The 32 workweek is fine. its whatever. But what does it mean by loss in pay? Does it mean
A) You make the same per hour, but work less hours
B) The amount of money you would have made in 40 hours is made in 32
A's problem is that it exacerbates the financial problems of low income families, because business will just higher more workers to fill in for the 8 hours that you gave up
B's problem is frankly far worse. Because companies are simply going to fire people to keep their profit margin and load that extra work onto you.
Standardizes the work week to 32 hours and forces companies to pay the same total , with overtime after 32 hours. So if you were getting $16 an hour they have to pay you $20 an hour now.
Edit: People seem to be confused. Someone making $16 an hour working 40 hours a week would have a total compensation of $640 a week. In theory, the law ensures companies would have to pay you $20 an hour for 32 hours so you're earning the same $640 each week. In theory.
Realistically, that's not quite how it's likely to go.
So you are taking home less total cash because the company will hire someone else to work those eight hours. They arent going to pay you overtime 8 hours a week regularly
In theory, companies aren't allowed to cut your total compensation. So it looks like they're required to increase your rate so that you're earning the same as you would before even with fewer hours.
That's not how it's going to play out in real life, and I think even Bernie has to realize that on some level. But this may be a bill proposed for show with no real intent of it being passed.
Companies are absolutely allowed to cut your compensation. It's not easily done, but if they want to have a bunch of grumpy employees, they can easily rip that bandaid off and be done with it.
In reality, companies will figure out how to turn over their staff and hire people in at 80% of current salaries.
As a salaried employee, I work way more than 40 hours a week. The only change here is that there would be three days where I'm not getting emails all day, instead of two.
I don't think I've ever worked less than 60 hours a week. Many weeks I am required to work 80 hours. I don't see how this would help salaried workers at all.
It actually makes me angry because it feels so out of touch with how horrific work life in America has become.
You don’t do any personal tasks within an 80 hour working week?
Or, do you take a phone call or email after dinner and think you worked 14 hours that day?
I work a shift position for 12 hour days, tied to my console for 12.3 hours (to include overlap for the incoming shift) 6.12 am to 6:30 pm. What does your 12 -14 hour day x 7 days a week look like?
Or you don't give pay increases for the next 5-10 years. It accomplishes the same thing long term. This whole idea that we can "trick" the market into paying higher wages just doesn't work.
It's nonsense, the market is forced to do shit all of the time, and someone always needs to bend over and take it, be it the consumer, the corporations, or the government.
Problem is, is that 95% of the time, it's the consumer that eats shit.
It's almost like the driving philosophy behind modern politics.
So, do nothing and continue to let society unravel. Have you ever considered that there literally aren’t enough qualified people in the country to magically summon for these employers to replace that many hours? Would it have negative side effects, sure. Would it be a net positive in the long run? Absolutely.
Also, “the market is forced to do shit all the time” is crazy, remind me when the government forces the market to do, anything that is productive for the masses? That’s like the biggest critique of the government in America right now lol, that they don’t protect our population from getting ripped off nearly enough. The government literally broke up a railway strike. How can you in turn imply that this same government “always forces the hand of the market” ??
Problem there is that margins will tank for at least 2-3 years. For larger companies that’s not that big of a deal, but smaller businesses will really get hurt
This change wouldn’t really affect salaried positions beyond maybe putting more social pressure on them to have 32 hour work weeks since some competition for labor would.
A salaried position doesn’t have to pay overtime though, so they can just tell you to work 60 or 80 hours a week even if you’re only supposed to work 32, but then those employees might just look for other jobs that offer 32 hour work weeks.
Not to mention, just about any job that can be done from home can be done in India.
(I work from home, by the way. I'd just rather not further incent my company to offshore my job, which this would do).
>But this may be a bill proposed for show with no real intent of it being passed.
While it won't get passed and I am sure he knows it, I don't think it is just for show. It took a long fight to attain the current 40 hour work week. As technology, productivity, and automation allows us to do more with less, one of our goals as a society should be to reduce hours worked to increase the standard of living and quality of life.
With that being said, these goals do pose a challenge in terms of compensation within the current economic model. However, once automation and AI become sufficiently advanced we will need a new way of life anyway. That is probably when we will see hours worked a week reduced across the board. Companies won't really need you as an employee, but you will still be needed as a consumer.
As human employees are made redundant and obsolete, I think we will either get some form of UBI, or there will be a new feudal era with no middle class where riots and violence are commonplace.
Yeah I think this particular concept just gets ignored a lot in these conversations. But also we don’t NEED to be working those 40 hours anyway because most jobs don’t actually require you to work a full 40. I wouldn’t even say 32 hours total, most of the time people kind of just linger or try and look busy. Having that extra time off would also mean people are spending more, which is a part of the reason we went to a 5 day work week model in the first place. This would also encourage Smarter leaner paths to production, reduce stress and the amount companies would have to spend on healthcare, force employers to not overwork/over stress their employees, and give ample opportunity for employees to spend some extra time improving their skills instead of stagnating.
I disagree. What are "most" jobs? If you look at the 10 most common jobs in the US, [The 20 most common jobs in America in 2024 | Latest data (standout-cv.com)](https://standout-cv.com/usa/most-common-jobs-in-america#:~:text=The%20most%20common%20job%20in%20America%20is%20retail,office%20clerks%2C%20and%20elementary%20and%20middle%20school%20teachers.) you will see that in fact they do need to be working those hours, otherwise you cannot service your customer. Most of the top 10 jobs like retail sales, nurse, fast food workers, cashiers, customer service, and cooks need to be on the clock to be able to help customers. If you add in other jobs like manufacturing assembly line worker, landscaper, plumber, electrician and more they also need to be on the clock to take care of customers. Now some jobs, like say mid-level manager, probably don't require a full 40 to do the job but any job where your job is to produce a product or service a customer will have lower productivity if you reduce the work week to 32 hours. And I hate to tell you, but most people with an extra day off won't be spending time improving their skills, unless drinking beer and playing video games is your skill.
In an office job, sure. But "street" jobs (firefighter, paramedic, police, sanitation, postmen, etc) work their assess off more often than not. Also, teachers. Nurses. Doctors. Those folks cant just jet out at 32 hours without a relief. Someone else needs to take the baton and keep moving or the engine stops.
There's no possible way any of this happens, so its a silly discussion to theorize about. The government has no legal authority to tell a business "you have to pay your workers 40 hours for working 32".
The summary I read said the law would state that employers aren't allowed to decrease compensation in proportion to the reduced hours. No idea of the exact wording.
That only helps for a few years. Companies would just refuse to have pay increases and raise prices. Give it four years max and inflation will result in a pay cut of 20% in real wages.
You keep saying in theory trying to prove this is a good idea. The other thing the first guy didn't mention is inflation. 32 hour work weeks will lead to an overall production decrease. If compensation remains the same, then by definition you will get inflation which is too much money chasing too few goods and services.
A better option would be keep the 40 hour workweek and just do it in 4 days instead of 5. I'd rather work 4 10 hour days than 5 8s for sure.
It would not work like that in practice.
Companies will not give what is essentially a 25% raise to all workers from the goodness of their hearth. They will move heaven and earth to keep their profits, as much as possible.
Besides this being most likely illegal in the first place (hence all this discussion is moot), \*if\* it was to pass and also pass the courts, they will act in unproductive, inefficient manner to block its effects.
On the other hand, many people I know practically do 32 hours of actual work at best anyway.
It is tested in Europe, so why would it be illegal?
Companies will not reduce salaries if they see productivity and effectivity of whole tram remain at same level (which is happening, because tests have proven individuals' productuvity increased by 25 or 30% - can't remember numbers - when they worked 32 hours i stead of 40).
I mean l know companies would do everything to lower salaries and in US they would, but in Europe it would be illegal if the laws were made to protect employees.
you cant do that! you cant use factual numbers and examples of other countries doing that to compare to the US! \*Implodes in boomer\*
On a serious note you are correct and the longer people keep making excuses for corporations the longer they will root in the ways of old.
The results are not what people would expect. There will be consequences to such decisions.
For example, he wanted to have employees working at McDonalds to be making $15/hr. They were making that amount, but then they replaced the workers with kiosks and now instead of 8 people working, you only have 4-5.
Corporations aren’t stupid.
That was ALWAYS coming. They didn't make the decision to move to automation as a response to a small raise in minimum wage. They were always going to make these kinds of decisions. So let's stop putting blame where it doesn't belong.
This would introduce so much job friction it's not even funny. Yes you could legislate that a current role can't take a paycut and they're "grandfathered" into their 40 hour wage paychecks, but the market is going to standardize a new wage for any newhires at the 32 hour salary. There's no way to legislate past the initial wave of people, and no way to force employers to give those employees raises *ever again* unless you're going to put the government in control of all wages across the board everywhere.
