I work 32 hours per week. Rather, I work 4 days a week. This means I have 50% more free time than I used to. I fill that free time with dates with my wife while my kids are at school, or hiking, or just goofing at home doing whatever I feel like. One day a week is MINE. I cannot understate just how much this has improved my mental health and quality of life. Not to mention, when holidays fall on certain days of the week, I get 4 day weekends which is like a mini vacation. 48 hours is not enough time to fully decompress and feel human again.
I am never going back to 5 days a week, if I can help it.
Still, these numbers all seem arbitrary. More flexible opt-in work arrangements would be nice. My wife is a nurse and she can work "per diem" which is just amazing. She opts-in and chooses her schedule. I think society as a whole would be a bit healthier if that flexibility was extended to more of the population.
I don't think the push-back here is against a 4 day work week, but the idea that wages increase or stay the same as you reduce down to 4 days. I known several people who work 4 days for 80% equivalent. They seem like you who seek a more balanced, family & personal focused lifestyle. This is awesome and I agree with you that flexibility can be a huge competitive differentiator for companies that doesn't need to cost them a lot more money. It's kinda crazy that more don't seek out creative approaches like this.
In my region, where the number of hours worked annually is 1800+ as per OECD, it's quite simply difficult. Employers expect full time availablity and would rather not have anyone fill that role than allow for this.
My friend managed to do it by boiling that frog via taking Friday afternoons off. Everyone was happy with that arrangement, so he started taking entire Fridays off. Then he switched to Mondays.
Meanwhile my SO got a hard "no" on any amount of reduction. She's looking for a part time job, but it's not something employers normally advertise.
It would have to be less than 80% for 4 days due to insurance, administrative, and possibly office space costs. You also know as well that people seeking out these kinds of arrangements will be holding down two jobs instead of one, which cuts down on reliability for both employers.
Of course I like the idea of having more options in the workplace but sometimes the down sides are too obvious to get worked up over it. Be thankful we can work five 8 hour days (or less). We could have the 9 to 9, 6 day a week culture that exists in some places.
Human productivity is not linear - I would not be surprised if 32 hours of work is roughly equivalent to 40 hours of work. In a similar vein, I would imagine 80 hours of work is actually less work than 40 hours, especially if repeated.
So why not cut it down to 1 day per week then? I agree with you in a way that there is a certain amount of diminishment in each additional unit of output, especially if you piss off the workers and make them half ass it. But I think we both know that your objections are ill-founded.
When AI people point to new jobs created like the industrial revolution, they are pointing to 9 to 9, 6 days a week of the 1880s industrial revolution era. The people of that era were told reducing to 5, 8 hour days was impossible, the economics wouldn't work, etc. We only arrived at our current number after the workers literally revolted, with much violence on both sides on the way to 'the perfect number' we have today that 'makes the most' sense and that totally can't be changed.
My jobs could never spare for me to take time off, I was too valuable to the company. Yet they also survived and were able to replace me once I left. 'impossible' is mainly 'inconvenient' in company speak.
I'm not saying you should put up with an intolerable vacation situation or anything else. But the simple fact of the matter is that people who work less get less done and therefore should make less. The people calling for higher salaries and much less time spent working are fooling themselves, at best.
The 9/9/6 culture is common in poorer countries and also in very highly paid professions, such as in finance. It's not some 1800s ethos, but something that a lot of people everywhere suffer with today. Some of them don't even view it as suffering. I personally wouldn't like that, but it depends on your stage in life and also your particular interest in the job.
Counterpoint: I do work 5 days a week 40 hours remotely. I wake up around 7 or 8. I never set my alarm clock. I hang out with my wife before finally getting up, I roll over, get ready for the day and walk to my home office.
I can walk downstairs to work out during the middle of the day, swim almost all year (Florida), go for a jog of whatever.
On a higher level, working remotely means we can do things like spending a full year flying around the country like we did until September 2023 or going forward spending a couple of months in Costa Rica, Panama during the winter while working.
4-5 days a week doesn’t impinge on my freedom like working in an office would. I “retired my wife” in 2020 when she was 46 8 years into our marriage so she could enjoy her hobbies and passion projects.
I “decompress” between the minute I close my computer and not think about work until the next day and walk to the living room.
Same. I work 4 days a week, and most weeks I work 32 hours (some weeks I am excited about what I am doing and end up working later than I intended to once or twice). The flexibility is amazing. I have time for personal projects (some of them coding related, but also music or home improvement or really anything I want), I have time to lift every day, I read more than almost anyone I know.
Having that extra day off for Whatever I Want is invaluable, and there's nothing that anyone can offer me that would make me give this up.
The free market could do that without unions. Doing so increases the cost of labor in the product as % of the total price.
You're super highly valued employee, your employer will be more than happy to buy your work in packages of 4 days instead of 5 if it suits him and you. Also if this is not suitable for one party of the deal (either employee or employer) both can go and freely trade/buy their labour.
However, generally advocates propose a blanket "mandatory 35 hours week", which have many negtive consequences:
- Why do you need to "enforce" that to other people who can't or wan't earn the same way and are more than happy to work overtime because they need to say earn more to pay medical bills or want to save to buy a house? Isn't that limiting the amount I as a person can sell my own work hours to the business?
- How can the business compete on the local market when other companies aren't forced to do work with the same cost base for the labour component in the final product?
- How can the business compete with the Mexican company across the border who can do it for even cheaper?
Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.
In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him. Societies are much wealthier now, but we shouldn't forget that starvation and poverty are the default state, not the other way around.
> Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.
At first, you seem like a sensible person, but then you seem to be completely ignorant as to what "moral" means.
You can't feed poor people with "morals", you need a productive tax base and good redestribution system to do that.
If you have a farm, you can't kill your chicken to feed the starving neighbour if your own chidren are starving. You need to keep the chicken alive because they will feed you and if they produce enough eggs you can help your neighbour too.
When you overtax your companies you make them uncompetitive and you have less tax to redistribute. It's just simple mathematics, no morals are needed to understand that. No tax = no social safety nets. Tax comes from profit. Profit comes from margin. Margin is destroyed by higher costs. If you increase the cost, you need to close the border so all the companies can share the same cost of labor. You'll squeeze more from the companies and make more social payments but less capital for the companies to invest and hire more people. So you're just making the stuff companies produce more expensive for all. (because you need to close the border to remove outside competition)
It's not rocket science. When societies got rich then they started having social nets, not before.
Where do you think the tax comes from? If there is no profit, there is no business and there is no tax base?
Taxes currently are for both the busness and the employees.
On the producer side:
- business pays tax on sales (or VAT)
- business pays tax on profit left
- business pays tax on each employee in the form of empolyers "contributions" (just another way to tax the work of the empolyees)
- persons pay income taxes and social contributions
- persons (owners) pay divident taxes
On the consumer side
- sales/VAT tax
- import duties on stuff you buy
- various local taxes on property, vehicles and etc
In EU many contries have on the producing side 35-39% and on consuming side around 20% VAT, e.g. the govenment takes about 50% of an average workers pay.
Who pays the worker? The business by making a profit.
A good explanation is both correct and tactful. I'm not sure your comment is either of those things.
I think the root cause is that you are trying to use the one word "profit" to mean different things. Admittedly the word profit is poorly defined (good financial reporting doesn't use it). For example:
> business pays tax on profit left
No. A company's profit is what is left after expenses and taxes (if you disagree with that then I'm unsure what to say). I am not an accountant so I'm not going to try and define earnings for you (gross, net, etcetera). Your sentence is just incorrect: maybe incorrect for the same underlying reason as why I wrote my original comment?
I could dissect many of your other points for being oversimplified or country specific (different juisdictions do things wildly differently). For example VAT/GST systems and US sales taxes have very little commonality (think where the money goes and what can be claimed).
> Who pays the worker? The business by making a profit.
Obviously incorrect, since a company can pay their workers and make a loss. Losses can go on for a long time (some people have different incentives than company dividends).
I think overall you are trying to say that businesses need profits (that's almost a tautology) and that governments need businesses. That makes sense.
Rationally you might think that people should therefore want profitable businesses. Unfortunately, voters and governments don't actually have to make economic sense over periods of many years.
I suggest doing some reading about labor movements, the Gilded Age, or about current issues - wealth inequality, housing costs, environmental impact, healthcare costs, enshittification.
The free market has failed miserably across multiple dimensions - even Trump has the government owning companies now (Intel). The “free market” has been a failed idea for a long time.
> In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him.
We have archeological evidence that contradicts this directly! What are you even talking about?
This isn’t a good way to structure a society, but your whole point about mixing morality with capitalism is perhaps the worst one.
If you can’t look at the damage to people (and the environment) under our current system and point out how it is broadly immoral, I would suggest taking a closer look at the very least.
I've read a lot and I have been in the buisness since I was 21 years old, almost homeless student in a big city that had to postpone my degree to survive so I've had years to think from the both sides of the "inequality" divide and I got a degree in economics.
You assume that if there is a price on it than there is a free market for it. It's not true at all...
Compare the freedom of the markets that are inefficient in your example:
- housing: one of the most regulated and non-transparent markets with zoning laws and NIMBYism blocking new supply to the market
- healthcare: even more regulated market for practitioners (licence to heal), medical supplies (licences for medicines) and a brocken system that incumbents can't enter (check cost+drugs Mark Cuban's post about how shitty the system is and how far away from normal free market)
- enivronmental impact: that's what the taxes are for and to have a good tax base you tax the polutants, but it's not "the market" it's "the people who consume" in any market free or not you'll get the resources used. In non-free markets you will just use more resources, because the encumbents will extract +400$ for 8Gb ram upgrade of your macbook pro or 10000 USD for a broken leg, that could've done much more if it wasn't inefficiently extorted.
- enshittification: this happens only in the "ecosystems" with no markets inside.
If you go to the freeer markets you'll see that the prices got down, not up. (check the price of computers, electronics and clothes for example).
There are some areas where the market is not the answer, but there humanity hasn't found a better way to optimize resources and ensure freedom unless the people have the ability to change their goods freely without restriction of the third party.
> 48 hours is not enough time to fully decompress and feel human again.
When I’m in that situation, I’m not thinking that my weekends are too short, but that my job is too stressful. I either need to change jobs or find peace in my current job.
How does this work with other countries not enacting 32-hour workweeks?
This will be a repeat of manufacturing going outside of US due to reduced standards (labor and pollution) and therefore cheaper manufacturing in China. And due to that blue collar work got destroyed in the long term.
Logically, unless there are high trade barriers for software/services/goods from countries that don't have similar standards, long-term, these jobs will just shift there.
One of Henry Ford biggest push was for a 5 day work week when no one else did it. Why? Because it meant workers had two days of week to spend money which increased consumer spending and look at the US today. Our consumer spending is about 2/3 of our GDP spending. I'm not saying you're wrong. But there's more to "drive your workers to the bone means we get better productivity and economic conditions". The biggest mistake the US is making is not capitalizing harder on onshoring + robotics.
