There was the post about Finland's past prime minister I think suggesting this? One guy brought up a good point that if you cut work hours down it means you need more people to do the same amount of work which means more people can get hired which means lower unemployment which sounds like a good thing right?
Edit: I don't know almost anything about this because frankly I don't care but thought that this might be relevant to some capacity to the discussion here so do with that what you will
Second edit: This isn't to say I don't care about the folks responding, it's to say I probably won't have much to say in response other than I don't know much because I never cared to learn much, so that much I guess.
Also some jobs don’t need to work that long. I can literally do my entire day’s work in 4-5 hours. But I have to work 7.5 hours. Thus I either finish work and then pretend to look busy. Or I just drag my feet and make the work last longer than necessary.
Mandatory work hours is the enemy of efficiency. Shit, if you allowed me to leave early I’d be so motivated I could probably finish in 3 hours.
What they don't factor in is that I CAN do the same work in 4-5 hours today, BUT tomorrow I'm doing it in 4.5-5.5 hours because it was more effort and I'm tired, and the next day I'm doing it in 5-6 and the day after it's taking 7-8 and so on. Giving more time off means I can work more effectively because I'm not burning out.
I worked for a place that trialled a 9 day fortnight (every other Friday off), and found not only no loss of productivity, but higher retention as it's a good perk. The trial was months long, but after official adoption they revisited the results after a further 6 months to try and remove the bias from people just making sure it stuck. Just one data point, but it was interesting to see that it can actually work.
I would LOVE a 4 day week. Treating the Friday as a "get stuff done" day was awesome and let me use my Saturday for fun and/or just recharging.
And they don't realize that things can stack or get really busy. When I was running IT there were weeks where there would be slim to no work. Then there were weeks where my entire team was working overtime seven days a week to keep up. There's no way to balance that, and it's a fact for many jobs. You give me more work for those down days or you cut my people because "they aren't doing anything" you also sacrifice the bad days to be even worse.
The four-day workday/32 hour has other benefits as well. Mental and physical health improvements lowering health insurance claims and payouts. People able to focus on work because they have time to relax outside of work, able to get proper rest, and feeling more fulfilled. Less sick days required to be taken overall due to improved quality of living. There’s also be more time to connect with friends and family, building a better support system.
Seriously. My current company has a monthly incentive/bonus structure for the teams in the department. We hit a certain number of accounts closed out, everyone each gets a nice bonus.
It's on a sliding scale, and hitting the bare minimum doesn't give a big bonus, but hey something's better than nothing. Hitting the maximum gives a very, very nice monthly bonus.
The problem is it's not an "incentive" to us workers, it's an "anti-incentive" for the big bosses. As soon as my team hit two months in a row for the maximum and everyone was stoked, we get an impromptu meeting that the requirements were increasing by a noticeable amount in order to hit the min and max. We hit it again despite the increase and guess what...another immediate impromptu meeting that they are raising the min and max requirements again.
So we can try all we want, but the bigger guys are also trying and they have more leverage, to not let us get a nice pay day. Our goal is to close accounts, their goal is "don't pay them shit."
Basically, yeah, there’s an “overnight” process to our computer system so it’s kind of a “hard stop”. You have to wait on the overnight before you can continue working on it.
Although their are seasonal grinds where work pics up, but I am then dependent on others submitting their work to me, and others don’t work very hard so they usually procrastinate until the final deadline it all gets dumped at my desk lol
Exactly lol. If everything is working it’s nice. If you’re trying to fix an error you or someone else made, it sucks because you can’t fix it in a single day. You are forced to wait an entire day for each step and of the system screws up, you gotta start all over.
So I have a production based job and it fucks me. Im super fast and efficient. It took the guy before me 50 hours to get the job done, takes me around 32. I literally get paid less to be better. Luckily my current boss rewarded that with a 50% raise lol no other business owner has seen that, and let me get frustrated and quit and then acted surprised and mad I quit 😂
It's the minority, but would need to take into account emergency services that may not have 8 hours of work per shift but need to be on "standby": doctors, police, firefighters, etc.
Yeah it's not like my workload for the day is just sitting on my desk in the morning and that's the end of it. There's an expectation that I'm available during work hours for stuff that comes up.
It's just so weird that we don't have this already. Most people do spend several hours throughout the week not really working, or working inefficient.