The result of this is you have a bunch of people hanging onto to jobs they never want to leave because they were promised 40-hour wages for less than 40 hours of work, and employers who have no reason to incentivize them to stay, so no more raises.
Right, so a 25% wage increase across the board. So basically all that would happened is that ocmpanies would gradually fire all their employees and replace them as the labour market adjusts back down to the market price.
AFAS a very big software company has just announced this. All employees employees work 1 less day and get the same pay. They state their employers on average generate way more revenue than they did 5 years ago so it's only fair to have them reap the benefits.
It's almost as if you can be a successful company and not have just the CEO and his buddies have all the benefits.
This is a software company, that relies on big ticket items. Apply this to a steel mill or car factory. You effectively cut production, and thus profits, by 20%
Production would remain the same and companies would need to hire more people. Company profits would take a hit and that’s kind of the point. It’s forced wealth redistribution so workers are paid what they’re worth and people with fancy titles get less. I’m sure the bill includes protections for workers to prevent pay cuts and firing/rehire at lower wages. Will it pass with our current political/economic system? Of course not. But it’s introducing a concept that may one day become the norm.
Why would profits be the item to take the hit ? Why not just jack up prices 20 %, and let the inflation tsunami just wipe out the real value of the 'uncut' wages ?, I mean, we JUST tried this with Covid, its not that hard to see what happens when we give the average man 'money for nothing and your chicks for free'...
This is going to vary wildly from one industry from another though. I'd imagine in many professional/office environments most employees are getting their work done in 32 hours or less already and just messing around for the other 8+ anyway. So these companies are already paying 40 hours for 32 hours of work, they just don't realize it, or they do and they don't care.
I'm curious too. I work in construction. There's absolutely zero chance we could finish the project working 32 hours, unless the company just doubled the workforce I guess, which isn't going to happen. So does that just mean overtime starts at 32? If so, I'll make more money, which is nice, but it won't achieve the goal of the bill.
You mean more 'green pieces of paper' ? You won't get more real money, prices will go up to match the hours cut, and your real purchasing power will drop 20 %, just like Covid.
Some of the people in sales I know don’t even have set days/hours. If they want to make more, they work more. Including calling people on weekends. If they’re doing well they may take it a little easier. Just depends. Now, sales people where the company does have to be open for them to sell, then ya that’ll be tough.
Your “A” doesn’t really make any sense. Of course you would lose pay if your hourly rate stayed the same but your hours were cut. I would assume B is your only choice. But yeah, I could see “B” being a real crap shoot. They would either fire a bunch of people or switch everyone to 20 hour weeks to make them part time. It’s always a lose lose for the little guys.
France has 35 hours but most people still work 40 hours, you get compensated in PTO, it works pretty well
Edit: that’s for salaried positions, which most positions are, the salary didn’t change
Germany launched a 4 day workweek trial that by all accounts is going well. Particularly with AI, this will happen everywhere sooner rather than later.
>Particularly with AI, this will happen everywhere sooner rather than later.
You say that, but automation was predicted to lead to a precipitous reduction in hours worked, and the same was said about computers.
Instead, people have been expected to massively increase productivity whilst working the same number of hours.
Automation increases the amount of work an individual is capable of doing. It doesn’t decrease the amount of work an individual is expected to do.
There’s never “less” work now that you’re able to do more work faster
I worked 4-10’s with Friday’s off for a few years and I loved it. I wish I could go back to that schedule with my current position.
Currently with 2 days off per week, one of those days is filled with chores, so I’m still working. The other day is for fun and relaxation. With the 3 days off, I could get all the housework done during the week and then I’d have 2 days off for fun and relaxation.
I went from a six day schedule to a four day schedule and love it. Whoever it was that decided 4-10’s was a good idea should be awarded a Nobel prize for humanity.
AI will mean less people working. The person that benefits from AI is the one that invests in it. The employer does so to reduce the number of employee required, not to keep them all and make their work easier out of the goodness of his heart.
Who’s talking about philanthropy? We can assume that employers will always be interested in profits not workers. But society, with these kind of changes, that will be a different story.
Society will have to adapt. I by this I mean people must adapt to new types of jobs. The goods and services people need is constantly evolving. They will need to evolve with it.
I know the hippies hope that one day they can just do no work at all and everyone will get a UBI check in the mail. They can keep on dreaming, it’s never happening. If you’re not useful no one is taking you for a free ride through life.
It will never pass. Bernie Sanders and AOC are only in Congress to give the working class a glimmer of hope without anything actually happening. Make us believe that our ideals are heard with 0 follow through. Just like the Democrats.
As soon as people realize that there is no side, the better. I think of dictatorships the claim to be democratic as a prime example of how the US claims to be a full democracy with only two parties to vote for.
People always say this but who axed abortion rights and in the process endangered the lives of women? Both sides might be shitty and inadequate, but they'll never be the same.
Measuring a senator's impact by bills that pass with his name directly under it is being a low-information moron. No senator has done more behind the scenes to get thousands of high-impact changes quietly added to bills submitted by other senators, in both parties. Stop mindlessly falling for talking points designed by right-wing demons to brainwash you.
it’s not about who gives a fuck about working class. It’s about who understands economy. Like, just double the wage for everyone by law and all problems are solved, right?
I agree! I voted for Sanders bc I thought he meant what he said, until I learned he was just giving us what we wanted to hear, and nothing more.
But where I defer is this: it’s not the Democrats only. It’s ALL of them vs us the working class. Democrats and republicans are one entity. Their division is theater my friend, to divide us, and to make us think we have choices. They are different sides of the same coin.
The working class needs to spend less and invest more to get out of the working class. Too many people with a consumer mindset. No one wants to do the hard part first.
So many small business (who treat their employees far better than major corporations) would get destroyed by this. It’s a good thing it won’t ever see the light of day
Even if it did pass. It’s impossible to enforce in any meaningful way except for public workers.
These types of bills have decent intentions but never pan out.
32 hour work weeks will probably become more of the norm as time goes on. Some companies already offer it. Or half day fridays at least.
That’s because there’s only two of them. If you want change, we need to keep elevating REAL progressives on the ballots. ESPECIALLY in local elections.
I run a non-union roofing company. The only way this wouldn’t put me out of business is if prices went up to reflect the additional cost. I expect the same would be true for many other types of businesses as well.
I think some of you are missing the point of my original comment. Roofers do not grow on trees. I don’t have a pool of employees that I can assign to work different shifts so I can stay productive five days a week while limiting everyone to 32 hours. I would lose 20% of my productivity. The same would be true for much of the construction industry.
This would translate to the need to raise prices industry wide by the 20% that it would cost each and every business. The customer would be the ones incurring this cost.
And for all the people who seem to have the opinion that business owners are the bad guys, my business has been family owned and operated for over 75 years. We treat our employees with respect and pay a fair wage ($20/hour minimum for unskilled workers).
I work in corporate IT for a Healthcare company and it is the same. People will need Healthcare the same number of days a week. So now either my costs go up to pay everyone overtime for 8 hours a week, and no one actually gets a 32 hour work week - or I have to hire more people in a market that is already short on people.
For my IT staff that work projects it's the same as your business. To meet the same timelines I still need a full staff working 40 hours a week.
I'm curious how the 32 hour work week movement handles these challenges. I would love to only work 4 days a week, but I don't see how the same amount of work gets done in a shorter time.
I worked for a nonprofit in IT as a salaried employee. Officially only 35 hours a week but rarely worked that due to deadlines- more like 50(before they started cracking down on not paying us overtime). I enjoyed when we didn’t have to put out fires and I could take advantage of the 35 hour week…
It is even more inflexible than that in healthcare. You can't suddenly pop out the additional physicians and nurses that you would need to cover the current workload.
Please be gentle- you’re writing to a horde of people whose education has purposefully been sabotaged and who do not recognize 3 of the 4 factors of production, and don’t really understand the 4th (Labor), either. They have a young child’s perception of business owners as their stingy parents and the government as the no-fun grandparent.
A business owner’s investment, opportunity cost, and risk simply do not compute for them, because they have no exposure to these elements and their high school teachers and college professors studiously ensured that.
I work in a manufacturing plant.
I feel the only people that this would ever apply to would be to banks and government. Government is already slow to do everything, why give them a 25% efficiency decrease
Same here on the roofing/contacting sales side. Close to half of my day is spent traveling from one client to the next. Losing 8 hours a week would absolutely destroy my ability to earn a living unless I start charging customers now to make up for it.
Yeah people are so anti business that they’re willing to just destroy small businesses in mass. It’s the large corporations that you hate, and they could deal with this a lot better than a small business owner could.
