$100k for 3 Hours A Day…

Did you know that you only need to work 15 hours a week for a full-time salary? Companies in the US and UK are trying out a 4-day, 32-hour work week to combat pandemic burnout, and a similar proposal is making its way through the California legislature. 

That’s a good start, but on average Americans work 47 hours a week, and if they’re salaried, they may be working as much as 60 hours a week or more for the same amount of money. But if you work full time, then you already know that nobody actually works 40 hours a week. How much of that time is spent checking social media, reading the news, talking to your coworkers, making coffee, eating snacks, taking microbreaks, texting, and looking for a new job on so-called “company time”? And if you’re not working that whole time, but still generating 40 hours of productive output, why does your job still own you for 30% of the day 70% of the week?

In fact, a study out of the UK found that the average office worker is only productive 2 hours and 53 minutes out of an 8 hour workday, and yet overall worker productivity is at an all time high. Of course, not everyone works in an office, and if you’re a teacher or healthcare worker putting in 40-60 productive hours a week, then your productivity is being severely devalued by someone working 15 productive hours a week but billing for 40. If we actually pegged productivity to income, you’d be making 3-4 times as much as you do right now, and that’s what you deserve.

What’s ridiculous is that working 40 hours a week is a totally arbitrary number that exists because of Henry Ford, one of the richest men in American history, who believed that his employees should work 8 hours, sleep 8 hours, and no joke, shop 8 hours. And he was actually piggybacking off of socialist labor organizers who were pushing to shorten the workday from 10-16 hours, but let’s not pretend Henry Ford — the only American mentioned and praised in Mein Kampf, by the way — instituted the 8 hour workday in solidarity with workers. In reality, he only lowered working hours to reduce accidents in his factories, and give his workers time to buy consumer goods like Ford cars.

And although 8 hours a day was a good advancement over 100 years ago, in 1914 — today, working conditions are different, family share of responsibility is different, the types of jobs are different, and the safety and pay of those jobs is different. In 2022, a 40-hour work week is wildly outdated, and wildly exploitative. But we’ve spent the last century working 9-5, while actual experiments and studies show that it doesn’t make sense, is a terrible idea and a huge waste of time.

In 1974, the UK temporarily cut the work week by 40%, and productivity only dropped by 6%. In the 2000s in France, the workweek was limited to 35 hours, with an increase in productivity, and in 2015 Swedish nursing homes cut their hours from 8 to 6 a day, and saw a huge increase in work quality. Working fewer hours makes us demonstrably better at our jobs, but it also makes it harder for companies to devalue our labor and exert control over the finite amount of time that we have on this Earth.

So instead of chaining workers to their desks or computers for 8 hours a day, most jobs would be able to switch to a 12 hour workweek with no loss of productivity, and offer generous overtime pay for jobs that require more than 15 hours of productive work a week, and employees could actually live their lives how they want to, and not how some weirdo billionaire antisemite capitalist said we should 108 years ago.