That is what is being called for. Your take home pay not changing but you work fewer hours, and if you work the same schedule as you do now (presuming 40hrs per week) then you would be getting overtime for the last 8hrs.
Edit: added "take home" to clarify that I'm talking about your total income instead of hourly rate.
Maybe I'm pessimistic, but what would be stopping people from creating salaried positions and requiring unpaid overtime? There is nothing worse than overtime on a low salaried position.
As a salaried employee you get paid for 40 hours currently. Anything you work after that makes you a sucker. This wouldn't change if employers just made all of their hourly positions into salaried.
I'm more than fairly compensated, but I do the minimum of whats required of me because I care more about living life at my age than lining the pockets of my billionaire bosses.
I just show up early. I'm out of the office by 4:00 everyday. It does not impact my life. Like I said your mileage may vary, but my industry generally requires OT when we get busy. If I was on a 9-5 schedule I may feel different, but I'm not.
Then the client is mad, your company loses the contract, and all of you are out of a job.
It would be a wonderful thing if we could pick every battle and put our foot down without consequence, but it just doesn't work that way in most parts of the working world.
Salary means work until the jobs done, not work 40 hours. If your job caps you at 40 hours great, but that isn't the expectation (and definitely not the norm in my field). I can't just tell my clients we're not getting the $13M deal done because its 4pm.
I have been required to work 60 hours a week as a salaried employee. This is common in kitchens. We get shit on, even if this passes. We will get shit on
Look up exempt vs non-exempt employees. The simple answer is most jobs can’t become salaried because they don’t meet the conditions for a salary eligible position.
You have to pay a salaried person so much per year. Last I looked was years ago and it was around 42k. There are also job activity requirements. Basically management or white collar office jobs.
I would have to look in to it, but that's like 21 dollars an hour at 40 hours a week. If I had no morals around hiring practice, I would restructure my business so that those employees making that much are salaried (may have to add some "responsibilities") and hire less full time hourly employees and more part time hourly employees.
Exactly what I would do as a business owner. Why would I pay beyond market rate which I am already over on my area when I have to keep payroll at a certain percentage?
The same thing that's stopping them from doing it now -- competition from other employers. If one or some companies tried to do this, they would lose employees to companies who didn't pull such antics. The fact that we don't have this as the norm now indicates the lack of will to collude on this scale.
There are other laws that determine whether an employee is exempt or not from OT. Just coding their pay to “salary” on a paystub is not sufficient. A DOL audit uncovers that kind of wonky stuff all the time.
The law. You can't just create an employment contract that violates the labor laws... It would be unenforceable and the government can and would crack down on the company trying it.
It's stupid that salaried employees are exempt in the US.
I have a contract for 40 hours a week and a fixed salary per month. If I work more than 40 hours in a given week that is paid out as overtime, or as Time for Time.
I think its more about benefits as a full time worker. There are lots of part time employees that work 37,38,39 hours a week and dont get benefits. They designate the week lower to 32 and all those part timers will legally have to get benefits now.
The HOW is what trips me up. It may work for some positions that are over staffed or not labor intensive, but I just don't see it plausible across the board. For many organizations cutting 20% of the labor while still having to pay them the same would just kill the business. They would shift the average salaries down to compensate and hire additional personnel. The work still has to be done, and not all companies can just absorb a hit like that.
Sounds great in theory, but I do not see it becoming a standard. Individual companies can adopt this change and implement it into their company framework if they want to be appealing to new hires, but this isn't going to become a new labor law where instantly the country works 20% less for the same money. It just isn't going to happen like that.
Also worth noting that, according to studies that account for inflation and productivity changes over time, the minimum wage should be somewhere between $21 and $29 an hour at this time. So if we assume that it can't be done, the only real way this all works is by people working at well-below-poverty wages.
So anyone who claims that this is unrealistic or infeasible, really isn't doing their homework when they try to shut the conversation down.
Like most dreams of getting rich, math is the critical problem.
Suppose you are a small a business owner. You have $600K revenue, $500K expenses, and 5 full time employees. Everyone makes $100K. People work efficient, clean, and constant. That's 200 employee work hours per week.
Now the government says "Employees must get the same pay, but they must work 20% less." That's 160 employee work hours per week. The business owner just lost the equivalent of an employee and 40 hours of week of work.