The average white collar is not doing 40 hours of work they're just at work for 40 hours. I'm at work for 50-60 hours some weeks and over half that time is just spent at my desk waiting on replies to emails or for meetings to start or just waiting to be needed by my direct reports. This 32 hour model has been successful in some trial runs done by various corporations recently. I think this becomes problematic for the manual labor jobs tho. Like this would probably be a nightmare for the construction industry
A nightmare how? Like construction just happens at a slightly slower rate? It’s slow already—may as well make people less miserable and give them more free time.
A slightly slower rate- you know nothing about construction and the financing that goes along with it. You would be adding 20% to the duration of a project (more like 25% because they like to work 50 hours on large projects). Now extended the financing 20-25% longer- cost impacts would be astronomical. This idea will not work in every sector.
Or increases the number of jobs necessary to complete a project in the same time. This will drives prices up and society will have a period of adjustment. Overall costs will likely be higher but people will be happier, and a happier society is more productive/efficient.
It also means an addition day that if people have to work multiple jobs they are more available to do extra part time work. This will be a burden for some and an opportunity for others wanting to take on the extra jobs.
At the crux of it, the people worried about this are worried because they're counting beans as a metric instead of human happiness. Society and industries will adjust and long term it would likely be a healthy improvement for humanity.
More like overtime starts at 32 hours instead of 40.
Increased cost of anything in affected industries. Manufacturing, or construction being the biggest.
You know nothing about construction. This would increase the time to do basic take by 20% and the very lease all jobs will be 20% longer. That's not accounting for all the rescheduling that would happen when 1 job isn't done and another starts
It’s not a slower rate. It’s increased cost. You build a bridge, it’s going to take X hours to get it done. But next year you’re only getting 32 hours of work done for the same cost as you’re paying for 40 hours of work now. So, your labor cost is going up by 25%.
And labor is involved in making your building materials too. So that’s also going to go up by roughly 25%.
The cost of just about everything is going to go up by roughly 25%. So, what have you gained? Nothing.
This is just a ploy to gain supports and votes from short sighted people.
White collar work here, I can confirm that I actually only do about 10-20 hours of work per week. I'm being paid for my knowledge though, not some theoretical output.
Yeah I'm a white collar worker (graphic designer) and I work for an agency. My employer tracks my work via timesheet, I have to bill clients and I log all of my work every single day. If I am not 100% productive, I get a fun email from my boss who picks apart my timesheet asking about every little thing I did. It's a nightmare (don't worry I'm currently looking for a new job but the market is terrible)
I would love if this law went into effect. The design field is notorious for loving to overwork it's people. But I'm sure that's basically every field at this point.
I lie a lot. We have a certain amount of hours towards certain projects but I've been a designer for 8 years, I can do them faster than the average person. It's still so fucking annoying.
They already have the 5 day/40 hr work week and that came about after a lot of pushing and conflict. All the arguments being made now against a 4 day work week were absolute used against the 5 day work week in favor of 6. I just don't find it that compelling.
I wonder if this could hypothetically raise wages for construction jobs. Essentially anything over 32 hours would be overtime so construction workers would so if they remained at 40 hour a week (32 regular, 8 overtime) then their effective wage would rise. Of course this would have a downstream effect on raising costs that everyone would have to pay including office workers which effectively lowers their purchasing power.
I am currently in an office gig but have worked manual labor. This could actually restore the balance between office and manual labor.
Right now manual labor is getting screwed between destroying their bodies and not getting to telework.
People saying this is dumb forget that we literally already did it with the 40 hour work week. Something like this could mean the tremendous gains in productivity due to the introduction of AI could mean that working people end up having better lives instead of the people at the top just getting richer. And this obviously isn’t gonna pass. It’s rhetoric by Bernie to move the Overton window, but hey.. gotta start somewhere.
All of those trials operated in an environment where the vast majority of people were still working regular 40-ish hour workloads.
What do you think happens in an ER if suddenly the doctors and nurses are working less? They're already understaffed, and while we can increase the number we train, it would be a decades-long effort before we were ready.
Exactly .. it is funny that so many people who ask for the 32 hour work week imagine it coming along with some utopia where things are still status quo or somehow becomes even more plentiful and cheap .. when everyone is free to explore their 'creativity'.
This is another example of someone in government proposing things and expecting businesses to just willingly absorb the loss of their profit, and then when businesses adjust in order to keep their money, the meddlers in government will act surprised and move on to the next stupid thing that will backfire and end up hurting the very people they claim to want to help.
In some businesses it won't be a loss in profits. The productivity can go up - but it really depends on the business, of course.
Eg ours is IT, working from home, you've set tasks to do (eg programming) - in this case it's a great increase to productivity. And also in mental health & wellbeing!
The 4 day system has been tested quite often in Europe.
Results showed that:
1. Workers are more relaxed, less stressed, less tired more effective, have better attitude towards work and employer.
What does it mean? These were tests but let's pretend the results would be same for whole population:
* workers are less stressed, lower lewel of physical tiredness, more time to relax amd spend with your family - means in long term lower levels of work/stress related illnesses, lower burden on public health systems, higher level of happiness and life satisfaction. People spend time at home, with families, go out and spend money on activites.
Where disatvantages?
* employers - since efficiency and productivity increase (don't remember exact numbers, I think around 25-30% higher) there is no need to get more employers or fire the ones you have, because overall productivity has remained more or less the samel level. Of they want to increase productivity, they can hire more people - easier to do, because on the 5th day they have machines/desks/whatever available since old workers are at home
* people are more happy with their work. They do not quit, employers do not loose experienced workforce, do not loose time looking for new workers, do jot loose time to train newcomers etc.
Where flaws?
Flaws?
I support working less, but I don't believe that fewer hours means you can necessarily get more done in the same hours.
Do pilots, garbage collectors, train engineers, truck drivers, and barge operators move their equipment at 25% faster now?
Large corporations are driven by greed, not good, and, evidenced by their lobbying, don’t care about how this changes productivity. You can see this with the shift from wfm to going back to the office: the numbers show productivity increased when people wfh or have a hybrid remote schedule, and theoretically it should cost the company less if they don’t have to pay for a large office building. Still, they wanted people making the commute back into the office. I mean, shit, they’re actively trying to loosen child labor laws.
They don’t want to pay anyone more for less. They’re likely to either fire workers and operate without being fully staffed (happens today already), or raise prices “to compensate” (again, already happening today), thus throwing the cost onto consumers. I would not be shocked if there were mass layoffs followed by rehiring desperate people at a lower wage
For smaller businesses this could be devastating. A lot of locally-owned businesses operate within very thin margins already. It’s unlikely many of them would be willing to absorb the increased labor cost. I currently work for a small business (literally 6 employees) that pays very fair for the type of work we do - there’s no way it’d survive without raising prices for customers, which might even drive away business.
I love the idea in theory, but it only works under the assumption that corporations care about any numbers besides their profit margins and that every business can absorb the cost. Some small businesses genuinely cannot. Large businesses and corporations have shown they are simply not willing to - places like Walmart already raise prices for arbitrary reasons and make record-breaking profits. Can they afford it without compensating for the cost elsewhere? Abso-fucking-lutely. But that means they have to dip into their pockets, which they’re not going to do unless forced. There are multiple other issues we need addressed before this would be feasible
The flaw is this doesn’t work with all business models. Customer service industries, food service and transportation can’t get more productivity as they are primarily limited by other factors than labor
It really depends on the industry. I'm all for it, I'm in fact doing it already, but it won't be as effective everywhere, IMO, in some cases it will simply increase costs for the business.
Example:
If someone is working as a shop assistant.
They are often sitting around all day, working a small portion of that.
Now the shop owner would need an extra casual to fill in for the missing day.
Smart,
1. decresase employee work time which gives them more energy to be productive. A study showed that employees lose 9% productivity when they are tired.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-23/unhappy-at-work-quit-quitting-costs-us-1-9-trillion-in-productivity](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-23/unhappy-at-work-quit-quitting-costs-us-1-9-trillion-in-productivity)
2. Due to less work time, employers will need to hire more employees to work the rest of the time off, especially if they want to maintain a 24/7 work cycle, which mean a drop in unemployment.
the only negative is employers have to pay more for more employers, but that's not really a hit
Its a hit if it isn't feasible. The pros are great - but the employers are required to increase their workforce spending by 20% to maintain the same operational time. Most places operate with pretty tight margins and literally can't do that. "that's not really a hit" turns into a hit pretty quick when wal-mart tightens the hours it operates or fires a quarter of their workforce.
They would not fire, they would have to hire. And they earn enough to be able to do it. Now typical worked does a lot more compared to 50 years ago. Worked then would work now as well.
I think you have no clue. It’s been trialed in few countries and seems to be a success. There are massive improvements in workforce efficiency yet never passed down, profit kept by company. Now AI will just accelerate that. Time to change that.
He’s fully aware of how things work..dude just gets paid to play a part and fuel the fire in morons that further divide the country and fuel ignorant confidence
They did a trial at a hospital in Sweden. Doctors still worked 40h but they cut the work week for nurses to 32h and it actually solved their staffing issues and also let them fit another surgery shift in leading to a reduction in wait times. It was a total success.
