Same problem for me. And I agree, seems like it would take a lot of ingenuity to turn a solution to this problem into a viable business. Maybe products aiding rat-race opt-out strategies, coordination tech enabling 20 hour work weeks.… I don’t really have any specific ideas.
But to answer the second question, I feel like I would pay a great deal for something like this. Hard to quantify since solutions offered might be partial, and a total solution might eliminate income, etc.; but just to illustrate (and ignoring things like extreme saving for early retirement, etc.) between the options A. and B. ---
A. $80,000/year at 40 hours a week
B. third party company L somehow enables me to earn $40,000/year at 20 hours a week in the same job with the same employer as above, but company L takes a 25% cut of my pay (so $10,000 a year to company L)
--- I’d gratefully choose option B. (which is just to give a sense of my intuitive preference, not saying I’d defend the merits of that choice necessarily).
Hell yes this is a problem! Hours worked and hourly pay are very much correlated (it costs a lot to get someone to work that 80th or 120th hour in a week) and part time jobs often don’t come with health benefits. Many workers have the opposite problem—the local retail store won’t increase their hours and they never hire anyone full time ever because then they would have to provide health insurance.
The part about healthcare is USA-specific, but the relationship between total hours and total pay is nonlinear at other places, too.
In Slovakia, the healthcare is set up so that everyone pays a fixed fraction of their income, and then everyone receives exactly the same healthcare regardless of how much they paid. So it shouldn’t have any impact on hourly rate.
Yet, it is difficult to find a part-time work on the market. When I tried it, I had to work for 50% of my previous salary just to reduce the work to 4 days a week, and the employer still believed they were doing me a favor. (After a few weeks I decided that getting 50% of money for 80% of time is not a smart deal, so I quit.)
I believe the problem is signalling. Almost everyone is okay with working full-time; especially men. (Women can use having small kids as an excuse for a part-time job, but that also dramatically reduces their hourly rate, which is an important part of the pay gap.) If you are a man unwilling to work full-time, it makes you weird.
So it’s not like the employer literally needs you there 5 days a week. It’s simply a decision to not hire a weirdo, when there are non-weird candidates available. If you differ from the majority by not willing to work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, who knows what else is weird about you? Why take the unnecessary risk? Also, well-paid employees are supposed pretend they love their job; and by asking for a part-time job you show too clearly that you actually care about something else more.
Thus, I sometimes had jobs where I was able to spend up to 50% of my working time just browsing websites from the company computer. But no comparably well paid option where I could officially work 4 days a week, or 6 hours a day, and then simply go home.
(I was also trying to get home office, so that instead of browsing the web I could do something useful. But the companies where the employees spend much time online are usually on some level aware of what is happening, so they don’t allow home office. As long as everyone must stay in the building the whole day, the management can keep pretending that people are actually working.)
I believe that if for example 50% of people working in some profession would demand part-time work, this problem would mostly disappear. Then, wanting to work part-time would simply be normal. But that’s a coordination problem, and I don’t even know how many people would actually be interested in working part-time if that would be a legitimate option (with the same hourly rate).
I am pretty sure this is not the main issue, nor is being “weird.” But it is the fact that you want to work unusually few hours. That shows, as Viliam said, that you are less interested in working than on average. Employers would prefer not to have people unusually disinterested in working. The guy paying 50% of the money for 80% of the time was probably being reasonable, in terms of the expected value of a worker disinterested in working.
I agree that if everyone worked less, the supposed problem would go away. But that could only happen if everyone became less interested in working. I note that the average work week used to be much longer than 40 hours. So the fact that it has gone down somewhat, but not more, shows that people are not infinitely interested in working, but also not totally disinterested.
Tyler Cowen, talking about why the standard work week hasn’t gone down to even less than 40 hours, says it is because people “like money, and like working,” but that the reason they like working is that they don’t like their personal lives that much. If he is right, then future improvements to personal life, as well as to the ability of less money to buy things, might end up leading to shorter work weeks. But it does not look like there is any short term solution that works well for people who are simply less interested in working than on average.
I’m pretty agnostic about what form a solution to the original needing-to-have-a-job-to-support-myself problem might take. The hourly breakdown thing was just an attempt to ballpark some money amounts, with an emphasis on how high the value might potentially be for me. I suppose other categories of solution along the lines of tiny houses or solar panels or whatever that might ease transition to lower cost of living lifestyles would have very different prices or payment structures probably ending up a lot lower than the scenario I first outlined.
I’m not actually in option A. in real life, sorry if I gave that impression. It’s just an attempt to illustrate how much I might be willing to pay, if hypothetically restricted to those two options. Not suggesting restriction to those two options is realistic or anything, nor do I have any mechanism in mind that might lead to those options.
My food is already cheap enough, especially since I use the rule of buying stuff that has the highest calories per dollar.
Rent is not cheap given that I live in the most expensive area of the country and that I want to live alone. If I had a roommate, “having a roommate” would be my most annoying thing rather than needing a job.
Needing to have a job to support myself. But I suspect that is a problem that entrepreneurs will have great difficulty solving.
Same problem for me. And I agree, seems like it would take a lot of ingenuity to turn a solution to this problem into a viable business. Maybe products aiding rat-race opt-out strategies, coordination tech enabling 20 hour work weeks.… I don’t really have any specific ideas.
