> Employee owned co-ops are more humane

Speaking as someone born in Yugoslavia.

That's almost how it was in Yugoslavia. Companies where "owned by society", but workers had voting rights. Whenever there was a vote to decide whether extra profit should be used for capital investments and/or operational improvements or assigned to salaries budget, everyone voted to increase their salaries.

Not every employ should be a co-owner, or at least not everyone should have voting rights.

That would be ok in a non-globalized world. In our world, any country that implements those laws will see a lot more offshoring.

People should realise that they will be the ones paying for it. Prices will increase a lot. People need to be aware of that. Personally I'm okay with that trade-off. Also corporations - when checks and balances work properly, which is frequently not the case unfortunately - are great and net benefit for humanity.

> This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal.

le reddit moment

Do workers really care about productivity? As long as I get paid that's what matters.

This will never happen for the simple reason that there are some countries whose members are poor and so they are rightfully ready to work harder and longer for opportunities.

A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?

This all sounds great until you've actually had your own small business and experienced things from the other side.

Employees are expensive, good employees are hard to find, and sometimes things need to be fixed outside 9-5 to avoid having an angry client on your hands.

What a hollow dismissal of based on acrobatic leaps of semantics.

The word 'study' is no sacred possession exclusive to the natural sciences, and there is nothing wrong with properly conducted surveys as a method in sociology, economics or psychology.

If surveys targeting the very people responsible for optimising their businesses' productivity, with no incentive to falsify their conclusions, is good evidence. Without any other way to systematically measure the change in productivity across a plethora of different businesses implementing a four-day workweek, it is as good as it gets — much better than purely theoretical assumptions that productivity must have dropped.

You can find the study here if you wish to critique its methods: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-026-07536-x

Edit: It’s becoming ever more increasingly common on HN to get downvotes for innocuous respectful posts. If you’re downvoting, I’d genuinely appreciate if you explained what is it that you find offensive about this post. You’re not going to hurt my feelings, I sincerely want to understand what it is that you see as transgressive so I can learn from it. Thank you. Another example which baffled me: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48222383#48227701

> As Feynman said, anything where they have to put science as a suffix is usually not science.

I appreciate Feynman’s contributions—and in fact have been recently revisiting the Messenger lectures—but that seems like an unnecessary jab. The use of “usually” is also a convenient cop-out which makes the remark meaningless because the speaker can pick and choose in any conversation so they always win.¹

I thought about it and picked the first thing which came to mind: Natural science. From Wikipedia²:

> Natural science or empirical science is a branch of science concerned with the description, understanding, and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and reproducibility of findings are used to try to ensure the validity of scientific advances.

Seems pretty scientific to me. But alright, let’s check the article to give it a fair shot in context. The only time the word “science” comes up is “Social Sciences”. Again from Wikipedia³:

> Social science (or the social sciences) is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among members within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of society", established in the 18th century. It now encompasses a wide array of additional academic disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, geography, history, linguistics, management, communication studies, psychology, sociology, culturology, and political science.

That’s a wide range. Are all of those “not science”?

¹ Assuming your rephrasing is accurate and not missing important context.

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_science

³ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science

Oh no, I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not, lol

Tax changes that have been overdue for twenty-odd years to address house prices and attempt to level the playing field between labour and capital.

Pity they didn't also change the gas tax.

So you're saying that four-day-workweek companies saw no decline in their productivity, in contrast to the Australian average productivity which went down overall‽

That means the four-day-workweek is even better than we thought it was!

You increase prices by 20%

what consulting company on earth pays 100% of their revenue to employee salary — I've worked at a number of them and it's not unusual for my pay to be half of the hourly rate charged

What's the actual problem? Most people don't live for work.

It's Hawthorne effect

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_effect

Related to it we have novelty effect and bunch of other psychological effects that are hard to isolate in human science. In this sector, a lot of studies cannot be repeated.

Only if you do bad science experiments without a control group, otherwise you'd see the control group productivity boost as they'd also be under the same scrutiny. I didn't read the study methodology, so I'm not comparing to that, only responding to your comment in isolation.

3 days off is infinitely better than moments of stress induced slacking spread throughout the week, so I don't see the downside.

Because if we did we’d have universal healthcare, 4 day work weeks, WFH where possible, walkable cities, and a lot more housing, and every single one of those things makes it harder for abusive jobs to control their employees.

Naive question but if it works best wouldn't companies that have a four day work week outperform theirs peers and because of that grow faster, and become more common?

I see the opposite in most startups that have a 6 day work week to get ahead of the "slowly moving" 5 day work week competition.

"study"... The replication crises in science has shown that most studies are total bs. So we probably don't want to go with them.

By inductive logic, a zero day week works best.