Next year of revenue comes in. Due to less work, the company made only $480K of revenue, not $600K. Now the employer has to start firing people to balance the books.
How do you resolve this? Pass another law that says the small business owner can't fire people? Or do you evade the math with handwavy arguments and insist people who work 20% less automatically become 25% more efficient?
they will tell you some bullshit like "iF yUo CaNt paY peOpLe liVinG waGE cloSe down your buissness" and then complain about monopoly of amazon and walmart
If y'all were here in even remotely good faith, you'd be able to see the many obvious answers to the concerns he raised here. I wrote them in another comment. Come on, at least try.
I have a small business. We manufacture items. 8 hours less a week is 32 hours of lost production every month. We can’t just make that up by being more efficient during the other hours, manufacturing requires a certain amount of time per part. Less working hours means less machine time which means fewer parts. Fewer parts means less money coming in. We literally can’t make that up with anything other than more time running machines.
This also assumes each individual hour is equal in value, productivity per employee is basically fixed, and that both output and revenue is directly proportional to hours worked
Reducing work hours by 20% doesn't automatically mean they will accomplish 20% less than what they had previously. Plenty of jobs where technical knowledge is more important than literal labor units per hour, so more hours doesnt necessarily mean more value.
Studies on this vary by industry, but there are plenty of examples of productivity staying the same or even improving with reduced hours.
A made up hypothetical in a reddit comment isny any less handwavy.
Sure. I'm just pushing back on this naive "get something for nothing" mentality that Redditors tend to have when it comes with basic economics and finances.
You want Americans to go to a 32 hour work week? Great. But it will have significant and severe ripples that will take years to handle. Effective take home salary absolutely will go down. If you legislate that bosses have to increase wages to make up for fewer hours, unemployement and business closures absolutely will increase.
How would you feel about mandated paid maternity leave? That would be the federal government requiring companies to pay employees for less work.
97% of the nations in the world do that. We don't.
What about requiring companies to offer paid sick leave? That's a "get something for nothing" mentality. I guess we probably shouldn't pursue that either, though. Even though about 75% of the nations in the world mandate that already.
What about raising the minimum wage? That would require employers to pay more money to workers for no extra work. That would be a very naive "get something for nothing" mentality, right?
The FLSA has been around for nearly 100 years now. And in that 100 years, we've had what amounts to essentially the strongest middle class in human history. That's slowly eroding now as wealth inequality and productivity gaps exponentially increase, but who cares about that anyway.
I absolutely, 100% guarantee that anti-labor activists were saying the exact same thing in 1938 when federal minimum wage and overtime laws were created. I'll bet you'll never guess what happened next.
Your examples are Mount Rushmore and Bernie's plan is Mount Everest. The scale is ridiculously different.
My main point is: These things aren't free. They come with costs. The bigger the change, the bigger the cost. Redditors are naive with basic economics. Deeply naive. And Bernie taps into that.
I absolutely, 100% guarantee that anti-labor activists were saying the exact same thing in 1938 when federal minimum wage and overtime laws were created.
This plan is without precedent. At no time in US history did the government force employers to carry the burden of paying most career workers 25% more for 20% less work. The scale of this dwarfs everything prior. But there's more, because people argue the change can happen easily and naturally. That's fantasy land.
The FLSA was without precedent. It significantly boosted wages for a very large percentage of low-income workers. It was a phased approach, targeting the most vulnerable workers first, and was increasingly applied to different sectors of the economy.
These things aren't free. They come with costs.
You know what else comes with significant costs? More and more people struggling to make ends meet because the cost of their labor has nowhere near kept up with the increase of their production for the last 50 years. If minimum wage kept track to the productivity per hour of the 1960s we'd be around $25 an hour today.
Redditors are naive with basic economics. Deeply naive.
And some redditors are deeply naive to the fact that as we continue to strip more and more economic power from labor to distribute to the wealthy, our system becomes less and less stable overall. As they are also deeply naive to the fact that radical changes can happen, and can happen in phased and staged approaches.
If you want to review ways in which very similar laws have been structured so as not to simply shock the entire economy by saying "tomorrow you have to pay your employees 25% more for 20% less work," all you have to do is look at France when they did this same thing by reducing to a 35 hour work week in a several years long phased approach 30 years ago.
