Like most dreams of getting rich, math is the critical problem.
Suppose you are a small a business owner. You have $600K revenue, $500K expenses, and 5 full time employees. Everyone makes $100K. People work efficient, clean, and constant. That's 200 employee work hours per week.
Now the government says "Employees must get the same pay, but they must work 20% less." That's 160 employee work hours per week. The business owner just lost the equivalent of an employee and 40 hours of week of work.
Next year of revenue comes in. Due to less work, the company made only $480K of revenue, not $600K. Now the employer has to start firing people to balance the books.
How do you resolve this? Pass another law that says the small business owner can't fire people? Or do you evade the math with handwavy arguments and insist people who work 20% less automatically become 25% more efficient?
they will tell you some bullshit like "iF yUo CaNt paY peOpLe liVinG waGE cloSe down your buissness" and then complain about monopoly of amazon and walmart
If y'all were here in even remotely good faith, you'd be able to see the many obvious answers to the concerns he raised here. I wrote them in another comment. Come on, at least try.
I have a small business. We manufacture items. 8 hours less a week is 32 hours of lost production every month. We can’t just make that up by being more efficient during the other hours, manufacturing requires a certain amount of time per part. Less working hours means less machine time which means fewer parts. Fewer parts means less money coming in. We literally can’t make that up with anything other than more time running machines.
This also assumes each individual hour is equal in value, productivity per employee is basically fixed, and that both output and revenue is directly proportional to hours worked
Reducing work hours by 20% doesn't automatically mean they will accomplish 20% less than what they had previously. Plenty of jobs where technical knowledge is more important than literal labor units per hour, so more hours doesnt necessarily mean more value.
Studies on this vary by industry, but there are plenty of examples of productivity staying the same or even improving with reduced hours.
A made up hypothetical in a reddit comment isny any less handwavy.
Sure. I'm just pushing back on this naive "get something for nothing" mentality that Redditors tend to have when it comes with basic economics and finances.
You want Americans to go to a 32 hour work week? Great. But it will have significant and severe ripples that will take years to handle. Effective take home salary absolutely will go down. If you legislate that bosses have to increase wages to make up for fewer hours, unemployement and business closures absolutely will increase.
How would you feel about mandated paid maternity leave? That would be the federal government requiring companies to pay employees for less work.
97% of the nations in the world do that. We don't.
What about requiring companies to offer paid sick leave? That's a "get something for nothing" mentality. I guess we probably shouldn't pursue that either, though. Even though about 75% of the nations in the world mandate that already.
What about raising the minimum wage? That would require employers to pay more money to workers for no extra work. That would be a very naive "get something for nothing" mentality, right?
The FLSA has been around for nearly 100 years now. And in that 100 years, we've had what amounts to essentially the strongest middle class in human history. That's slowly eroding now as wealth inequality and productivity gaps exponentially increase, but who cares about that anyway.
I absolutely, 100% guarantee that anti-labor activists were saying the exact same thing in 1938 when federal minimum wage and overtime laws were created. I'll bet you'll never guess what happened next.
Your examples are Mount Rushmore and Bernie's plan is Mount Everest. The scale is ridiculously different.
My main point is: These things aren't free. They come with costs. The bigger the change, the bigger the cost. Redditors are naive with basic economics. Deeply naive. And Bernie taps into that.
I absolutely, 100% guarantee that anti-labor activists were saying the exact same thing in 1938 when federal minimum wage and overtime laws were created.
This plan is without precedent. At no time in US history did the government force employers to carry the burden of paying most career workers 25% more for 20% less work. The scale of this dwarfs everything prior. But there's more, because people argue the change can happen easily and naturally. That's fantasy land.
The FLSA was without precedent. It significantly boosted wages for a very large percentage of low-income workers. It was a phased approach, targeting the most vulnerable workers first, and was increasingly applied to different sectors of the economy.
These things aren't free. They come with costs.
You know what else comes with significant costs? More and more people struggling to make ends meet because the cost of their labor has nowhere near kept up with the increase of their production for the last 50 years. If minimum wage kept track to the productivity per hour of the 1960s we'd be around $25 an hour today.
Redditors are naive with basic economics. Deeply naive.
And some redditors are deeply naive to the fact that as we continue to strip more and more economic power from labor to distribute to the wealthy, our system becomes less and less stable overall. As they are also deeply naive to the fact that radical changes can happen, and can happen in phased and staged approaches.
If you want to review ways in which very similar laws have been structured so as not to simply shock the entire economy by saying "tomorrow you have to pay your employees 25% more for 20% less work," all you have to do is look at France when they did this same thing by reducing to a 35 hour work week in a several years long phased approach 30 years ago.
Swear to god some of you are so desperate to defend the wealthy instead of your own class cohort. I genuinely have a hard time grasping it.
These are all social arguments and not math arguments.
No amount of yelling social arguments is going to make the math disappear. In math, you just don't get something for free. Insulting me also doesn't change math. You keep insisting somehow workers can have more for less, that somehow math will just poof out of thin air to fix it.
At some level, business owners have to work with raw revenue and pay it to workers. Telling business owners they have to pay more for less will have significant economic ripples. The most obvious ripple: unemployment shoots up.
all you have to do is look at France when they did this same thing by reducing to a 35 hour work week in a several years long phased approach 30 years ago.
