Shorten the standard workweek as productivity grows from technology, without cutting monthly pay
In short
- Society stops letting productivity rise while working hours stay the same as they were long ago.
- The standard working hours are shortened on a regular schedule, in step with productivity growth.
- As a rule, monthly pay does not go down when working hours get shorter.
- An independent committee decides the changes, and it includes representatives of workers and of employers.
- Small companies and jobs that are short on workers get a longer grace period to make the move.
If this comes true
A woman who works in a warehouse now has one less workday each week, so on a weekday morning she goes to practice with her local choir, and on the way home she stops at a bakery with an older man from the next town who sings in the same choir.
Perhaps
A small town factory that cannot fill its orders in the shorter hours might lose its customers and close its doors.
Water so far 💧 0
The proposal in detail
This proposal would shorten the "standard working hours" set by law, meaning the weekly hours beyond which employers must pay extra wages, on a regular schedule tied to the growth of productivity in the whole economy. A committee independent of the government would measure, every few years, how much the value created per hour of work has grown, and would use a fixed share of that growth to shorten the standard hours. The remaining share would go, as before, to higher wages and investment. Besides economic experts, the committee would include equal numbers of representatives of workers and of employers, and it would decide how much to shorten the hours and when. Even when hours get shorter, cutting monthly pay would be banned as a rule, and for people paid by the hour, employers would be required to raise the hourly wage by the same proportion. Companies with few employees, and jobs where it is hard to find enough workers, such as caregiving, medical care and emergency services, would get a longer grace period for the change, and during that time part of the extra cost would be supported with public money. Extra work would be allowed when the worker wants it, but a weekly limit would be set, and employers would be banned from cutting staff on the assumption that the remaining people will work overtime. Talks within each industry could also bring shorter hours sooner and by a larger amount.
BenefitsThe benefits of technology become time for every worker
By linking productivity growth to the standard hours, the benefits of technological progress are handed out to every worker as "time of their own," and not only as profits or pay for a few. Because hours shorten across all of society at once, no single company has to worry about shortening first and falling behind, and companies compete by finding better ways to work, not by how long people work. With more room in their time, people can rest their minds and bodies and spend time on child raising, caring for parents, community activities and going back to school, and the illness and isolation that long hours caused will decrease. Also, if some workplaces add staff to do the same amount of work in shorter hours, people who lost jobs to automation and people who can only work short hours will find it easier to get work, and the imbalance between people working too much and people with no work will be smoothed out. Being able to choose a kind of richness other than making and using more and more things also helps reduce the burden on resources and the environment.
DrawbacksCosts rise, and small companies and understaffed workplaces suffer
Shortening hours without cutting pay means, for employers, that the labor cost per hour goes up. Large companies may absorb it by improving their machines and methods, but small shops and factories that run on very thin profits have no room to hire more people, and if they raise prices they lose customers, so they could be pushed into closing. In workplaces that already lack people, such as caregiving and medical care, they may not find anyone to fill the shortened hours, and the quality and amount of service could drop. The rise in costs is passed on to prices and comes back to hit everyone as higher prices. Also, if factories and jobs move to countries without the same rule, the very jobs the rule meant to protect could be lost. Among workers, too, there are people who want to work more and earn more, and families who run their own shop together, and they would likely feel that a nationwide fixed set of hours is confining. There is also debate over how to measure productivity growth, and if the committee's decision lands in a bad economic period, it could badly drain companies' strength.
Learn the background
Thanks to advances in machines and information technology, what a person can produce in one hour has grown greatly over many decades. But in many countries, the standard working hours have not changed for a long time, starting from some point. The gains from higher productivity were mostly taken as company profits, dividends to shareholders, and high pay for a few people, and hardly any came back to workers as free time. Meanwhile, long work hours cause illnesses of the mind and body, too little time with family and the community, and difficulty balancing work with caregiving and child raising. As automation advances, an imbalance is also spreading in which some people keep working long hours while others lose their jobs. Shortening working hours has been talked about for a long time, but if only one company shortens them first, its costs become higher than its competitors' and it ends up at a disadvantage. Workers also worry that if their hours go down, their pay will go down too. Because of a structure in which anyone who moves first loses out, a rule for sharing productivity gains as time has been slow to appear as a rule for society as a whole.
Choose them ready to accept their drawbacks too (up to 5)
It helps pay for the server and the AI's planting
This proposal was written in Japanese by AI (claude-opus-5-5, policy version 2026-10-23b) and translated by AI (claude-sonnet-5-5). Nobody has checked the facts. Read the original (日本語) How the AI writes