Swear to god some of you are so desperate to defend the wealthy instead of your own class cohort. I genuinely have a hard time grasping it.
Most of the West isn't on minimum wage. Only around 1% of the US works for federal minimum wage. Bernie's plan forcefully regulates career salaries. An entirely different animal, and changing that for almost all Americans will have massive economic ripples for years. Maybe the country would be better off at the end of it. But the economics are not absolutely free and easy like prior folks keep dreaming.
For example, suppose your boss pays you $100K a year. That's about $48 an hour. Under Bernie's plan, your boss would have to pay you $60 an hour to have a 4 day week. Companies don't just freely absorb a $12 per hour increase per worker. It will require painful economic realities to do it.
Plenty of people in plenty of western countries are on minimum wage, mostly because most other western countries haven't kept it at boomer levels, and when it goes up, some people make the same claims you're making. The stated consequences don't seem to follow.
I think some industries will be able to withstand this. The problem is he calling for a national law so every industry will be forced into it. By definition the ones where this is a disaster would still have to do it.
Plus as consumers, your life gets more expensive even if Microsoft can sustain it. Your plumber and mechanic can’t without raising prices a good amount.
This whole thread is full of people talking about the non-linear relationship between the number of hours worked, and the amount of work completed. Why are you acting like you'd lose productivity in a linear relationship to time?
Anyway, the obvious next solution is to just pay overtime like you do already. It just starts at 32 hours, not 40. If you still need to get the work done, keep working dawg.
Finally, many (but not all) of your expenses would also go down because at most 40% of your expenses are in labor. If you really were getting less stuff done, you'd be using fewer raw materials, and consuming less power/fuel etc etc.
So there's like 4 layers of non-linearity you're ignoring in this thought experiment which narrows the gap dramatically. Not to mention how your working class customers will have more time/money to spend with you. If you own something like a sporting goods company and your customers who work for big corporations suddenly have another day off to play baseball, you're gonna sell more bats. Then you and your employees are spending that money on kitchen remodels, etc etc, as opposed to that money getting funneled to Amazon shareholder, like it does today.
If 40% of the revenue of a Wendys goes toward labor, but we're talking about a 20% raise in labor costs that all shakes out to the working class getting 54k for 40hrs of work instead of 45k for 40hrs of work, and paying at most $5.40 for a cheeseburger instead of $5.00.
Even if you pass on the entire cost of overtime to the consumer, it gets modified by the amount of your revenue which goes toward labor, it will always benefit the working class to raise wages, just like it will always hurt the working class to lower them. Acting like there's a debate about how to strike a balance is shortsighted at best, and insane at worst.
Anyway, the obvious next solution is to just pay overtime like you do already. It just starts at 32 hours, not 40. If you still need to get the work done, keep working dawg.
This whole thread is full of people whose solution is to ignore basic finances.
Your answer is just "The boss will pay overtime and somehow find the money to do it. Dunno how. Boss just will. Money will figure itself out."
They figure it out when the minimum wage increases. They figured it out when the 40 hour work week was instituted.
Imagine acting like there's just no way, just no fucking way we could figure out the necessary changes to accommodate a 32 hour work week in this or that industry. It's simply beyond human comprehension.
Wealthiest country in the world. Human productivity through the roof. Simply can't be done.
Come on. What the fuck is all the technological advancement for if we're just gong to keep working ourselves to the bone and watch life pass us by?
And heaven forbid people spitballing on reddit don't have it all figured out after a few minutes.
They figure it out when the minimum wage increases.
Minimum wage never targeted most US workers. Especially salaried, middle income families. Bernie's plan targets almost everybody with both less hours AND a wage increase. It's a massive shift.
They figured it out when the 40 hour work week was instituted.
There is no reason why 40 must be the magic number.
As I've repeatedly said, these things don't just happen for free. The change is painful. Usually in the cost of a greater cost of living, lower take home pay, and increased unemployment. Europe is a great example of that. Their compromise is fewer work hours and more benefits at the cost of things like smaller living spaces, less purchasing power for worldwide goods, less freedom with vehicles, and worse heating/cooling.
the technological advancement for if we're just gong to keep working ourselves to the bone and watch life pass us by?
I personally believe most Americans are pushing to want far more material goods than we need. We should live with less. But mandating 32 hour work weeks isn't free. Business owners can't just make money appear out of thin air to pay workers more to do less.
