In-depth political discussion from around the world; if it's a political happening, you can post it here.
These guidelines will be enforced on a know-it-when-I-see-it basis.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Less incentive to waste time, more ability to focus on work, and a population suddenly increasing their potential time as consumers by 50%? The capitalists should be drooling over it as much as the socialists. It's like increasing the population of some markets by half for free without any additional housing costs.
And it helps with unemployment and makes more of the population productive.
I truly don’t see how doing so would adversely affect any company. If they need the additional labor an extra eight hours can provide, they can hire someone else at 32 hours/week to cover it with an overlapping schedule. If the business is smaller, they can pay overtime.
Anecdotally, my own job doesn’t require me to work eight hours every day. Shit, I’m lucky to do four hours of actual work in a day. The amount of work ebbs and flows, but I find myself more often than not watching YouTube on my work computer simply because there’s literally no more work for the day.
Oof this screams out of touch though you see that right?
I'm a chef I work a lot. 11 hour shifts no break is common. 32 hour work week means I'm assured 8 hours OT + my already typical 2 hours OT every week.
For someone like me this is a huge pay bump or they hire someone and I get more time off. Either way is a win.
11 hour shifts no break is common.
But they shouldn’t be and that’s the point.
And so cutting to 32 hours a week helps. I didn't make this standard it just goes this way because of the career.
Truckers, Doctors, Nurses all deal with similar schedule issues and it is usually because we can't just hand out workload over you have to know what is going on, nobody can just walk in and take over.
Tbf it's expensive to find a new hire. At least, that's the logic I rely on when arguing not to fire employees frequently.
Oh no! A company spending money on anything but the CEO’s next yacht is such an awful idea!
Why not fix two problems? I don't expect a fair answer though.
naturally the talking heads on fox who work 3 hours a day are upset
What would be curious to see, are effects on the wider economy (i.e. main street).
Having an extra day during the week would mean more hobbies, travel, purchases, doctor visits, etc etc....
A collective breath of relief for society
I think I recently saw an article about a trial of the 32-hour work week in the UK that most of the companies ended up sticking with.
I work at a smallish company that has to be really precise with how much time is charged to specific (mainly government) programs, but there’s a lot of downtime. I think this would really help.
John Maynard Keynes, basically the founder of modern, macroeconomic theory predicted in 1930 that his grandchildren would only be working 15 hours a week. Ironically, up until the 80’s in the US, average work hours per employee per week was trending down and had it continued would have gotten as low as 15 by now (I think, can’t perfectly recall the trend line)
Here is the actual bill. As far as I can tell, all it really does is make some wording substitutions and redefinitions to the original 1940 bill.
What I find interesting is that it addresses weekly pay, assuming salaries workers. What happens to hourly employees? Will the employer be required to up their hourly rate to compensate for the 8 hour loss? People are already stretched thin enough, an 8 hour loss for hourly workers would be devastating in many cases.
There would also need to be payroll tax adjustments on the employer side regarding hourly workers. Payroll taxes generally end up being about 90% of an employee's wage added on to their gross wage (at least here in California), so while employees see a great benefit of increased pay and/or reduced hours, this would absolutely screw small/medium businesses that already operate on tight margins. I operate in the construction industry, and dropping down to 4 days would delay projects even more, and having to pay overtime on a fifth day at increased hourly wages would be prohibitively expensive that most wouldn't do it.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think this is a step in the right direction, but I think there needs to be a good balance for both employees and employers. I know online communities like to paint all companies as evil, but I do my damnedest to take care of my guys and provide good jobs with great pay and benefits while also giving my customers reasonable prices in a state that's already stupid amounts of expensive to do business in, and I'm not penny pinching or being anal about my bottom line. Stuff like this without consideration of the impacts of small businesses is how you end up with mega corps that are the only ones that can afford to stay in business.
I find it interesting that you oppose this bill because it would make your life harder, which you plan to pass onto your workers.
How much better of a life exactly do you deserve for being the "boss"?
There's a whole lot of assumptions you've got going on right there, along with terrible reading comprehension. At no point did I say that I'm going to make life harder for my employees, nor that I deserve a better life than them. I also said I think this is a step in the right direction, just that it needs to be hashed out a little more for businesses other that office workers.
