Was looking at a post talking about someone’s dream of reducing all workers hours. I know a lot of these discussion posts I see come from office workers whose work hours could probably be reduced without much other adjustments needed and no impact to productivity. A lot of the criticisms in these types of posts are from people in fields that do healthcare/care work, create a physical product (manufacturing, construction, etc.), are in retail where certain business hours are needed to be maintained, etc. Which is fair. I don’t think the goal of reducing people’s working hours across the board to improve quality of life will have a one size fits all solution. It would probably take buy in from a group of willing professionals from each field to rethink our company/organizations systems and division of work.
I think it’s unfair to say that people in those fields have no hope for improving their hours because of the way they chose/wanted to contribute to society or because they were forced into a certain type of work. I’d think that even with those kind of fields mentioned above, increased staffing and shift work would greatly alleviate the load on workers. For example, I always hear that nurses are short staffed. If hospital admin gave better incentives to stay (not only work hours issue in nurses case I hear, also in their case connected with pay, benefits, etc.) and increased staffing to the point be able to run a programs where multiple healthcare professionals are working with each patient so there is always coverage rather. I don’t know too much about this field so sorry if I’m over reaching but you get my point.
Just wondering (open discussion) if you had to get creative reworking these types of fields where physical production and hours worked are important, what thoughts come to mind? Again, every field is different and large reform like this would be difficult for sure but there’s got to be a way.