On the 6 day week, for I don't think mos people will like it but I propose that asa likely future scenario. Given the context of a highly globalised labour market and the rapdily accelerating education levels and he rise of AI tools as assistants to increase productivity , then local labour markets and and desires of local workforces will largely become irrelevant.
China already has a semi-official 9am-9pm 6 day a week workweek . India is pushing on a 70 hour work week
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-67269976
I manage a team of software engineers in India and they do work 70 hours, spread over the week. in general, hey are smarter, better educated and harder working than most of the engineers I see in Europe and the US. At the same time salaries are 5x higher than India. My employer, like most other big tech companies has announced LRs and layoffs, but looking at the details you see it is explictly layoffs in Europe and the US. Indeed, our companies restructuring plan includes over 1bn USD investment, with jobs earmarked for India.
At the same time, Europe and the US have a severely ageing demographic and the only way to rectify that without lowering living standards will be to increase productivity.
Now I would personally love to work 40-45 hours over 4 days, but the reality is there are tens of thousands of people on the planet with similar skills that could replace me and do their 70 hour weeks for 60K USD per year vs my 360K.
I think the people hoping for a better work-life balance might be in for a shock when they find their job is simply outsourced because they can't keep up on 5 days a week, let alone 4 days a week. I really wish things would be different. people mistakenly think the productivity gains of AI will reduce the required working hours but in fact the oposite effect will occur. If you work 50 hours a week and new AI tool can double your throughout, then no employer will hire you on the same salary at 25 hours, conversely, increasing hours to 60 hours would provide a 40% additional productivity gain . In this way the labour costs can be reduced and the fewer workers happy to work the increased time can be well awarded. And well, you might not want to increase hours from 50 to 60 to maintain employment but there already millions working 60 hours and would be willing to increase to 70 hours leveraging AI tools to far outproduce what you are doing on a mere 50 hour week.
I can imagine in 20-30 years time societal changes in China, India, Indonesia etc will also see a reduction in work hours, but then you will see the rise of the African labour force aided by AI to be more productive than today's europeans.
