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Antiwork

Why is working time prolonged instead of diminished for productivity?

If the responsibility is on the individual worker or work teams to provide a certain level of productivity for a business, then why is there a universal standard for employment in which workers or a team of workers have to be available for at least eight hours a day (typically, the 40 hour work week) when most individual workers or teams of workers are able to get their job done often way before that amount of time is finished? Why is this standard applied to all jobs in all industries and not just the jobs where it should be applicable? I don't think you can just squeeze productivity from people by prolonging the amount of time that they have to be available because that provides absolutely no incentive for people to work their best. It seems like naturally, that can only be a disincentive. Hence why lowering working hours has…


If the responsibility is on the individual worker or work teams to provide a certain level of productivity for a business, then why is there a universal standard for employment in which workers or a team of workers have to be available for at least eight hours a day (typically, the 40 hour work week) when most individual workers or teams of workers are able to get their job done often way before that amount of time is finished? Why is this standard applied to all jobs in all industries and not just the jobs where it should be applicable?

I don't think you can just squeeze productivity from people by prolonging the amount of time that they have to be available because that provides absolutely no incentive for people to work their best. It seems like naturally, that can only be a disincentive. Hence why lowering working hours has generally been found to increase productivity.

Instead, if you want to increase productivity, you have to aim to diminish working time as much as possible by rewarding people for completing their work according to both the speed of it's completion and quality of the work, and let them off after its completion. Then there would be way better incentives for people to work their best. People would be more likely to use the full extent of their resources.

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