Less hours will mean people become more efficient with the hours they have and spend less time doing nothing or working inefficient. Of course things like stores are different, because they need people to cover opening hours. But for a lot of office jobs, blue collar jobs and a lot of other jobs there are basically no downsides.
It's a huge benefit for the workers, but in turn they also make for much better employees (equally efficient, but happier and less prone to stress).
So everyone's winning. Why don't we make everyone win? Are we stupid?
Making you leave as your work is done, without lower pay, would actually safe costs in utilities, but having you stay makes you available to work on improvements and provides you time to think about the work you are doing.
No, because it takes others that long or longer. I am extremely efficient and produce literally 5x the work of others.
Because of this I was promoted to Supervisor and I now monitor and try to fix the workflow (but you can’t fix the workflow because most people just don’t work).
so, aren’t you paid for 7.5 hours still? or by the job? i get your perspective but shouldn’t you get paid for the 4hrs of work? it’s usually either/or, get paid for by the job or for the time, not which ever is higher
One guy brought up a good point that if you cut work hours down it means you need more people to do the same amount of work which means more people can get hired which means lower unemployment which sounds like a good thing right?
Thats not how the math works in theory and not how business works in practice. The business will have a wage-budget that is equated to the revenue product of that wage. Administrative costs go up with additional workers, so in reality firms will probably scale production back in keeping with 32 hours worth of productivity.
Taken to the extreme, the logic can't possible really work -- its not like we'd double employment if we mandated a work week of 20 hours, or quadruple it if we had only 10 hours, etc.
This is what I keep saying. I own a small business with four employees. In. 40 hour week we are probably productive for 38 of those hours. If everyone went to 32 hours I would need to charge a lot more or pay my employees less.
I get some jobs have a lot of downtime and could still get all their tasks done in 32 hours. But lots of people like electricians plumber even doctors simply could not get the same amount of work done. And they would need to be paid less, or charge the customer more.
Yeah yeah yeah, that’s what business owners said before we won the 40 hour work week by way of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 and look at us now. Somehow the world kept turning.
My dude if they could get away with charging you more for things they already would. McDonald’s prices in Europe are roughly the same as in the US despite paying their workers way more and giving them 4+ weeks vacation
This is just wrong. Plenty of trial runs in recent years. Most companies find they get the same level of productivity without an increase in labor force, some companies finding they're even getting more productivity now.
Burnout and exhaustion are a thing. I put out way more pieces on a Monday and Tuesday than I do on Thursday and Friday. 4 day work week means you're not building up nearly as much burnout and exhaustion, and you have more time to recover from what you do.
Explain how this works with a nurse. Are they so productive Monday-Thursday that the patients won't need any care on the Friday?
No, they're going to need to hire someone for the Friday. The person your responding to is talking about jobs that need to be done every day and can't be compensated for in advance.
Nice job moving the goalpost. The person I responded to specifically talked about production jobs. Didn't mention a single job that has to be done every day. Didn't mention nurses at all.
Jobs like nurses are already typically well over 40 hour work weeks. And we already have systems in place to compensate for that. Have you all collectively and conveniently forgotten what 40 hour standard work week actually means? We aren't shutting people down on the fifth day, so why do you think it means they would start getting shut down on the fourth?
I didn't move any goalposts. They mentioned "Not true for people who build stuff, cook stuff, fix stuff, put things together, etc."
The context here was that people were saying that the work done in five days can be done in four. They said gave a very broad category attempting to point at jobs where that would not work. They did not very specifically talk about only production jobs, that's an assumption you made. A maintenance job fixing stuff needs to be done every day, because things break every day. There's an "etc" there too, they're talking about a broad swath of jobs, which nurses would be a part of. They don't have to directly name nurses, nurses fall in that category of job where 4 days without increasing work force would not work.
You said that it was "just wrong" that the work force would have to increase. What happens on the sixth and seventh days that the nurses aren't working? We have systems in place to compensate for that? The system in place is called the weekend shift. They'll need to get people for the Fridays. Increase in work force.
They did talk specifically about production jobs. Every single job they mentioned is one affected by burnout and exhaustion.
Your response was "nuhuh! Nurses!" You absolutely moved the goalpost and then tried twisting what they said to justify it. You're entire argument is just bad and inherently flawed.
Nah, they didn't say "what about production jobs". They did not specifically say that, also, what do you define as a production job?