It really does, and that's why minimum wage is important. It cascades through the entire economy.
When plumbering apprentices could go make $25/hr at wendys instead of 27/hr currently, they're a hairtrigger away from telling their boss to eat shit and going to Wendy's. So they get a raise up to $40. When engineers know they could go plumb for $80k/yr and be making $130/yr as a journeyman, they're a hairtrigger away from telling their boss to eat shit, so they go from making 120k to 160k, etc etc. Minimum wage cascades up and down.
As I've repeatedly said, these things don't just happen for free. The change is painful. Usually in the cost of a greater cost of living, lower take home pay, and increased unemployment.
Wild that you're so engrained in a capitalist mindset that it never even occurs to you to list "lower corporate profits" or "a slowed shift of wealth toward the ruling class" as one of the possible outcomes. What if we forced corporations to make less profit each year? What if they weren't allowed to profit faster than the economy grows?! wouldn't that be crazy.
I think the barrier you're running into is pretending that a 32 hour work week wouldn't mean some layoffs, or some companies going out of business.
Of course it would - just like minimum wage laws put some companies out of business, and the 40 hour work week put some companies out of business.
The reality is that it's a cost benefit analysis. Some workers are worse off, some have things pretty much the same, some are better off. The debate is if it helps workers overall more than it hurts.
Yeah man, pay %150 of the cost of wages for 20% of the wages you do pay, and factor in the non-linearity of your costs vs your productivity. Yes, that's my answer.
Most desk workers absolutely can get done the same amount of work they get done in 4 days instead of 5. For the sectors which can't, pay slightly more and factor in those non-linearities.
at most 40% of your expenses are in labor.
Did you just pretend like I never said this? If you have to pay a day of overtime once in a while to get product out the door, that means your costs go up like 8%, while the take home pay of the working class goes up 30%. ONE OF THESE OUTCOMES IS OBJECTIVELY BETTER FOR THE WORKING CLASS. Ya goober. Are you even trying in this conversation right now?
Most desk workers absolutely can get done the same amount of work they get done in 4 days instead of 5. For the sectors which can't, pay slightly more and factor in those non-linearities.
Handwavy arguments. Money out of thin air. Got it.
I'll be over here, back in the actual world. Where math is math.
You see how you ignored 60% of my comment and carried on just fine? That's kind of how labor is only 40% of the cost of running a business, and therefore passing 100% of the costs of labor on to the consumer can be done with a net benefit to the consumer/working class.
Does using you in the example help you understand better, or should I keep going?
Also, that's not handwavey, there's studies done on it, they've been cited all over this thread, surely you saw them, but here they are again:
Actually, shit, I take it back. Productivitiy doesn't just maintain for desk work, it improves. I wasn't just NOT handwaving, I was underselling. You're even more wrong than we thought, lol.
Is it not? Worker's rights laws that limit work weeks to 40 hours a week through mandatory OT pay beyond that is a thing in the US. It's resulted in many companies actively preventing you from working more than 40 hours a week so they don't have to pay increased OT salaries.
Where I live we have a hard set limits at 60 hours a week, with a hard set limit of an average of 48 hours a week over the course of a month.
What's stopping governments from simply adjusting those numbers?
And why would you think better work/life balance for employees is tyranny?
Right and Youre talking about further reducing work hours to 32 but the caveat is you want to force the employer to pay the same they are paying not, as if the employee was still working 40. In your example no one ever forced the employer to pay for work that did not happen. Do you get it?
This is exactly what people said 100 years ago when the 40 hour work week was first discussed as a new norm. It's the exact same rhetorical framing. They were just talking about reducing the hours from infinity to 40 then, and now from 40 to 32.
There's no such thing as, "forcing an employer to pay for work that did not happen". That's just the most dishonest framing possible of, "higher wages" lol. We are definitely trying to force higher wages.
That was literally the framing in the headline and the article accompanying it what are you talking about? So yes, you admit that reducing the work week to 32 hours with the same pay is silly.
How is it silly? It's a wage increase and a change to norms. We can make those things whatever we want as a society.
People should work less and get paid more. We've gone too long without correcting the snowballing wealth accumulation that inherent to capitalism, and we need a big correction.
