I’d love to have a 32 hour week.
It’s been a struggle lately to get even 16 hours of work a week lately.
Turns out, problems are more complex than just what goes on in the US
They didn’t just hand us the forty hour workweek. You can thank the early unions for that. Organizations like this.
So I used to work in industrial automation, and I did see a factory owner buy a robot to automate a task because it was a brain meltingly simple task that was unpopular with his workers. The robot was slower, and more expensive than a human.
It was taking a small piece of metal from a stack and putting it in a machine and pushing a button (not sure if he had a two-hand-no-tie-down set up) then taking the now bent piece of metal out of the machine and putting it on a stack. I think they had about 8 hours production per week of demand for the part.
He didn’t do it out of the kindness of his heart but because he got tired of paying recruiters to find people willing to do it.
Worse, there’s actual practical evidence that a 4-day workweek for the same pay as the 5-day one still makes the company more money and the workers happier and healthier, but adoption is still glacial.
you can have a 32 hour work week but you get paid for working 32 hours
I want more people to think though
“If this tool makes me produce double, and I get paid the same, who’s keeping all that new value?”
If your productivity doubles, they will lay off half the people, and all gains disappear upwards. It’s already happening.
in the civilised world we just vote for people that support 4 day work weeks
do catch up neo-commies
Does your region have laws that mandate no more than four days? If it was in my industry it’d just end up being four fifteen hour days. I worked 18 this last Sunday.
Didn’t France throw an absolute shit fit over raising their retirement age. In then end, guess what, the retirement age was raised.
Do catch up neo-liberals.
Maintenance workers, the engineers who designed the machine, everyone above who keeps it running.
Plants get shut down yearly for maintenance, stuff need to be lubed, replaced, upgraded etc.
Those contractors are gonna be making 3x what you do. Sure they’re keeping some extra profit, but their expenses also go up proportionally too. Millwrites here make over $50 an hour, the company charges out at $100+ per man hour. Maintenance is friggen expensive on machines.
All you need is 2-4 weeks off a year, and they save money while you’re off. Machines always cost money.
If that was true, if it was a wash to get the new tool for the owner, they wouldn’t do it. That’d be silly.
Upgrading someone from pen and paper to a laptop with LibreOffice is probably going to dramatically (let’s say 4x) increase their productivity, without a corresponding 4x increase in maintenance cost.
You know companies have whole branches deticated to computer support and cyper security, right?
Or do you think that before laptops businesses had their own divisions of Quill-Certified Problem Solvers and Paper-Based Troubleshooting Engineers?
And you think that costs more than the productivity gains from having the computer?
No. I think the computer industry is more expensive and creates more jobs than all the paper and pen industries have trough the history.
What does that have to do with the ownership class extracting value from labor?
Hmm. What could industry producing millions of jobs world wide offer for working class. What a tough nut. You got me stumped. Maybe we should have just stayed using pen and paper.
Jokes on you, I get paid for my five weeks of holidays.
Which is likely less than your full time rate, or it’s accounted for in total yearly “salary”. You’re paying for it somehow, even if it’s making a dollar less instead.
And think more the lowly workers, the ones that only get 2 weeks, and that’s because they’re forced to by laws.
Lowly workers? I had five weeks paid as a dishwasher. Make unions strong and reap the benefits.
They have their own issues, as described in my story in another comment.
They made a company waste millions of dollars replacing a job, than forced them to remove the machine and reinstate the worker.
They create problems where they are none, than celebrate when they win.
You are also fooling yourself if you don’t think you’re not paying for that time off another way. Most people would rather have the higher hourly rate.
Most people are morons who trade their entire lives for a slightly nicer bed to die in
I like the time off. I like having the ability to plan a trip every year (near or far), and not having to worry about how my bills are going to get paid.
Much better for my mental health than to work those weeks and not have anything to look forward to.
the contractor getting over double is a bad deal for the worker unless they are providing significant infrastructure like complex expensive tools and vehicles and such.
I’m so fucking done, it will take 4 years for us to get a 40 hour workweek and yeah that’s great but it’s a fucking joke
Gracias Sheimbaum
Here in Colombia it were like that and did it work. I think it’s because not terrorize the right hand
yeah they gave us the same reasons here and I get it to certain extend. the same companies that have exploited us for decades were scared of this reduction and asked for this compromise.
I’m still mad that the so called “left leaning” president bent to their claims but was not able to secure TWO free days a week
This reminds me of this old productivity / salary chart that shows how fucked we are.Weird that the divergence is also the same point in time where (a) modern conservatism is born, (b) Fox News is conceived, and © the middle class died.