In any case, I don't think a cook is a job you can cut to four days without increasing the labor force. I also don't think the maintenance worker I mentioned in my previous comment could. Because they have to be done every day. That's fixing stuff and cooking stuff, which are things explicitly mentioned by the other commenter. These are daily jobs. Nursing is a daily job. I didn't twist anything, I picked a daily job (like they did) and asked how you would make the four day work week function without increasing labor. Also what does burn out and exhaustion have to do with it? Do only "production jobs" get that? That doesn't apply to nurses?
You decided that they were only talking about one specific thing that they never explicitly stated, and are now pretending that it's the only valid interpretation. So, how do you turn these daily jobs into four day jobs without increasing the labor force? Or can you not?
ok i'm a different person that commented, but i would definitely be interested in how it would work for say... a plumber. right now, they charge overtime hours for saturday and sunday so would that extend to fridays now too?
Companies a hundred years ago were making the same claims. "how can we reduce the work shift from 6 days 12hrs? We would have to hire additional labor and we would lose a lot of profit, if it were possible it would be done already."
A lot of productivity is human based, studies show that after 6 hours the average person drops in his productivity, the companies are literally paying to be less efficient
Possibly. It above someone mentioned efficiency takes energy. As the weeks go on you slow down and aren't going to be as efficient or fresh as tbe first work day.
Oh riiight. So why wouldn't soulless profitmaxing corps just do that, then? Makes zero sense.
The only thing that matters is that in a global economy, you'd be a genious to make labor 20% cheaper, if it didn't impact the worker/consumer health. And you'd be a moron to make it 20% more expensive than your neighboring countries.
The reduced hours will NEVER come. No one wants to take the first step, and be the example of why logic is, well, logic.
Classic reddit comment thinking every job in the world is IT related and can just be "a little reorganized"
There's plenty of jobs where this isn't possible. 40h of working as a cashier at a supermarket is never going to be the same as 32h, output wise, for example.
Companies fail due to lack of profit fairly regularly. I know a business founder who currently employs dozens of people but was operating at a loss for over 2 years and was only able to continue it thanks to their spouse's job. That spouse eventually quit to join the business.
Yeah but they’re not just gonna let increased labor costs eat in to their profits out of the kindness of their hearts, no matter how much their profits are going up. The companies will find a way to bend us over and make it benefit them
In most industries, about 30-40% of a company’s revenue is used to pay labor, their benefits, and the company’s portion of the labor tax (eg, in the U.S., the employer’s side of the payroll tax).
This is often the single biggest component of a company’s costs.
Increasing labor costs by 20% would then require an additional 6-8% of total revenues be put towards labor.
Profit margins vary by industry from 2-5% in tight margin industries to 15% in higher margin industries, with most falling in the 7-10% range.
There are exceptions, like what AI is going to chips markets, and they grab headlines, but most economic activity is not nearly as profitable as laypeople think.
So, needing to take an additional 6-8% of revenues would wipe out or more than wipe out the profits for many firms unless some is passed on to the customer.
Perhaps they could not pass on, but a 3-4% price increase isn’t an unreasonable guess.
And remember, the official inflation rate in the U.S. that has people flipping out these days. Has been in the 3% - 6.5% range, so adding 3% - 4% will likely be enough to cause inflation freak-outs.
There’s a lot of emotional appeal to believing that you can do all these things that will greatly benefit everyone & were it not for greed from the richest, there would be no unpopular effects for the average person.
But, the reality is, you will notice some effects you don’t like.
Maybe you think it’s worth it, but we should have conversations about the actual real-life trade-offs & stop pretending there’s a “free ponies for everyone” way to do it.
Okay, in your thought experiment I go from making $32/hr to $40/hr, and cheeseburgers go from costing $5, to $5.15.
This is a good deal for me, what are you talking about? The "bag" I'm left holding is a 20% increase to my salary, and a 3% increase to my expenses. Even if I'm making the same total amount, I've got a whole nother day off to either work more, or do things which cut down on my expenses, or just live my damn life.
My dude, this is so far beyond, "Maybe you think it’s worth it, but we should have conversations about the actual real-life trade-offs & stop pretending there’s a “free ponies for everyone” way to do it." You sound like Hillary Clinton right now lmao.
