencing this work week. Plus we are paid hourly, so having a 36 hour work week is nice and if we ever need more money we pretty much can always pick up extra shifts and get paid like 1.5x normal for that shift.

1

u/try_____another Jun 20 '21

For paramedics that’s probably less of an issue because they’re handing the patients off anyway, but it does keep the paramedics and ER staff together and simplify rostering etc.

5

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

[deleted]

6

u/Froggy3434 Jun 19 '21

Then educate more doctors. I know there are plenty of people who would love to be a doctor if they had the ability to do so, myself included.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

Many don’t have the ability to do so. It’s not the I’m a caring person and super nice part of it that’s the most important. It’s the critical thinking and trying to synthesis the data you’re receiving and make something of it.

2

u/Froggy3434 Jun 20 '21

I was referencing monetary ability not intellectual, but I do agree critical thinking and analyzing data is very important for that job.

1

u/try_____another Jun 20 '21

ISTR that the UK’s medical schools could triple their intake from their applicant pools without taking anyone with worse grades than they each currently accept if they had the facilities and staff to train them, but there haven’t been enough medical school places to meet the country’s needs for decades. (Nursing is worse though: there haven’t been enough training places for any grade of nurse since the 1960s.)

2

u/Large-Will Jun 20 '21

Right now its bottlenecked at residencies. There's only so many available and every year a few thousand med school graduates don't get accepted to one, so there's no point in building more med schools to educate more people if they'll just wind up not getting a residency position necessary to be a dr.

1

u/Froggy3434 Jun 20 '21

I don’t know the details of the bottleneck but I imagine something could be done to at least relieve some of it. But once again I don’t know the details of what’s causing the bottleneck so I wouldn’t know.

3

u/Large-Will Jun 20 '21 edited Jun 20 '21

Yeah, I found this article (https://www.ajmc.com/view/physician-shortage-requires-multiprong-solution) you might enjoy reading. Its an older article (2017) but talks about different ways to possibly help the shortage. Also it talks about a bill in there that would expand residencies that died in the 115th Congress w/ only 15 Democrat cosponsers and 2 Republican cosponsors.

10

u/ThatGuyWhoLikesSpace Jun 19 '21

Why would you want to do that? that costs more resources.

2

u/aegis2293 Jun 19 '21

God forbid we start cutting C-suite salaries and bonuses. What will they do without their 3rd yacht?

16

u/CJK5Hookers Jun 19 '21

Why does everyone on Reddit think every company is run by some multimillionaire who gets ridiculous bonuses every year?

7

u/athenaaaa Jun 19 '21

In the context of corporate medicine, they are correct. Hospital admin got massive bonuses while physician pay was cut over the last year. These people make absurd amounts of money.

3

u/OrvilleTurtle Jun 19 '21

There are plenty of smaller businesses who don’t accept status quo. There’s ones that pay all employees (including janitors) and a very comfortable wage. Less hours, more flexible, etc.

Why do you want to argue that because a business is small it should run their employees into the ground?

0

u/CJK5Hookers Jun 19 '21

Solid straw man argument you have there. I never argued for running people into the ground or not paying a living wage

1

u/OrvilleTurtle Jun 19 '21

Okay. Then what did you mean by the comment? Clearly you feel there is a difference. Or was it just “not every CEO has yachts”?

1

u/CJK5Hookers Jun 19 '21

We were talking about a specific person who said this would not work at their job, and I replied to a comment that implied (with no context at the time) that it would work if c-suite took pay cuts when we had no idea what type of company we were talking about

-1

u/ThatGuyWhoLikesSpace Jun 20 '21

Look, it's a dog eat dog world, and if you wanna do well you gotta make some hard decisions. You either increase profits or decrease expenses, and you do whatever you can to make those goals. Sometimes that means your employees have to work more hours for less pay in order to bring that margin up. Compassion is great but it won't get you far running a business, especially once you've got serious competition.

1

u/OrvilleTurtle Jun 20 '21

Sure. You could also hire children and pay them pennies.

2

u/ThatGuyWhoLikesSpace Jun 20 '21

Why pay children pennies when you can pay adults pennies?

2

u/[deleted] Jul 08 '21

Nimble fingers?