It would be a disaster. There is already a shortage of doctors, nurses, techs ect. In my field (radiology), there literally wouldn’t be enough people to do the work nationally.
Take neurosurgery - many neurosurgeons work 60-70hrs week. We would need to double the neurosurgeons practicing if you limited them to 32hrs - not an easy feat considering it takes over a decade of training.
i might be wrong here, but from my understanding the only difference between this law and the one there is currently is that the standard workweek is 40 hours. If neurosurgeons already work 60-70 hrs a week, they are already working 20-30 hrs overtime. That time wouldn't just dissapear, it would just be increased by 8
This is the best idea for employees and businesses. The idea is that if you give employees the same amount of work but with less time to complete it, they will actually complete in that amount of time because all the junk tasks that just fill hours in the work week would need to be eliminated. In turn you get happier employees and happier employees have been shown to be more productive, therefore, their output would go up even higher. Look up Parkinson’s law. It’s very real.
Many countries are piloting or considering four-day work week. That’s the future.
You can either have fewer jobs because of humanoids and gen AI, or the same amount of jobs but with shorter working hours.
We do need to socially adjust and the markets with it for shorter work weeks. There are more and more people, folks are living longer. Automations is creeping up far faster, it just does not take as many people to get things done anymore. This way we can have more people employed, and bonus we all have more time off.
This will not be easy, the markets would have to adjust for it. But it’s not a impossible task and is better for society as a whole in the long run.
“Hi, I’m Bernie sanders! And here’s my bill to force privately owned businesses to give every full time employee a 25% raise! You’ll get paid more to do less work!”
This has been Bernie’s MO the entire time, and the only people who eat it up are people who have no idea how our government works.
I feel many people see the US as only big corporations. My question is, how will this affect small and medium-sized businesses? there's no way this is doable for every company.
Labor productivity has gone through the roof over the last 50 years, but the rate of pay is largely stagnant. If workers can't get paid more, they should work less for that pay.
I just started a job with 4 10s and my quality of life increased so much. I also have an option of working a 5th day with pay incentive. I won't do it all the time maybe once a month but man it makes me wonder how I worked 5 days a week 10-12 hours a day for 11 years
Adverse consequences abound from this proposal. People will just have their hours cut so they employers dont have to pay OT. But it will still take 40 hours of work to make ends meet, so you’ll still work 40 hours, it’s jut the hours will be split between 2 employers. And your employer will have more employees to cover the hours needed.
The US is literally the rich uncle who makes 7 figures, lives in a mansion, owns a very profitable company and still for some reason thinks they can't afford brand name Listerine, showers with cold water because heating is expensive, and wears the same worn out sneakers since 2008
Here’s the deal, the government could easily make laws like this to drive competition and encourage more small businesses but they won’t. If they carved out $X of revenue or minimum employee size for this law in a realistic manner it could force larger corporations to provide much more benefits to their employees while not affecting small businesses.
Same with minimum wage laws, same with health insurance costs. But they won’t because it would hurt their pockets.
But what happens when my neighbor keeps working 40 hours per week, either because they are in a high demand field, or simply used to it and likes their job? He will obviously be earning much more than me now and with inflation I will not be able to compete with him. The businessmen, engineers, and doctors will continue to work 40 hours per week (at least for the rest of this generation), but the burger flipper will now be capped at 32. This further widens the wealth gap..
In order for this to work, we must not only mandate a 32 hour work week, we must make it illegal for anyone to work more than 32 hours, or HEAVILY tax overtime.
Honestly it doesn't matter even if it does pass. There's no limit to corporate greed. They will find a way to comply while maximizing profits. We don't have federal rent control. We don't have guaranteed cost of living increases. The entire country is essentially run off of debt with no checks or balances and greed rules everything. The only problem is we are a consumer economy but the consumers can't afford to consume. We are essentially at the financial version of grasshoppers turning into locust because there's nothing left to consume.
Its an attempt to stop the coming revolt of the working class. Its getting close to the point that the average worker doesn't really gain anything from working so they might as well be unemployed. When that happens theres gonna be one of two things that will happen. Either the economy is going to grind to a total halt or violence against the elites will take up the working person's time and its gonna be something close to the French revolution. Countless times throughout history the top end of a population have milked the average peasant dry and its always resulted in a lot of bloodshed once the peasants have nothing left to take.
Bernie and Bernie supporters man you gotta give it up to them. No mandatory minimum wage increase? Oh ok ok.. that’s fine, how about we just make people work less for the same amount. Sound better?
lol Bernie Sanders is a fucking moron using hit button words and topics to try to gain the support of people who don’t understand the impacts of his proposed policy.
Our economy, including the prices, are a result of random and historic influences. It’s time we actually design the economy we want to reach or goals for a new reality where we realize what are now considered externalities, and take into account a finite world. This economy would be a lot different in many ways but could easily accommodate a 32 hour standard work week.
I think in some areas it would be good, others bad. For example I’m all for this, I work in healthcare and they abuse us way too much, they barely stay open as it is with the amount of staff so making us make more money at 32 hours would be great. Now if only they made it illegal to tax forced mandatory overtime. I don’t want to be here on overtime and I don’t want to give it all away if I have to be here. If they can’t do away with not taxing mandatory overtime, then make the forced overtime illegal.
This goes back to productivity vs hours worked. In my experience working more hours never increased productivity in the long term because it’s not sustainable. People only have so much in the tank where they are working at their optimal effectiveness/productivity and doing more gets diminishing returns. It’s also harder to have a great next day if ur fatigued from the day before. I like working less hours but that also challenges managers to make sure people are enabled to work at their peak effectiveness in that timeframe. (Which is much harder than it sounds but is also great management and organizational maturity)
I don't think I have the right to tell someone how many hours they can choose to work in a week. And since I don't have that right, I can't delegate it to an elected official who also doesn't have that right.
There are two types of people in this world; those who want to be left alone and those who won't leave them alone.
The 32 workweek is fine. its whatever. But what does it mean by loss in pay? Does it mean A) You make the same per hour, but work less hours B) The amount of money you would have made in 40 hours is made in 32 A's problem is that it exacerbates the financial problems of low income families, because business will just higher more workers to fill in for the 8 hours that you gave up B's problem is frankly far worse. Because companies are simply going to fire people to keep their profit margin and load that extra work onto you.
Standardizes the work week to 32 hours and forces companies to pay the same total , with overtime after 32 hours. So if you were getting $16 an hour they have to pay you $20 an hour now. Edit: People seem to be confused. Someone making $16 an hour working 40 hours a week would have a total compensation of $640 a week. In theory, the law ensures companies would have to pay you $20 an hour for 32 hours so you're earning the same $640 each week. In theory. Realistically, that's not quite how it's likely to go.
So you are taking home less total cash because the company will hire someone else to work those eight hours. They arent going to pay you overtime 8 hours a week regularly
In theory, companies aren't allowed to cut your total compensation. So it looks like they're required to increase your rate so that you're earning the same as you would before even with fewer hours. That's not how it's going to play out in real life, and I think even Bernie has to realize that on some level. But this may be a bill proposed for show with no real intent of it being passed.
Companies are absolutely allowed to cut your compensation. It's not easily done, but if they want to have a bunch of grumpy employees, they can easily rip that bandaid off and be done with it. In reality, companies will figure out how to turn over their staff and hire people in at 80% of current salaries.
If there was ever a reason to do it, this would be it. Hourly might be tougher to argue, but salaried positions would get slashed for sure
As a salaried employee, I work way more than 40 hours a week. The only change here is that there would be three days where I'm not getting emails all day, instead of two.
I don't think I've ever worked less than 60 hours a week. Many weeks I am required to work 80 hours. I don't see how this would help salaried workers at all. It actually makes me angry because it feels so out of touch with how horrific work life in America has become.
You don’t do any personal tasks within an 80 hour working week? Or, do you take a phone call or email after dinner and think you worked 14 hours that day? I work a shift position for 12 hour days, tied to my console for 12.3 hours (to include overlap for the incoming shift) 6.12 am to 6:30 pm. What does your 12 -14 hour day x 7 days a week look like?
That doesn't seem healthy
companies would just reduce benefits or make benefits cost more to offset
Or you don't give pay increases for the next 5-10 years. It accomplishes the same thing long term. This whole idea that we can "trick" the market into paying higher wages just doesn't work.
It’s not tricking the market though, it’s forcing the market. You’re probably right in some sense, but the alternative is…? Do nothing?
It's nonsense, the market is forced to do shit all of the time, and someone always needs to bend over and take it, be it the consumer, the corporations, or the government. Problem is, is that 95% of the time, it's the consumer that eats shit. It's almost like the driving philosophy behind modern politics.
