Speaker 1: Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
Speaker 2: This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
Speaker 2: episode is going to be a longer one part of
Speaker 2: the series where I interview fascinating people about how they
Speaker 2: take their days from great to awesome, their expertise, and
Speaker 2: any advice they might have for the rest of us.
Speaker 2: So today I am delighted to welcome Juliette Shore to
Speaker 2: the show. She's a professor at Boston College, the author
Speaker 2: of several books, including The Overworked American and a new
Speaker 2: one called Four.
Speaker 1: Days a Week. So, Julie, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Thank you, great to be here.
Speaker 1: Yees, So why don't you tell our listeners a little
Speaker 1: bit about yourself and your work.
Speaker 3: So I'm an economist originally, and I worked on issues
Speaker 3: of work time. I was in the Harvard Economics department
Speaker 3: when I sort of got intrigued by a sort of
Speaker 3: theoretical error in a philosopher's book. I mean, it just
Speaker 3: kind of a strange way to get into it, but
Speaker 3: it got me looking at American work time, and I
Speaker 3: was surprised to find that contrary to what everyone believed
Speaker 3: would happen, and was happening. Americans were actually starting to
Speaker 3: work more and more. So that book came out in
Speaker 3: the nineteen nineties and it cataloged a couple of decades
Speaker 3: of rising work time, high levels of stress, burnout, et cetera.
Speaker 3: And since then I've done much more research on work
Speaker 3: and work patterns, and in twenty twenty one, I was
Speaker 3: invited to be the lead researcher for a path breaking
Speaker 3: series of trials that ended up taking place all around
Speaker 3: the world with companies who were giving their employees a
Speaker 3: four day, thirty two hour work week, so not a
Speaker 3: compressed with full pay, but with an attempt to try
Speaker 3: and maintain their productivity. So a lot of the kinds
Speaker 3: of things that go under the rubric of personal productivity
Speaker 3: of course, that you work on and so forth. These
Speaker 3: companies were trying to implement some of those ideas in
Speaker 3: the workplace and the results have been phenomenal, like very
Speaker 3: very successful, huge increases in people's well being and great
Speaker 3: successes for the company.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk.
Speaker 2: About that successes for the company, because you know, I
Speaker 2: have many people here who are probably individual contributors listening
Speaker 2: to this. Also people who are managing companies, running companies,
Speaker 2: who are wondering like, Okay, I can see why, you know,
Speaker 2: your average worker might enjoy having a four day week.
Speaker 2: What's in it for the organizations?
Speaker 1: Like? Why were the organizations willing to try this out?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I think there's sort of two categories, and I
Speaker 3: talk about these in the book. The founder of the
Speaker 3: organization that ran the trials was an entrepreneur or in
Speaker 3: New Zealand, a man named Andrew Barnes, and he tried
Speaker 3: it at his own finance company. He called it the
Speaker 3: one hundred eighty hundred, so one hundred percent of the
Speaker 3: pay for eighty percent of the time. But he asked
Speaker 3: his employees to all sign a contract saying they would
Speaker 3: get one hundred percent of their work done in those
Speaker 3: four days. He believed there was a lot of slack
Speaker 3: in his organization, and many of the companies are in
Speaker 3: that model. So what's in it for them is they're
Speaker 3: able to maintain their productivity or maybe even increase it.
Speaker 3: And we can get into a bit more about how
Speaker 3: that happens. I think a key point of this is
Speaker 3: although individuals do make changes in how they do things,
Speaker 3: there's also a full organizational effort. I mean, often by
Speaker 3: teams sometimes by the whole group together, and you know,
Speaker 3: depending on size of organizations, to figure out what they're
Speaker 3: doing that isn't efficient, you know, where they're wasting time,
Speaker 3: where they putting a lot of time into low value activities,
Speaker 3: et cetera. And so the organization maintains its productivity, but
Speaker 3: it gets big well being impacts for its employees. And
Speaker 3: that has multiple impacts. One is that often they report
Speaker 3: better quality of work because people are rested, they're not
Speaker 3: burning out, they are looking forward to coming to work
Speaker 3: on Monday morning. Many of them take Fridays off, they
Speaker 3: don't get the Sunday scaries, et cetera. So there's that
Speaker 3: piece of it, but that also leads to the other
Speaker 3: interesting phenomenon that I call the one hundred eighty eighties.
Speaker 3: One hundred percent of the pay eighty percent of the work.