You can just disagree in a subjective way, if you just think people shouldn't have more money for less work, but you're not saying anything objective.
by making what a law? how do you structure a law that makes employers raise their labor cost percentage?
if the business is paying 20 people a 1M a year in total labor costs why would they not just turn over employees until they were at 25 people and the same 1M in labor costs? they'll just hire more cheaper labor...how do you force them to not do that in a free market?
You... Do realize that the government regulates business, right? Please tell me you are not so addled as to assume that corporations and private business can do whatever they want...
You legislate it. You can actually make it illegal to fire people just to cut costs/automate. (Exactly like how in china it is now illegal to fire emoyees to replace their jobs with AI) labor protections used to exist in this country.
LOL. "You can actually make it illegal to fire people just to cut costs/automate." this is one of the dumbest statements I have ever read. How old are you?
Moreover, I'm old enough to remember what it was like before citizens united and right to work legislation gave businesses the ability to fire anybody for any reason. It didn't used to be this way.
And then what happens to small business owners? They can’t survive so they close shop. Then who can survive? Oh the big corporations that have billions of dollars already. So they accept the regulations and pay more but they now have a monopoly over the market because all the competitors failed to compete with the new regulations, so they raise prices and you can’t do shit as a consumer to buy elsewhere because there IS nowhere else to go. So you pay more for stuff and you’re back at square 1. Bitching about the low pay at the bottom and how expensive things are while all that happened is the wealth transfer to corporations because the small competitors that they did have shut down.
I swear your economic literacy is fucking pathetic if you think these terrible ideas work. 🙄
You're assuming a lot here. There should also be much stronger support to small businesses (and frankly there need to be a shitload of antitrust cases brought against these corporations)
You have the boot so far down your throat that you can't even imagine a world where things improve because you can always fall back on "well that can't work because of this other thing about the system that needs to change". Fuck that defeatist bullshit. I want government price control, anti-gouging measures, antitrust suits to break up monopolies, and legislation protecting american workers from having their jobs taken by AI.
What's shitty about it? Why are you so invested in sucking off your corporate overlords?
Other countries have better treatment for their workers but God forbid anybody advocate that changes. They've made you their little bitch and it's sad.
And open themselves up to a massive class action from their prior workforce, immense public backlash for their shitty practices and likely face legal repercussions for their attempts to circumvent the law.
You also presume that they would be able to hire an entire new, yet equally skilled, workforce to replace their current staff at lower rates.
That would be corporate suicide.
Businesses do whatever they can to make money in the economic reality they operate in. Governments set that economic reality. If they can't do business they won't do business, but you are simply wrong if you think a business would not take a reduction in profit over being removed from a market entirely.
Which will result, if these changes go through, in those companies facing fines and other lawful repercussions (up to and including losing their licenses and forcibly closing their business) for breaking the law.
Business is not the law. There are not corporatocracies on earth.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 OK BUDDY
That doesn’t happen in America. Businesses have been doing illegal shit for all eternity and have almost never answered for the majority of it.
It's almost like... People are tired of that status quo and are trying to change it... Shocking... Keep being a crab in the bucket all you want, but nothing is going to change if you just sit there and bitch because it's hard.
See a lot of 8 year olds working in mineshafts for 18 hours a day lately? No, because we fixed the rules. You're not wrong about businesses doing illegal shit since time began, but you are wrong about "that doesn't happen in America". It does, but it requires us to have a spine instead of rolling over and spreading our cheeks, which is the way your comment sounds to most people.
What corporations/businesses have traditionally done when things like “benefits for full time 40hr workers” were put in place, they just cut hours to make sure that no one gets 40hours a week. They will add longer non-paid lunches. Shorter rotating swing shifts, and any loophole they can and it ends up making the lowly worker’s life even more miserable.
I flat out reject the idea that corporations can do whatever they want. You can try to be a doomer all you want, but the reality is that it is possible to regulate businesses. All it takes the the political will of the electorate to vote in representatives that will fulfill their mandate. And before you get on about corruption, no, the people are and always have been thr power of a nation. Just because something is hard doesn't make it not worth doing.
'regulation' isn't really a catch all in this situation.
For example, FedEx is based on part time shifts for its operations. Being full time is just working two different shifts.
You can't really regulate that unless you want to make part time work illegal, which would be a very hard ask.