I think instead of paying everyone overtime, most places will have to adopt to shifts. A crew that is Monday to Thursday and another crew Tuesday to Friday with most work occuring Tuesday through Thursday
Yeah that probably is the way to do it. Overtime is already insanely expensive to do, but what gets me is they also tax employees even more for taking on overtime, which I always thought was ridiculous.
id be happy if i could work 40 hours a week and not be freaking on call all the time.
maybe he could have proposed this when there was actually any chance of it passing, instead of waiting to deploy it as election fodder. who am I kidding, there was never any chance of it passing.
if people stopped crying about how they weren't going to vote every four years just because they didn't get 100% of what they wanted because they're not the only people who live in the country and actually kept voting then there could be a bigger majority than 50 and you could pass it.
The two most recently elected democrat presidents were both put in office on the backs of record voter turnout. One of them even had a congressional majority.
the last president to have a supermajority in congress was president obama and that lasted for about 60 days and because of it we got the biggest overhaul to the american healthcare system in years which has benefitted millions.
the biggest overhaul being an extremely watered down republican bill that no republicans voted for.
you think republicans would have voted for a healthcare bill that was proposed by a black president?
and that bill is one of the most popular pieces of legislation that has helped millions afford healthcare and medicine when they couldn't before
i don't think they would have voted for any bill proposed by a black president, so why start with their garbage bill as a basis to negotiate (with themselves) from?
if nothing can be legislatively accomplished without handing the president a supermajority then why should I have any concern about the possibility of another republican president? why is it that republicans seem to have no issue achieving their policy goals without one?
because it wasn't a garbage bill; it was a great bill that continues to help millions of people
if nothing can be legislatively accomplished without handing the president a supermajority
nothing happening without 2/3rds of a majority is why republicans haven't been able to pass don't say gay bills and ban abortion nationally...
they got their wall, though, and it wasn't based on some democrat written border bill, though the dems have been more than happy to keep building it for them and even give them more concessions on border policy. they killed roe v. wade and didn't need congressional approval for that, either. the ACA certainly helped plently of people, the private insurance industry among them. other countries manage to have universal healthcare without all this bullshit so why is it apparently impossible to do that here?
if you'd like an example of the kind of power the president can wield without support of congress, look no further than Biden's unflinching support and aid for Israel in the face of the genocide in Gaza. or his circumvention of environmental protections to pave the way for trump's wall.
they didn't get "a wall" though; trump took money from defense and used it for a wall but nothing was actually passed.
roe was killed by the courts not in congress.
labour took years to get the nhs up but be careful what you wish for because the tories are currently using the control of it to ban trans healthcare. the us also doesn't have a parliamentary system and i doubt the nhs could be created in the uk today.
and a) supporting israel has been public policies for years b) biden hasn't been unflinching in his support; he's been very publicly critical of netanyahu c) israel was STILL attacked by hamas who are not necessarily saints when it comes to how they treat both israeli and palestinian citizens.
the history of Israel and Palestine did not begin on Oct 7. regardless of what you think of Hamas nothing they've done could possibly justify the response from Israel. Biden criticizing Bibi is worthless without any action to back it up, especially when the aid and weapons keep flowing regardless.
as for the NHS, apparently its fine that the ACA is flawed because it helps millions of people, but the NHS doesn't also get similar deference for doing the same? and for the timeframe: Nancy Pelosi's original campaign platform included advocacy for universal healthcare, how much more time do they need?
do democrat presidents not also get to appoint judges? are republicans the only party who can obstruct appointments?
if they didn't get their wall, then what is this about?
I love Bernie, but all his bills are so pie in the sky, they never have any chance of passing. He's the great hope, that's always dashed on the rocks. Unless we king him...
🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:
Click here to see the summary
In a hearing on Thursday before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions on the proposed law, Mr. Sanders, independent of Vermont, said profits from boosts in productivity over the decades had been reaped only by corporate leaders, and not shared with workers.
Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, said at the hearing such a reduction would hurt employers, ship jobs overseas and cause dramatic spikes in consumer prices.
Mr. Sanders is far from the first to propose the idea, which has been floated by Richard Nixon, pitched by autoworkers and experimented with by companies ranging from Shake Shack to Kickstarter and Unilever’s New Zealand unit.
But the concept has gathered steam in recent years, as the Covid-19 pandemic has caused fundamental shifts in work culture and reset expectations about employment.
Representative Mark Takano, Democrat of California, introduced the 32-Hour Workweek Act in the House in 2021, and has reintroduced it as a companion bill to the one sponsored by Mr. Sanders in the Senate.
Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College who was the lead researcher on the study, testified at Thursday’s hearing that 91 percent of the companies that switched to a four-day workweek had stuck with the new arrangement a year later.
Saved 61% of original text.
Yeah. Okay. Good.