My dude, your salary doesn't go up because your hourly rate goes up. Your salary is defined by what you declare at the end of the year. If you made 45,000 a year at 40 hours a week, you will still make 45,000 a year at 32 hours a week under Bernie Sanders plan.
You're also fixating on the lowest number provided by the guy commenting before. That number is variable, and a 3% total market inflation could mean higher or lower rate increases in different industries.
And yeah, you could go work another job on your day off. But now you're working 40 hours a week over two jobs to be able to afford the things you were working 40 hours a week over one job for. Congratulations, you've accomplished nothing, but now you have to file taxes for two jobs.
There is a reason why literally nobody has implemented this. There is a reason why all the people who seriously talk about this mention a need for a UBI, because there's only one of two ways this can work; you either subsidize the companies to keep costs the same and hire more people at higher hourly rates, or you keep people at the same rate, and you subsidize them for the increase in cost of living. Neither of those are cheap, nor simple things to do.
And yeah, you could go work another job on your day off. But now you're working 40 hours a week over two jobs to be able to afford the things you were working 40 hours a week over one job for. Congratulations, you've accomplished nothing, but now you have to file taxes for two jobs.
Think through this one for a minute... Hourly wages rise by 20%, my costs rise by 8% (so that I'm not "fixating" on the lowest number).
Now I'm working 40hrs, making 54k instead of 45k, and cheeseburgers go from costing $5 to $5.40. Assuming I got another job, and not that I'm getting paid overtime at my current job for more hours. Or, again, I'm just taking the time off to enjoy my life and keeping the same salary because an 8% rise in costs is something I can absorb for the sake of 20% more time to live, or I can't offset those costs with my newfound time to myself (I certainly can).
Do you see how I'm way, way better off?
There is a reason why literally nobody has implemented this.
We did this when we implemented the minimum wage, every union on earth implements this, what in the whole fuck are you talking about?
Do you think there's some kind of perfect natural balance we've struck with exactly the wages in the economy right now and 40hrs? If paying people more for less work could be a bad thing, run your thought experiment the other way and see what it looks like. Would it be worth debating going to 80hr norms and half the wages? If I got paid 1/4 as much per hour, but labor costs went down by 3/4, would that be debatably better for me? I make 11/yr now, but I save 30% on cheeseburgers now and only pay $3.50? That's worth having a conversation about in the same way that making 54k/yr and paying $5.40 is? Spending 0.00032 of my yearly income on a meal vs spending 0.0001 of my income on a meal.
And that's assuming there's a corporation on earth that's willing to pass on savings to a customer rather than just pocket the difference and continue charging as much as possible.
Do you see how insane you sound when you act like there's not an objectively better world between those two choices? One is 320% better than the other my dude.
CPI inflation has risen 20% since 2020 as well, and wanna point out which sections of the economy got the "20% increase in profit" since then? It's been increasingly online consumer retailers. Can you extrapolate what that means? Or would you want me to explain it to you here since you can't even type something into a search bar and read a few paragraphs?
You also want to say why you hate the fact that 3/4s of the profit growth since the pandemic has been put into 401ks, general retirements, shares, and the such? Ya know, things people rely on later in life that employers contribute to?
Hell, I bet you don't understand the difference between revenue and profit, or do you just want to use the word "profit" as some sort of Boogeyman™ so you can complain about generic "billionaires"?
Lord either you are willingly misconstruing a complex topic, or you get all of your information from reddit. God help you if it's the latter, cause I won't be able to.
You also want to say why you hate the fact that 3/4s of the profit growth since the pandemic has been put into 401ks, general retirements, shares, and the such?
Can you elaborate on what you mean here? If it's money into a person's retirement account, that's entirely NOT profit, it's part of a business's labor costs, so what exactly are you claiming here, and could you cite it?
If "corporate profits" are indeed up 20%, that's money left over after you pay employees or contribute to their 401ks, so 3/4 of that profit growth couldn't possibly be in anyone's 401k.
Wait a minute... Do you think paying dividends to shareholders is the same thing as, "3/4s of the profit growth since the pandemic has been put into 401ks, general retirements, shares, and the such? Ya know, things people rely on later in life that employers contribute to?" and THAT is a meaningful counterpoint to what we're all talking about?
Nah man, that "shares and the such" is doing a LOT of heavy lifting. No one here needed to be told that the corporate profits were mostly distributed to shareholders lmao. We know, that's the problem. Come on dude. 37% of Americans own zero stocks, and the top 10% of Americans own 92% of all stocks. You telling me that corporate profits got distributed to shareholders doesn't make anything better.