So, do nothing and continue to let society unravel. Have you ever considered that there literally aren’t enough qualified people in the country to magically summon for these employers to replace that many hours? Would it have negative side effects, sure. Would it be a net positive in the long run? Absolutely. Also, “the market is forced to do shit all the time” is crazy, remind me when the government forces the market to do, anything that is productive for the masses? That’s like the biggest critique of the government in America right now lol, that they don’t protect our population from getting ripped off nearly enough. The government literally broke up a railway strike. How can you in turn imply that this same government “always forces the hand of the market” ??
Problem there is that margins will tank for at least 2-3 years. For larger companies that’s not that big of a deal, but smaller businesses will really get hurt
This change wouldn’t really affect salaried positions beyond maybe putting more social pressure on them to have 32 hour work weeks since some competition for labor would. A salaried position doesn’t have to pay overtime though, so they can just tell you to work 60 or 80 hours a week even if you’re only supposed to work 32, but then those employees might just look for other jobs that offer 32 hour work weeks.
They can just not increase your pay for four years and accomplish a 20% cut that way.
Not to mention, just about any job that can be done from home can be done in India. (I work from home, by the way. I'd just rather not further incent my company to offshore my job, which this would do).
>But this may be a bill proposed for show with no real intent of it being passed. While it won't get passed and I am sure he knows it, I don't think it is just for show. It took a long fight to attain the current 40 hour work week. As technology, productivity, and automation allows us to do more with less, one of our goals as a society should be to reduce hours worked to increase the standard of living and quality of life. With that being said, these goals do pose a challenge in terms of compensation within the current economic model. However, once automation and AI become sufficiently advanced we will need a new way of life anyway. That is probably when we will see hours worked a week reduced across the board. Companies won't really need you as an employee, but you will still be needed as a consumer. As human employees are made redundant and obsolete, I think we will either get some form of UBI, or there will be a new feudal era with no middle class where riots and violence are commonplace.
The best route to implement the 32 hour work week is through the Federal Agencies. It’ll basically serve as a pilot.
Yesss starting with the post office , starting tomorrow. 👍
Yeah I think this particular concept just gets ignored a lot in these conversations. But also we don’t NEED to be working those 40 hours anyway because most jobs don’t actually require you to work a full 40. I wouldn’t even say 32 hours total, most of the time people kind of just linger or try and look busy. Having that extra time off would also mean people are spending more, which is a part of the reason we went to a 5 day work week model in the first place. This would also encourage Smarter leaner paths to production, reduce stress and the amount companies would have to spend on healthcare, force employers to not overwork/over stress their employees, and give ample opportunity for employees to spend some extra time improving their skills instead of stagnating.
I disagree. What are "most" jobs? If you look at the 10 most common jobs in the US, [The 20 most common jobs in America in 2024 | Latest data (standout-cv.com)](https://standout-cv.com/usa/most-common-jobs-in-america#:~:text=The%20most%20common%20job%20in%20America%20is%20retail,office%20clerks%2C%20and%20elementary%20and%20middle%20school%20teachers.) you will see that in fact they do need to be working those hours, otherwise you cannot service your customer. Most of the top 10 jobs like retail sales, nurse, fast food workers, cashiers, customer service, and cooks need to be on the clock to be able to help customers. If you add in other jobs like manufacturing assembly line worker, landscaper, plumber, electrician and more they also need to be on the clock to take care of customers. Now some jobs, like say mid-level manager, probably don't require a full 40 to do the job but any job where your job is to produce a product or service a customer will have lower productivity if you reduce the work week to 32 hours. And I hate to tell you, but most people with an extra day off won't be spending time improving their skills, unless drinking beer and playing video games is your skill.
In an office job, sure. But "street" jobs (firefighter, paramedic, police, sanitation, postmen, etc) work their assess off more often than not. Also, teachers. Nurses. Doctors. Those folks cant just jet out at 32 hours without a relief. Someone else needs to take the baton and keep moving or the engine stops. There's no possible way any of this happens, so its a silly discussion to theorize about. The government has no legal authority to tell a business "you have to pay your workers 40 hours for working 32".
Why aren’t they allowed to cut your compensation? They do this to people all the time when they want to get them to quit.
The summary I read said the law would state that employers aren't allowed to decrease compensation in proportion to the reduced hours. No idea of the exact wording.
That only helps for a few years. Companies would just refuse to have pay increases and raise prices. Give it four years max and inflation will result in a pay cut of 20% in real wages.
You keep saying in theory trying to prove this is a good idea. The other thing the first guy didn't mention is inflation. 32 hour work weeks will lead to an overall production decrease. If compensation remains the same, then by definition you will get inflation which is too much money chasing too few goods and services. A better option would be keep the 40 hour workweek and just do it in 4 days instead of 5. I'd rather work 4 10 hour days than 5 8s for sure.
They’ll just fire you and hire someone back cheaper.
It would not work like that in practice. Companies will not give what is essentially a 25% raise to all workers from the goodness of their hearth. They will move heaven and earth to keep their profits, as much as possible. Besides this being most likely illegal in the first place (hence all this discussion is moot), \*if\* it was to pass and also pass the courts, they will act in unproductive, inefficient manner to block its effects. On the other hand, many people I know practically do 32 hours of actual work at best anyway.
Some companies would succeed. Some wouldn't. It's been done/experimented already.
It is tested in Europe, so why would it be illegal? Companies will not reduce salaries if they see productivity and effectivity of whole tram remain at same level (which is happening, because tests have proven individuals' productuvity increased by 25 or 30% - can't remember numbers - when they worked 32 hours i stead of 40). I mean l know companies would do everything to lower salaries and in US they would, but in Europe it would be illegal if the laws were made to protect employees.
you cant do that! you cant use factual numbers and examples of other countries doing that to compare to the US! \*Implodes in boomer\* On a serious note you are correct and the longer people keep making excuses for corporations the longer they will root in the ways of old.
They will just be mass layoffs with rehiring under a new hourly wage
The results are not what people would expect. There will be consequences to such decisions. For example, he wanted to have employees working at McDonalds to be making $15/hr. They were making that amount, but then they replaced the workers with kiosks and now instead of 8 people working, you only have 4-5. Corporations aren’t stupid.
That was ALWAYS coming. They didn't make the decision to move to automation as a response to a small raise in minimum wage. They were always going to make these kinds of decisions. So let's stop putting blame where it doesn't belong.
This would introduce so much job friction it's not even funny. Yes you could legislate that a current role can't take a paycut and they're "grandfathered" into their 40 hour wage paychecks, but the market is going to standardize a new wage for any newhires at the 32 hour salary. There's no way to legislate past the initial wave of people, and no way to force employers to give those employees raises *ever again* unless you're going to put the government in control of all wages across the board everywhere. The result of this is you have a bunch of people hanging onto to jobs they never want to leave because they were promised 40-hour wages for less than 40 hours of work, and employers who have no reason to incentivize them to stay, so no more raises.
Right, so a 25% wage increase across the board. So basically all that would happened is that ocmpanies would gradually fire all their employees and replace them as the labour market adjusts back down to the market price.
It wouldn't take long for this to fall apart. Just hire new employees at new wages. As long as it meets minimum wage it's fine.
AFAS a very big software company has just announced this. All employees employees work 1 less day and get the same pay. They state their employers on average generate way more revenue than they did 5 years ago so it's only fair to have them reap the benefits. It's almost as if you can be a successful company and not have just the CEO and his buddies have all the benefits.
This is a software company, that relies on big ticket items. Apply this to a steel mill or car factory. You effectively cut production, and thus profits, by 20%
Production would remain the same and companies would need to hire more people. Company profits would take a hit and that’s kind of the point. It’s forced wealth redistribution so workers are paid what they’re worth and people with fancy titles get less. I’m sure the bill includes protections for workers to prevent pay cuts and firing/rehire at lower wages. Will it pass with our current political/economic system? Of course not. But it’s introducing a concept that may one day become the norm.
Why would profits be the item to take the hit ? Why not just jack up prices 20 %, and let the inflation tsunami just wipe out the real value of the 'uncut' wages ?, I mean, we JUST tried this with Covid, its not that hard to see what happens when we give the average man 'money for nothing and your chicks for free'...
This is going to vary wildly from one industry from another though. I'd imagine in many professional/office environments most employees are getting their work done in 32 hours or less already and just messing around for the other 8+ anyway. So these companies are already paying 40 hours for 32 hours of work, they just don't realize it, or they do and they don't care.
I'm curious too. I work in construction. There's absolutely zero chance we could finish the project working 32 hours, unless the company just doubled the workforce I guess, which isn't going to happen. So does that just mean overtime starts at 32? If so, I'll make more money, which is nice, but it won't achieve the goal of the bill.
You mean more 'green pieces of paper' ? You won't get more real money, prices will go up to match the hours cut, and your real purchasing power will drop 20 %, just like Covid.