On the flip side I would argue that European countries have largely fell flat or negative because employment law is too generous and it forces companies to be too cautious in hiring. I don’t know what the right balance but I am not sure going for even fewer hours is the right move.
I assume we agree that working less produces less (which reasonable people debate) since otherwise competition from abroad wouldn't be an issue.
If that is the case, then adding trade barriers also doesn't fix anything. Adding the trade barriers would ultimately just produce a lower standard of living. You'd essentially have an isolated system and the system is now producing less, so necessarily there will be less for everyone in the system.
Adding trade barriers also doesn't fix the threat of an adversarial country working 50% more than you for the next 50 years and as a result having the infrastructure to dominate you in numerous ways.
> I assume we agree that working less produces less
That’s a pretty big assumption. From what perspective, since the “working less” is only the perspective of the worker?
Production is not a zero-sum game that assumes companies make zero effort to invest in more manpower rather than profits.
Profit rates, however, are a significant part of the problem as each US company in the chain attempts to maximize profits they obtain from the next and avoid any competition (often using the legal system for protection). That doesn’t occur in the areas you mention because competition is the name of the game in those countries, which is why they have maximized production and flexibility.
> I assume we agree that working less produces less
Per capita, let's say yes, though I think there are people that assert that individual productivity is higher when working less hours.
But as a whole, probably not. In aggregate companies will pay more people less money, to do the same amount of work, so I think it should balance itself out.
It seems that most peoples of most countries have an unquenchable thirst for more, yes. No one forced the car, the smart phone, the sugary snacks, cheap plastic toys, ... to exist. They exist because people want them.
Maybe certain people think they are made of better clay than the average consumer and should determine what everyone else can buy; that path is a dangerous one...
Maybe certain people shouldn't be so quick to call other people fascists just because they voiced a thought on capitalism's need for infinite growth. Ironically enough, certain people are the thought police here, with a dangerous path...
I didn't claim that anyone did.. If you didn't notice, I just used the same construct as the person above me to throw out accusations with deniability.. But we all know what they meant, and that was a wild take based on my simple question.
I wonder if there could ever be a tariff policy that is automatically proportional some measure of worker/environmental exploitation. I know tariffs are current very unpopular, but maybe they can be used for good?
I'm a senior South African software developer (let my add my perspective here).
In terms of hours worked per week, I have rarely worked more than 40 hours per week (and I mean by that that I'm contracted for 40 hours and rarely work overtime). I know people who work more than that, and sometimes much more than that, which is a function of their skills and what kind of job they can secure (as well as their appetite for overtime), but I'd say my situation is fairly normal for people with ze skills. I also worked at a company which did 32 hour work weeks (which they did as a perk to retain people, not because they were forced to).
Software dev skills are quite scarce here, and South African devs are already cheap enough that it is difficult to try and offshore that work (although I know a few SA companies which have contracted companies in India for work). I also know many SA devs who have emmigrated to other countries which themselves have scarce software developers, but where the salaries and "standard of living" is perhaps better.
Neither am I. But how do you prevent countries doing 996 from dominating the market like they did in manufacturing without strict regulation and barriers?
> how do you prevent countries doing 996 from dominating the market
Why do you need to? Is this a manifestation of American exceptionalism, or do you think that overall as a nation you get a better life for your citizens when you're at the economic top?
It's not a manifestation on anything. What's cheaper with better quality will be chosen by the consumer. To get cheaper economies of scale are needed.
My competitor has a contracting factory in Pakistan that has the same labor costs as me, but works for 50 hours, instead of 32 hours. He can produce 36% more per week, while paying the same cost of capital, opex and other costs, even if he pays the same per hour as me.
But if he has 1/10 of the cost of labor and labor is a high % of end product cost, I can't compete and my business is bust, my employees are on the street and we all live from
1. the taxes of the productive people in the society who can sell something competitively outside (to have currency to buy imports)
2. governmental loans to be paid in the future by the people from 1.
I said "more people for less money"[1]. Nothing prevents your company to pay more people to work those 50 hours a week and pay them the same you would pay a single person working them.
[1] Sorry, I said that in a different comment in this thread.
> Many countries have <40 hours/week and are still thriving.
May I have the list of such countries with a level of prosperity comparable to the US (which seriously consider an $85k tax-free minimum wage)?
Your "everything is still thriving" on paper turns out to be "everyone except the elite is drowning in poverty and they can't complain about it because then their totalitarian government will declare them terrorists or something" in practice. All the time.
You may be right about some parts of Europe, but I think you would be surprised just how prosperous at least the northern part is, despite sub-40 hour work weeks and comparatively high taxes, 5-6 weeks paid vacation and “socialist” politics.
California is the only state I’ve visited in the US, but I would say Scandinavians are wealthier on average/higher quality of life.
> 5-6 weeks paid vacation and “socialist” politics
I'm not even surprised.
Socialist politics are extremely good at ensuring a high standard of living for the elite and shutting everyone else up. Look at any North Korean media outlet (of two or however many) - they're the best in the world, and everyone else is envious of them.
Are you under the impression that North Korea is an actual socialist country? Just because it's in the name it does not make it so. I thought history thought us the lesson about that.
> Socialist politics are extremely good at ensuring a high standard of living for the elite and shutting everyone else
European social democratic politics are usually characterized by the opposite outcome, where high taxes and redistribution means the top 10% is much closer to the average Joe than in ultra capitalist countries. Less inequality in general.
> Look at any North Korean media outlet
If you seriously compare NK to any country in Europe, you have no clue, sorry.
Denmark has 37 hours/week. Netherlands is around 32-33 on average AFAIK. Switzerland is ~35 hours/week. Ireland and Austria are also well below 40 to my knowledge.
Most research shows that non-mechanical work (i.e. where you have to think a little), gets a lower work-output above 40 hours/week than below. If sustained, it’s not just diminishing returns, but lower absolute output, even at just 3-5hours weekly overtime.
Sorry, I am not Swiss myself, so I may be completely mistaken.
I read that the average working hours is ~31/week. Digging further into that, it was the number of actual working hours on average (including part time and self-employeds), not what constitutes full-time employment.
Fair enough. Once you get into actual hours worked, you have a lot of people working less than FTE numbers by quite a bit.
For example, once the maternity leave runs out, in finance a lot of couples go to 80% so that with 1-2 days of home office you can always have someone watching the child. It's less money but the nurseries are so crazy expensive in Switzerland that it can actually even be positive in terms of total (edit:net) income.
I am not sure if we are in disagreement, but I believe my point stands: that Switzerland is a rich country despite working less than 40 hours/week on avg (actual hours).
In Norway 40 hours is the maximum legally allowable (other than temporary overtime), most people have 37,5 hour work week. If one in addition count vacation days etc the difference between other countries and the US might be even starker, in total hours per year?
> Many countries have <40 hours/week and are still thriving.
But it's a fiction built on U.S. force projection. It's become apparent that none of these countries could defend themselves against an aggressive competitor.
Well you are comparing a single country of over 300 million (the US) with the countries in the EU that are on average 16-17 million. Do you think that makes sense?
Idk historically some European nations like Germany have been very successful at least at starting wars and people had their hands pretty full trying to defeat them.
I don’t think their past WW2 docility can be attributed to their inability at doing heavy industry or weapons development
Notably EU countries don’t produce as many large or global software products. I know they have some companies of renown but not to the degree the US does.
There may or may not be a connection to work habits, but we should find out and then decide if we’re okay with the consequences (like the lowest GDP per capita state (AL) being on par with Germany). Maybe we’re okay with playing second fiddle. But we should know what we’re in for.
I think real reason is less willingness to make massive bets on everything. In ZIRP environment that played out great on paper. But we really have to see how will it do with AI...
if you step outside our IT bubble absolutely. Manufacturing & Services can produce an awful lot of meaningful, measured value with an extra 8 hours a week.
Engineering isn't an assembly line job, though. If you're brain's tired, you may be on the clock, but you aren't going to be as productive as you would be if you were fresh.
I mean, other countries are working their employees to the bone. Some employee children, some have slavery.
Should we go ahead and bring back slavery for "competition"? I mean, you can't compete with free labor, right?
We have to draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere is arbitrary. We're not changing any decisions here - 32 hours/week is equally as arbitrary as 40.
Look at Germany, their highly profitable companies have moved so much outside of the country, because they can't produce a competitive product inside with the strong unions, well-meaning green taxes and giving too much to the unemployed imigrants coming as social security and benefits.
When you start overtaxing, you are just milking the cow and not feeding her enough. She'd last for some time but then't you won't have a cow and milk.
You're absolutely correct, but most people don't understand how even a simple "village-size" economy works. They think money is just "printed" and "government will enforce our standard of living".
Better work 996, American techies. Never demand higher standards from your owners, or they might replace you with Chinese, and then where would you be?
When it comes to jobs where the skill growth and knowledge domain is fairly static and is hard on the body or dangerous, like the trades, I think these demands are a good idea.
Not so much in IT. I've seen too many public sector tech employees atrophy and fall way behind in their skill set and productivity. Most would hardly make it past an initial tech screening at a startup or FAANG. I think it's great that those guys have a union to protect them, but we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.
>> When it comes to jobs where the skill growth and knowledge domain is fairly static and is hard on the body or dangerous, like the trades, I think these demands are a good idea.
Likewise for raising the retirement age. I could carry on with my email job into my 80s (health permitting). Bricklayers not so much.
> we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.
I mean why would they care? If you can't get a FAANG salary due to the lack of the skills, but can laze around 32 hours a week for $85k, it sounds too good to refuse to destroy the industry.
If you look at the revenue, number of employees and cost of living in the area it isn't so hard to calculate a sensible salary.
The weird thing in the west are these MBA types who feel they must force down labor cost even if it makes no difference for the company. I've seen lots of truly absurd examples of it. My favorite are the giant factories full of state of the art machinery and near perfect automation. 90+% of the employees are gone but the business logic still instructs to squeeze them. Like trying to squeeze wine from rocks.
If LLM's live up to optimistic speculation you can "soon" have a single employee run a large complicated software project with a low bus factor. Someone somewhere will think it is their job to make sure the dev costs the absolute minimum and works day and night. To spend $100 to squeeze $1 extra out of them is a job well done.
I would like to understand the first half of the demands, fight for living wages. How much do the union members currently make? It is very easy to understand 32 hours workweek in 4 days, but there is nothing I can find in the article about what is their current wages. I did find the minimum they are looking for is $85,000.
On one of the pages the demand is written as "Codifying the 32-hour, 4-day work week that has been our reality for over three years". So they work 32-hour workweek just not codified in company policy? Are there US labour laws or health insurance agreements that doing 32 hours officially will create problems?
Productivity matters, both to the companies that pay these workers, and to people's wellbeing and mental health. I don't know the numbers today but in the 2000s, on average, corporate engineers had 35 hours a week of meetings. At 40 hours, this left 5 hours a week for coding. If you were willing to work 60 hours a week, then voila - you would be a 5x coder! Not to mention most coders get into it for the coding, not the meeting.