Speaker 3: We're not asking you to do anything more. We're not
Speaker 3: asking you to get more efficient. Why you're already crazy efficient.
Speaker 3: You are a nurse in a hospital with no wasted time.
Speaker 3: You're the chef ft a restaurant who's just working a
Speaker 3: really long day and you've already optimized out anything time wasting.
Speaker 3: But you're burned out and so you just need a
Speaker 3: day off to recharge. And so for those companies or organizations,
Speaker 3: they're stopping the bleeding of the burnout, the resignations, et cetera. So,
Speaker 3: for example, with some of the nurses in our studies,
Speaker 3: they rescinded resignation letters when they heard they were going
Speaker 3: to get a four day week. And for these people
Speaker 3: it's just life changing because they're kind of on the edge.
Speaker 3: So it's a paradox I argue because it's the low
Speaker 3: intensity organizations that could actually you know, they got a
Speaker 3: lot of slack there and they're really high intensity that
Speaker 3: at the beginning are sort of the early adopters here
Speaker 3: where it's very easy to see how they might benefit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, especially on that latter one, because what I
Speaker 2: think a lot of people don't understand is the toll
Speaker 2: that turnover takes on productivity. That you know, if you
Speaker 2: have your five member team running at full tilt, that's great,
Speaker 2: but when one of them leaves, you are suddenly not
Speaker 2: running at full tilt until you can you know, hire replacement,
Speaker 2: train that person. You know, for the first however much
Speaker 2: time they are not you know, operating at where that
Speaker 2: person was who left and you're also encouraging management costs
Speaker 2: in training the person.
Speaker 1: And so from an organizational perspective, if you.
Speaker 2: Can cut that at all, you boost productivity even if
Speaker 2: the average person is working fewer hours.
Speaker 1: Is that's what I'm hearing you say?
Speaker 3: Absolutely, Laura, I mean that is such an important point.
Speaker 3: So I have a sort of deep dive into a
Speaker 3: company where that was so interesting what happened. And the
Speaker 3: book is both a lot of you know, kind of
Speaker 3: statistical findings, but also those deep dives into individual companies
Speaker 3: that represent different ways, strategies, experiences. So this one is
Speaker 3: a global marketing company and advertising and marketing. They were
Speaker 3: the person who ran the trial, the manager saying like
Speaker 3: thirty to forty percent turnover in that industry. And so
Speaker 3: what she figured out she did a lot of calculations
Speaker 3: with their accounting people to figure out how much it costs.
Speaker 3: But when she went the company, which is a lot,
Speaker 3: and she said on her team, she had a fifty
Speaker 3: seven person team, they're constantly onboarding, hiring, training, et cetera.
Speaker 3: And when she put in the four day week, she
Speaker 3: went to zero resignations, zero turnover. Okay, And that we
Speaker 3: hear that from quite a few of our companies. And
Speaker 3: then what was so fascinating about it was she began
Speaker 3: to figure out, I can monetize this in my contracts.
Speaker 3: So she put in, we get a bonus if no
Speaker 3: one leaves the team, and the clients just couldn't believe
Speaker 3: it because like table, yeah, and sure enough, and so
Speaker 3: it's yeah, it's really I mean there's very cold, hard
Speaker 3: cash here sitting on the table, lying on the lying
Speaker 3: on the table, if you will, if you can stop
Speaker 3: that those resignations in those high turnover places, and that's
Speaker 3: why we're hearing from like social service agencies, restaurants, healthcare.
Speaker 3: I mean, these are many of the places which have
Speaker 3: had these big turnover problems in recent years. And you know,
Speaker 3: of course advertising and marketing, there's a lot of a
Speaker 3: lot of those kinds of companies in our sample.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, Well, we're going to take a quick ad break
Speaker 2: and then I will be back with more from Juliette Shore. Well,
Speaker 2: I am back talking with Juliette Shore, who's the author
Speaker 2: of the new book Four Days a Week, looking at
Speaker 2: the results of a broad experiment with a number of
Speaker 2: organizations that experimented with a four day work week. So
Speaker 2: Julie we were talking about very you know, intensely structured organizations.
Speaker 2: We're reducing turnover had a positive benefit. Now we mentioned
Speaker 2: that there's also some you know, organizations that have a
Speaker 2: fair amount.
Speaker 1: Of slack in how people are working.