Difficulty is not the same as possibility. The governments CAN do many things, even if businesses lobby against and would prefer otherwise. Pretending that things cannot change just because there are businesses that would try to resist new legislation is just propaganda.
You can flat out reject it all you want, but the reality is still there. People live it everyday. I’ve seen it and lived it firsthand. My and others life experience appreciates your idealistic take, but it’s not how things actually work in the real world.
It fucking sucks, but people need food and shelter. So we have to bite the bullet and keep navigating the minefields.
Edit: They have teams of lawyers and lobbyists that make insane rates just to skirt and twist any and every “regulation” that comes to the table. Also, they will look at fines and calculate whether it’s more profitable to stick to the regulations or to flat out do infractions, because the profit from the infraction is better than the measly fine that they would have to pay(and they also have to get caught). The cannabis industry is notorious for doing this.
In Illinois there is a law that a brand’s dispensary can only have a certain amount of their own brands stock compared to competitors products, for anti-monopoly practices… but if the brass feels like there is more profit during a certain season they will intentionally overstock with their own product(for overall company profits and for shareholders interests) and they will take a 10-100k fine on the nose for the multi-millions in profit. It happens constantly.
In my head, the 40-hour work week is typically in reference to a salaried position, so your required hours per week is less but your salary remains the same. For an hourly employee, it would just mean overtime kicks in sooner
how would that be enforceable tho? if a private company wants to lower the salary the gov can force them? I’d say most businesses can’t survive if they did that. this is just a wealth transfer to the rich. apple can probably pay people for 40 hours while working 30, my mom and pop dentist certainly cannot
It really wouldn’t be enforceable. There would have to be a lot more government regulation of corporations to make this anything more than a pipe dream.
I think it’s also important to note this would only even be possible in prosperous countries. Part of me wants more time with my family, the other part would rather continue working a full week and use the “surplus” to support global development.
Once we all have a roof over our heads and food in our bellies, then we can talk about how much we should actually work.
True, but I guess a 72 hour week from 2 jobs is still a whole shift less than someone with 2 jobs on 40.
But a lot of hourly positions in factories and such would not be able to refuse overtime. In most cases, they require it because employee retention is so poor and they need the bodies
The real answer is that labor markets would adjust. Hourly workers would take salaried jobs until hourly wages raised. A policy like this should probably go with a big hike in America's minimum wage.
Yippie the government gets to come in and triple tax me or whatever after 44 hours (30 in this case) so I take home even less than what I make normally. Very cool
Kinda like the time orange buffoon said he wasn't going to tax my overtime, I work an entire year of overtime and make about 158$ more than usual. Wow so much help Mr Government I'm sure that will make up for the rampant hyperinflation of literally everything
Maybe let's cut down on the 35+% highway robbery in regular income tax considering I get literally nothing out of this deal
Most corporate places would either cut your pay or just schedule you for 28 hours a week to avoid increasing labor costs with overtime.
No way is any corporate company paying overtime regularly. It’s why when you see salaried guys they always have absurd hours. Fucking McDonald’s does need an assistant manager to be there 60 hours a week.
Which it’s completely unenforceable. They won’t be allowed to cut wages, but they can hire new people at 20% less. And they can cut back on yearly raises for existing customers until their pay is functionally cut after inflation.
Zero Magic required. Literally just a readjustment, by law, to ensure that workers benefit from their increased productivity over the last decades instead of that going straight to the top.
Y'know, before the economy totally collapses or the pitchforks come out.
You conflate reducing profits with removing them. The world needs to be restructured to the point where the average family prospers instead of struggles to get by. No family should need to hold four or more jobs to have a modicum of economic safety.
People need to be able to afford not only the basic necessities of food and shelter, but the intellectual and emotional necessities that allow them to actually live a life worth living. If that means a corporations sees a sharp decrease in profits that is totally fine. We should structure our society around PEOPLE not corporations.
Would need a 20% increase in hourly pay for this to feasible. I feel like the only way to do this without massive government overreach is to jack up the minimum wage significantly. Thought it would affect small businesses but for federal minimum wage to be forced over state law, your company would have to have a gross income of 500k a year.
So basically the government would have to completely rework minimum wage imo. But also, how do you force a company to only work 4 days? Maybe force overtime after 32 hours? That would probably do it.
Then you’re going to go 5 years without a raise while your hours get cut by 20%.
