Bernie Sanders unveils 32-hour workweek bill

[Liminal Trans Girl]

Most workers don't even work 32-hours in a 40-hour work week. Why not cut eight hours of pretending off of that?

I remember that on my full time job, I lost at least one and a half hours a day spent not working

[Flats the Flounder]

During the Gilded Age, before federal labor standards and union bargaining, 72-hour-weeks where you worked in a factory 12 hours a day, 6 days a week were perfectly normal.

And when people called for shorter work weeks, the very concerned factory owners insisted that was economically impossible, they could never possibly afford that and they would have no choice but to close down if the meddling bureaucrats and labor agitators had their way.

sure, and where we draw the line is the argument we are having now.  Why not a 24 hour work week?  And it will have an affect on prices and wages that will not be good for anyone.  Maybe the positives outweigh the negatives (which is likely impossible to know at this point), but to ignore the negatives because assholes 100 years ago used similarly sounding arguments is, and you know this, dumb.

I mean, why not a 24 hour work week at some point in the future? I think what was established after we had introduced these laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was that there wasn't this predicted economic disaster that befell the country after. In fact, any inflation that might have occurred was likely offset by the fact that companies were able to reduce their expenses by having fewer operating hours, as well as employees being able to save money on things like commuter costs.

[dead0man]

During the Gilded Age, before federal labor standards and union bargaining, 72-hour-weeks where you worked in a factory 12 hours a day, 6 days a week were perfectly normal.

And when people called for shorter work weeks, the very concerned factory owners insisted that was economically impossible, they could never possibly afford that and they would have no choice but to close down if the meddling bureaucrats and labor agitators had their way.

sure, and where we draw the line is the argument we are having now.  Why not a 24 hour work week?  And it will have an affect on prices and wages that will not be good for anyone.  Maybe the positives outweigh the negatives (which is likely impossible to know at this point), but to ignore the negatives because assholes 100 years ago used similarly sounding arguments is, and you know this, dumb.

I mean, why not a 24 hour work week at some point in the future? I think what was established after we had introduced these laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was that there wasn't this predicted economic disaster that befell the country after. In fact, any inflation that might have occurred was likely offset by the fact that companies were able to reduce their expenses by having fewer operating hours, as well as employees being able to save money on things like commuter costs.

what small percentage of companies will be able to reduce hours?  'cause most companies make stuff or sell stuff to people, and you can't cut hours from either of those (unless you want to also cut the companies income).  The mostly useless administrators hours can be cut, a lot, and no one will notice the difference.

[Celebi]

France has 35 hour work week without any negative issues.

[dead0man]

France has 35 hour work week without any negative issues.

yeah, there is nothing at all wrong with labor in France


(to be fair, the problems in France are caused by things much worse than the number hours the average worker works in a week)

[Celebi]

France has 35 hour work week without any negative issues.

yeah, there is nothing at all wrong with labor in France


(to be fair, the problems in France are caused by things much worse than the number hours the average worker works in a week)

France is one of the most prosperous economies in the world, country with high living standards and excellent healthcare. Whatever they're doing is working.

[dead0man]

France has 35 hour work week without any negative issues.

yeah, there is nothing at all wrong with labor in France


(to be fair, the problems in France are caused by things much worse than the number hours the average worker works in a week)

France is one of the most prosperous economies in the world, country with high living standards and excellent healthcare. Whatever they're doing is working.

oh well, then I guess they have nothing to worry about.  My mistake.

[DS0816]

…

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday introduced a bill to establish a standard four-day workweek in the United States without any reduction in pay.

…

…

This was introduced at a time in which the Democratic Party does not have both houses of Congress.

In other words: deliberate timing of knowing it will likely not pass.

The Republicans should vote anyway to pass it.

[Diabolical Materialism]

Please for the love of god pass this

[Electric Circus]

I love how this is being touted as "a 32-hour work week WITHOUT A PAY DECREASE," as if there were any reliable way to guarantee that. This bill is so dumb that it makes the worthy goal of a shorter work week look ridiculous.

