having done it the past few summers...

We have deadlines to hit and production goals to reach. How/when/where we do it is up to us. It obviously doesn't work for every company, but when it does, it's outstanding.

Tying our "labor" to an "hour" is a vestige of the transformative industrial/manufacturing labor union movement.

We don't really do that anymore.

Under the old model, a 25 hour workweek would be part-time, with no benefits to speak of.

Already, in our "gig economy," where the job and productivity are unrelated to the old owner/employer/manager/ employee structure, the old rules often serve the inevitable tendency towards capitalist exploitation.

If you eliminate the unproductive work related to a fixed hourly position, you also identify a smaller amount of productive performance time.

I don't know any employer who would pay us for not working.

So, what is the unproductive work related to a fixed hourly position? Some jobs require a bit of downtime and ramp-up at the beginning of the shift, with some jobs requiring more than others. That is why so many construction jobs have gone to a 4-10's workweek. The set-up and break-down times eliminated for that one day makes the job more profitable.

We're talking what, the 1950's? That's a fairly different world.

Making living the other 4 days of the week more difficult.

You just moved the stress from on the job to off the job.

you would get the same amount of pay.

there's nobody who would think about you and me or anybody, especially when we're talking about corporate overlords

As long as the work gets done to the high standards that are expected by the deadline, no one cares how long it takes me. Unless I'm working too much; my boss doesn't want me to burn out, either.

It'll take a lot of education for larger companies to understand and accept it. But entrepreneurs are leading the way, and it can be done.

so a 20 hour work week at the same pay isn't much of a stretch.

from the productivity increase has gone to the board room. They aren't going to give that money up.

I am pretty sure that I could get a week's worth of work done in three days if I wasn't so burnt out after such short weekends cleaning, doing errands, etc. I would happily work longer days for a shorter work week.

I'm sorry, the bank is only open Mon-Wed

Your FIOS is down, well you are screwed, use the automated menu to get a ticket created and somebody will come out in the next week or three...

I worked once at a plastic factory, making plastic head rest inserts for the Ford Taurus was one machine I was on. I'm PRETTY fucking sure they can't speed that injection mold up any faster. So I guess your cars are more expensive since supply-demand...not enough supply.

Or some could work morning shifts and others afternoon. There's all sorts of options. It's useful in different ways for different industries of course; but implementing flexibility often results in higher productivity for most employers.

How about this little gem - if you want to continue to tie pay to the "work week?"

There is executive management work, which is broken up into two forms; leadership and oversight. Leadership is a very flexible work construct; a leader just needs to be able to understand components of an activity or an organization, and make strategic and tactical decisions based on the environment that activity/organization is operating in for ongoing optimal results. Oversight management is involved with incorporating and executing the decisions of leadership within the organization, and to monitor and steer the ongoing efforts towards the desired result.
While these executive work forms seem to take a lot of time and effort, in actuality, due to the hierarchal nature of executive functions, the work itself tends to be very high or conceptual level; more involved with socialization of ideas and concepts rather than the actual process of doing the work.
In most instances, executive management depends on lower task levels to bring information that has already been assessed or analyzed to the executive levels, rather than get down to the nitty-gritty of the actual task/work environment and get the raw data. It is very easy to identify executive management work with a project concept or directional task; the attention to hours on the job is typically directed towards the timeliness to gather enough information to make decisions and policies.
25 - 30 hours of actual work - the actual sit down and make strategies and decisions (not travel or socialization golf games, chatting up other executives or production workers, etc) is probably a common practice amongst the executives as it is.

There is production work, where some individual "thing" is produced; a manufactured item, a project concept, a service product, a performance, or a sale. That sort of work is more flexible; if necessary, one can pay by the production task, and people who are tasked to do that work can decide how long they wish to work to be able to produce one or multiple item(s) at an acceptable quality level or to meet a deadline. Most high-level and professional work falls within this category, along with a good amount of technical analysis and evaluation work.
While many professionals will work 60 to 80 hours a week on a project, it's still "by the piece", and there is a flexibility in this category form that, if adequately compensated, most professionals will be willing to take a significant amount of "down" or personal time for their own personal enrichment once a particular production task is finished - so long as there are enough professionals available to pick up follow-on tasking within the organization so it does not lose the revenue required to remain in business.

......

As a side, my Pappy (grandfather) used to talk about his youth in the 1910's/20's working the family wheat and orchard farm. That before corporate farming with its all year long constant plant and harvest cycle; the average American farm was structured along a seasonal cycle, no matter if it was a main crop farm, a subsistence farm with both crops and animals, or a mix of both (like Pappy's family farm).
For the most part, except for plowing and harvest time - and of course, the women's work of cleaning and cooking - farm work tended to be a 24 - 30 hour/ 7 day a week job, with plenty of time for learning and practice of a wide range of skilled crafts that was necessary to maintain the farm. He had 8 siblings and a dozen cousins, so the work was spread out around the family and no one got too tired to do anything unless they got sick. Other farms would hire him or his fellow generation as "hands" during planting or harvest if those farms didn't have enough family members to take care of the crop work.
He used to say he worked longer and harder as an insurance agent than he did on the farm.
On the farm, the hard labor 10 - 12 hour work day periods basically amounted to only three months a year; the rest of the time, the family would work around 3 - 4 hours a day in chores and farm maintenance work, then be off for any repair work, school, or hobbies, or play. Except for his mom, grandmother, and aunts, of course.

Back to work categories...

Finally, there is scheduled or station work, where there is a specific length of time one is tasked to be either on call or at a station to handle real-time tasking - monitoring, dispatch, reporting, lower level management, turn-around or on call customer service, repair or mitigation processes, emergency services, and queries.
Unfortunately, from the view of the worker, the nature of this work is both sporadic and time intensive - while there is an ebb and flow to this category of work, it needs to be done at the time the requirement to do the task arrives. The worker does not have the ability to plan how long one would be on a task, nor can they plan how many tasks they might be working at any one time; therefore, the hourly employee/shift model is the most efficient way of providing the amount of service or tasking.

The problem with scheduled or station work is the turn-over cycle within the task. The worker needs to be on station or on call long enough to be able to complete an optimum number of tasks as they come up; however, if they're in the middle of a task when the new shift begins, the task needs to be either put aside or passed on to the next worker. While a 25 hour work week schedule may be optimal for a worker, it usually isn't optimal for a service task. Even though there is certainly enough of the population that is working scheduled or stationed work, businesses under the current culture of work are a more than a bit resistant to cutting scheduled working shifts, and still pay a living wage to those workers who will be making up those shifts.

The problem is that business wants to stay in business, and more than anything else, that requires that costs be kept to a minimum.
Why pay two - or three - people at $15 an hour each to make up for the fact they're only working 8 hours for 3 days a week, when only one at $11 an hour for 40 hours a week is optimal to complete tasking as scheduled? And if that one can't keep up, there's always a dozen more where s/he came from that would be eager to take that job.

That's one of the reasons we need a minimum living wage - to offset the majority of the people who work scheduled/station jobs who would be most effective working 24 hours a week.

Haele

A 3 day work week would be completely impractical.