[bato]

When I was living in France, I thought it was a great idea.

As a white collar (so not being bound to the 9 to 5 and sometimes pulling in 36h shifts...), the system worked as such:

I would work 5 days a week, and get an extra day off of my choice every fortnight.

The results were really great for me and people I knew:

I no longer needed to take days off to deal with paperwork, and other administrative tasks, I could finally get an appointment with my banker. I could afford to go to the day market to buy fresh produce.

I knew of married couples that would alternate theirs to be on days where the kids didn't have school (traditionally wednesdays) so they didn't have to source someone to watch over the kids on a traditionally very busy day for childcare.

Obviously the system is not perfect, but surely as work gets "easier" the way forward would be to reduce hours worked, not increase them...

[FoeNyx]

What you are describing is not the 35h system, but the "RTT" (the extra days off coming for the accumulated extra time per day).

There are a lot of private companies in France where the 35h do not implies those extra days off. For example, in some companies, they say the employees "can" take 15min break time every half day, but 80% of employees work during this so called break so effectively doing working 37.5h per week, paid 35h. (And lot of extra work hours are not even paid either for blue or white collars).

But yes people I know who benefit from RTT are generally truly happy with them, for all the reasons you cited.

[blencdr]

Also some company pay the RTT at the end of the year.

It's a good solution for a employee to get a little bonus once a year.

[nrao123]

Because of Robots- the whole world may move to a 3 day work week. Here is Larry Page on that.

“If you really think about the things that you need to make yourself happy—housing, security, opportunities for your kids—anthropologists have been identifying these things. It’s not that hard for us to provide those things,” he said. “The amount of resources we need to do that, the amount of work that actually needs to go into that is pretty small. I’m guessing less than 1% at the moment. So the idea that everyone needs to work frantically to meet people’s needs is just not true.”

“You just reduce work time,” Page said. “Most people, if I ask them, ‘Would you like an extra week of vacation?’ They raise their hands, 100% of the people. ‘Two weeks vacation, or a four-day work week?’ Everyone will raise their hand. Most people like working, but they’d also like to have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests. So that would be one way to deal with the problem, is if you had a coordinated way to just reduce the workweek. And then, if you add slightly less employment, you can adjust and people will still have jobs.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/07/07/googles-l...

[jiggy2011]

The problem with that is that the best jobs (such as google) are competitive. Even if two people competing for the same job only want to work 30 hours per week, they both know that they can make themselves more attractive to the employer by offering to work more hours than the other person. This is especially true for immigrant groups competing with domestic labour.

The state could regulate the working week to 30 hours, but this will impact GDP and thus the state's ability to provide public services via taxation and also the ability of poor people to get out of poverty by outworking the more wealthy.

[toomuchtodo]

Whomever develops and owns that automation is going to have to give it away (similar to what Elon did with the Tesla patents) if Page wants to move towards that model.

We've already seen wages stagnate for 30+ years because of productivity's decoupling from human capital (with productivity now captured through technology, which would encompass software, robotics, and other various automations): http://thecurrentmoment.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/producti...

[rumcajz]

I've done a little write-up on the sociology/economics of the work done beyond what's actually useful: http://250bpm.com/blog:44

[logfromblammo]

I call that the "Mitochondria Theory of Economics".

There is a very, very tiny proportion of the population, certainly less than 10%, and possibly as small as 1%, that does essentially all the work required to support the entire species. They are systematically encysted into vesicles and surrounded by giant masses of inert cytoplasm and various organelles that depend on them completely.

The people that drive these economic mitochondria are often completely unaware that the entire burden of Earth's civilization rests upon their shoulders. They only see the needs of their own cell, and the other mitochondria in it, if any.

The entire remainder of the economy exists to distribute the output of the productive workers out to the nonproductive people. Much of that transport network consists of creating an artificial need with advertising and then fulfilling it with retail goods and services.

Reducing weekly hours would simply slow the distribution network, and possibly decrease the overall output of the mitochondria.

The problem is that the entire system is completely built upon the concept that people need to look like they are important to the function of the cell in order to acquire the resources and energy produced by the mitochondria. So everyone has to pretend that they are useful and important, as hard as they possibly can. And the worst possible thing in the world would be to let the mitochondria catch on that they could be independent organisms, and that they don't actually need the cells to survive.

Unlike biological cell mitochondria, economic mitochondria have actually been becoming stronger, faster, and more efficient during our recorded history. This bothers the mitochondria not at all. But it stresses the hell out of the cell's resource distribution systems, as the median useless organelle becomes further away from its vital resources.

Reducing working hours is not a viable solution, because it does nothing to address the fundamental problem with our resource distribution system. It is still completely built upon pretending to be important, with the best actors and those closest to the real economic producers getting the most resources.

Would it be so hard to admit that the majority of humanity is just useless cytoplasm, and put some of the massive and increasing output of the mitochondria into a vascular system to distribute resources evenly throughout the cell, rather than relying upon diffusion and fakery? And it turns out that yes, it actually is rather difficult. Pretending to be important has been so critical to survival for so long that admitting one's uselessness is tantamount to suicide.

[keypusher]

Keynes and many others thought the same thing, almost 100 years ago. Guess what? We work more hours now than they did then.

http://money.howstuffworks.com/five-day-weekend2.htm

[nilkn]

A friend of mine is a chemical engineer at Chevron and he gets every other Friday off. This is in the US. Technically he's supposed to be working 9 to 6 instead of 9 to 5 to make up for it (which amounts to an extra 8-9 hours over the 9 working days from the two week period), but I think in practice it's still pretty lenient.

That said, this sort of arrangement seems to be extremely rare in the US, and I think even among oil companies it's fairly rare for desk jobs.

[derf_]

> That said, this sort of arrangement seems to be extremely rare in the US

No, this is pretty common in government and government contracting. It's called an RDO: "regular day off"... more commonly known outside the US as a "rostered day off".

When I was a contractor we had even more flexible arrangements: we could work whatever hours we wanted, as long as they added up to 80 every two weeks. Eventually this got abused enough it was cut down so you could shift at most 10 hours between week 1 and week 2, but you could still, say, work just four 10-hour days every week.

[keypusher]

This sounds like such a good idea. One of the main problems I have working 9-5 is scheduling things like doctor and dentist appointments, bank visits, government paperwork, etc. I have to take a vacation or sick day just to get normal things done.

[meej]

I interviewed at a Raytheon office in Rhode Island as a college grad in 1999 and they did this too then. Not sure if it's still in place or if it's a companywide thing.

[zobzu]

i think thats a great point - that said most french ppl i know pull about 45h a week in the tech industry and are "manager" level (but arent actually managers)

[bato]

That's what most white collar jobs are ("cadre").

They do come with a more favourable termination notice and retirement plan as well so it's not all bad.