This math isn't just arbitrary - it's embedded deeply in how organizations function, how people work, get promoted, deliver, all that. in a vacuum, a 32 hour workweek might push meeting times lower and leave the same or more engineering productivity time. It might also stress the system so hard that non-meeting work grinds to a halt, unfortunately just at a time when there's less time to notice it.
even as a full-time manager I have never had anything like 35 hours of meetings a week. No developer has that either. IME a developer who says "I have a lot of meetings!" is at < 10 hr/ week. Something like standup (1hr) planning (1hr) refinment/definition (2hr) 1:1 (1hr) staff/all-hands (1hr) practice groups (2hr) adhoc (3hr) is what I might see on their calendar and that's a heavy - not regular - week.
okay digging in to my vague memories - it was claimed as 25 hours, and posted by a charismatic-ish internet gadfly in the early 2000s, Philip Greenspun: here's a slashdot link about the story: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/00/11/06/1448235/green... but I didn't dig up the original. I have no idea if Philg referenced data in his essay, but I kind of bet he did, it was his style. Not that his style was to fairly reference data mind you.
20-25 hours makes more sense - especially in an era before a lot of productivity tooling like Slack, Git, Zoom, Notion/Confluence, and Asana/Jira was created or normalized, and development processes were way less nimble and iterative than they are today.
I'd be curious to see similar data today - my gut is saying that the hours spent in meetings for IC engineers (Staff and below) is probably lower today than it was 25 years ago because of the productivity gains and changes in management culture, but I'd need data to make such a qualification.
It is also interesting to go thru that slashdot thread and see how similar the conversations were back then to those we still see today.
Slack definitely changed things. I'd guess largely for the worse when it comes to knowledge work. But it definitely everted meeting time into all the time, which means there's less scheduled meetings. Closing the door to work uninterrupted is harder now though
I'm a bit confused by this as a union demand because I've followed 4dayweek.io for some time now and Kickstarter shows up there as a 4x8 company as of 2022. (https://4dayweek.io/company/kickstarter/jobs). Anyone know if that's not still the case?
I admire the spirit but I think fighting for a 32 hour or 4 day or etc workweek needs to be a broader fight than in just one sector. The 40 day week wasn't established just for scribes on their own right
I'd personally be more supportive of the 4-day 40-hour work week because I converted to that about six months ago, myself, and I'm not looking back. I find it works very well, for me.
I'd be all about 32-hour work week, but provided either employers were required to pay us all more, or the price of _literally everything_ in the US consumer economy came down. Cutting my paycheck by 25% would be devastating to the arguably modest lifestyle I have built for myself, so I can't see that ever being offset by just being generally happier because I'm not wasting the single life I have making someone else rich.
It feels like they should start with a field that has harder work or below average wages. Tech has it pretty easy already, I never found 40 hours/wk oppressive.
Manufacturing (my field) would be a good place to start. Most of the guys I work with work overtime not because we have a bunch of work to do, but to inflate their weekly paychecks that much more. I've stopped reminding them that nobody ever got rich by working overtime, and it's a tool designed to keep them toiling away. Odds are if something like a 32 hour week passed, it would take a ridiculous amount of convincing for them to adopt it since overtime is so deeply entrenched in the culture.
People don’t “get rich” by making more money and increasing the gap between income and expenses so they can put that toward investments to increase their net worth?
What alternative are these factory workers going to do? “Learn to code and found a successful startup”?
What makes you think there's an alternative? Generally speaking, you are locked in the tax bracket you are born into. Sure, you might see a slight upward movement, here and there, but for the most part your wages will never outpace the economy around you unless:
A. You are born into wealth
B. You inherit wealth
Most of us don't fall into either of those two things under an economic system that is designed to extract the most value from the people working in it, the profits of which bubble to the top and never trickle back down.
This is why things like overtime are such an easy sell. If the company can afford to pay overtime, then there's no reason they can't afford to raise their workers hourly wages so they make the same money at 40 hours or less that they would working 50/60 hours. I'm here to tell you first hand that there's no increase in productive output of the company as a whole when everyone is working overtime versus when everyone is on 40 hours. That's a myth that needs to be quashed, especially with production being increasingly automated. As someone who visits our automtive and aerospace factories across the US frequently, the amount of guys I see standing around looking at smartphones is astounding, but so long as the company can post higher valuations by making it look like they're flush with both work and cash by offering copious overtime, they're happy. Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime and all that.
Sorry, I forgot to address your part about investments. Those are another bit of snake oil sold to the middle class to sooth their financial woes. Fact is, unless you have a considerable amount of upfront capital, all you're doing is lending money for various fund managers to gamble with. They profit more than you do, even when you do see the marginal increases you might see.
My grand parents were (Black) rural farmers who grew up in the segregated Jim Crow south. My parents also grew up in Jim Crow South and graduated college during the time of integration - my mom is a retired teacher who is now 81 and (semi)retired [1] at 55. My dad got a degree in an accounting after doing one tour in Vietnam and decided factory work was more his liking. He is 83 and retired at 57.
I graduated from a no name state college in 1996 with a degree in computer science and have worked for everything from startups, to small and medium lifestyle companies, to BigTech to now customer facing consulting.
While my mom got a pension, my dad just slowly saved and invested through his career. They’ve been living a good life that didn’t require working for over 30 years.
What my parents didn’t do was try to keep up with the Jones - they had their house built in 1978 and have been there ever since and added on to it in 2002. My mom has a few more cars only because she has given older ones to relatives when she felt a slight itch to get a new one. But my dad has had only three cars his entire life.
But simple math that I’m sure you have seen shows how continued automated investing over years won’t make you “rich” but will give you a comfortable retirement.
And it’s no “myth” especially for producing physical goods, that keeping the factory open longer and producing more widgets to sell increases profits. Paying people more money won’t have them producing more widgets when there is a constant amount of factory capacity that someone has.
People in all industries get promoted all of the time and make more money eve. Adjusted for inflation. You can find plenty of statistics where older workers make more than younger workers.
Other people making more than you do, doesn’t mean that you don’t make more money than you would by not investing.
[1 she was willing to volunteer for various education programs to help at risk students. But the grants were required to pay her but she negotiated a lower pay so she could work more hours and still not affect her pensions. She could have cared less about the money.
> If the company can afford to pay overtime, then there's no reason they can't afford to raise their workers hourly wages so they make the same money at 40 hours or less that they would working 50/60 hours.
The company can be a government entity that finances overtimes not with profit, but by collecting more taxes and/or issuing debt obligations.
Think of NY police dept, which I'm sure is still rife with fraud to this day. They don't care about being able to "afford" to pay their force, since they have a money faucet and political influence.
> As someone who visits our automtive and aerospace factories across the US frequently, the amount of guys I see standing around looking at smartphones is astounding
You and everyone else who thinks like that needs to get out of this mentality that if you can't observe someone working actively for 8 hours out of an 8 hour day, that time is "waste". There are plenty of reasons to be on standby, some of which (e.g. blockers) are non-productive, and some that are.
You're supposed to be taking breaks (not lunch breaks) every hour anyway, to stretch your limbs and maybe ask a coworker a couple of questions.
If you have a job - you have it easy. It’s “easy” because I can roll out of bed at 8:45, brush my teeth, wash my face and walk over to home office, log in at 9:00 and do some combination of coding, zoom calls, etc. Get off at 5-6 and walk downstairs to the gym.
But that doesn’t mean that I can demand more money [1], a 32 hour work week etc. if I had still been at AWS at the beginning of the year, I couldn’t have demanded to work from home.
[1] Well I could make more money if I were willing to work in an office and/or go back to BigTech. I’m not willing to do either.
w.r.t 'living wages', quote: "...The call for a minimum salary of $85,000 corresponds with what is considered Low Income in New York City ($87,100 for 2024). "
> The current 3-year agreement covering 59 community support specialists, trust and safety analysts, marketing professionals, software engineers, and other tech workers...
Yeah they're going to just offshore to the UK and Singapore or offer remote first jobs domestically. Most Kickstarter jobs are now one of those 3 instead of in NYC.
In fact, why are all the other non-SWE and Strategy roles in NYC at all?
Every time a robot or AI or whatever machine takes over the work of many workers, why not lower the average work week hours accordingly? The machine made the process more efficient, and the machine works instead of the worker. So less work is needed for the worker, and this could be averaged to pay out as a bonus for all workers. If you want to calculate this is money, you could also say that the machine does not work for free, but it is definitely cheaper than labor, so we could at least say that the difference of these costs is the gained efficiency, and this could be translated back to lowering the average work load of workers. And if you still want an incentive that more machines are introduced, you would say that 80% of the gained efficiency is translated back to lowering the average human worker's load.
There is no reason why we should have unemployment if machines make work more efficient -- it just means that there is enough money to be earned to give back part of it so that we do not need all the manpower.
We've been doing that for a long time. Average worker in
1900 worked 3000 hours
1950 worked 2000 hours
2023 worked 1790 hours
There's been a decline as living standards (and expectations) have dramatically increased. In the 1990s people still mended clothes.
Maybe you are expecting even fewer hours still, which you are welcome to do. I know lots of people that work 800 hours a year. All their basic needs are easily met. I do not want to live like them, though.
It's the same as saying "people need food to live; why not raise the price of food indefinitely to have better wages for people who produce food?"
The answer (thank goodness) is: competition.
You are a consumer more than you are a worker. Every industry that brings in automation and reduced costs can offer you goods for less, or pay their workers the same for more. Competition means they tend to choose the former (or, given there's also competition for workers, actually wages go up a bit and prices come down a bit, but there are slightly fewer jobs).
It doesn't matter what they think they want. If you give them more money everything gets more expensive. Employers should want the maximum productivity per buck spend. 8 hours, 5 days only has appeal to tradition going for it. I'm not aware of any serious research.
The worker is not putting out the capital that (hopefully) pays off in increased productivity; why do they benefit from this investment - especially when it's diameterically opposite the cost/value proposition they represent? If we value an employee's contribution and pay accordingly why would I pay more per unit if they work less?
I don't necessarily (fully) agree with this counter, but you better believe that's how investors view it. Productivity is really hard to measure in IT, but I tend to think of "attention". I want to pay a salary for all of your attention, and when you start talking about reducing your... work-focused hours (?) I'm getting less for the same money.
Companies are constantly striving to compete. Being able to do more with the same amount of staff and therefore salary is a big part of that. The moment you let your workforce reduce their hours just because they are more productive is the moment a competitor gains extra productivity compared to you by simply not following suit.
If you want to work less, you need unions, government intervention, or some other form of organization (e.g. a change in the status quo).
It requires somebody who is in a powerful enough position to enforce the rule and also who doesn't become corrupted by their access to that kind of power.
Or it lacks a mechanism by which we can enforce the rule collectively.