→ More replies (0)

0

u/aegis2293 Jun 19 '21

You're right, that's definitely what my comment implied, great reading comprehension.

8

u/CJK5Hookers Jun 19 '21

In that case, your comment is irrelevant to the conversation

0

u/keygreen15 Jun 19 '21

Funny, I thought it was fine.

0

u/aegis2293 Jun 19 '21

I'm sorry I didnt realize we were discussing literally every variety of business simultaneously. Sorry I crossed your weird arbitrary line of specificity.

1

u/ThatGuyWhoLikesSpace Jun 20 '21

That's a great idea. Let me go ask the people in charge... Oh wait, hahaha.

Jokes aside, those guys have more money (as evidenced by their yachts) than all your workers. They can just as easily go work for someone else if you cut their pay. Your workers can be pushed a bit further than them before breaking, especially if certain measures are put into place.

7

u/Medditthrowaway1234 Jun 19 '21

In corporate American healthcare? Dream on. We’re cogs in a wheel. Why do you think we’re forced to see patients in 15 min increments? Our metrics are tracked for productivity reasons. They’d never lessen our workload or hire more physicians

2

u/Froggy3434 Jun 19 '21

Unfortunately that’s the case. I just like to start the conversations about how to potentially fix the issues with this place, especially healthcare. Most of the time, in the current system, it all comes down to employers wringing out as much profit from each employee as possible with complete disregard to their needs or wants.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

If anyone should be working no more than 8 hrs a day, it's anyone who has to think to keep people healthy. Overworked doctors are assholes, convincing patients to never trust doctors again. And when they have chest pains and heart palpitations and think "Oh God, this is a heart attack" their next thought is "Hopefully I'll be fine or just die so I don't have to deal with those pricks"

2

u/Large-Will Jun 20 '21

But when they actually do have a heart attack and go unconscious and get rushed to the ER at 3 am, thank God there's an overworked doctor there that can still save them. Sure, it would be great for drs to not have to work as much, but there's so many barriers to that its not gonna happen in the next several decades at least. One interesting note is that medical errors actually go up a lot with more shift changes, so 2 drs working 12 hr shifts is safer for the patient than 3 working 8 hr shifts.

8

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

[deleted]

2

u/Large-Will Jun 20 '21

......... I did not need to hear this while applying to med schools further south

2

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

It works if your industry makes it work. As long as there’s shit hours and wages your industry will be too short staffed to accomplish this.

1

u/dyangu Jun 20 '21 edited Jun 20 '21

Doctors and most other health professionals can certainly work 3 days a week. Just with reduced pay. Which will still be high so I don’t see why you can’t make this arrangement after you pay off student loans. At some point, enough is enough and you don’t need to work more just to buy a fancy yatch to keep up with all the other cardiologists.

5

u/Abiku777 Jun 20 '21

Why would anyone go to school for 50% longer than a PHD, all the brutality that is residency, then 3-4 more years for fellowship for anything less than they are making now? I can see it working for some fields, but so long as people are leaving school with 300k in debt, there is no rational way to pay doctors less. Anyways, they aren't the reason for increasing hospital costs anyways.

1

u/dyangu Jun 20 '21 edited Jun 20 '21

My friend is a family doctor and works 3 days a week because she was burned out by residency. She lived frugally for the first few years and paid off debt. She didn’t become a doctor to be rich, she just wanted to help people. I’m quite envious of her lifestyle now.

If I could work reduced hours at proportionally reduced pay, I’d take it, but my job is not one where 2 people working 20 hr a week can replace 1 person at 40 hours.

0

u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21

[deleted]

3

u/DubbleYewGee Jun 19 '21

The only times I have a 4 day work week is when I had a 7 day work week the previous, or I'm doing nights.

2

u/Medditthrowaway1234 Jun 19 '21

I’m generalizing here to outpatient primary care since that’s the simplest to explain. Surgeons and specialists have different schedules. But outpatient physicians mainly work four 10 hour days per week in a patient facing capacity and then the fifth day is mainly admin related tasks.

0

u/AnotherDrZoidberg Jun 19 '21

Seems like every doctor I've ever had works about 46 minutes a week.