But to answer the second question, I feel like I would pay a great deal for something like this. Hard to quantify since solutions offered might be partial, and a total solution might eliminate income, etc.; but just to illustrate (and ignoring things like extreme saving for early retirement, etc.) between the options A. and B. ---
A. $80,000/year at 40 hours a week
B. third party company L somehow enables me to earn $40,000/year at 20 hours a week in the same job with the same employer as above, but company L takes a 25% cut of my pay (so $10,000 a year to company L)
--- I’d gratefully choose option B. (which is just to give a sense of my intuitive preference, not saying I’d defend the merits of that choice necessarily).
You do know that part-time work is a normal and accepted thing?
I do know.
So your problem is that it’s much harder for you to find part time work than full time work, at the same average hourly rate?
Hell yes this is a problem! Hours worked and hourly pay are very much correlated (it costs a lot to get someone to work that 80th or 120th hour in a week) and part time jobs often don’t come with health benefits. Many workers have the opposite problem—the local retail store won’t increase their hours and they never hire anyone full time ever because then they would have to provide health insurance.
Well, that’s a very USA-specific problem. Maybe you should consider fixing your broken healthcare system?
The part about healthcare is USA-specific, but the relationship between total hours and total pay is nonlinear at other places, too.
In Slovakia, the healthcare is set up so that everyone pays a fixed fraction of their income, and then everyone receives exactly the same healthcare regardless of how much they paid. So it shouldn’t have any impact on hourly rate.
Yet, it is difficult to find a part-time work on the market. When I tried it, I had to work for 50% of my previous salary just to reduce the work to 4 days a week, and the employer still believed they were doing me a favor. (After a few weeks I decided that getting 50% of money for 80% of time is not a smart deal, so I quit.)
I believe the problem is signalling. Almost everyone is okay with working full-time; especially men. (Women can use having small kids as an excuse for a part-time job, but that also dramatically reduces their hourly rate, which is an important part of the pay gap.) If you are a man unwilling to work full-time, it makes you weird.
So it’s not like the employer literally needs you there 5 days a week. It’s simply a decision to not hire a weirdo, when there are non-weird candidates available. If you differ from the majority by not willing to work 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, who knows what else is weird about you? Why take the unnecessary risk? Also, well-paid employees are supposed pretend they love their job; and by asking for a part-time job you show too clearly that you actually care about something else more.
Thus, I sometimes had jobs where I was able to spend up to 50% of my working time just browsing websites from the company computer. But no comparably well paid option where I could officially work 4 days a week, or 6 hours a day, and then simply go home.
(I was also trying to get home office, so that instead of browsing the web I could do something useful. But the companies where the employees spend much time online are usually on some level aware of what is happening, so they don’t allow home office. As long as everyone must stay in the building the whole day, the management can keep pretending that people are actually working.)
I believe that if for example 50% of people working in some profession would demand part-time work, this problem would mostly disappear. Then, wanting to work part-time would simply be normal. But that’s a coordination problem, and I don’t even know how many people would actually be interested in working part-time if that would be a legitimate option (with the same hourly rate).
Having more workers (shorter hours for each worker) adds administrative costs. I have no idea whether employers are over-estimating those costs.
I am pretty sure this is not the main issue, nor is being “weird.” But it is the fact that you want to work unusually few hours. That shows, as Viliam said, that you are less interested in working than on average. Employers would prefer not to have people unusually disinterested in working. The guy paying 50% of the money for 80% of the time was probably being reasonable, in terms of the expected value of a worker disinterested in working.
I agree that if everyone worked less, the supposed problem would go away. But that could only happen if everyone became less interested in working. I note that the average work week used to be much longer than 40 hours. So the fact that it has gone down somewhat, but not more, shows that people are not infinitely interested in working, but also not totally disinterested.
Tyler Cowen, talking about why the standard work week hasn’t gone down to even less than 40 hours, says it is because people “like money, and like working,” but that the reason they like working is that they don’t like their personal lives that much. If he is right, then future improvements to personal life, as well as to the ability of less money to buy things, might end up leading to shorter work weeks. But it does not look like there is any short term solution that works well for people who are simply less interested in working than on average.
Yes, that’s absolutely an aspect of it.
I’m pretty agnostic about what form a solution to the original needing-to-have-a-job-to-support-myself problem might take. The hourly breakdown thing was just an attempt to ballpark some money amounts, with an emphasis on how high the value might potentially be for me. I suppose other categories of solution along the lines of tiny houses or solar panels or whatever that might ease transition to lower cost of living lifestyles would have very different prices or payment structures probably ending up a lot lower than the scenario I first outlined.
Then I don’t really understand your post. Why pay a middleman 25% of your pay when you can just go to your boss and ask for part-time hours?
I’m not actually in option A. in real life, sorry if I gave that impression. It’s just an attempt to illustrate how much I might be willing to pay, if hypothetically restricted to those two options. Not suggesting restriction to those two options is realistic or anything, nor do I have any mechanism in mind that might lead to those options.
One category of solutions to this problem is to lower your costs. Your main costs will probably be food and rent.
Some ideas on making food and rent cheaper:
Cheaper food.
Low carb Soylent.
//Why is food so expensive anyway?
Cheaper rent.
Convince likeminded people to move somewhere with cheap land (e.g. http://www.fortgalt.com/).
Nice vans that are built for people to live in.
Dating site for roommates to share a house.
My food is already cheap enough, especially since I use the rule of buying stuff that has the highest calories per dollar.
Rent is not cheap given that I live in the most expensive area of the country and that I want to live alone. If I had a roommate, “having a roommate” would be my most annoying thing rather than needing a job.
Y Combinator Research is looking into basic income