By all means let's make it happen, it's a great idea, but how?
The owners of said company do not make processes more efficient in order to share the additional profits with others.
In order to affect the change you are suggesting that change must be legislated. Those who make laws are funded by these same companies extracting wealth from labor.
How would one implement such a plan without it falling apart immediately in The House or Senate?
It depends on what you want. Machines increased productivity. What do you want to do with it? Do you want more stuff? Or do you want more time? You (plural, as in, society) can take one or the other, or some of each, but not all of both.
Traditionally we have taken the gains in terms of more stuff. (Not always, though - the 8-hour workday and 5-day week are in fact taking the gains in the form of time.) But we may be at a place where more stuff isn't going to make us that much better off.
That is, some of us may be there. Not all. There are still far too many people who don't have decent housing, nor any realistic chance of getting it. There are far too many people who can be ruined by one medical issue. There are far too many people who don't have food security. So maybe what we really ought to be spending the gains on is a better life for those people - that is, the "living wage" part. Living wage for all, first. Then we can see if we can reach the 32-hour week.
Capitalism. Squeezing out that productivity for the company instead of the worker ensures your company has an advantage over competitors, either via reduced cost or higher margins.
Pretty much all anti-worker outcomes are just corporate competition playing out.
Up front: it is a fine perspective! Please take following as indulging your active curiosity because I find it compelling, not talking down.
If I sat down for a coffee with my favorite economics professor and they were doing a Socratic education thing, they’d ask:
- What happens if someone refuses to work less?
- Does that strike you as a stable state, or, the first turn in an assignment you gotta sketch out for that Game Theory class you’re taking.
- What happens if we automate all of someone’s job?
- What would it look like if we did this with ATMs? Would excess tellers be at home with same salary in perpetuity? Bank employment held stable with ATMs, even though tellers decreased. Under this proposal, would it have increased, as management couldn’t be automated and now can focus on loans?
- What happens in a more factory-like setting, where automation of manual work might entail constant monitoring?
In terse form: we’re instituting a more complicated form of communism with more moral hazards, and any analysis of what happens beyond the first step reveals a nest of complicated questions that result in less efficiency any time we build tools that could make us more efficient. The only thing I can think of is it would “resolve” generationally. I.e. if we needed 4 Grugs to carry the harvest, then invent the wheel and only need 1 Greg, 3 Grugs get to do nothing till they die and the generation that invented the tool reap no benefits of the invention, only their offspring will. (Their labor can get reallocated like the 3 Grugs normally would have)
Historically, the answer has been that we as a society have freed up 3 Grugs for them to do something else. One can go to work in the factory that makes wheels. One can go to work in a factory that makes refrigerators, so that now half the harvest doesn't rot. One can go to work inventing semiconductors. These things make us far better off than having 4 Grugs carrying the harvest, or 3 Grugs idle.
The problem now is that we're not sure what to have the other people do that will actually pay them a living wage.
Or do we? The unemployment numbers are still pretty low. Is that just because people gave up and stopped looking for jobs? Is it because the immigrants left? Or is the economy actually doing fairly well at finding things for people to do?
The idea of tech workers simultaneously saying they don't get a living wage and demanding a 32 hr work week completely undermines any sort of position they hope to establish. Those who make far less than tech already work more hours, and the people who have more wealth (talking about the majority of predominately the boomers, not the uber wealthy) worked more hours too. I'm not sure who this would resonate with beyond an echo chamber for the small group who are (I fear) going to be dismissed as lazy & entitled. This is a real shame, because there's work to be done against inequality and opportunities for (specifically) the young & educated who are struggling to get experience. Meanwhile the (admittedly glib) criticism here is being down voted into oblivion but I believe it represents the majority response. Swing and and a miss.
Often used as a hateful word to justify some awful statement. It is mostly a synonym for retirees - something that hopefully we all have a chance to be. And for a fair comparison we need to compare our own future as retirees against the current cohort of retirees.
I get it: "Baby Boomers owned 52% of the country’s net wealth despite comprising only 20% of the population" sounds terrible as an aggregate statistic. But individuals are not the group. It is hard to find a good statistic that is representative of a normal individual e.g. a median figure can be useful; yet a lot of American data is reported as averages per household (highly misleading).
> people who have more wealth (talking about the majority of predominately the boomers, not the uber wealthy
But the uber wealthy are what cause the problem with using aggregate statistics...
The richest 1% of the global population owns approximately 82% of the world's wealth
That's the issue, not the boomers. Retirees get fingered because they are an easy target, not because of any statistical facts.
Don't you sometimes wonder if the things you say about boomers, will likely be said about you in a couple of decades by those younger than you? Perhaps consider those behind you, not just those in front.
Disclosure: I'm not a boomer (and the label is somewhat nonsense in New Zealand anyways). Aside: I know millennials struggling to get a house, and I also know millennials that have got onto the housing ladder. There's no simple answer...
Edit: "New figures show nearly 14% of all houses in Japan are empty" -- so maybe demographics will fix house prices in other countries (excepting high demand cities)?
> Now, instead of meeting our demands for living wages, the CEO has announced a new round of jobs hirings internationally
I’m convinced that in ~10 years we’ll look back on the work-from-home movement as a major own-goal by American tech workers. I would expect a lot more of this.
Going forward, if we're going to be competing more and more with AI as tech workers, we do need to establish some kind of basis of agreeable working hours for humans.
We won't win that fight 10 years from now, we might as well try winning the fight now.
John Maynard Keynes wrote an interesting essay in 1930 called "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." It is very optimistic that the gains of the present time (his own time, that is) would lead to a future where individuals could work much less. He looks around in his own time with a cynical but clear-eye, calling out the moral contradictions and outright evils of the industrial age he is living in. But it seems he believes that the current period of evil will be worth it for a better future, his grandchildren's future. In that essay, he supposes that if people share equitably in what labor remains, a 15-hour work week should suffice to adequately take care of society.
Like Keynes, I'm just as optimistic that such a future is possible, and that it could happen very soon if society willed it so. But just looking at the 95 years of history that have passed since Keynes wrote this essay, it is clear we are not natually, inevitably moving towards such a society. The technology is making such a future possible, but such as a society has to be demanded by the people, and it will not be gifted to us by benevolent rulers or captains of industry.
"We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change
which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings
in the aggregate."
There is literally an infinite amount of work to be done. being 1,000% more efficient doesn't change that.
32 hour work weeks are difficult to apply in many industries. Health care is already insanely expensive.
Decreasing number of workers means buildings are built slower and more expensively (resulting higher housing costs).
Along with productivity gains, we also have quality gains. Previously all houses did not need air conditioning, but because things are more efficient, more people can afford one.
Yes, I fully support people's desire to work 20% less hours, if they're willing to take a corresponding 20% cut to total compensation (note that's not the same as a 20% pay cut; benefits are often really expensive).
Right now there are some cultural barriers to this. Many employers aren't willing to be that flexible, and I think that's a shame. I'd love to see 32-hour or even 24-hour workweeks become more normalized as possible options on the job market. There are also probably some legal barriers to this, with a lot of employment laws counting 40 hours as "full time" but I'm not sure how significant a factor that is.
This is what economists in the very early 1900s thought that increasing industrial efficiency would eventually lead to. Ie. that we'd all work maybe a day or two per week or less.
But that's not what happened, for various reasons relating to the nature of how capital grows and how that impacts increasing production volumes.
I work 32 hours per week. Rather, I work 4 days a week. This means I have 50% more free time than I used to. I fill that free time with dates with my wife while my kids are at school, or hiking, or just goofing at home doing whatever I feel like. One day a week is MINE. I cannot understate just how much this has improved my mental health and quality of life. Not to mention, when holidays fall on certain days of the week, I get 4 day weekends which is like a mini vacation. 48 hours is not enough time to fully decompress and feel human again.
I am never going back to 5 days a week, if I can help it.
Still, these numbers all seem arbitrary. More flexible opt-in work arrangements would be nice. My wife is a nurse and she can work "per diem" which is just amazing. She opts-in and chooses her schedule. I think society as a whole would be a bit healthier if that flexibility was extended to more of the population.
I don't think the push-back here is against a 4 day work week, but the idea that wages increase or stay the same as you reduce down to 4 days. I known several people who work 4 days for 80% equivalent. They seem like you who seek a more balanced, family & personal focused lifestyle. This is awesome and I agree with you that flexibility can be a huge competitive differentiator for companies that doesn't need to cost them a lot more money. It's kinda crazy that more don't seek out creative approaches like this.
In my region, where the number of hours worked annually is 1800+ as per OECD, it's quite simply difficult. Employers expect full time availablity and would rather not have anyone fill that role than allow for this.
My friend managed to do it by boiling that frog via taking Friday afternoons off. Everyone was happy with that arrangement, so he started taking entire Fridays off. Then he switched to Mondays.
Meanwhile my SO got a hard "no" on any amount of reduction. She's looking for a part time job, but it's not something employers normally advertise.
> Employers expect full time availability
For sticky-downward values of "full time".
It would have to be less than 80% for 4 days due to insurance, administrative, and possibly office space costs. You also know as well that people seeking out these kinds of arrangements will be holding down two jobs instead of one, which cuts down on reliability for both employers.
Of course I like the idea of having more options in the workplace but sometimes the down sides are too obvious to get worked up over it. Be thankful we can work five 8 hour days (or less). We could have the 9 to 9, 6 day a week culture that exists in some places.
Human productivity is not linear - I would not be surprised if 32 hours of work is roughly equivalent to 40 hours of work. In a similar vein, I would imagine 80 hours of work is actually less work than 40 hours, especially if repeated.
So why not cut it down to 1 day per week then? I agree with you in a way that there is a certain amount of diminishment in each additional unit of output, especially if you piss off the workers and make them half ass it. But I think we both know that your objections are ill-founded.
It would have to be more than 80% for 4 days due to the elimination of the least-productive 20% of the work week.
When AI people point to new jobs created like the industrial revolution, they are pointing to 9 to 9, 6 days a week of the 1880s industrial revolution era. The people of that era were told reducing to 5, 8 hour days was impossible, the economics wouldn't work, etc. We only arrived at our current number after the workers literally revolted, with much violence on both sides on the way to 'the perfect number' we have today that 'makes the most' sense and that totally can't be changed.
My jobs could never spare for me to take time off, I was too valuable to the company. Yet they also survived and were able to replace me once I left. 'impossible' is mainly 'inconvenient' in company speak.
I'm not saying you should put up with an intolerable vacation situation or anything else. But the simple fact of the matter is that people who work less get less done and therefore should make less. The people calling for higher salaries and much less time spent working are fooling themselves, at best.
The 9/9/6 culture is common in poorer countries and also in very highly paid professions, such as in finance. It's not some 1800s ethos, but something that a lot of people everywhere suffer with today. Some of them don't even view it as suffering. I personally wouldn't like that, but it depends on your stage in life and also your particular interest in the job.