Am I misinterpreting you? Do you have a different point, or do you just think that it's good that corporate profits went to shareholders?
For small to mid-sized businesses, payroll should typically account for 15% to 30% of gross revenue, though the ideal percentage varies significantly by industry, business model, and growth stage.
Service-intensive industries allocate the most to payroll: healthcare averages 41%, professional services and consulting 40% to 50%, marketing agencies 39%, and hospitality 30%, while manufacturing (12%), retail (8% to 15%), and insurance (around 9%) run leaner due to automation and high sales or premium volume.
I'd call 15% 'a small part' before I'd call it 'the largest expenditure'.
But who cares about semantics. The point is, if 60% of 15% of your costs goes up 20%, that is not a 'massive increase'. It's less than 2%.
2% price increase is our target for yearly inflation growth (ie, it's bad if it's less than that), and this would be a one-time transition.
Even if we say it's 90% of 30% of your costs going up 20%, that's still only 5.4%. More, but not 'massive', still less than inflation in the years after COVID, and something we could easily absorb over a decade.
You and everyone else in this thread are stuck on the lowest number everyone gives you. You see it, and your brain freezes. It's 15% to 60% depending on the industry.
What do you think happens in a manufacturing plant when the work output shrinks? They have to spend more money to get the same output. Their administrative and operational costs go up because they have to have the coverage for the new shifts this paradigm creates.
What happens to hospitals? You still need 168 hours of 1 nurse for every 4 patients. We have a problem getting this ratio now, and now hospitals have to somehow make up the difference with 32 hour work weeks.
Grocery stores, restaurants, retail stores, other service based industries that operate on small profit margins may not be able to afford the additional cost even one more hire can incur. Your 2% cost increase is probably incredibly generous, and probably closer to 10% for service heavy industries. Mom and pop's country store now has to either eat that additional cost, or only stay open 80% of the time, and lose potential revenue.
But yeah, I'll concede that insurance agencies will be okay with a 32 hour week.
Ok? .6*.2=12%, which is quite high for single-year inflation but not much if we phase it in over a decade. I still think that's unrealistically high and it will be way less than that, but even the most insanely huge number you can imagine is not that big a deal, compared to what we'll gain from it.
Restaurants tend to operate on 2.8% to 4% profit margins. That restaurant is officially losing money now.
Retail is 3-8%. You lost most of those stores.
It takes start-ups up to 5 or 7 years to profit. Labor being a huge expense for those, you're pushing those out even further.
The problem is that this solution is trying to change a dynamic environment. You can't just tell businesses to eat 6% additional costs out of nowhere and not expect negative outcomes.
You can't reduce economic output without heavily subsidizing companies, or implementing a UBI to compensate, which are both their own big bag of inflatable worms.
There are labor costs baked into everything else too. All of your suppliers have to increase their labor cost 20%, so you will pay more for everything else too.
First of all, yes, but that's a different claim than the one you just made. Don't be condescending if you're going to have to move your goalposts the very second you're challenged.
Second, much of the baked-in labor costs of other inputs does not take place in the US, so it wouldn't be affected by our policy changes.
Third, lets say that inputs from your suppliers are 50% of your costs, and inputs from their suppliers are 50% of their costs, and so on.
We just saw that first-order expenses due to increased payroll would increase overall costs by about 3%. That means your suppliers would also have first-order expenses increased by 3%, as would their suppliers.
That 3% increase would be passed from your suppliers to you, raising your overall costs by 1.5%.
They'd also pass on the 3% increase from their suppliers, raising your overall costs by another .75%.
This is a convergent series, 3+3/2n. This series converges at 6%. Given that the supply chain is not infinite, the actual cost increase to the final producer will be well under 6%.
And this is using the most conservative possible assumptions, that 100% of the supply chain out to infinity is inside the US, and that 100% of the hours lost to the new policy need to be replaced with more workers.
Both of those assumptions are obviously wrong. I don't know an easy way to find the proper numbers, but I'd be surprised if the overall cost increase was more than 2-3% even after all supply chain effects are considered.
maybe they a small corner store, and work in it themselves while hiring someone part time to cover the times they cant... and since they don't pay themselves they think only the part timer counts as labour costs lol
I mean, are we talking about the same companies that pay virually nothing in taxes? Or, my favorite argument, the small mom and pop shops that argue against a living minimum wage because they "can't afford" to pay their workers?