[Fuzzy Bear]

I wonder how many people pushing this have actually been in the workforce.  How many hours they actually work.  How their employer would be affected by having to give everyone an instant 20% raise (which it would be).

Experience is relevant in evaluating the credibility of one's argument.  When I was young I believed I was entitled to more because I needed and wanted.  Nowadays, I still need and want, but I recognize that if the owner of an enterprise doesn't have his/her needs/wants met from the fruits of their enterprise, they can simply close up shop.  Yes, if the Government employed us all, there would be political pressure to keep the unprofitable shop open, but there would also be demands from other parts of the electorate to shut down the unprofitable shop.  And every revolution of some sort of proletariat has ended up as a form of the Soviet Union or Communist China.

[jojoju1998]

I wonder how many people pushing this have actually been in the workforce.  How many hours they actually work.  How their employer would be affected by having to give everyone an instant 20% raise (which it would be).

Experience is relevant in evaluating the credibility of one's argument.  When I was young I believed I was entitled to more because I needed and wanted.  Nowadays, I still need and want, but I recognize that if the owner of an enterprise doesn't have his/her needs/wants met from the fruits of their enterprise, they can simply close up shop.  Yes, if the Government employed us all, there would be political pressure to keep the unprofitable shop open, but there would also be demands from other parts of the electorate to shut down the unprofitable shop.  And every revolution of some sort of proletariat has ended up as a form of the Soviet Union or Communist China.

I mean, a 32 hour work week is mostly a boon as I said for white collar workers, because they don't really have to be on the mark 8-9 hours a day, 5 days a week. And they're salaried workers. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/four-day-week-workweek-studies-white-collar.html

If you're an hourly worker on the other hand, you're probably going to get a pay cut, unless your employer raises the hourly wage, but even that is not a given, because employers will probably not do that.

[Flats the Flounder]

During the Gilded Age, before federal labor standards and union bargaining, 72-hour-weeks where you worked in a factory 12 hours a day, 6 days a week were perfectly normal.

And when people called for shorter work weeks, the very concerned factory owners insisted that was economically impossible, they could never possibly afford that and they would have no choice but to close down if the meddling bureaucrats and labor agitators had their way.

sure, and where we draw the line is the argument we are having now.  Why not a 24 hour work week?  And it will have an affect on prices and wages that will not be good for anyone.  Maybe the positives outweigh the negatives (which is likely impossible to know at this point), but to ignore the negatives because assholes 100 years ago used similarly sounding arguments is, and you know this, dumb.

I mean, why not a 24 hour work week at some point in the future? I think what was established after we had introduced these laws like the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was that there wasn't this predicted economic disaster that befell the country after. In fact, any inflation that might have occurred was likely offset by the fact that companies were able to reduce their expenses by having fewer operating hours, as well as employees being able to save money on things like commuter costs.

what small percentage of companies will be able to reduce hours?  'cause most companies make stuff or sell stuff to people, and you can't cut hours from either of those (unless you want to also cut the companies income).  The mostly useless administrators hours can be cut, a lot, and no one will notice the difference.

How exactly will companies lose income by cutting their hours? In the business of "selling stuff," it's not like customers can only buy a product on a certain day of the week. Whatever income flow would be lost on the extra day the company's closed would just redistribute itself to the other days.

I'll grant you that the manufacturing industry might lose some income from a 32-hour workweek at first, but I'm not particularly worried about that for multiple reasons.

First, the loss of income itself would mostly affect people like the administrators at these companies, which you yourself admit are useless and overpaid for the quality of their work. Second, any losses that might result from a change in labor policy would end up subsiding over time as companies learn to navigate the change. Third, the role manufacturing plays in the US is somewhat overstated: https://www.statista.com/statistics/200143/employment-in-selected-us-industries/ Like it or not, the US is increasingly a white-collar society, and most Americans are not in the business or making or selling "stuff," unless you really stretch the definition of stuff. Finally, even in an absolute worst-case scenario, where US manufacturing loses a fifth of its output from this change (personally I think this is unlikely to happen), we would still be making $2 trillion dollars a year in manufacturing. The US would still be a manufacturing powerhouse no matter what catastrophe might befall its industry.