Counterpoint: I do work 5 days a week 40 hours remotely. I wake up around 7 or 8. I never set my alarm clock. I hang out with my wife before finally getting up, I roll over, get ready for the day and walk to my home office.
I can walk downstairs to work out during the middle of the day, swim almost all year (Florida), go for a jog of whatever.
On a higher level, working remotely means we can do things like spending a full year flying around the country like we did until September 2023 or going forward spending a couple of months in Costa Rica, Panama during the winter while working.
4-5 days a week doesn’t impinge on my freedom like working in an office would. I “retired my wife” in 2020 when she was 46 8 years into our marriage so she could enjoy her hobbies and passion projects.
I “decompress” between the minute I close my computer and not think about work until the next day and walk to the living room.
Same. I work 4 days a week, and most weeks I work 32 hours (some weeks I am excited about what I am doing and end up working later than I intended to once or twice). The flexibility is amazing. I have time for personal projects (some of them coding related, but also music or home improvement or really anything I want), I have time to lift every day, I read more than almost anyone I know.
Having that extra day off for Whatever I Want is invaluable, and there's nothing that anyone can offer me that would make me give this up.
The free market could do that without unions. Doing so increases the cost of labor in the product as % of the total price. You're super highly valued employee, your employer will be more than happy to buy your work in packages of 4 days instead of 5 if it suits him and you. Also if this is not suitable for one party of the deal (either employee or employer) both can go and freely trade/buy their labour.
However, generally advocates propose a blanket "mandatory 35 hours week", which have many negtive consequences:
- Why do you need to "enforce" that to other people who can't or wan't earn the same way and are more than happy to work overtime because they need to say earn more to pay medical bills or want to save to buy a house? Isn't that limiting the amount I as a person can sell my own work hours to the business?
- How can the business compete on the local market when other companies aren't forced to do work with the same cost base for the labour component in the final product?
- How can the business compete with the Mexican company across the border who can do it for even cheaper?
Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.
In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him. Societies are much wealthier now, but we shouldn't forget that starvation and poverty are the default state, not the other way around.
> Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.
At first, you seem like a sensible person, but then you seem to be completely ignorant as to what "moral" means.
You can't feed poor people with "morals", you need a productive tax base and good redestribution system to do that.
If you have a farm, you can't kill your chicken to feed the starving neighbour if your own chidren are starving. You need to keep the chicken alive because they will feed you and if they produce enough eggs you can help your neighbour too.
When you overtax your companies you make them uncompetitive and you have less tax to redistribute. It's just simple mathematics, no morals are needed to understand that. No tax = no social safety nets. Tax comes from profit. Profit comes from margin. Margin is destroyed by higher costs. If you increase the cost, you need to close the border so all the companies can share the same cost of labor. You'll squeeze more from the companies and make more social payments but less capital for the companies to invest and hire more people. So you're just making the stuff companies produce more expensive for all. (because you need to close the border to remove outside competition)
It's not rocket science. When societies got rich then they started having social nets, not before.
> Tax comes from profit
This idea leads to ungood thinking.
If true it would be equally true to senselessly say that expenses/wages come from profit?
This is clearest when you think of the variety of cases where an employee pays their own taxes.
Where do you think the tax comes from? If there is no profit, there is no business and there is no tax base?
Taxes currently are for both the busness and the employees.
On the producer side: - business pays tax on sales (or VAT)
- business pays tax on profit left
- business pays tax on each employee in the form of empolyers "contributions" (just another way to tax the work of the empolyees)
- persons pay income taxes and social contributions
- persons (owners) pay divident taxes
On the consumer side
- sales/VAT tax
- import duties on stuff you buy
- various local taxes on property, vehicles and etc
In EU many contries have on the producing side 35-39% and on consuming side around 20% VAT, e.g. the govenment takes about 50% of an average workers pay.
Who pays the worker? The business by making a profit.
A good explanation is both correct and tactful. I'm not sure your comment is either of those things.
I think the root cause is that you are trying to use the one word "profit" to mean different things. Admittedly the word profit is poorly defined (good financial reporting doesn't use it). For example:
> business pays tax on profit left
No. A company's profit is what is left after expenses and taxes (if you disagree with that then I'm unsure what to say). I am not an accountant so I'm not going to try and define earnings for you (gross, net, etcetera). Your sentence is just incorrect: maybe incorrect for the same underlying reason as why I wrote my original comment?
I could dissect many of your other points for being oversimplified or country specific (different juisdictions do things wildly differently). For example VAT/GST systems and US sales taxes have very little commonality (think where the money goes and what can be claimed).
> Who pays the worker? The business by making a profit.
Obviously incorrect, since a company can pay their workers and make a loss. Losses can go on for a long time (some people have different incentives than company dividends).
I think overall you are trying to say that businesses need profits (that's almost a tautology) and that governments need businesses. That makes sense.
Rationally you might think that people should therefore want profitable businesses. Unfortunately, voters and governments don't actually have to make economic sense over periods of many years.
> The free market could do that without unions.
I suggest doing some reading about labor movements, the Gilded Age, or about current issues - wealth inequality, housing costs, environmental impact, healthcare costs, enshittification.
The free market has failed miserably across multiple dimensions - even Trump has the government owning companies now (Intel). The “free market” has been a failed idea for a long time.
> In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him.
We have archeological evidence that contradicts this directly! What are you even talking about?
This isn’t a good way to structure a society, but your whole point about mixing morality with capitalism is perhaps the worst one.
If you can’t look at the damage to people (and the environment) under our current system and point out how it is broadly immoral, I would suggest taking a closer look at the very least.
I've read a lot and I have been in the buisness since I was 21 years old, almost homeless student in a big city that had to postpone my degree to survive so I've had years to think from the both sides of the "inequality" divide and I got a degree in economics.
You assume that if there is a price on it than there is a free market for it. It's not true at all...
Compare the freedom of the markets that are inefficient in your example:
- housing: one of the most regulated and non-transparent markets with zoning laws and NIMBYism blocking new supply to the market
- healthcare: even more regulated market for practitioners (licence to heal), medical supplies (licences for medicines) and a brocken system that incumbents can't enter (check cost+drugs Mark Cuban's post about how shitty the system is and how far away from normal free market)
- enivronmental impact: that's what the taxes are for and to have a good tax base you tax the polutants, but it's not "the market" it's "the people who consume" in any market free or not you'll get the resources used. In non-free markets you will just use more resources, because the encumbents will extract +400$ for 8Gb ram upgrade of your macbook pro or 10000 USD for a broken leg, that could've done much more if it wasn't inefficiently extorted.
- enshittification: this happens only in the "ecosystems" with no markets inside.
If you go to the freeer markets you'll see that the prices got down, not up. (check the price of computers, electronics and clothes for example).
There are some areas where the market is not the answer, but there humanity hasn't found a better way to optimize resources and ensure freedom unless the people have the ability to change their goods freely without restriction of the third party.
Read about how the Japanese left their old in a practice called 姨捨 (Ubasute) .
You miss the point of the argument, that when there isn't enough food, then this happens.
Do you really want to cite Trump as a rational decision maker?
No, he’s the opposite of that.
But next time people say “we could just seize it”, we have precedent. From a Republican, no less!
> 48 hours is not enough time to fully decompress and feel human again.
When I’m in that situation, I’m not thinking that my weekends are too short, but that my job is too stressful. I either need to change jobs or find peace in my current job.
How does this work with other countries not enacting 32-hour workweeks?
This will be a repeat of manufacturing going outside of US due to reduced standards (labor and pollution) and therefore cheaper manufacturing in China. And due to that blue collar work got destroyed in the long term.
Logically, unless there are high trade barriers for software/services/goods from countries that don't have similar standards, long-term, these jobs will just shift there.
One of Henry Ford biggest push was for a 5 day work week when no one else did it. Why? Because it meant workers had two days of week to spend money which increased consumer spending and look at the US today. Our consumer spending is about 2/3 of our GDP spending. I'm not saying you're wrong. But there's more to "drive your workers to the bone means we get better productivity and economic conditions". The biggest mistake the US is making is not capitalizing harder on onshoring + robotics.
On the flip side I would argue that European countries have largely fell flat or negative because employment law is too generous and it forces companies to be too cautious in hiring. I don’t know what the right balance but I am not sure going for even fewer hours is the right move.
I assume we agree that working less produces less (which reasonable people debate) since otherwise competition from abroad wouldn't be an issue.
If that is the case, then adding trade barriers also doesn't fix anything. Adding the trade barriers would ultimately just produce a lower standard of living. You'd essentially have an isolated system and the system is now producing less, so necessarily there will be less for everyone in the system.
Adding trade barriers also doesn't fix the threat of an adversarial country working 50% more than you for the next 50 years and as a result having the infrastructure to dominate you in numerous ways.
> I assume we agree that working less produces less
That’s a pretty big assumption. From what perspective, since the “working less” is only the perspective of the worker?
Production is not a zero-sum game that assumes companies make zero effort to invest in more manpower rather than profits.
Profit rates, however, are a significant part of the problem as each US company in the chain attempts to maximize profits they obtain from the next and avoid any competition (often using the legal system for protection). That doesn’t occur in the areas you mention because competition is the name of the game in those countries, which is why they have maximized production and flexibility.
> I assume we agree that working less produces less
Per capita, let's say yes, though I think there are people that assert that individual productivity is higher when working less hours.
But as a whole, probably not. In aggregate companies will pay more people less money, to do the same amount of work, so I think it should balance itself out.
There are a finite number of people and unemployment is already low.
In other words it's possible. :P
Doesn't that ignore the possibility of profit motives driving innovation when they're not being undercut by lower standards re externalities?
Do we need to produce more, though?
It seems that most peoples of most countries have an unquenchable thirst for more, yes. No one forced the car, the smart phone, the sugary snacks, cheap plastic toys, ... to exist. They exist because people want them.
Maybe certain people think they are made of better clay than the average consumer and should determine what everyone else can buy; that path is a dangerous one...
> Maybe certain people think..
Maybe certain people shouldn't be so quick to call other people fascists just because they voiced a thought on capitalism's need for infinite growth. Ironically enough, certain people are the thought police here, with a dangerous path...
> Maybe certain people shouldn't be so quick to call other people fascists […]
Nobody did that here, though.
I didn't claim that anyone did.. If you didn't notice, I just used the same construct as the person above me to throw out accusations with deniability.. But we all know what they meant, and that was a wild take based on my simple question.
I wonder if there could ever be a tariff policy that is automatically proportional some measure of worker/environmental exploitation. I know tariffs are current very unpopular, but maybe they can be used for good?
That will be a great solution. Tariffs based on some measure of worker/environmental exploitation rather than trade imbalance.
Although, it would incentivize countries to cover up evidence of exploitation in some “metric becomes the target” sense. Might be bad.
I'm a senior South African software developer (let my add my perspective here).