Speaker 2: And I'm sure you and I have both seen the
Speaker 2: time diaries of people at some organizations. Who are you know,
Speaker 2: in meetings all day or who are you know, switching
Speaker 2: applications frequently? You know as they're constantly interrupted? You know,
Speaker 2: what's going on in those organizations and how are they
Speaker 2: sort of thinking about becoming more productive instead of just
Speaker 2: assuming that there's kind of an infinite number.
Speaker 1: Of hours that you can you can put out a task.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that's probably the more common kind of organization
Speaker 3: among the hundreds that we have been studying. So for them,
Speaker 3: I would say ground zero has been meetings, and that's
Speaker 3: a kind of well known problem in these kinds of organizations.
Speaker 3: So when a company joins one of these trials, there's
Speaker 3: a they're sort of groups of companies doing it together
Speaker 3: and they do two months of onboarding and what we
Speaker 3: call work reorganization where we figure out with them, they
Speaker 3: go through these trainings and so on for they get
Speaker 3: peer mentors people who have done it before figure out
Speaker 3: where they're wasting time. So meetings is a key place,
Speaker 3: and a lot of them make their meetings more productive.
Speaker 3: They reduce their numbers of meetings, and there's a you know,
Speaker 3: there's like a huge amount of literature now on meetings
Speaker 3: and sort of how they're affecting productivity in many organizations.
Speaker 3: The flip side of that is the focus time. Because
Speaker 3: of that distraction problem, so many of these organizations also
Speaker 3: set times in the day when people will have focused
Speaker 3: time and they shouldn't be bothered and so forth, and
Speaker 3: there will be no meetings, et cetera. Other people can
Speaker 3: do that sort of individually, but then there are other
Speaker 3: sorts of things that they do to figure out how
Speaker 3: to make it work. So in some of the manufacturing companies,
Speaker 3: they do like a process engineering exercise where they go
Speaker 3: through every stage of their process and figure out where
Speaker 3: they wasting time. Where could they slot one thing one
Speaker 3: task into a dead time with another task. If they
Speaker 3: you know the brewery that I talk about in the book,
Speaker 3: they have many different tasks going on it once. But
Speaker 3: the same thing can be done in way call organizations
Speaker 3: where you sort of follow the chain of decision making
Speaker 3: or you follow you know, a form going through all
Speaker 3: the steps, and so they do those sorts of things.
Speaker 3: One interesting one at Kickstarter, which was the lead company
Speaker 3: in our first US trial, was that they realized the
Speaker 3: leadership team was not giving clear enough instructions to the programmers,
Speaker 3: you know, when they wanted them to do something, and
Speaker 3: they would get stuck or go down the wrong fork
Speaker 3: for a while. So leadership team figured out how it
Speaker 3: could make its intentions clearer to itself to begin with,
Speaker 3: and then give better instructions to the programming teams and
Speaker 3: then kind of just let them run with things. One
Speaker 3: other thing really important in certain kinds of businesses. We
Speaker 3: had a broadband provider that got a massive new contract
Speaker 3: at the same time that they went to the four
Speaker 3: day week, and we did in addition to all the
Speaker 3: surveying we did before and after interviews with this group,
Speaker 3: and when we came back to them, we were like, well,
Speaker 3: how did you make it work? You had this huge
Speaker 3: influx of business and mostly it was like dealing with
Speaker 3: customer service problems, connecting and so forth. And what they
Speaker 3: explained was, well, they finally got serious about documentation. They said,
Speaker 3: first of all, no, the four day week is what
Speaker 3: made it viable. Otherwise everybody would have burned out. But
Speaker 3: they got serious about documentation something. And this is a
Speaker 3: more general point, like if you don't put the time
Speaker 3: in upfront to save you time later, you're going to
Speaker 3: get overloaded. And so you know, their people had previously
Speaker 3: been reinventing the wheel with customer service, but now they documented.
Speaker 3: And that's a more general point to which I think
Speaker 3: many of us, you know, don't do it, which is
Speaker 3: you get some new piece of software, equipment, whatever, you
Speaker 3: don't spend the time at the beginning learning how to
Speaker 3: make it more efficient for you because you just want
Speaker 3: to get going. And I call it the forcing mechanism
Speaker 3: of the four day week because it forces you to
Speaker 3: get more efficient earlier on.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, just in general, I think a lot of people
Speaker 2: and probably organizations too, just don't treat time as valuable.
