It is not the duty of the lawmaker but of the contracting parties (= employer and employee) to define the amount of work hours per day.
There are many variables in the process:
- Demand for money of the employee (poor father of five vs. rich single)
- Demand for work of the employer (company needs a helping hand vs company needs to recruit a new team)
- Scale effect of product (does one additional hour or man lead to one additional unit produced?, compare laying bricks vs programming)
These variables are unknown to the lawmaker for each specific instance, so any a-priori determination of the amount of work hours per week cannot be optimal.
There are pretty severe network effects in place, though, as well as obvious imbalance of power (the wage worker is, almost by definition, relatively poor, indebted, etc). Working hours have always been a big part of labor politics. The individual contractual perspective is not the whole story.
But I agree with the imbalance of power, at least in the common case. However, the more specific and difficult your job is, the more the power leans towards the employee.
Still, I believe any kind of power inequality will manifest itself somewhere whether you fix working hours or not.
Almost every time I've talked to someone about reducing their working hours, the most serious reason not to has been something like "but everyone else is working 8 hours."
It's not like the "invisible hand" simply discovered the optimum life arrangement for all workers everywhere.
> It is not the duty of the lawmaker but of the contracting parties (= employer and employee) to define the amount of work hours per day.
Who mentioned lawmakers? I only see two contracting parties here: the municipal government in Gothenburg, and a group of its employees.
This idea that there's a short and slippery slope between 'City municipality experiments to find the most efficient working day for its employees' and 'GOVERNMENT BANS ANYONE WORKING MORE THAN SIX HOURS' is, ISTM, dubious.
Usually the employee has a much weaker negotiating position due to the threat of finding himself without a job. Basic income could lead to a "freer" and thus more efficient job market (free markets are efficient, right?).
There are many variables in the process:
- Demand for money of the employee (poor father of five vs. rich single)
- Demand for work of the employer (company needs a helping hand vs company needs to recruit a new team)
- Scale effect of product (does one additional hour or man lead to one additional unit produced?, compare laying bricks vs programming)
These variables are unknown to the lawmaker for each specific instance, so any a-priori determination of the amount of work hours per week cannot be optimal.