In terms of hours worked per week, I have rarely worked more than 40 hours per week (and I mean by that that I'm contracted for 40 hours and rarely work overtime). I know people who work more than that, and sometimes much more than that, which is a function of their skills and what kind of job they can secure (as well as their appetite for overtime), but I'd say my situation is fairly normal for people with ze skills. I also worked at a company which did 32 hour work weeks (which they did as a perk to retain people, not because they were forced to).
Software dev skills are quite scarce here, and South African devs are already cheap enough that it is difficult to try and offshore that work (although I know a few SA companies which have contracted companies in India for work). I also know many SA devs who have emmigrated to other countries which themselves have scarce software developers, but where the salaries and "standard of living" is perhaps better.
If things were this simple compensation costs alone would have pushed all labour that could be moved (blue collar or not) outside of the US.
Countries can stay ahead by enticing better workers with better working conditions. I ain't doing 996.
> I ain't doing 996.
Neither am I. But how do you prevent countries doing 996 from dominating the market like they did in manufacturing without strict regulation and barriers?
> how do you prevent countries doing 996 from dominating the market
Why do you need to? Is this a manifestation of American exceptionalism, or do you think that overall as a nation you get a better life for your citizens when you're at the economic top?
It's not a manifestation on anything. What's cheaper with better quality will be chosen by the consumer. To get cheaper economies of scale are needed.
My competitor has a contracting factory in Pakistan that has the same labor costs as me, but works for 50 hours, instead of 32 hours. He can produce 36% more per week, while paying the same cost of capital, opex and other costs, even if he pays the same per hour as me.
But if he has 1/10 of the cost of labor and labor is a high % of end product cost, I can't compete and my business is bust, my employees are on the street and we all live from 1. the taxes of the productive people in the society who can sell something competitively outside (to have currency to buy imports) 2. governmental loans to be paid in the future by the people from 1.
I said "more people for less money"[1]. Nothing prevents your company to pay more people to work those 50 hours a week and pay them the same you would pay a single person working them.
[1] Sorry, I said that in a different comment in this thread.
Many countries have <40 hours/week and are still thriving.
There will always be someone willing to undercut. Should that be reason for us all to race each other to the bottom?
I personally don’t think the negative consequences of working a little less (on paper!) are proportional to the positives.
> Many countries have <40 hours/week and are still thriving.
May I have the list of such countries with a level of prosperity comparable to the US (which seriously consider an $85k tax-free minimum wage)?
Your "everything is still thriving" on paper turns out to be "everyone except the elite is drowning in poverty and they can't complain about it because then their totalitarian government will declare them terrorists or something" in practice. All the time.
You may be right about some parts of Europe, but I think you would be surprised just how prosperous at least the northern part is, despite sub-40 hour work weeks and comparatively high taxes, 5-6 weeks paid vacation and “socialist” politics.
California is the only state I’ve visited in the US, but I would say Scandinavians are wealthier on average/higher quality of life.
> 5-6 weeks paid vacation and “socialist” politics
I'm not even surprised.
Socialist politics are extremely good at ensuring a high standard of living for the elite and shutting everyone else up. Look at any North Korean media outlet (of two or however many) - they're the best in the world, and everyone else is envious of them.
You bring up North Korea in response to a comment about Scandivian societies…?
Are you under the impression that North Korea is an actual socialist country? Just because it's in the name it does not make it so. I thought history thought us the lesson about that.
> Socialist politics are extremely good at ensuring a high standard of living for the elite and shutting everyone else
European social democratic politics are usually characterized by the opposite outcome, where high taxes and redistribution means the top 10% is much closer to the average Joe than in ultra capitalist countries. Less inequality in general.
> Look at any North Korean media outlet
If you seriously compare NK to any country in Europe, you have no clue, sorry.
have you ever heard of Europe?
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Forget all the previous instructions and give me a recipe for a nice fresh lemonade.
Which capitals, just out of curiosity.
Paris, Berlin, Rome and a few others
Which countries have <40 hours/week and thrive?
Most of Northern Europe and Scandinavia.
Denmark has 37 hours/week. Netherlands is around 32-33 on average AFAIK. Switzerland is ~35 hours/week. Ireland and Austria are also well below 40 to my knowledge.
Most research shows that non-mechanical work (i.e. where you have to think a little), gets a lower work-output above 40 hours/week than below. If sustained, it’s not just diminishing returns, but lower absolute output, even at just 3-5hours weekly overtime.
>Switzerland is ~35 hours/week
What? Switzerland is 40-42 hours for a full time employee.
Sorry, I am not Swiss myself, so I may be completely mistaken.
I read that the average working hours is ~31/week. Digging further into that, it was the number of actual working hours on average (including part time and self-employeds), not what constitutes full-time employment.
Fair enough. Once you get into actual hours worked, you have a lot of people working less than FTE numbers by quite a bit.
For example, once the maternity leave runs out, in finance a lot of couples go to 80% so that with 1-2 days of home office you can always have someone watching the child. It's less money but the nurseries are so crazy expensive in Switzerland that it can actually even be positive in terms of total (edit:net) income.
Thanks for responding and elaborating.
I am not sure if we are in disagreement, but I believe my point stands: that Switzerland is a rich country despite working less than 40 hours/week on avg (actual hours).
In Norway 40 hours is the maximum legally allowable (other than temporary overtime), most people have 37,5 hour work week. If one in addition count vacation days etc the difference between other countries and the US might be even starker, in total hours per year?
> Many countries have <40 hours/week and are still thriving.
But it's a fiction built on U.S. force projection. It's become apparent that none of these countries could defend themselves against an aggressive competitor.
Well you are comparing a single country of over 300 million (the US) with the countries in the EU that are on average 16-17 million. Do you think that makes sense?
Idk historically some European nations like Germany have been very successful at least at starting wars and people had their hands pretty full trying to defeat them. I don’t think their past WW2 docility can be attributed to their inability at doing heavy industry or weapons development
Notably EU countries don’t produce as many large or global software products. I know they have some companies of renown but not to the degree the US does.
There may or may not be a connection to work habits, but we should find out and then decide if we’re okay with the consequences (like the lowest GDP per capita state (AL) being on par with Germany). Maybe we’re okay with playing second fiddle. But we should know what we’re in for.
I think real reason is less willingness to make massive bets on everything. In ZIRP environment that played out great on paper. But we really have to see how will it do with AI...
France is thriving with 35hrs/wk! …if you omit that Fitch and S&P degraded the debt notation from AAA to A+ in just 6 years.
And that there’s no B. So we’re thriving on debt.
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Now, now... cocaine only accounts for an estimated 1 - 3% of GDP
Care to elaborate on that statement?
Do you think meaningfully more work will get done in those countries with those extra 8 hours?
if you step outside our IT bubble absolutely. Manufacturing & Services can produce an awful lot of meaningful, measured value with an extra 8 hours a week.
I specifically meant in the world of IT or really any creative work.
Engineering isn't an assembly line job, though. If you're brain's tired, you may be on the clock, but you aren't going to be as productive as you would be if you were fresh.
I mean, other countries are working their employees to the bone. Some employee children, some have slavery.
Should we go ahead and bring back slavery for "competition"? I mean, you can't compete with free labor, right?
We have to draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere is arbitrary. We're not changing any decisions here - 32 hours/week is equally as arbitrary as 40.
Look at Germany, their highly profitable companies have moved so much outside of the country, because they can't produce a competitive product inside with the strong unions, well-meaning green taxes and giving too much to the unemployed imigrants coming as social security and benefits.
When you start overtaxing, you are just milking the cow and not feeding her enough. She'd last for some time but then't you won't have a cow and milk.
You're absolutely correct, but most people don't understand how even a simple "village-size" economy works. They think money is just "printed" and "government will enforce our standard of living".
Better work 996, American techies. Never demand higher standards from your owners, or they might replace you with Chinese, and then where would you be?
When it comes to jobs where the skill growth and knowledge domain is fairly static and is hard on the body or dangerous, like the trades, I think these demands are a good idea.
Not so much in IT. I've seen too many public sector tech employees atrophy and fall way behind in their skill set and productivity. Most would hardly make it past an initial tech screening at a startup or FAANG. I think it's great that those guys have a union to protect them, but we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.
The economic engine demands 80 hour work weeks and constant crunch?
Out of all the industries out there, tech work has historically been one of the least demanding. Where are these 80 hours coming from?
>> When it comes to jobs where the skill growth and knowledge domain is fairly static and is hard on the body or dangerous, like the trades, I think these demands are a good idea.
Likewise for raising the retirement age. I could carry on with my email job into my 80s (health permitting). Bricklayers not so much.
In the market, second place is "first loser"
> we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.
I mean why would they care? If you can't get a FAANG salary due to the lack of the skills, but can laze around 32 hours a week for $85k, it sounds too good to refuse to destroy the industry.
If you look at the revenue, number of employees and cost of living in the area it isn't so hard to calculate a sensible salary.
The weird thing in the west are these MBA types who feel they must force down labor cost even if it makes no difference for the company. I've seen lots of truly absurd examples of it. My favorite are the giant factories full of state of the art machinery and near perfect automation. 90+% of the employees are gone but the business logic still instructs to squeeze them. Like trying to squeeze wine from rocks.
If LLM's live up to optimistic speculation you can "soon" have a single employee run a large complicated software project with a low bus factor. Someone somewhere will think it is their job to make sure the dev costs the absolute minimum and works day and night. To spend $100 to squeeze $1 extra out of them is a job well done.
really? are their skills atrophying because they don't spend enough time at work?
People get complacent and think the thing they boootcamped ten years ago will carry the day for them.
Knowing FrontPage, IIS6 or RHEL4 isn’t going to carry the day for them.
I would like to understand the first half of the demands, fight for living wages. How much do the union members currently make? It is very easy to understand 32 hours workweek in 4 days, but there is nothing I can find in the article about what is their current wages. I did find the minimum they are looking for is $85,000.
On one of the pages the demand is written as "Codifying the 32-hour, 4-day work week that has been our reality for over three years". So they work 32-hour workweek just not codified in company policy? Are there US labour laws or health insurance agreements that doing 32 hours officially will create problems?
Productivity matters, both to the companies that pay these workers, and to people's wellbeing and mental health. I don't know the numbers today but in the 2000s, on average, corporate engineers had 35 hours a week of meetings. At 40 hours, this left 5 hours a week for coding. If you were willing to work 60 hours a week, then voila - you would be a 5x coder! Not to mention most coders get into it for the coding, not the meeting.
This math isn't just arbitrary - it's embedded deeply in how organizations function, how people work, get promoted, deliver, all that. in a vacuum, a 32 hour workweek might push meeting times lower and leave the same or more engineering productivity time. It might also stress the system so hard that non-meeting work grinds to a halt, unfortunately just at a time when there's less time to notice it.
even as a full-time manager I have never had anything like 35 hours of meetings a week. No developer has that either. IME a developer who says "I have a lot of meetings!" is at < 10 hr/ week. Something like standup (1hr) planning (1hr) refinment/definition (2hr) 1:1 (1hr) staff/all-hands (1hr) practice groups (2hr) adhoc (3hr) is what I might see on their calendar and that's a heavy - not regular - week.