Speaker 1: And it's one thing.
Speaker 2: If you're paying somebody by the hour, because then obviously
Speaker 2: you know how many hours they are working and there's
Speaker 2: a you know, natural accountability on that. But for people
Speaker 2: who aren't, there just isn't that accountability. It is why
Speaker 2: you see one of these things. But with that I
Speaker 2: think you mentioned in the book that it was harder
Speaker 2: for managers though to adopt this sort of.
Speaker 3: Schedule, especially the scene, especially seniors. Yes, so what we
Speaker 3: heard a bit more from them is more some of
Speaker 3: them took that day off and that was it. So
Speaker 3: I don't want to make it seem like none of
Speaker 3: them were successful with this, but what some of them
Speaker 3: would do is use it a little bit as a
Speaker 3: catch up day because nobody else was working. So this
Speaker 3: is another key thing.
Speaker 1: So you don't have any meetings.
Speaker 3: You don't have any meetings, and you don't have people
Speaker 3: giving you work. And that's also an important principle when
Speaker 3: companies think about how are you going to do this?
Speaker 3: Is everybody going to be off on the same day,
Speaker 3: because that's one way of making sure that people don't
Speaker 3: just get overloaded when they come back because their coworkers
Speaker 3: were putting more on their plate. They use it as
Speaker 3: a catch up day, or they you know, they work
Speaker 3: a little bit on that day. They can't take it
Speaker 3: totally off. But part of what that means is they
Speaker 3: don't have to do as much work on weekends and nights,
Speaker 3: so they are getting a break. It's just a little
Speaker 3: bit different number one, I did. She talked to me
Speaker 3: about how she would work from home that day and
Speaker 3: she'd feel free to put in laundry, pick up her daughter,
Speaker 3: this than that, which on a regular work from home
Speaker 3: day she wouldn't feel she could do that. And so
Speaker 3: it was just it was a huge blessing to them
Speaker 3: as well, even if they didn't manage to reduce by
Speaker 3: the full eight hours that many of their.
Speaker 1: Co workers do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I wonder and I think you talk a
Speaker 2: little bit about this, that there's some drifting toward this,
Speaker 2: especially as you know, if you think about summer Fridays
Speaker 2: or more, people are sort of working from home on Fridays,
Speaker 2: not that they're not working.
Speaker 1: I mean, I want to put that out there. I'm
Speaker 1: a big fan of working from home.
Speaker 2: People working from home generally are working, but they're probably
Speaker 2: is a tendency to leave a little bit earlier on
Speaker 2: a Friday, if it's a work from home day for instance.
Speaker 3: And we are seeing, yeah, this is great. I call
Speaker 3: it the evolution of Fridays. We are seeing this showing
Speaker 3: up in hard numbers, interesting numbers, like in finance numbers,
Speaker 3: where like stock traders and other kinds of people, there's
Speaker 3: less activity going on, or studies of business people responding
Speaker 3: to surveys. And this is actually one of the interviews
Speaker 3: of a guy a marketing the head of a marketing
Speaker 3: company talk to me about how by taking Fridays off,
Speaker 3: there really wasn't as much going off on Fridays anyway,
Speaker 3: So Friday is no longer a sort of twenty percent
Speaker 3: productivity day in lots of places. And then I you know,
Speaker 3: I've got a lot of anecdotal stuff in there about
Speaker 3: how things really have evolved to be different on Fridays,
Speaker 3: and it's just it is evolving into less of a workday,
Speaker 3: especially Friday afternoons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, there's I mean, there's obviously some caveats here.
Speaker 1: I mean people are like, well, okay, four day's great,
Speaker 1: how about three? How about two? You know, I mean
Speaker 1: there's there's.
Speaker 2: Some limits on this obviously, of how much productivity we
Speaker 2: can wreak out of the ring out of the system.
Speaker 2: And then also with that, one of the caveats being
Speaker 2: that I imagine one of the things that makes this
Speaker 2: extra weekday off useful is that places are open that
Speaker 2: you could then go. I mean, one of the things
Speaker 2: people are doing is they're doing their grocery shopping, or
Speaker 2: they're going to the doctor, or they're you know, doing
Speaker 2: those life maintenance things, which we couldn't then have every
Speaker 2: place only open a certain limited number of days or
Speaker 2: we'd lose that benefit.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely. I mean there are many organizations in our
Speaker 3: trials that are twenty four to seven organizations and they're
Speaker 3: still twenty four sevens or that are five days. That
Speaker 3: marketing person I was just talking about his company went
Speaker 3: to half teams on Monday and Friday because they wanted
Speaker 3: a full forty hour availability for their clients for example.