Total coincidence, I’m sure.
Literally been flat lined for 50 years
“Class now observe this is called a K shaped economy.” The students now start to grind their teeth.
great but there are more studies about it just look up salary vs productivity
Now that is limp.
Let’s knock this one out of the way now: despite what people at the mises institute would have you think, not a lot of couples divorce because of bitter arguments on the convertibility of the dollar to gold.
The divorce rate increase since 1960 is related to the no-fault divorce laws passing in the US Before that, if a couple went to a court and said “we hate each other, grant us a divorce, please” the judge could legally say “fuck you, you’re still married, work it out”.
Ah a breath of fresh air about this bs website. The gold standard won’t fix your economic woes, much less your marital ones
“That’s a bad source. So anyways, here’s a Reddit link.”
Would you like me to buy a domain for $10/yr and copy and paste it onto there for you, would that make it seem more legitimate somehow?
You could link the blog the Reddit post links to.
Fair point, will keep that in mind. For anyone else allergic to clicking Reddit links, here’s the blog the author also posted the content to:
https://singlelunch.com/the-bad-economics-of-wtfhappenedin1971
Reddit is an unreliable source but not to be dismissed just because it is reddit. There is a higher chance of having a good source from reddit than from randomwebsiteabouttopic.com.
Yup.
Workers have to fight hard for every little thing, which is why it’s so sad to see us back pedal by electing born rich anti-worker dipshits into the highest offices in the land. We’re losing things that will take years and a lot of struggle to get back.
Exactly. Productivity gains don’t magically turn into free time for workers unless people organize and demand it.
Right and why would it? If you let people take advantage, they will. Doesnt matter what’s right. Doing what’s right gets you fucked in this world. Literally people distrust you if you try to do what’s right. It’s a lonely existence and that’s fucking sad.
What amazes me is how many people believe they will get universal basic income from the pedophile tech bro overlords who don’t pay taxes are actively gutting the meager safety net and worker protections we have. The cognitive dissonance is staggering
There’s an argument that ubi will make you reliant on the state (which will be owned by private interest via the network state…)
Basically. The elites recreate society through who gets meaningful work and who gets an ubi and has to dance on TikTok selling products to the other group who has the money to buy.
Who gets meaningful work = the producers. Those who ship. The rest get to be beggars.
I guess I should say, those who own the means of production. Since it might seem like I believe the elites produce, which I don’t.
Welfare is a system of control. UBI would be used similarly.
I guess that’s why they’re trying to buy up all the farms. We really all need to have a permaculture vegetable garden and backyard chickens, ducks or rabbits
I would worry more about what conditions come with that UBI. They can make you agree to anything.
They all seem to just be lies dangled over everyone’s heads to keep them working into the grave.
Every little luxury we have with working, from safety to days off, is paid for in blood.
Even things like the 15 minute break.
Companies will begrudgingly give you the bare minimum they’re mandated to, and pretend you’re only getting it out of their sheer appreciation and benevolence.
Maddening.
I’ve been salaried for just over 30 years consecutively. What are breaks? What is overtime? You’re speaking a foreign language to me.
Pshh. Yeah.
I have no idea how they passed and we accepted this concept of “Salary means we own you and your thoughts and ideas, labor laws basically don’t apply, and you never actually stop working.” Absolutely deranged.
It was probably pitched as such a great thing to employees, too, but I’ve always seen it as a scam.
(No judgment on you personally, of course, if somehow this affords you a good life balance!)
I’m also paycheck-to-paycheck with little in the way of advancement prospects unless one of my creative projects lands. So I’m not exactly writing as a sage of material success or anything 😂.
I do appreciate what little time I have to my own autonomy though. Anything trying to take that from me gets met with stiff resistance.
leave your ai to cover for 8 hours. they’ll love it
There is no war but class war.
also the increase 30-40+hrs is design to exhaust people so they are to tired to protest for reforms socially, financially and to keep people disengaged from politics/ and information.
I suggest an alternative. All war is class war. Start fighting like it.
30 hour workweek should have been 40 or 50 years ago. 30 would be late. We should be moving down to 20 about now.
I think you mean “we should be fighting hard for a 20 hour work week now, as hard as our ancestors fought for an 8 hour work day, and we should be willing to die for the cause, the way they died for theirs.”
It should not even take that much. A big issue was unions somewhere in the 80’s or even in the 70’s stopped looking to shorten hours in favor of increased wages with overtime. The membership were easily swayed by time and a half. This lead to the reversal of the 40 hour week. More than 40 became more normal than 40. Of course then over time they have gotten rid of access to time and a half and more defining of roles as exempt.