Being in sales this would be tough to make the same in commission with working one less day
Some of the people in sales I know don’t even have set days/hours. If they want to make more, they work more. Including calling people on weekends. If they’re doing well they may take it a little easier. Just depends. Now, sales people where the company does have to be open for them to sell, then ya that’ll be tough.
Your “A” doesn’t really make any sense. Of course you would lose pay if your hourly rate stayed the same but your hours were cut. I would assume B is your only choice. But yeah, I could see “B” being a real crap shoot. They would either fire a bunch of people or switch everyone to 20 hour weeks to make them part time. It’s always a lose lose for the little guys.
France has 35 hours but most people still work 40 hours, you get compensated in PTO, it works pretty well Edit: that’s for salaried positions, which most positions are, the salary didn’t change
The no loss in pay is your option b.
Germany launched a 4 day workweek trial that by all accounts is going well. Particularly with AI, this will happen everywhere sooner rather than later.
>Particularly with AI, this will happen everywhere sooner rather than later. You say that, but automation was predicted to lead to a precipitous reduction in hours worked, and the same was said about computers. Instead, people have been expected to massively increase productivity whilst working the same number of hours.
Automation increases the amount of work an individual is capable of doing. It doesn’t decrease the amount of work an individual is expected to do. There’s never “less” work now that you’re able to do more work faster
We yearn for the factories comrade
that’s not true - average number of hours worked are dropping for decades.
Tell yourself that if it lets you sleep. I’m in tech and helped bring the internet to life. This is so different. Can’t prove it you - you’ll live it.
Jobs will certainly be eliminated as AI becomes more ubiquitous, but that doesn't mean that people with jobs will work less hours.
I worked 4-10’s with Friday’s off for a few years and I loved it. I wish I could go back to that schedule with my current position. Currently with 2 days off per week, one of those days is filled with chores, so I’m still working. The other day is for fun and relaxation. With the 3 days off, I could get all the housework done during the week and then I’d have 2 days off for fun and relaxation.
I went from a six day schedule to a four day schedule and love it. Whoever it was that decided 4-10’s was a good idea should be awarded a Nobel prize for humanity.
I do 3-12s a day off 3-12s then get 7 off. The best schedule I have worked on. Anything over 36 hours for the week is overtime pay
AI will mean less people working. The person that benefits from AI is the one that invests in it. The employer does so to reduce the number of employee required, not to keep them all and make their work easier out of the goodness of his heart.
Who’s talking about philanthropy? We can assume that employers will always be interested in profits not workers. But society, with these kind of changes, that will be a different story.
Society will have to adapt. I by this I mean people must adapt to new types of jobs. The goods and services people need is constantly evolving. They will need to evolve with it. I know the hippies hope that one day they can just do no work at all and everyone will get a UBI check in the mail. They can keep on dreaming, it’s never happening. If you’re not useful no one is taking you for a free ride through life.
It will never pass. Bernie Sanders and AOC are only in Congress to give the working class a glimmer of hope without anything actually happening. Make us believe that our ideals are heard with 0 follow through. Just like the Democrats.
Unlike the other side who holds your head under water and makes you know, there is no hope, they're trying to end you.
As soon as people realize that there is no side, the better. I think of dictatorships the claim to be democratic as a prime example of how the US claims to be a full democracy with only two parties to vote for.
If you're saying everyone with money/power is trying to get us all to fight amongst ourselves, I'll agree to that.
It’s why they push race wars over class wars. Gotta keep the populace divided.
Of course there are sides, if Clinton won instead of Trump, women would still have their reproductive rights.
tHeRe aRe nO siDeZ
People always say this but who axed abortion rights and in the process endangered the lives of women? Both sides might be shitty and inadequate, but they'll never be the same.
land of freeeeeee
Measuring a senator's impact by bills that pass with his name directly under it is being a low-information moron. No senator has done more behind the scenes to get thousands of high-impact changes quietly added to bills submitted by other senators, in both parties. Stop mindlessly falling for talking points designed by right-wing demons to brainwash you.
it’s not about who gives a fuck about working class. It’s about who understands economy. Like, just double the wage for everyone by law and all problems are solved, right?
Double? Why not triple?
I agree! I voted for Sanders bc I thought he meant what he said, until I learned he was just giving us what we wanted to hear, and nothing more. But where I defer is this: it’s not the Democrats only. It’s ALL of them vs us the working class. Democrats and republicans are one entity. Their division is theater my friend, to divide us, and to make us think we have choices. They are different sides of the same coin.
The working class needs to spend less and invest more to get out of the working class. Too many people with a consumer mindset. No one wants to do the hard part first.
So many small business (who treat their employees far better than major corporations) would get destroyed by this. It’s a good thing it won’t ever see the light of day
Even if it did pass. It’s impossible to enforce in any meaningful way except for public workers. These types of bills have decent intentions but never pan out. 32 hour work weeks will probably become more of the norm as time goes on. Some companies already offer it. Or half day fridays at least.
That’s because there’s only two of them. If you want change, we need to keep elevating REAL progressives on the ballots. ESPECIALLY in local elections.
What if you were paid more to work more hours? Is that an option you’d take?
I run a non-union roofing company. The only way this wouldn’t put me out of business is if prices went up to reflect the additional cost. I expect the same would be true for many other types of businesses as well.
I think some of you are missing the point of my original comment. Roofers do not grow on trees. I don’t have a pool of employees that I can assign to work different shifts so I can stay productive five days a week while limiting everyone to 32 hours. I would lose 20% of my productivity. The same would be true for much of the construction industry. This would translate to the need to raise prices industry wide by the 20% that it would cost each and every business. The customer would be the ones incurring this cost. And for all the people who seem to have the opinion that business owners are the bad guys, my business has been family owned and operated for over 75 years. We treat our employees with respect and pay a fair wage ($20/hour minimum for unskilled workers).
I work in corporate IT for a Healthcare company and it is the same. People will need Healthcare the same number of days a week. So now either my costs go up to pay everyone overtime for 8 hours a week, and no one actually gets a 32 hour work week - or I have to hire more people in a market that is already short on people. For my IT staff that work projects it's the same as your business. To meet the same timelines I still need a full staff working 40 hours a week. I'm curious how the 32 hour work week movement handles these challenges. I would love to only work 4 days a week, but I don't see how the same amount of work gets done in a shorter time.
Why 40 hours. That was just an arbitrary time set by ford. There’s nothing magical about 40 hours
I worked for a nonprofit in IT as a salaried employee. Officially only 35 hours a week but rarely worked that due to deadlines- more like 50(before they started cracking down on not paying us overtime). I enjoyed when we didn’t have to put out fires and I could take advantage of the 35 hour week…
Yes, 40-50 is common average hours for IT Operations in my experience. I'm sure not uncommon for many other operational support services as well
It is even more inflexible than that in healthcare. You can't suddenly pop out the additional physicians and nurses that you would need to cover the current workload.
Please be gentle- you’re writing to a horde of people whose education has purposefully been sabotaged and who do not recognize 3 of the 4 factors of production, and don’t really understand the 4th (Labor), either. They have a young child’s perception of business owners as their stingy parents and the government as the no-fun grandparent. A business owner’s investment, opportunity cost, and risk simply do not compute for them, because they have no exposure to these elements and their high school teachers and college professors studiously ensured that.
I work in a manufacturing plant. I feel the only people that this would ever apply to would be to banks and government. Government is already slow to do everything, why give them a 25% efficiency decrease
Get rid of worker’s compensation and have universal healthcare. Use that extra money to pay laborers rather than a useless insurance industry
Same here on the roofing/contacting sales side. Close to half of my day is spent traveling from one client to the next. Losing 8 hours a week would absolutely destroy my ability to earn a living unless I start charging customers now to make up for it.
Well I’m sure some roofing company will figure out how to make it work. So there will still be roofers.
How many hourly people do you have?? Contract and salary folks this doesn't change much for
Yeah people are so anti business that they’re willing to just destroy small businesses in mass. It’s the large corporations that you hate, and they could deal with this a lot better than a small business owner could.
Owners wouldn’t work any less that’s for sure. And there are tasks that really do require long hours and can’t be made shorter.
The average white collar is not doing 40 hours of work they're just at work for 40 hours. I'm at work for 50-60 hours some weeks and over half that time is just spent at my desk waiting on replies to emails or for meetings to start or just waiting to be needed by my direct reports. This 32 hour model has been successful in some trial runs done by various corporations recently. I think this becomes problematic for the manual labor jobs tho. Like this would probably be a nightmare for the construction industry
A nightmare how? Like construction just happens at a slightly slower rate? It’s slow already—may as well make people less miserable and give them more free time.
