The only 4 work day plan here outside of nerd experiments here in the u.s.a is only if you’re working 10 hour shifts

In the UK, you get studies and recommendations about it (and I’ve seen a fair share of videos online over the years about how great it is) but I don’t think the people who want this without being socialists quite understand that the suffering is a feature, not a bug. Let’s say the total labour done by the population does actually increase if a 4-day work week was mandated - the thing is that you’re meant to feel permanently exhausted from work, that’s one of the negative forces keeping workers from putting effort into things like creating organizations and parties.

The only way I could see it taking off is if a socialist government took power electorally and wasn’t immediately couped (impossible) or if businesses decided by themselves to do this. And again, outside of pilot studies, it’s simply not going to happen. You’re not going to convince them, you’d have to use force, and that is hecking anti-free market and therefore the worst possible blasphemy against our holy god, The Economy. But liberals and socdems think that those businesses can be convinced, hence all the studies, so at this point I almost feel a kind of disdain for the idea despite it being theoretically good just because it’s wasting time and energy.

Here in the UK the media literally never ever talks about it. The 4 day week comes almost exclusively from the socialists and socdems. The Starmerites hate it, Tories literally never engage with it at all and I haven’t seen any of them on to talk about it.

A few business-ey types have talked about it with left politicians on tv from time to time, the ones that are willing to trial it.

It’s definitely not a trend here, but when it does come up it’s very technocratic and always in the context of well-paid email workers. It feels more like the tech and finance PMC pushing for job benefits on an individual level, not connected to class consciousness. The argument also makes more sense for those jobs: “we all know we aren’t actually doing anything productive anyway, can we have Friday off? We’ll just cancel a few timewasting meetings.”

There’s a <30 hrs work week at my job but only applies if you have a PhD and have multiple peons doing the grunt work.

I had the option of a 4 day work week in several previous jobs but we still had to do 40 hours in those 4 days so it just ended up making me feel awful from Monday to Thursday when I tried to do it

back in highschool in KKKlanada our teachers always said by the time we were out of college there would be a 4 day work week. Never heard it said by a politician.

Here in Aus there is no discussion of it AFAIK. I don’t pay much attention to asutralian politics because it is 100% red vs blue id-pol.

People who are forced to work fewer hours can often do more work in those fewer hours. Opposition to the four-day week, like opposition to free healthcare, does not even make economic sense. It is purely a form of sadism.

There has been a few faint whispers about it in Denmark but these have been thoroughly beaten down. The prime minister, succdem chairman Mette Frederiksen, even went on stage and said something along the line of “some people are even talking about a four day work week. Forget it friends!”, going on to rant about how people need to work more to ensure funding for the welfare state.

No major political party supports a four day work week except maybe for the radlib green Alternative party or maybe, on a good day, the eurocommunist Red-Greens. Both of these parties are completely politically irrelevant and is going to be so for years.

While nobody supports reducing people’s workload, few seems more obsessed with increasing it than the succdems. It has been a fixation of theirs for at least a decade when then PM Helle Thorning Schmidt made great efforts to get people to work “just 12 minutes more” each day. That attempt, like most others of her administration, failed.

Last year Frederiksen’s succdem-led right-wing regime fulfilled a long-held wet dream of succdem ghouls in the finance ministry by abolishing a public holiday, thereby increasing work hours. Their fixation on getting people to work more has even led them to toy with the idea of increasing opening hours in daycare to enable parents to work more. A prominent succdem minister (don’t ask me who, I can’t be bothered to keep track of these c*nts) felt compelled to write a long public condemnation of some harmless “simple living” grifter who had written a book about her family living to a small island to work less and have fewer possessions so they can spend more time together. Reading his ranting vitriol would give you the impression that it was people like her who was responsible for the crumbling welfare state and he was literally accusing her of being “unsolidaric” for not working “at least full time”.