Why is it so unusual that employers compete with less hours rather than with larger wages? Is it because granting someone with less work would probably make other employees require the same?
I feel that after a certain amount it would be much more enjoyable to get less hours rather than a raise. However the latter seems to be much easier, if not the only one, to get.
1) Puritanical roots of America (Idle hands are the devil's workshop) still linger as the ideal is you spend most of your time working.
2) Hiring more people is hard; furthermore the larger the team, the less efficient (per person) the team is. Therefore you want to get maximum value out of the people you have any way possible. A 25% boost in output of each person on the team is easily worth as much as (if not more than) hiring twice as many people. Similarly a perceived loss of 20% of productivity per person would be like halving the size of your team. I could easily believe that a 16 hour week has 20% lower output than a 40 hour week.
3) Lots of companies do offer lower hours for lower pay. They just typically don't hire people into that situation for some reason (I'm open to suggestions why that is so). However, no good place I've ever worked would fail to do that for an employee they want to keep.
I agree with point 1 - sad but true. Not only in America as well.
I like that you say "perceived loss of 20%". I wonder how substantial the actual difference in productivity is. I wouldn't want to compare at this day to 16 hours, but rather something like 30 hours.
Person X produced me $A amount in 40 hours. His salary is $B. B being much smaller than A[1], I can increase it without much an impact on the bottom-line. But, again, B being much smaller than A, if he worked less hours, I'd reduce A much more than I reduce B.
[1] It has to be, otherwise, will all the overhead a business has, I'd go broke.
I feel that after a certain amount it would be much more enjoyable to get less hours rather than a raise. However the latter seems to be much easier, if not the only one, to get.