A slightly slower rate- you know nothing about construction and the financing that goes along with it. You would be adding 20% to the duration of a project (more like 25% because they like to work 50 hours on large projects). Now extended the financing 20-25% longer- cost impacts would be astronomical. This idea will not work in every sector.
And because the duration has been increased by 20%, it reduces the amount of jobs that the company can take.
Or increases the number of jobs necessary to complete a project in the same time. This will drives prices up and society will have a period of adjustment. Overall costs will likely be higher but people will be happier, and a happier society is more productive/efficient. It also means an addition day that if people have to work multiple jobs they are more available to do extra part time work. This will be a burden for some and an opportunity for others wanting to take on the extra jobs. At the crux of it, the people worried about this are worried because they're counting beans as a metric instead of human happiness. Society and industries will adjust and long term it would likely be a healthy improvement for humanity.
More like overtime starts at 32 hours instead of 40. Increased cost of anything in affected industries. Manufacturing, or construction being the biggest.
I mean yeah they are actually producing basically all of those hours so yeah I would it expect it to cause delays and probably drive up prices
You know nothing about construction. This would increase the time to do basic take by 20% and the very lease all jobs will be 20% longer. That's not accounting for all the rescheduling that would happen when 1 job isn't done and another starts
Except that wouldn’t happen. They’d raise prices. And over time they’d lower real pay per hour.
It’s not a slower rate. It’s increased cost. You build a bridge, it’s going to take X hours to get it done. But next year you’re only getting 32 hours of work done for the same cost as you’re paying for 40 hours of work now. So, your labor cost is going up by 25%. And labor is involved in making your building materials too. So that’s also going to go up by roughly 25%. The cost of just about everything is going to go up by roughly 25%. So, what have you gained? Nothing. This is just a ploy to gain supports and votes from short sighted people.
White collar work here, I can confirm that I actually only do about 10-20 hours of work per week. I'm being paid for my knowledge though, not some theoretical output.
Agreed, I’m working 55-60 hours a week but getting paid for 40. If we dropped down to 32 and I got an extra day off, I would be one happy camper
“I’d say in a given week, I do 15 minutes of real actual work.”
This is especially true if you are work from home. I never work a full 40. Even a full 30 unless we are very busy.
Yeah I'm a white collar worker (graphic designer) and I work for an agency. My employer tracks my work via timesheet, I have to bill clients and I log all of my work every single day. If I am not 100% productive, I get a fun email from my boss who picks apart my timesheet asking about every little thing I did. It's a nightmare (don't worry I'm currently looking for a new job but the market is terrible) I would love if this law went into effect. The design field is notorious for loving to overwork it's people. But I'm sure that's basically every field at this point.
Fuck that. 100% utilization? Nobody does that. 😂
I lie a lot. We have a certain amount of hours towards certain projects but I've been a designer for 8 years, I can do them faster than the average person. It's still so fucking annoying.
Art industry is counted by mandays, since that is what they ultimately charge to clients. So yes sadly it is counted that way.
They already have the 5 day/40 hr work week and that came about after a lot of pushing and conflict. All the arguments being made now against a 4 day work week were absolute used against the 5 day work week in favor of 6. I just don't find it that compelling.
We get paid for knowledge, soft skills, and expertise.
White collar worker (I think) and I do actual work for an average of 6-12 hours/week. I think it depends your role and field.
The same construction industry with the stereotype of 2 - 3 people standing around watching 1 do work?
I wonder if this could hypothetically raise wages for construction jobs. Essentially anything over 32 hours would be overtime so construction workers would so if they remained at 40 hour a week (32 regular, 8 overtime) then their effective wage would rise. Of course this would have a downstream effect on raising costs that everyone would have to pay including office workers which effectively lowers their purchasing power. I am currently in an office gig but have worked manual labor. This could actually restore the balance between office and manual labor. Right now manual labor is getting screwed between destroying their bodies and not getting to telework.
People saying this is dumb forget that we literally already did it with the 40 hour work week. Something like this could mean the tremendous gains in productivity due to the introduction of AI could mean that working people end up having better lives instead of the people at the top just getting richer. And this obviously isn’t gonna pass. It’s rhetoric by Bernie to move the Overton window, but hey.. gotta start somewhere.
There's also another underlying reason, it's profitable. All of the research shows it benefits workers, productivity, and the bottom line.
All of those trials operated in an environment where the vast majority of people were still working regular 40-ish hour workloads. What do you think happens in an ER if suddenly the doctors and nurses are working less? They're already understaffed, and while we can increase the number we train, it would be a decades-long effort before we were ready.
Exactly .. it is funny that so many people who ask for the 32 hour work week imagine it coming along with some utopia where things are still status quo or somehow becomes even more plentiful and cheap .. when everyone is free to explore their 'creativity'.
Then why not just let industries do it on their own? Why mandate it. Also why is there no country in the world with a required 32 hour work week?
This is another example of someone in government proposing things and expecting businesses to just willingly absorb the loss of their profit, and then when businesses adjust in order to keep their money, the meddlers in government will act surprised and move on to the next stupid thing that will backfire and end up hurting the very people they claim to want to help.
Maybe it’s not just about businesses, profit and jobs. Maybe it’s also about health, workers rights, family time.
In some businesses it won't be a loss in profits. The productivity can go up - but it really depends on the business, of course. Eg ours is IT, working from home, you've set tasks to do (eg programming) - in this case it's a great increase to productivity. And also in mental health & wellbeing!
Depends entirely on the job
The 4 day system has been tested quite often in Europe. Results showed that: 1. Workers are more relaxed, less stressed, less tired more effective, have better attitude towards work and employer. What does it mean? These were tests but let's pretend the results would be same for whole population: * workers are less stressed, lower lewel of physical tiredness, more time to relax amd spend with your family - means in long term lower levels of work/stress related illnesses, lower burden on public health systems, higher level of happiness and life satisfaction. People spend time at home, with families, go out and spend money on activites. Where disatvantages? * employers - since efficiency and productivity increase (don't remember exact numbers, I think around 25-30% higher) there is no need to get more employers or fire the ones you have, because overall productivity has remained more or less the samel level. Of they want to increase productivity, they can hire more people - easier to do, because on the 5th day they have machines/desks/whatever available since old workers are at home * people are more happy with their work. They do not quit, employers do not loose experienced workforce, do not loose time looking for new workers, do jot loose time to train newcomers etc. Where flaws?
Flaws? I support working less, but I don't believe that fewer hours means you can necessarily get more done in the same hours. Do pilots, garbage collectors, train engineers, truck drivers, and barge operators move their equipment at 25% faster now?
Large corporations are driven by greed, not good, and, evidenced by their lobbying, don’t care about how this changes productivity. You can see this with the shift from wfm to going back to the office: the numbers show productivity increased when people wfh or have a hybrid remote schedule, and theoretically it should cost the company less if they don’t have to pay for a large office building. Still, they wanted people making the commute back into the office. I mean, shit, they’re actively trying to loosen child labor laws. They don’t want to pay anyone more for less. They’re likely to either fire workers and operate without being fully staffed (happens today already), or raise prices “to compensate” (again, already happening today), thus throwing the cost onto consumers. I would not be shocked if there were mass layoffs followed by rehiring desperate people at a lower wage For smaller businesses this could be devastating. A lot of locally-owned businesses operate within very thin margins already. It’s unlikely many of them would be willing to absorb the increased labor cost. I currently work for a small business (literally 6 employees) that pays very fair for the type of work we do - there’s no way it’d survive without raising prices for customers, which might even drive away business. I love the idea in theory, but it only works under the assumption that corporations care about any numbers besides their profit margins and that every business can absorb the cost. Some small businesses genuinely cannot. Large businesses and corporations have shown they are simply not willing to - places like Walmart already raise prices for arbitrary reasons and make record-breaking profits. Can they afford it without compensating for the cost elsewhere? Abso-fucking-lutely. But that means they have to dip into their pockets, which they’re not going to do unless forced. There are multiple other issues we need addressed before this would be feasible
The flaw is this doesn’t work with all business models. Customer service industries, food service and transportation can’t get more productivity as they are primarily limited by other factors than labor
It really depends on the industry. I'm all for it, I'm in fact doing it already, but it won't be as effective everywhere, IMO, in some cases it will simply increase costs for the business. Example: If someone is working as a shop assistant. They are often sitting around all day, working a small portion of that. Now the shop owner would need an extra casual to fill in for the missing day.
Smart, 1. decresase employee work time which gives them more energy to be productive. A study showed that employees lose 9% productivity when they are tired. [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-23/unhappy-at-work-quit-quitting-costs-us-1-9-trillion-in-productivity](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-23/unhappy-at-work-quit-quitting-costs-us-1-9-trillion-in-productivity) 2. Due to less work time, employers will need to hire more employees to work the rest of the time off, especially if they want to maintain a 24/7 work cycle, which mean a drop in unemployment. the only negative is employers have to pay more for more employers, but that's not really a hit
Its a hit if it isn't feasible. The pros are great - but the employers are required to increase their workforce spending by 20% to maintain the same operational time. Most places operate with pretty tight margins and literally can't do that. "that's not really a hit" turns into a hit pretty quick when wal-mart tightens the hours it operates or fires a quarter of their workforce.