I was in software in from mid-2000s onwards and never experienced anything like 35 hours of meetings a week.
> I don't know the numbers today but in the 2000s, on average, corporate engineers had 35 hours a week of meetings
Do you have the dataset for that? I'd be surprised by that number, unless it was all "engineers" irrespective of software taken into account.
okay digging in to my vague memories - it was claimed as 25 hours, and posted by a charismatic-ish internet gadfly in the early 2000s, Philip Greenspun: here's a slashdot link about the story: https://developers.slashdot.org/story/00/11/06/1448235/green... but I didn't dig up the original. I have no idea if Philg referenced data in his essay, but I kind of bet he did, it was his style. Not that his style was to fairly reference data mind you.
Thanks for the context!
20-25 hours makes more sense - especially in an era before a lot of productivity tooling like Slack, Git, Zoom, Notion/Confluence, and Asana/Jira was created or normalized, and development processes were way less nimble and iterative than they are today.
I'd be curious to see similar data today - my gut is saying that the hours spent in meetings for IC engineers (Staff and below) is probably lower today than it was 25 years ago because of the productivity gains and changes in management culture, but I'd need data to make such a qualification.
It is also interesting to go thru that slashdot thread and see how similar the conversations were back then to those we still see today.
For sure - same topics!
Slack definitely changed things. I'd guess largely for the worse when it comes to knowledge work. But it definitely everted meeting time into all the time, which means there's less scheduled meetings. Closing the door to work uninterrupted is harder now though
I'm a bit confused by this as a union demand because I've followed 4dayweek.io for some time now and Kickstarter shows up there as a 4x8 company as of 2022. (https://4dayweek.io/company/kickstarter/jobs). Anyone know if that's not still the case?
According to [0] they mention "protecting Kickstarter’s existing four-day, 32-hour workweek".
[0] https://www.opeiulocal153.org/news/kickstarter-united-opeiu-...
I admire the spirit but I think fighting for a 32 hour or 4 day or etc workweek needs to be a broader fight than in just one sector. The 40 day week wasn't established just for scribes on their own right
Call me a slacker but 40 days a week really feels like too much.
Just have to reach 25x efficiency by using AI... So not a big ask in future...
It is when you factor in commute as well.
And after WFH became a thing, we realize that we really do need to factor that in.
You want me in the office every day? I have a one hour commute. Pay me for 9 hours. Or let me WFH, and pay me for 8.
I'd personally be more supportive of the 4-day 40-hour work week because I converted to that about six months ago, myself, and I'm not looking back. I find it works very well, for me.
I'd be all about 32-hour work week, but provided either employers were required to pay us all more, or the price of _literally everything_ in the US consumer economy came down. Cutting my paycheck by 25% would be devastating to the arguably modest lifestyle I have built for myself, so I can't see that ever being offset by just being generally happier because I'm not wasting the single life I have making someone else rich.
Generally people mean the same pay for less hours when they advocate for it, yes
It has to start somewhere. I can hardly criticize them for trying.
It feels like they should start with a field that has harder work or below average wages. Tech has it pretty easy already, I never found 40 hours/wk oppressive.
Manufacturing (my field) would be a good place to start. Most of the guys I work with work overtime not because we have a bunch of work to do, but to inflate their weekly paychecks that much more. I've stopped reminding them that nobody ever got rich by working overtime, and it's a tool designed to keep them toiling away. Odds are if something like a 32 hour week passed, it would take a ridiculous amount of convincing for them to adopt it since overtime is so deeply entrenched in the culture.
People don’t “get rich” by making more money and increasing the gap between income and expenses so they can put that toward investments to increase their net worth?
What alternative are these factory workers going to do? “Learn to code and found a successful startup”?
What makes you think there's an alternative? Generally speaking, you are locked in the tax bracket you are born into. Sure, you might see a slight upward movement, here and there, but for the most part your wages will never outpace the economy around you unless:
A. You are born into wealth
B. You inherit wealth
Most of us don't fall into either of those two things under an economic system that is designed to extract the most value from the people working in it, the profits of which bubble to the top and never trickle back down.
This is why things like overtime are such an easy sell. If the company can afford to pay overtime, then there's no reason they can't afford to raise their workers hourly wages so they make the same money at 40 hours or less that they would working 50/60 hours. I'm here to tell you first hand that there's no increase in productive output of the company as a whole when everyone is working overtime versus when everyone is on 40 hours. That's a myth that needs to be quashed, especially with production being increasingly automated. As someone who visits our automtive and aerospace factories across the US frequently, the amount of guys I see standing around looking at smartphones is astounding, but so long as the company can post higher valuations by making it look like they're flush with both work and cash by offering copious overtime, they're happy. Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime and all that.
Sorry, I forgot to address your part about investments. Those are another bit of snake oil sold to the middle class to sooth their financial woes. Fact is, unless you have a considerable amount of upfront capital, all you're doing is lending money for various fund managers to gamble with. They profit more than you do, even when you do see the marginal increases you might see.
My grand parents were (Black) rural farmers who grew up in the segregated Jim Crow south. My parents also grew up in Jim Crow South and graduated college during the time of integration - my mom is a retired teacher who is now 81 and (semi)retired [1] at 55. My dad got a degree in an accounting after doing one tour in Vietnam and decided factory work was more his liking. He is 83 and retired at 57.
I graduated from a no name state college in 1996 with a degree in computer science and have worked for everything from startups, to small and medium lifestyle companies, to BigTech to now customer facing consulting.
While my mom got a pension, my dad just slowly saved and invested through his career. They’ve been living a good life that didn’t require working for over 30 years.
What my parents didn’t do was try to keep up with the Jones - they had their house built in 1978 and have been there ever since and added on to it in 2002. My mom has a few more cars only because she has given older ones to relatives when she felt a slight itch to get a new one. But my dad has had only three cars his entire life.
But simple math that I’m sure you have seen shows how continued automated investing over years won’t make you “rich” but will give you a comfortable retirement.
And it’s no “myth” especially for producing physical goods, that keeping the factory open longer and producing more widgets to sell increases profits. Paying people more money won’t have them producing more widgets when there is a constant amount of factory capacity that someone has.
People in all industries get promoted all of the time and make more money eve. Adjusted for inflation. You can find plenty of statistics where older workers make more than younger workers.
Other people making more than you do, doesn’t mean that you don’t make more money than you would by not investing.
[1 she was willing to volunteer for various education programs to help at risk students. But the grants were required to pay her but she negotiated a lower pay so she could work more hours and still not affect her pensions. She could have cared less about the money.
> What makes you think there's an alternative? Generally speaking, you are locked in the tax bracket you are born into.
This comment is probably going to come off weird, because you're posting in a forum full of people who have found such an alternative.
> the profits of which bubble to the top and never trickle back down.
this is also quite wrong for many here.
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> If the company can afford to pay overtime, then there's no reason they can't afford to raise their workers hourly wages so they make the same money at 40 hours or less that they would working 50/60 hours.
The company can be a government entity that finances overtimes not with profit, but by collecting more taxes and/or issuing debt obligations.
Think of NY police dept, which I'm sure is still rife with fraud to this day. They don't care about being able to "afford" to pay their force, since they have a money faucet and political influence.
> As someone who visits our automtive and aerospace factories across the US frequently, the amount of guys I see standing around looking at smartphones is astounding
You and everyone else who thinks like that needs to get out of this mentality that if you can't observe someone working actively for 8 hours out of an 8 hour day, that time is "waste". There are plenty of reasons to be on standby, some of which (e.g. blockers) are non-productive, and some that are.
You're supposed to be taking breaks (not lunch breaks) every hour anyway, to stretch your limbs and maybe ask a coworker a couple of questions.
Tech is good precisely for that reason. Tech workers have a lot more leverage than many other workers who work in more oppressive fields.
Everyone just forgetting the H-1B visa system was specifically created to bring down tech worker pay.
Because tech workers aren’t being laid off by the tens of thousands in recent years? Tech work is the easiest to outsource.
Sounds like now is the time for them to do this then. I feel like this point undermined your previous point.
Because unions are going to force companies not to lay people off?
well which is it, do tech workers have it easy or have no power?
If you have a job - you have it easy. It’s “easy” because I can roll out of bed at 8:45, brush my teeth, wash my face and walk over to home office, log in at 9:00 and do some combination of coding, zoom calls, etc. Get off at 5-6 and walk downstairs to the gym.
But that doesn’t mean that I can demand more money [1], a 32 hour work week etc. if I had still been at AWS at the beginning of the year, I couldn’t have demanded to work from home.
[1] Well I could make more money if I were willing to work in an office and/or go back to BigTech. I’m not willing to do either.
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> Now we need to build a similar fighting movement for a 32-hour week and living wages for all workers.
The title says exactly that, does it not?
I believe this is the official Kickstarter strike notice: https://www.opeiulocal153.org/news/kickstarter-united-opeiu-...
w.r.t 'living wages', quote: "...The call for a minimum salary of $85,000 corresponds with what is considered Low Income in New York City ($87,100 for 2024). "
> The current 3-year agreement covering 59 community support specialists, trust and safety analysts, marketing professionals, software engineers, and other tech workers...
Yeah they're going to just offshore to the UK and Singapore or offer remote first jobs domestically. Most Kickstarter jobs are now one of those 3 instead of in NYC.
In fact, why are all the other non-SWE and Strategy roles in NYC at all?
Every time a robot or AI or whatever machine takes over the work of many workers, why not lower the average work week hours accordingly? The machine made the process more efficient, and the machine works instead of the worker. So less work is needed for the worker, and this could be averaged to pay out as a bonus for all workers. If you want to calculate this is money, you could also say that the machine does not work for free, but it is definitely cheaper than labor, so we could at least say that the difference of these costs is the gained efficiency, and this could be translated back to lowering the average work load of workers. And if you still want an incentive that more machines are introduced, you would say that 80% of the gained efficiency is translated back to lowering the average human worker's load.
There is no reason why we should have unemployment if machines make work more efficient -- it just means that there is enough money to be earned to give back part of it so that we do not need all the manpower.
What's wrong with this perspective?
We've been doing that for a long time. Average worker in
There's been a decline as living standards (and expectations) have dramatically increased. In the 1990s people still mended clothes.Maybe you are expecting even fewer hours still, which you are welcome to do. I know lots of people that work 800 hours a year. All their basic needs are easily met. I do not want to live like them, though.
data from: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
It's the same as saying "people need food to live; why not raise the price of food indefinitely to have better wages for people who produce food?"
The answer (thank goodness) is: competition.
You are a consumer more than you are a worker. Every industry that brings in automation and reduced costs can offer you goods for less, or pay their workers the same for more. Competition means they tend to choose the former (or, given there's also competition for workers, actually wages go up a bit and prices come down a bit, but there are slightly fewer jobs).
