So I had this thought when you posted, and came back around to it this morning. There's a loss of expertise that would come with diluting the time an individual spends in a role. 2x20 hour workers are less experienced than a single 40 hour worker. It's also probably true that the biggest automation gains are coming in the most tedious manual labor. But more and more skilled technicians are required to maintain those machines. And I fear George Jetson up there with his 3 hour workweek will have only Homer Simpson level competency.
An excellent point! Truncated work weeks would indeed create much longer on-ramps to competency.
But the problem isn't as serious as we might assume from within our 40 hr/week paradigm. One study found that people work less than 3 hours per day. It would seem that our employers are already getting precious little out of us during the remaining 25 hrs/week.
Your point still stands, of course. I'm just saying that we have a long way to go before we have to deal with the problem. We probably can't go much below 3 hrs/day, for reasons articulated by you.
After that point, we're going to need a whole new scheme for organizing production (and for whacking up the resulting products amongst ourselves). That's the prophecy of Herr Marx in a nutshell.
So I had this thought when you posted, and came back around to it this morning. There's a loss of expertise that would come with diluting the time an individual spends in a role. 2x20 hour workers are less experienced than a single 40 hour worker. It's also probably true that the biggest automation gains are coming in the most tedious manual labor. But more and more skilled technicians are required to maintain those machines. And I fear George Jetson up there with his 3 hour workweek will have only Homer Simpson level competency.
An excellent point! Truncated work weeks would indeed create much longer on-ramps to competency.
But the problem isn't as serious as we might assume from within our 40 hr/week paradigm. One study found that people work less than 3 hours per day. It would seem that our employers are already getting precious little out of us during the remaining 25 hrs/week.
Your point still stands, of course. I'm just saying that we have a long way to go before we have to deal with the problem. We probably can't go much below 3 hrs/day, for reasons articulated by you.
After that point, we're going to need a whole new scheme for organizing production (and for whacking up the resulting products amongst ourselves). That's the prophecy of Herr Marx in a nutshell.
https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-productivity
Love it.