Speaker 3: You know, another message of the book is that there
Speaker 3: isn't a one formula for this, that each of these
Speaker 3: companies sort of figures out what's going to work for
Speaker 3: them based on their their business, their what their employees want,
Speaker 3: you know a lot of different factors. But yeah, absolutely
Speaker 3: you need to Uh, if you're an access business, good
Speaker 3: chance you're going to keep that access.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, that people are counting on that.
Speaker 2: We're going to take one more quick ad break and
Speaker 2: then I will be back with more from Juliette Shore.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: I am back talking with Juliette Shore who is the
Speaker 2: author of the new book Four Days a week.
Speaker 1: So, Julia, we always like to.
Speaker 2: Hear about how people manage their own personal productivity. I mean,
Speaker 2: you're obviously, you know, leading research and writing books and
Speaker 2: being a public intellectual about things like that, and I
Speaker 2: I assume have duties at your university as well.
Speaker 1: Do you have any routines that make you more productive?
Speaker 3: It's funny you ask this, because I do. Just we
Speaker 3: were just talking about the Friday evolving thing. I mean,
Speaker 3: I often get asked when I wrote The Overworked American,
Speaker 3: I was always asked how many hours a week do
Speaker 3: you work? And at that point I was like the
Speaker 3: poster child for needing a makeover by you, which was
Speaker 3: I was in the office long, long hours, and many
Speaker 3: of them were not productive.
Speaker 1: It was okay.
Speaker 3: The office was also my socializing place. I didn't have kids,
Speaker 3: I wasn't married in those early days. So with this one,
Speaker 3: of course, I get asked how many days a week
Speaker 3: I work? And I always used to say, well, I
Speaker 3: just work when I want and I don't work when
Speaker 3: I don't feel like it, et cetera, et cetera. But
Speaker 3: I noticed about two weeks ago someone asked me that
Speaker 3: and I was like, you know, what Friday is evolving
Speaker 3: away from a workday for me, so productivity. Yeah, So
Speaker 3: I do think taking that Friday has really helped me.
Speaker 3: I'm feeling pretty relaxed, despite you know, juggling a lot
Speaker 3: of balls. When I am writing a book or articles,
Speaker 3: I start first thing in the morning, after exercise, so
Speaker 3: I have started a morning exercise routine. I do my
Speaker 3: exercising first thing in the morning. I actually run exercise classes.
Speaker 3: I'm not the teacher. I just put on the tape
Speaker 3: and do the zoom room. But it means I have
Speaker 3: that accountability to the other people who come. And then
Speaker 3: I then I, you know, go trudge up to my
Speaker 3: third floor and start writing. I do find that first
Speaker 3: period of the day, the morning, is most productive. I
Speaker 3: write until I just peter out. You know. If I'm
Speaker 3: writing a book, for example, and that works really well
Speaker 3: for me, I just do that. What are some of
Speaker 3: my other tips? So I think those are the two
Speaker 3: most important things, Like I have a dedicated place and
Speaker 3: time for my most And you say that you made
Speaker 3: that point about trying to do the hardest thing first.
Speaker 1: I always do that.
Speaker 3: Now with writing a book, I always start with my
Speaker 3: hardest chapter and dedicated time, place, exercise routine. And then
Speaker 3: I think also that point I started with just making
Speaker 3: sure I have enough rest time and relaxation, and that
Speaker 3: I'm not feeling like I work all the time and
Speaker 3: I don't have time to do other things that I want.
Speaker 3: I just I just you know, I'm lucky because I
Speaker 3: control my own time basically, so I take as much
Speaker 3: time non work time as I feel I want. And
Speaker 3: that also makes the working so much easier because I'm
Speaker 3: not feeling like, oh, I have to work all the time.
Speaker 3: Occasionally during the semester when I'm teaching, I sometimes feel like, oh,
Speaker 3: why am I working so much? But that's you know,
Speaker 3: that's the part of my job I can't really control.
Speaker 2: Well, that comes with the territory, So dealing with people's
Speaker 2: messages and questions all the time, I am sure in
Speaker 2: that role. Well, I always ask guests something and man,
Speaker 2: we can talk about the things maybe that you do
Speaker 2: in your non working hours. What is something you have
Speaker 2: done recently to take a day from great to awesome?