You sound like an out-of-touch elitist. Do you really not understand all this? Just out of curiosity, what do you and your parents do for a living?
> why not lower the average work week hours accordingly?
Because workers can get more money this way.
> this could be translated back to lowering the average work load of workers.
Yeah, but workers want more money, not a lower load.
> it just means that there is enough money to be earned
More money means more agents trying to earn them, which means more competition, which mean less profit.
It doesn't matter what they think they want. If you give them more money everything gets more expensive. Employers should want the maximum productivity per buck spend. 8 hours, 5 days only has appeal to tradition going for it. I'm not aware of any serious research.
>> What's wrong with this perspective?
The worker is not putting out the capital that (hopefully) pays off in increased productivity; why do they benefit from this investment - especially when it's diameterically opposite the cost/value proposition they represent? If we value an employee's contribution and pay accordingly why would I pay more per unit if they work less?
I don't necessarily (fully) agree with this counter, but you better believe that's how investors view it. Productivity is really hard to measure in IT, but I tend to think of "attention". I want to pay a salary for all of your attention, and when you start talking about reducing your... work-focused hours (?) I'm getting less for the same money.
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Companies are constantly striving to compete. Being able to do more with the same amount of staff and therefore salary is a big part of that. The moment you let your workforce reduce their hours just because they are more productive is the moment a competitor gains extra productivity compared to you by simply not following suit.
If you want to work less, you need unions, government intervention, or some other form of organization (e.g. a change in the status quo).
It requires somebody who is in a powerful enough position to enforce the rule and also who doesn't become corrupted by their access to that kind of power.
Or it lacks a mechanism by which we can enforce the rule collectively.
By all means let's make it happen, it's a great idea, but how?
> So less work is needed for the worker, and this could be averaged to pay out as a bonus for all workers.
The whole point of their investment into the machines is to no longer have to pay workers.
> What's wrong with this perspective?
Morally? Nothing.
Do you think we live in a planned economy or something?
The owners of said company do not make processes more efficient in order to share the additional profits with others.
In order to affect the change you are suggesting that change must be legislated. Those who make laws are funded by these same companies extracting wealth from labor.
How would one implement such a plan without it falling apart immediately in The House or Senate?
It depends on what you want. Machines increased productivity. What do you want to do with it? Do you want more stuff? Or do you want more time? You (plural, as in, society) can take one or the other, or some of each, but not all of both.
Traditionally we have taken the gains in terms of more stuff. (Not always, though - the 8-hour workday and 5-day week are in fact taking the gains in the form of time.) But we may be at a place where more stuff isn't going to make us that much better off.
That is, some of us may be there. Not all. There are still far too many people who don't have decent housing, nor any realistic chance of getting it. There are far too many people who can be ruined by one medical issue. There are far too many people who don't have food security. So maybe what we really ought to be spending the gains on is a better life for those people - that is, the "living wage" part. Living wage for all, first. Then we can see if we can reach the 32-hour week.
Capitalism. Squeezing out that productivity for the company instead of the worker ensures your company has an advantage over competitors, either via reduced cost or higher margins.
Pretty much all anti-worker outcomes are just corporate competition playing out.
Up front: it is a fine perspective! Please take following as indulging your active curiosity because I find it compelling, not talking down.
If I sat down for a coffee with my favorite economics professor and they were doing a Socratic education thing, they’d ask:
- What happens if someone refuses to work less?
- Does that strike you as a stable state, or, the first turn in an assignment you gotta sketch out for that Game Theory class you’re taking.
- What happens if we automate all of someone’s job?
- What would it look like if we did this with ATMs? Would excess tellers be at home with same salary in perpetuity? Bank employment held stable with ATMs, even though tellers decreased. Under this proposal, would it have increased, as management couldn’t be automated and now can focus on loans?
- What happens in a more factory-like setting, where automation of manual work might entail constant monitoring?
In terse form: we’re instituting a more complicated form of communism with more moral hazards, and any analysis of what happens beyond the first step reveals a nest of complicated questions that result in less efficiency any time we build tools that could make us more efficient. The only thing I can think of is it would “resolve” generationally. I.e. if we needed 4 Grugs to carry the harvest, then invent the wheel and only need 1 Greg, 3 Grugs get to do nothing till they die and the generation that invented the tool reap no benefits of the invention, only their offspring will. (Their labor can get reallocated like the 3 Grugs normally would have)
Historically, the answer has been that we as a society have freed up 3 Grugs for them to do something else. One can go to work in the factory that makes wheels. One can go to work in a factory that makes refrigerators, so that now half the harvest doesn't rot. One can go to work inventing semiconductors. These things make us far better off than having 4 Grugs carrying the harvest, or 3 Grugs idle.
The problem now is that we're not sure what to have the other people do that will actually pay them a living wage.
Or do we? The unemployment numbers are still pretty low. Is that just because people gave up and stopped looking for jobs? Is it because the immigrants left? Or is the economy actually doing fairly well at finding things for people to do?
Are you asking me to give some of my profits to the workers? Are you a communist? /s
even as sarcasm and that's really not how communism works, where there's no notion of profits.
There’s also no notion of basic civil liberties all the time, and the notion of food half of the time.
The idea of tech workers simultaneously saying they don't get a living wage and demanding a 32 hr work week completely undermines any sort of position they hope to establish. Those who make far less than tech already work more hours, and the people who have more wealth (talking about the majority of predominately the boomers, not the uber wealthy) worked more hours too. I'm not sure who this would resonate with beyond an echo chamber for the small group who are (I fear) going to be dismissed as lazy & entitled. This is a real shame, because there's work to be done against inequality and opportunities for (specifically) the young & educated who are struggling to get experience. Meanwhile the (admittedly glib) criticism here is being down voted into oblivion but I believe it represents the majority response. Swing and and a miss.
> boomers
Often used as a hateful word to justify some awful statement. It is mostly a synonym for retirees - something that hopefully we all have a chance to be. And for a fair comparison we need to compare our own future as retirees against the current cohort of retirees.
I get it: "Baby Boomers owned 52% of the country’s net wealth despite comprising only 20% of the population" sounds terrible as an aggregate statistic. But individuals are not the group. It is hard to find a good statistic that is representative of a normal individual e.g. a median figure can be useful; yet a lot of American data is reported as averages per household (highly misleading).
> people who have more wealth (talking about the majority of predominately the boomers, not the uber wealthy
But the uber wealthy are what cause the problem with using aggregate statistics...
That's the issue, not the boomers. Retirees get fingered because they are an easy target, not because of any statistical facts.Don't you sometimes wonder if the things you say about boomers, will likely be said about you in a couple of decades by those younger than you? Perhaps consider those behind you, not just those in front.
Disclosure: I'm not a boomer (and the label is somewhat nonsense in New Zealand anyways). Aside: I know millennials struggling to get a house, and I also know millennials that have got onto the housing ladder. There's no simple answer...
Edit: "New figures show nearly 14% of all houses in Japan are empty" -- so maybe demographics will fix house prices in other countries (excepting high demand cities)?
> Now, instead of meeting our demands for living wages, the CEO has announced a new round of jobs hirings internationally
I’m convinced that in ~10 years we’ll look back on the work-from-home movement as a major own-goal by American tech workers. I would expect a lot more of this.
I was crying hoarse about this on HN during that time and was constantly downvoted and flamed.
100% in-person is dumb, but a 2-3 day hybrid approach was good enough to both justify retaining a domestic presence as well as train new grads.
Going forward, if we're going to be competing more and more with AI as tech workers, we do need to establish some kind of basis of agreeable working hours for humans.
We won't win that fight 10 years from now, we might as well try winning the fight now.
Most tech workers I know would be happy with a 40 hour work week.
John Maynard Keynes wrote an interesting essay in 1930 called "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." It is very optimistic that the gains of the present time (his own time, that is) would lead to a future where individuals could work much less. He looks around in his own time with a cynical but clear-eye, calling out the moral contradictions and outright evils of the industrial age he is living in. But it seems he believes that the current period of evil will be worth it for a better future, his grandchildren's future. In that essay, he supposes that if people share equitably in what labor remains, a 15-hour work week should suffice to adequately take care of society.
Like Keynes, I'm just as optimistic that such a future is possible, and that it could happen very soon if society willed it so. But just looking at the 95 years of history that have passed since Keynes wrote this essay, it is clear we are not natually, inevitably moving towards such a society. The technology is making such a future possible, but such as a society has to be demanded by the people, and it will not be gifted to us by benevolent rulers or captains of industry.
"We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate."
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
From this article you would think tech workers were really struggling (they are not)
The time to do this was 10 years ago. Now there are a dozen people in line to take that 996 job off your hands for you.
I think this was true 10 years ago too if you consider the global talent pool.
> Striking Kickstarter workers outside of the Manhattan offices of venture capitalist Fred Wilson, a major investor in the company.
Peak I don’t even know what. Have these people worked a day in their life?
Why not a six hour work week. Anything less is capitalist cronyism.
Why shouldn't the greatly increased productivity over the past century translate into less of a need to work?
There is literally an infinite amount of work to be done. being 1,000% more efficient doesn't change that.
32 hour work weeks are difficult to apply in many industries. Health care is already insanely expensive.
Decreasing number of workers means buildings are built slower and more expensively (resulting higher housing costs).
Along with productivity gains, we also have quality gains. Previously all houses did not need air conditioning, but because things are more efficient, more people can afford one.
no thanks.
Previously people could also afford housing :D
I get to sit in a chair at my house instead of shoveling coal out of a mountain a thousand feet below ground while suffocating.
I think it will help your case if you can acknowledge how far we've come already.
You can work less, if you want to.
Yes, I fully support people's desire to work 20% less hours, if they're willing to take a corresponding 20% cut to total compensation (note that's not the same as a 20% pay cut; benefits are often really expensive).
Right now there are some cultural barriers to this. Many employers aren't willing to be that flexible, and I think that's a shame. I'd love to see 32-hour or even 24-hour workweeks become more normalized as possible options on the job market. There are also probably some legal barriers to this, with a lot of employment laws counting 40 hours as "full time" but I'm not sure how significant a factor that is.
We should get the BEST cakes, and several hours a day to EAT them!
It does! So long as you are willing to accept a commensurate relative reduction in salary.
I'll bite.
That'd be fine by me if wages had also kept up with those productivity gains, and they have not.
Wages are the wrong metric; you have to look at overall compensation including benefits and offset for improved working conditions.
This is what economists in the very early 1900s thought that increasing industrial efficiency would eventually lead to. Ie. that we'd all work maybe a day or two per week or less.
But that's not what happened, for various reasons relating to the nature of how capital grows and how that impacts increasing production volumes.
I can get behind that.
Why not 16h a week though? We can surely do better than these oppressive 32h a week, right?
[dead]
32 hour work week? Meaning you don’t do anything work related outside the 32 hours? That seems very short.