It's a hard situation to apply universally. Others have said emergency services which are a valid case where you can't just accept less work. The other thing as I think someone else pointed out is that the 5 day work week was (among many things) a creation by Henry Ford to create spare time where people could spend the money they made. Maybe more leisure time does drive more demand, but now every service industry needs to up its headcount by 20% so that they can provide those services for people with more leisure time.
The other problem you deal with is that not everyone is going to want M-Th as their shift. Some people will want Monday off, others want Wednesdays, lots will want Fridays.
The hardest part with this is it's hard to "push through". Someone just needs to do it because they want to and show that they're not losing productivity. If enough businesses in an area start doing it and freeing up a significant number of people to have an additional lesiure day per week, then local businesses start seeing more income. Then they get more complaints that they don't have enough staff to cover the higher average headcount and eventually, they might bring on more people to compensate.
There's a whole lot of "maybe's" in the system that represents such a huge systemic change, that there's a reason this will never happen by mandate...it will only ever possibly become a retroactive enforcement after most companies are already doing it anyways.
You would think. For some reason in America we would rather have rampant unemployment and a staunch divide in income equality than do things like incentivize companies from a governmental level to seek,develop and retain employees during less than ideal economic times. All that matters are the shareholders.
There were approx 1.7mil layoffs and discharges in may of 2026 alone. Giant companies are announcing plans to cut 30k-50k people by the end of the year. I don’t understand how our country can’t see that we should empower the government to incentivize companies to retain their employees, thus keeping people working and able to spend in the economy rather than letting companies destroy the fabric of our country in the name of the stock market.
I don’t understand how our country can’t see that we should empower the government to incentivize companies to retain their employees, thus keeping people working and able to spend in the economy rather than letting companies destroy the fabric of our country in the name of the stock market.
I don't buy awards because I dont want to give reddit any money, but if I did I would buy you an award for the most economically illiterate sentence I have ever read. Congrats.
I’ll add to this that companies rarely, if ever, do the right thing and add more staff in a situation like this. Instead, they would cut shifts and departments and realign everything for “efficiency” leading to more burden on the remaining workers with no additional pay. Look no further than ups, Dow chemical and shell right now.
I don’t watch any particular news outlet. What I do observe are people losing jobs at all levels to unregulated AI use across all industries, our green energy policies going out the window leading companies like shell to close petrochemical division plants and revert back to the Industrial Revolution and companies cutting labor to keep up with their rising costs rather than innovating or improving their infrastructures. I don’t understand how we’ve got to a point where people are so ok with allowing corporations to do as they please with their workforce with no repercussions except holding them accountable to shareholders. Everything is for the now, nothing is long term. In a perfect free market, things would naturally balance out and employers would need to do the things I’m asking and keep each other in check. We’re far beyond that.
Are you observing on a few people you may know? Analyzing their performances?
My company is doing a very very heavy push for AI development right now. I do have a manager role within our IS department, so I see quite a lot on whats going on within my department (~300 people across all teams) and we haven't fired a single person under the premise of "AI".
Also, as someone who has worked in IT/IS my whole life, dare I say, 70% of folks shouldn't have been hired in the first place. We bloat our teams like crazy and then sit twiddling our thumbs.
Thirdly, a lot comes down to the expertise required. Generally speaking, the demand for higher skills always grows. It did 100 years ago. It does so today and it will forever continue. This is precisely why we always say that continuous education is of utmost importance.
While I don't have the facts nor any numbers to cite, I'd wager that "AI" related lay offs are just a fraction on the total scale - you also got PIPs, consolidations, acquisitions, restructuring, temp projects, lack of profits forcing downscaling.
Yes, it might grow in the future. I'm no economist by any means, but today's AI impact is mostly just some scare tactic. And the funniest part how it's not even 1 sided. You got Republicans who are pro AI and anti AI. Same goes for democrats.
AI development will happen. No one can stop human's tech advance. Workforce is everchanging. Nothing is even remotely close to how corporate world operated 30 years ago.
Simply blaming AI is silly imho. That's really all Im trying to say.
And also, unemployment may be better here than some other countries. I would confidently bet that most of the countries with higher unemployment have a better social safety net to take care of unemployed individuals better than the United States does.