Speaker 3: The delayed Mother's Day celebration, so my favorite thing to
Speaker 3: do is to take a bike ride. On a Sunday,
Speaker 3: took a bike ride with my son, which was really wonderful,
Speaker 3: and then went out with son and husband sadly daughters
Speaker 3: on the other coast to our favorite vegetarian restaurant and
Speaker 3: had an awesome meal and then watched a playoff basketball
Speaker 3: game for my wonderful team that sadly lost, the Boston Celtic.
Speaker 2: We can guess where you are, and yes, sadly, well,
Speaker 2: I'm not a I'm not a Boston fan myself, but
Speaker 2: I understand, I understand the feeling and the Sixers here
Speaker 2: have been a long string of disappointments lately, so yeah,
Speaker 2: it's sure, you know, oh well.
Speaker 1: Some yere some here and what are you looking forward
Speaker 1: to now?
Speaker 3: So two big things. One is we are extending our
Speaker 3: research into looking at the relationship between the four day
Speaker 3: week and AI. So our hypothesis is that four day
Speaker 3: week companies are better at adopting and using AI. There's
Speaker 3: some survey evidence that suggests that might be true, and
Speaker 3: we're we're going to be able to get some sort
Speaker 3: of harder evidence about that. We now have companies all
Speaker 3: around the world, hundreds of companies, tens of in the
Speaker 3: you know, more than ten thousand employees that we can
Speaker 3: go back to and find out what they're doing now,
Speaker 3: so that's pretty exciting. And I also do a lot
Speaker 3: of research on climate change and the impacts of working
Speaker 3: hours on climate change and how countries or places I've
Speaker 3: done research across the US too, that have reduced their
Speaker 3: working hours actually also reduced their carbon emissions. So I've
Speaker 3: got some new papers coming up on that too.
Speaker 1: I guess that would make sense.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, if you're not driving to and
Speaker 2: from work on Friday, that's at least one less time.
Speaker 2: And then probably the you know, electronic activity that's that's
Speaker 2: going on with that, that too fascinating. Yeah, well, the
Speaker 2: AI thing, I mean, you know, people, there was always
Speaker 2: the probably the idea that technology would be able to
Speaker 2: reduce hours without reducing you know, lifestyle and product because
Speaker 2: of the productivity statistics would still be high. I mean,
Speaker 2: just real quick. I mean, this is it told separate topic.
Speaker 2: But you think that that might finally be the case
Speaker 2: with AI.
Speaker 3: Well, we don't know what's going to happen. I mean,
Speaker 3: I have a chapter in the book on AI. The
Speaker 3: first Industrial Revolution had tremendous productivity enhancing machinery and technology,
Speaker 3: and it led to big increases in hours of work
Speaker 3: and with AI. I just think we could go down
Speaker 3: two paths. I mean, one is we could go down
Speaker 3: a similar path in which what companies do is they
Speaker 3: just lay off lots of workers and they buy that
Speaker 3: AI and they use it more intensively, and the people
Speaker 3: they have work more intensively, and that's it took a
Speaker 3: long time to reverse that upward trend of hours from
Speaker 3: the first Industrial revolution. That could happen with AI. The alternative,
Speaker 3: and the one I argue obviously for in the book,
Speaker 3: is we could actually use technology to reduce hours of
Speaker 3: work and not not just lay people off, but actually
Speaker 3: share out the work more equitably and reduce hours per job,
Speaker 3: keep more and more, you know, people in work with
Speaker 3: incomes and meaningful lives from that work. But we're gonna
Speaker 3: have to that's gonna have to be a social choice
Speaker 3: and not just something that where the companies just see
Speaker 3: the incentive. We know, Microsoft just laid off a lot
Speaker 3: of workers.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, so we'll see that's.
Speaker 3: Going to be a really bad social outcome.
Speaker 1: We will see how it plays out. Yeah, so we
Speaker 1: do not know.
Speaker 2: Well, Julia, thank you so much for joining us. Thank
Speaker 2: you to everyone for listening. If you have feedback about
Speaker 2: this or any other episode, you can always reach me
Speaker 2: at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In the meantime,
Speaker 2: this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
Speaker 2: the most of our time.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to Before or Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas,
Speaker 1: or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura
Speaker 1: vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
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