The fact is that most Americans don't own a company. Many of them don't own stock in a company. But almost everyone works, so I see the potential positives of a 32-hour workweek as greatly outweighing the potential negatives, at least on a human level.

[jojoju1998]

"When a company cuts a salaried worker’s hours by eliminating nonproductive work time, it is (rightly) called a victory for labor. When a company does the same to an hourly worker, however, it’s called “just-in-time scheduling.” While optimizing the percentage of work hours in which an employee is actually productive delivers more paid time off for the salaried worker, it leaves the hourly laborer with both less pay and a more unpredictable schedule.

As scheduling algorithms have empowered managers to precisely tailor worker shifts to match labor demand, hourly workers have found themselves subjected to ever-shifting schedules that make planning the rest of their lives more difficult. According to UC Berkeley’s Shift Project, up to 60 percent of hourly workers receive less than two weeks’ notice of revisions in their schedule.

There probably isn’t a way to give such laborers a better work-life balance without reducing their employers’ efficiency. And there almost certainly isn’t any way to ensure that every U.S. worker can earn enough in four workdays to rest easy during the other three without redistributing income from business owners to employees.

Meanwhile, in some sectors of the economy, establishing a four-day week would create massive social problems in the absence of drastic economic reforms. A marketing agency might be able to close up shop three days a week and still function. But a hospital can’t. Proponents of the four-day week aren’t blind to this reality. Rather, they argue that hospitals and other enterprises that must operate seven days a week should cut their workers’ hours and make up the difference through hiring.

This was an attractive proposal during the long period of mass unemployment that followed the Great Recession. Indeed, just a few years ago, proponents of a four-day week framed it as a means of sharing scarce jobs across a broader section of the workforce. And yet, in the United States, we already have more than 100,000 fewer registered nurses than our health-care sector demands. If we restrict every nurse to 32 working hours a week, then that gap will greatly expand.

Thus, universalizing the four-day week would require, on the one hand, policies that drastically increase wage laborers’ power and income relative to that of business owners (such as enhanced collective-bargaining rights and fiscal transfers) and, on the other hand, measures that channel more workers into socially vital occupations like nursing, perhaps through targeted wage subsidies and other benefits.

These reforms would not be all that technically difficult to execute. But at present, they are politically unthinkable.

"


https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/03/four-day-week-workweek-studies-white-collar.html

[Del Tachi]

In a short essay published in 1930, the world's most important economist, John Maynard Keynes, predicted that within 100 years, most people would be working no more than 15 hours a week.

He believed the standard of life for most people would be four to eight times better for us all by 2030, and that for the majority, working would be optional.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/a-century-ago-it-was-predicted-we-d-work-just-15-hours-a-week-by-2030-what-happened-20231204-p5eoqf.html

The optimism of the early 20th century seems unfathomable.

Standard of living in the United States today is 8x what it was in 1930, easily.  People make more money in less demanding professions, live longer and healthier lives, have more leisure time, and have access to way more consumer comforts and gadgets.

The reason working hasn’t become optional is not because evil capitalists gobble everything up for themselves, but because the scope of human want is infinite.  Satisfy one set of human needs and we simply extend our needs further.  There is no such thing as post-scarcity.

[GeneralMacArthur]

I am a salaried worker and my expectations are set on a biannual basis.

I have such and such amount of work I'm expected to get done by June 30.  How I get that done is up to me.