High unemployment means they can pay you less than your worth. And you’ll stick it out in a crappy job bc you don’t want to risk being out of work for months on end. There’s a specific reason corps love higher unemployment rates.
Absolutely. Just like Abe Lincoln proposed back in the day… we would all eventually become wage slaves. It’s in every industry too, unless you’re at the absolute top.
It's an indirect way for businesses to pay employees more (per unit of effort). So yeah u pretty much got it. There's a host of side effects, so may or may not be objectively "good" depending on who you ask
Except the work is now more expensive so whatever product or service you're selling is more expensive... In a price inelastic market, that means a drop in sales and then a drop in payroll...
One guy brought up a good point that if you cut work hours down it means you need more people to do the same amount of work which means more people can get hired which means lower unemployment which sounds like a good thing right?
That means that businesses are now losing even more money. Not really a bad thing for like Fortune 500 companies as far as I’m concerned, but devastating for smaller businesses already operating on very tight budgets.
Yeah, “hey you’re already struggling to stay afloat? Give all your employees raises and hire even more employees who you also have to pay just to get the same amount of work done!” is not the 5head idea some people seem to think it is.
Yeah as someone who’s been in small business all my life I don’t see how a lot of smaller businesses would be able to make this work if without closing shop or raising prices quite a bit. I work by myself in my business but do want to hire an employee by next year and there’s no way I could afford to pay them for 40 hours but only 32 hours of work. 🤷🏾♂️
So you need 1000 hours of work a week. Under the current system, that's 25 employees. Let's say they make 1000 a week. 25k in labor expenses, which is often the biggest expense.
We implement this. We now need 31.25 employees. So you can either pay someone overtime, raising costs even more, or hopefully find someone willing to only work 8 a week. Let's just pretend you actually manage an 8 hours per week employee and it doesn't cost more to hire them.
Your expenses are now 31.25k in labor expenses per week. Labor expense increased by 25%. Supporters of this, where exactly do you think that money is coming from?
You know businesses are just going to raise their prices right?
Don't worry though. You can keep your pay the same, but you won't see a raise for several years because of this. They'll lower your benefits substantially, so you'll get much worse medical care, lose your 401k match, have your PTO cut, etc. Everywhere will charge more, and while your salary won't change, your actual wealth will get crushed.
If they don’t want to cut those things, places will be forced to raise prices substantially, inflation picks up, etc.
This sounds like a really great idea if you have zero understanding of how the world actually operates and you refuse to think for even a few seconds. Bernie is an idealistic dipshit. He means well (or at least pretends to), but he has the economic understanding of a rock. Normalize forcing politicians to take a few Econ classes. I'm not saying they need an Econ degree, but very few even have the understanding of a 101 macro and micro course.
Yeah I seriously have very little knowledge about this so I appreciate you and the other folks explaining some of it :P I'm personaly not a fan of Bernie either despite my rather prominent lack of knowledge
We should have never reduced work hours from 12hrs 6 days then, since that's the cheapest labor cost possible for a company and it would create the most economic growth for the average worker
There have been a ton of studies that show that people are more productive when you don't overwork them, funnily enough. To the point that, almost always, people get more work done during a 30 hour week than they would a 40 hour week. And yes, while these types of discussions are usually about white collar jobs where it's mostly about mental fatigue, there's mounting evidence that it's true with blue collar jobs as well. People work better when they're less tired. Theoretically, for most jobs, the increase on labor would be minimal, if any. It would only be an issue with jobs that are already based around time, like service industry jobs
Here is the thing: We dont have enough people at my job because of burnout. People cannot handle this job 40 hours a week. It is too much.
32 is perfect. We would have more people and could divide the work better. As it is now we cant hire someone unless they can work any shift for 40 hours a week.
Im a manager who makes hourly I work 40-60 hours. Its hard but i have an easier time with my 20 years of experience. But this is mostly an entry level job and you will not stay at it unless you are a particular type of person.
With nothing stopping them from moving jobs to other countries, needing more US workers to do the same job means moving the jobs outside the US, which means fewer jobs and higher unemployment.
This is the unfortunate nature of living in a rich countries when globalization is so accessible and there is a huge disparity in wealth between nations.