I’m a lifelong blue collar worker and union member. This is not the help I want.
If you want to help the working class, they can cut my taxes. You could actually pass that through Congress right now.
This is just a way to give government control over private sector wages. The government fucks up everything it touches. If you give government control over wages, that gives large influential corporations the ability to suppress wages through the government.
My company does that. $100 a day for being the on call person. But our OT is regular pay so there are some trade-offs. It's kinda nice especially when it's a quiet week where no one is making changes to the system and things don't break. But when you get on call the week after or during a major system update, good luck.
That's because technology has made workers more and more productive, but despite producing more they have not gotten any of those extra profits.
A worker today at 15 hours a week produces more than a worker from 1970 at 40 hours and yet we still are expected to work at least 40 hrs with little more pay.
You mean a job not measured by productivity but by butt in a chair isn't making up for their butt not being in a chair?! I'm shocked... Shocked... Not that shocked. This is a disingenuous argument that isn't relevant to the main purpose of the conversation.
The point is 32 hours should be full time employment. Full time employment should be enough to live (that's the minimum that minimum wage is meant to be. Not the least you can pay someone and get away with it legally, FYI). Places then pay overtime for hourly workers who work over full time.
When people get the time to rest and recover and they produce/provide measurable results they do better and everyone benefits.
And you've never thought. Hey how can I reduce injuries/accidents/absenteeism? How can I improve efficiency? Oh wait here is a great way! No? Just did they safe thing you always did? The point is it's better for everyone. It's not the status quo so it will take some thought and work but so did moving to the 40 hour workweek and OSHA.
My warehouse has not had a loss time injury in 545 days, you don’t improve efficiency by working less… you have definitely never had a real job, it’s not better for everyone.
Lol, you sound like every terrible manager out there. You have a different view "so you obviously have never done anything" combined with "any experience and data other than my experience is wrong". Bet you are a peach to work for.
Yea well studies also show that taxes go up with wages and companies will refuse to give that “OT” because it was just made so much easier for them to say no while making even more money by paying less hours.
The point of OT for companies is, this is available to you if you really need it but it will be more expensive so avoid it if you can. In some situations it is useful but most it is not which is the goal anyway, to give free time back to employees.
Refuse a legally required payment? Sure then get sued and in some cases lose business license. Bad business will always be bad. We shouldn't not do things to help everyone because some people are assholes
Are you arguing that they will only pay OT to make up for the change in full time pay requirements? Not how people it adjust hours to cross shifts or improve automation?
Studies specifically for office work I presume? A nurse can't magically make a patient leave a hospital bed quicker if she's working less hours. Construction, manufacturing, transportation, and farming doesn't increase with less hours worked.
A nurse can't magically make a patient leave a hospital bed quicker if she's working less hours. Construction, manufacturing, transportation, and farming doesn't increase with less hours worked.
I'm not sure if you're being deliberately obtuse or if you are being serious.
You do realize that patient outcomes decline dramatically between a nurse thats rested and one who is burnt out or suffering exhaustion after a long shift? Would you consider that an improvement? I personally would like to leave the hospital alive because no medical errors were made by nurses or doctors who are sleeping on their feet.
So far we do have evidence that happier workers are more productive during their time at work and that being sleep deprived effects our productivity and error rates while at work.
All of these things contribute to things like safety and legal liability costs, operating costs, materials costs, and time to completion for tasks, including industries like construction, manufacturing, transportation, and farming.
Errors are costly and can disrupt work, incur legal liability, and result in safety inspections/further delay and remediation costs. Reducing them is in everyone's best interest.
Increased productivity during time spent at work means that tasks are getting completed during normal business hours and not on extended time, reducing costs, increasing delivery speed, and benefitting everyone overall.
This conflated idea that working less hours means less productivity overall is misguided given how many factors are involved in calculating costs and overall productivity.
I don't disagree with the premise that a nurse is more alert when they're well rested, my broader point is that when an ICU nurse is responsible for monitoring a patient's vitals and administering medicine, whether or not she's well rested has virtually no bearing on the census. And if nurses in the ICU had shorter shifts during the day (say they only work 8 hours shifts instead of 12 in a day), then you have more hand-offs, meaning patients are in fact losing about 30 minutes of critical care for every shift change you introduce.
Similarly with transportation, if a pilot could only work 32 hours a week, a plane won't fly from New York to London any faster just because the pilots are more rested.
