I haven’t written about Matt D’Avella for a while but he has a new video that fits into one of Irreal’s recurring themes: our working environment. The video is about the death of the 40 hour work week. For as long as most people alive can remember, there has always been a 40 hour work week. It seems like the law of gravity. Just something that always was and always will be. But the key phrase is “most people”. The 40 hour work week was established in 1938 with the Fair Labor Standard Act. If you’re in your 20s, that seems indistinguishable from the age of Plato but most of us almost certainly know someone—parents or grandparents, say—who were alive then. It really wasn’t that long ago.
It was a big thing when it was introduced. It ended the terrible working conditions that were prevalent at the time and ushered in the notion that people could have a life outside of their job. But like many useful innovations, its time has passed. The 40 hour work week was adopted and adapted for factory workers. Most of us no longer work in that environment but the majority of us still suffer under its yoke.
D’Avella makes the case that the 40 hour work week no longer makes sense. It isn’t rational even from the employer’s point of view. Productivity declines well before the 40 hour limit is reached. A much better criterion is “just get the job done.” We even have a term for it: ROWE.
A lot of this will be fixed by the remote work movement. When you don’t have to be in an office for a specific amount of time but just need to get the job done, the 40 hour work week will fade away on its own.