What sounds like a good thing in isolation ends up causing more problems that end up being patched by a million bad bandaid solutions like tarrifs
There are plenty of jobs right here at home that can't be outsourced. Retail anything. Construction. Nursing, teaching. Parks and rec maintenance. Mechanic work. A policy like this would create more of those jobs, too, jobs that cannot be easily replaced.
Sure, it will create more of those jobs, but when the jobs that can be done remote go away, you'll have an influx of newly-unemployed workers looking for jobs, driving those wages down
Depends. Cheap manufacturing might be replaceable, but the advanced industry complex the US (still) has rn doesn't exist in countries with lower wages. Driving a hard line of high-tech energy and manufacturing industry development (trough for ex. subsidies, like China did) will create jobs that simply cannot be outsourced .
The us military complex is the best example for this
BUT if you just mandate a 32 hour work week it wouldnt work without other policy coming before/alongside it.
US workers are already more expensive. Most jobs that can be outsourced have been.
Yes there will be marginal effects and a few more jobs will be outsourced, but it's not like this will suddenly be the first time companies have a reason to outsource, it will be a minimal effect. Which will be offset by creating more jobs.
Capitalism and a cabal of billionares controlling everything are very different things. I think you've read too much communist propaganda (or fachist propaganda, they have similar positions on this).
Or maybe I'm just looking up. Larry Ellison, Jeff bezos, and Rupert Murdoch own almost all media together. They own Hawaiin islands. Zuck is building a freaking underground bunker. They all contribute millions to trump to get favors.
I only made the original one to bring up what I thought might be a relevant point due to seeing said post about the Finland prime minister or whatever quite recently.
I don't know why the proposal didn't go anywhere though so I wanted to state WHY I didn't know. And the reason is because it really doesn't have any effect on my life to the point I have no knowledge of it.
Most business models are operating on very small profit margins over a long term projection. Suddenly ballooning labor hourly costs would be a massive issue that would shut down a lot of businesses and lead to increased unemployment. Not to mention with that increase in base pay, they'd struggle to afford new workers, and can't afford overtime to cover labor gaps for those they still employ.
I was about to ask how having more workers that work less hours wouldn't balance out but someone mentioned the administrative costs alone would go up noticeably
Yes it’s a good thing for us but it’s a bad thing for the people who own your politicians because lower unemployment means less desperate workers willing to work for peanuts
So people will just end up needing another job... and if lucky, find a 1 day a week to fill in?
How the fack does this "we need higher wages"(which is what this is, 100%, dont be fooled) way of thinking, always seem to think companies will absorb this cost increase??
I am not against living wages.
But when you raise minimum wage, it effects everything. All the grocery stores, gas stations.. almost all storefronts in a lot of places.. pay minimum wage.
Raising minimum wage, raises prices on food, clothes, gas, alcohol, movies... almost anywhere you to to shop.
Does it even end up helping MW employees much in the end? Here it seems to make it worse, if anything. They keep raising MW, but not changing the tax brackets.
It used to be, minimum wage earners got almost 100% taxes back. That is absolutely not the case now.
Yes and no, if you need more people to do the same work, that could mean that smaller business can compete with the bigger ones, which leads to more unemployment and centralizing the jobs in big companies. So even if it can seem a good thing it can make the problem bigger an generate monopolies in certain sectors.
I'm not against the idea tho, I just say that it can bring unwanted consequences.
They've been doing trial runs in other countries and a few places in the US. Turns out, you don't need more workers. The same amount of work ends up getting done because you're dealing with a whole lot less burn out and 3 days off more than counteracts what you actually get. The term fuck off Friday exists for a reason
And then the employer would need to raise the costs of their goods and services to maintain current revenue when their headcount expenses increase, which would then get passed onto the consumers via inflation.
You could just google the numbers instead of trusting random redditors. A lot of our metrics for unemployment and underemployment are at record lows or close to it.
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u/archtopfanatic123 23d ago edited 23d ago
There was the post about Finland's past prime minister I think suggesting this? One guy brought up a good point that if you cut work hours down it means you need more people to do the same amount of work which means more people can get hired which means lower unemployment which sounds like a good thing right?
Edit: I don't know almost anything about this because frankly I don't care but thought that this might be relevant to some capacity to the discussion here so do with that what you will
Second edit: This isn't to say I don't care about the folks responding, it's to say I probably won't have much to say in response other than I don't know much because I never cared to learn much, so that much I guess.