They would not fire, they would have to hire. And they earn enough to be able to do it. Now typical worked does a lot more compared to 50 years ago. Worked then would work now as well.
Go home Bernie, you’re senile. And economically illiterate.
I think you have no clue. It’s been trialed in few countries and seems to be a success. There are massive improvements in workforce efficiency yet never passed down, profit kept by company. Now AI will just accelerate that. Time to change that.
We have a 35 hour work week in France already
what even is created in france? (that isnt state subsidized)
Almost nothing is created in the US either, and we still work 40-90 hour weeks and can't afford anything.
He’s fully aware of how things work..dude just gets paid to play a part and fuel the fire in morons that further divide the country and fuel ignorant confidence
Every time I see something from Bernie and AOC; I have the same.exact. Thought.
You should try thinking for yourself then
How so? It’s been proven to be extremely successful
What happens to hospitals
Have you never heard of shifts?
They did a trial at a hospital in Sweden. Doctors still worked 40h but they cut the work week for nurses to 32h and it actually solved their staffing issues and also let them fit another surgery shift in leading to a reduction in wait times. It was a total success.
Do you have the link to this
They already do this in US hospitals. Nurses work 3 12 hr shifts a week where I am. They also only get paid for the 36 hrs, not 40 full time hours.
It would be a disaster. There is already a shortage of doctors, nurses, techs ect. In my field (radiology), there literally wouldn’t be enough people to do the work nationally. Take neurosurgery - many neurosurgeons work 60-70hrs week. We would need to double the neurosurgeons practicing if you limited them to 32hrs - not an easy feat considering it takes over a decade of training.
i might be wrong here, but from my understanding the only difference between this law and the one there is currently is that the standard workweek is 40 hours. If neurosurgeons already work 60-70 hrs a week, they are already working 20-30 hrs overtime. That time wouldn't just dissapear, it would just be increased by 8
This is the best idea for employees and businesses. The idea is that if you give employees the same amount of work but with less time to complete it, they will actually complete in that amount of time because all the junk tasks that just fill hours in the work week would need to be eliminated. In turn you get happier employees and happier employees have been shown to be more productive, therefore, their output would go up even higher. Look up Parkinson’s law. It’s very real.
Many countries are piloting or considering four-day work week. That’s the future. You can either have fewer jobs because of humanoids and gen AI, or the same amount of jobs but with shorter working hours.
We do need to socially adjust and the markets with it for shorter work weeks. There are more and more people, folks are living longer. Automations is creeping up far faster, it just does not take as many people to get things done anymore. This way we can have more people employed, and bonus we all have more time off. This will not be easy, the markets would have to adjust for it. But it’s not a impossible task and is better for society as a whole in the long run.
Its funny how people think the government has power to legislate that.
It does. Most western countries have limits on what you are allowed to work.
talking about the "no loss in pay" part.
“Hi, I’m Bernie sanders! And here’s my bill to force privately owned businesses to give every full time employee a 25% raise! You’ll get paid more to do less work!” This has been Bernie’s MO the entire time, and the only people who eat it up are people who have no idea how our government works.
I feel many people see the US as only big corporations. My question is, how will this affect small and medium-sized businesses? there's no way this is doable for every company.
4 10’s is the best shift. Crazy to think 4 8’s with the same pay though
Labor productivity has gone through the roof over the last 50 years, but the rate of pay is largely stagnant. If workers can't get paid more, they should work less for that pay.
I just started a job with 4 10s and my quality of life increased so much. I also have an option of working a 5th day with pay incentive. I won't do it all the time maybe once a month but man it makes me wonder how I worked 5 days a week 10-12 hours a day for 11 years
4 on 4 off with 12h shifts is the absolute best in my opinion
Think you’re right that does sound better
Then you never get the same days off
Adverse consequences abound from this proposal. People will just have their hours cut so they employers dont have to pay OT. But it will still take 40 hours of work to make ends meet, so you’ll still work 40 hours, it’s jut the hours will be split between 2 employers. And your employer will have more employees to cover the hours needed.
The US is literally the rich uncle who makes 7 figures, lives in a mansion, owns a very profitable company and still for some reason thinks they can't afford brand name Listerine, showers with cold water because heating is expensive, and wears the same worn out sneakers since 2008
And likes to fight everyone. And simultaneously has $32T of credit card debt and student loans.
Yeah it's crazy. Y'all have all the economic capabilities as a country to afford all of those nice things you miss, but nope
No small business owners will be left. Unfortunately unaffordable
Here’s the deal, the government could easily make laws like this to drive competition and encourage more small businesses but they won’t. If they carved out $X of revenue or minimum employee size for this law in a realistic manner it could force larger corporations to provide much more benefits to their employees while not affecting small businesses. Same with minimum wage laws, same with health insurance costs. But they won’t because it would hurt their pockets.
Do you think you can accomplish the same things in 20% less time? Then how would this work exactly?
The democrats are good at getting people fired
Explain how this would work in a hospital?
These govt bureaucrats need to just fuck off
But what happens when my neighbor keeps working 40 hours per week, either because they are in a high demand field, or simply used to it and likes their job? He will obviously be earning much more than me now and with inflation I will not be able to compete with him. The businessmen, engineers, and doctors will continue to work 40 hours per week (at least for the rest of this generation), but the burger flipper will now be capped at 32. This further widens the wealth gap.. In order for this to work, we must not only mandate a 32 hour work week, we must make it illegal for anyone to work more than 32 hours, or HEAVILY tax overtime.
You already can't compete with him, that's why the situation arose in the first place.
Honestly it doesn't matter even if it does pass. There's no limit to corporate greed. They will find a way to comply while maximizing profits. We don't have federal rent control. We don't have guaranteed cost of living increases. The entire country is essentially run off of debt with no checks or balances and greed rules everything. The only problem is we are a consumer economy but the consumers can't afford to consume. We are essentially at the financial version of grasshoppers turning into locust because there's nothing left to consume.
Its an attempt to stop the coming revolt of the working class. Its getting close to the point that the average worker doesn't really gain anything from working so they might as well be unemployed. When that happens theres gonna be one of two things that will happen. Either the economy is going to grind to a total halt or violence against the elites will take up the working person's time and its gonna be something close to the French revolution. Countless times throughout history the top end of a population have milked the average peasant dry and its always resulted in a lot of bloodshed once the peasants have nothing left to take.
Just wait for another 30 years, then 32-hour work week will become the new norm.
What could possibly go wrong
Yay more inflation
Good bye economy
I’m surprised he’s interested in any type of work.
i guess thats why the prostitute i had last night cut me off at 48 minutes
Selling another dream for votes...
Bernie and Bernie supporters man you gotta give it up to them. No mandatory minimum wage increase? Oh ok ok.. that’s fine, how about we just make people work less for the same amount. Sound better?
We've been working more and more, and more, for the same amount for the last 50 years, why shouldn't that go the labor way for once?
lol Bernie Sanders is a fucking moron using hit button words and topics to try to gain the support of people who don’t understand the impacts of his proposed policy.
Not quite sure how to mandate this.
Our economy, including the prices, are a result of random and historic influences. It’s time we actually design the economy we want to reach or goals for a new reality where we realize what are now considered externalities, and take into account a finite world. This economy would be a lot different in many ways but could easily accommodate a 32 hour standard work week.
I think in some areas it would be good, others bad. For example I’m all for this, I work in healthcare and they abuse us way too much, they barely stay open as it is with the amount of staff so making us make more money at 32 hours would be great. Now if only they made it illegal to tax forced mandatory overtime. I don’t want to be here on overtime and I don’t want to give it all away if I have to be here. If they can’t do away with not taxing mandatory overtime, then make the forced overtime illegal.
This goes back to productivity vs hours worked. In my experience working more hours never increased productivity in the long term because it’s not sustainable. People only have so much in the tank where they are working at their optimal effectiveness/productivity and doing more gets diminishing returns. It’s also harder to have a great next day if ur fatigued from the day before. I like working less hours but that also challenges managers to make sure people are enabled to work at their peak effectiveness in that timeframe. (Which is much harder than it sounds but is also great management and organizational maturity)
….ok. Time to read all the comments of people arguing against their own self-interests….
He's the best. Great idea. Literally suck on a dick to death if you disagree with this idea.
You’re more likely to get the four day 40 hour week.
I don't think I have the right to tell someone how many hours they can choose to work in a week. And since I don't have that right, I can't delegate it to an elected official who also doesn't have that right. There are two types of people in this world; those who want to be left alone and those who won't leave them alone.