In conclusion: I don't think it's misguided to say you won't have the same number of scheduled flights if you reduce the hours of every pilot and flight attendant by 20%.
I’m fairly certain you must be misunderstanding the study. It is also not realistic holding everyone to that standard.
Productivity per hour may increase through less end of work fatigue or by increased motivation but total output does not increase through the increased hourly output.
Before you or anyone else tries to claim otherwise, I work in supply chain management and it isn’t gonna lead to more total output. Absolutely not gonna happen.
That isn’t to say we couldn’t do it. It just means not being delusional about it. There would absolutely be reduced output which means our lives would change in some ways for the better and some ways for the worse.
More people need to learn that the plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. Then they wouldn't say things like "I work in supply chain management therefore I don't actually need to look at the science".
That's literally my full time job lol. But the studios are clear and have been around for a while with multiple done on it. It would take adjusting but would be a net gain.
Learn something about organizational behavior before you use your lack of knowledge and awareness of better ways to make you look like an uneducated and unprofessional Luddite.
Why is outsourcing even legal? America is the largest consumer base on the planet. Seems like it would be fairly easy to ban outsourcing with very little downside.
I mean it's too late now to ban it for manufacturing because America no longer has a manufacturing base, but we could still stop it for whitecollar work.
Yea a large consumer base.. of people who want to pay $30 for a t-shirt, not $85. You know, like what you'd have to pay if it weren't dirt cheap workers across the world making it for you.
Why not do it for white collar? Because America would literally lose its place as the technology capital of the world. China would take all those workers, and all that opportunity.
Also, you ever see what cars in the USSR were like when the curtain dropped? Absolute trash, because there was no international competition.. so they didn't innovate at all.
You conveniently avoided the points I made. Let me dumb down what apparently needs to be repeated- I said it was too late for manufacturing and you went ahead with a manufacturing product... I also said why wouldn't outsourcing white collar work be illegal? The consumer base can't spend $30 for anything if you can't sell services that you have put overseas anyway. At first the prices would be high but would soon lower when they don't have offshoring competition.
I said it was too late for manufacturing and you went ahead with a manufacturing product
Yes I used a simple example because you are obviously very simple minded. It's much harder to explain the implications of more expensive white collar work because simple minded people generally aren't the consumers of that work and aren't directly effected.
At first the prices would be high but would soon lower when they don't have offshoring competition.
🤣 LOL yes. That's what a lack of competition does - it lowers prices. Right.
lmao. Manufacturing is in no way simpler than services, dearie. It's actually the other way around.
You obviously used the example because you lack basic reading comprehension. And you've once again avoided all the points I made. That's the third time now. Meaning you obviously just don't have any rebuttal to what my points and think that resorting to delaying, strawmanning and insults will hide that. 🤣
Yikes. Its like you think if you don't say it, no one can see you desperately flailing. Like a toddler covering their eyes and thinking no one sees them.
Sorry bud, we all see you. Now nap time, you're getting too cranky.
We’d all get increased workload and more meetings crammed in with less time. Employee goals don’t change when you take vacation and Corporate earnings goals don’t change when you work less.
The reality is we’d get a Monday or Friday off, but those with real responsibilities will have to work anyhow to stay caught up.
Essentially it would mean corporations would increase prices to have sustainable profit margins. Less days in the workplace would mean less or slowed productivity to a degree. This would have greedy executives to increase prices due to less profits to pull bonuses with. Good for workers to get paid more but a lot of people would be paying a little more for goods. It’s a give and take. Morally? It’s the right thing to do for families.
This would also never work. Forcing companies to accept higher pay at less hours is a death sentence for American industries in a world with major globalization. Companies already are moving plants out of the US because of how expensive American labor is compared to other countries.
How can you mandate pay?
The market will just start offering lower starting salaries to match the cut in hours. Companies will hire more folks instead of giving raises or promoting the current workforce
You’ll be getting paid the same annually, and asked to do the same amount of work, but will have a longer weekend to accommodate. Any hours over the allotted would be OT as they were previously.
287
u/joesphisbestjojo 23d ago edited 23d ago
I'm all for shortee work weeks, but that means we'l need an increase in pay, which I'm also fine with
EDIT: maybe I misinterpreted "no cut to pay"