The expectation is that I work 40 hours a week -- my biweekly paycheck divides my salary by 80 and claims that's my hourly wage -- but realistically there are weeks where I work much more than that, and weeks where I work much less than that.  Overall it's probably about right, because I usually come in and go home at around 8-9 hours apart, and my expectations are set based on my productivity in previous years, which means they're set to what my productivity is for a 40 hour week.  But there are definitely days where I diddle around and do nothing, and then days where I'm in the office until midnight.

Frankly I wish I had the option to set my number higher and work an alleged 50 hours a week for 25% more pay.  I could definitely handle 25% more work in more like 40-45 hours a week by just being more efficient and hardcore about things.  But the company doesn't give you this option.  You can do a bunch of extra work to try and get promoted, but that's very speculative, and realistically it's hard to add meaningful extra work if you don't start it early.

I think if we went down to a 32 hour workweek, either I would have the same expectations and work the same amount anyway, or I would have 80% of my current expectations, for which I would expect to receive only 80% of my current pay, which would suck.

[GP270watch]

Why not a 31 hour work week?

Six minute abs!

[GP270watch]

 They've already done preliminary studies on the 32 hour work week or 4 day work week and guess what happens, no loss in productivity, happier and less sick workers with less turnover.

A Four-Day Workweek Reduces Stress without Hurting Productivity

[GeneralMacArthur]

They've already done preliminary studies on the 32 hour work week or 4 day work week and guess what happens, no loss in productivity, happier and less sick workers with less turnover.

A Four-Day Workweek Reduces Stress without Hurting Productivity

If I really believed this was true I would just label every Friday "no meeting day" on my calendar and stop coming into the office.  If it's true, my productivity shouldn't drop, right?

Idk, I feel like maybe I could pull it off, but I'd definitely be more stressed out the other 4 days and probably end working a lot of late nights to try and stick to my no-work-on-Fridays rule.

[West_Midlander]

How would this work in education?

[Ferguson97]

How would this work in education?

Per the article, they would get paid overtime after the 33rd hour.

[West_Midlander]

How would this work in education?

Per the article, they would get paid overtime after the 33rd hour.

OK, thanks.

[GoTfan]

They've already done preliminary studies on the 32 hour work week or 4 day work week and guess what happens, no loss in productivity, happier and less sick workers with less turnover.

A Four-Day Workweek Reduces Stress without Hurting Productivity

If I really believed this was true I would just label every Friday "no meeting day" on my calendar and stop coming into the office.  If it's true, my productivity shouldn't drop, right?

Idk, I feel like maybe I could pull it off, but I'd definitely be more stressed out the other 4 days and probably end working a lot of late nights to try and stick to my no-work-on-Fridays rule.

There's a distinction to be made here. If you choose to work forty hours if thirty-two is legislated, then it's your decision, and those of us favouring the four-day work week are fine with that.

[Electric Circus]

How would this work in education?

Per the article, they would get paid overtime after the 33rd hour.

Which means that you're either looking at substantial staff cuts or a big increase in property taxes.

Teachers weren't the first thing that came to mind for me though. That would be primary care doctors. That money would need to come from somewhere, too.

Is this bill going to come with federal compensation for FQHCs that are struggling to find staff anyway, and that would suddenly be on the hook for OT pay for nurses and primary care providers just to keep up with existing clinic hours? If not, you're probably screwing over a lot of Medicaid enrollees who will struggle to find care.

They've already done preliminary studies on the 32 hour work week or 4 day work week and guess what happens, no loss in productivity, happier and less sick workers with less turnover.

A Four-Day Workweek Reduces Stress without Hurting Productivity

That's nice, but you would need a 20% increase in productivity just to break even.

There's a distinction to be made here. If you choose to work forty hours if thirty-two is legislated, then it's your decision, and those of us favouring the four-day work week are fine with that.

Employers aren't always generous about overtime. If a bill like this became law, a lot of people would lose hours.

[Ferguson97]

Which means that you're either looking at substantial staff cuts or a big increase in property taxes.

Well, it's certainly not going to be cuts, because there's already a massive teacher shortage.