Offering 4-day weeks: Do you see this often? Just curious -- I feel like it's rare, so my guess would be the opposite. (I do know several people that work 4 10hr days as machinists or window installers).
My intuition is also the opposite of yours on affordability :), at least in tech...
I live in a country I where yeah it’s common enough (let assume for good workers not borderline ones) but we’re not paid as highly as the US, so supporting a family on a 4 day senior dev salary is a push unless you end got a paid off house.
The US system's structure penalizes companies for hiring workers between 20-40 hours. Any company that doesn't rely on flexible <20 hour employees or salary + forced-overtime is basically throwing money away.
Tax code relating to benefits and labor laws (which kind of assume the environment encouraged by the tax code.)
As an example, benefits have fairness tests between highest and lowest paid employees. Fail those tests and the benefits are taxed, possibly as normal income. Companies find tricks to get people out of the group of normal employees under the IRS rules to beat these tests.
I'm curious. Could you by any chance know some reason behind this? Is the salary not sufficient for the zone, or people do enjoy working, or they just simply think they would be bored as they take it?
Some people work 6-7 days a week already. So if they're working under that arrangement now, it will probably be fine for them to work more than mandatory hours in the future also.
i guess the idea is, considering how much worker productivity has improved over the decades, even working 4 days a week, one should still be able to survive just fine (at least that is my interpretation)
Are many companies offering 4 day weeks? I’d guess yes.
Can people afford to live off a 4 day week salary? I’d guess no in general.