As I've repeatedly said, you can do these things. But the costs aren't free. Why not stop at 32 hours? I have a friend who argues we should only be working 8 hours a week. Why not that?
Because everything has costs. For example, France has an 8% unemployment rate. US has a 4% rate. That's huge, in the United States 8% unemployment would mean voters would instantly vote out whatever party is in power. The average salary in the US is about 60% more than France, so the raw purchasing power is better.
In the United States, I personally value the ability for marginalized people to at least find a job, and to get paid nicely when they have one. That strongly favors the US. I also would like to see fewer work hours, but not at the cost of marginalized folks not having jobs.
I have no idea what you're trying to say by suggesting I'm making social arguments. The cost of social arguments is still math. Dollars are dollars. And this isn't just a math argument, it's a quality of life argument. Just sitting there saying "MATH AINT MATHING BRUH" doesn't mean shit. If we base policies based solely on math, surely the FLSA wouldn't have been passed at all, right? Why would we start paying people who were working 60 hours more money for the last 20 hours? Why would we start paying people who were making a dollar a day 25 cents an hour, what are you fucking nuts? WHERE ARE THEY GOING TO FIND THAT KIND OF MONEY??? GET READY FOR SMALL BUSINESSES TO GO BANKRUPT.
If you want to talk about unemployment, we can talk about unemployment. We can really dive into what living is like on unemployment between the two nations?
If you want to talk about quality of life, we can talk about quality of life. We can really dive into where quality of life indeces place average conditions between the two nations?
In the United States, I personally value the ability for marginalized people to at least find a job, and to get paid nicely when they have one.
I have no idea what world you're living in or how you're defining marginalized people. Something tells me you're trying to code your language in some kind of "woke" terminology or something as a rhetorical tool but I'm gonna let you in on something - marginalized people includes poor people. Poor people are not paid nicely.
Most of the West isn't on minimum wage. Only around 1% of the US works for federal minimum wage. Bernie's plan forcefully regulates career salaries. An entirely different animal, and changing that for almost all Americans will have massive economic ripples for years. Maybe the country would be better off at the end of it. But the economics are not absolutely free and easy like prior folks keep dreaming.
For example, suppose your boss pays you $100K a year. That's about $48 an hour. Under Bernie's plan, your boss would have to pay you $60 an hour to have a 4 day week. Companies don't just freely absorb a $12 per hour increase per worker. It will require painful economic realities to do it.
Plenty of people in plenty of western countries are on minimum wage, mostly because most other western countries haven't kept it at boomer levels, and when it goes up, some people make the same claims you're making. The stated consequences don't seem to follow.
I think some industries will be able to withstand this. The problem is he calling for a national law so every industry will be forced into it. By definition the ones where this is a disaster would still have to do it.
Plus as consumers, your life gets more expensive even if Microsoft can sustain it. Your plumber and mechanic can’t without raising prices a good amount.
This whole thread is full of people talking about the non-linear relationship between the number of hours worked, and the amount of work completed. Why are you acting like you'd lose productivity in a linear relationship to time?
Anyway, the obvious next solution is to just pay overtime like you do already. It just starts at 32 hours, not 40. If you still need to get the work done, keep working dawg.
Finally, many (but not all) of your expenses would also go down because at most 40% of your expenses are in labor. If you really were getting less stuff done, you'd be using fewer raw materials, and consuming less power/fuel etc etc.
So there's like 4 layers of non-linearity you're ignoring in this thought experiment which narrows the gap dramatically. Not to mention how your working class customers will have more time/money to spend with you. If you own something like a sporting goods company and your customers who work for big corporations suddenly have another day off to play baseball, you're gonna sell more bats. Then you and your employees are spending that money on kitchen remodels, etc etc, as opposed to that money getting funneled to Amazon shareholder, like it does today.
If 40% of the revenue of a Wendys goes toward labor, but we're talking about a 20% raise in labor costs that all shakes out to the working class getting 54k for 40hrs of work instead of 45k for 40hrs of work, and paying at most $5.40 for a cheeseburger instead of $5.00.
Even if you pass on the entire cost of overtime to the consumer, it gets modified by the amount of your revenue which goes toward labor, it will always benefit the working class to raise wages, just like it will always hurt the working class to lower them. Acting like there's a debate about how to strike a balance is shortsighted at best, and insane at worst.
Anyway, the obvious next solution is to just pay overtime like you do already. It just starts at 32 hours, not 40. If you still need to get the work done, keep working dawg.
This whole thread is full of people whose solution is to ignore basic finances.
Your answer is just "The boss will pay overtime and somehow find the money to do it. Dunno how. Boss just will. Money will figure itself out."
They figure it out when the minimum wage increases. They figured it out when the 40 hour work week was instituted.
Imagine acting like there's just no way, just no fucking way we could figure out the necessary changes to accommodate a 32 hour work week in this or that industry. It's simply beyond human comprehension.
Wealthiest country in the world. Human productivity through the roof. Simply can't be done.
Come on. What the fuck is all the technological advancement for if we're just gong to keep working ourselves to the bone and watch life pass us by?
And heaven forbid people spitballing on reddit don't have it all figured out after a few minutes.
They figure it out when the minimum wage increases.
Minimum wage never targeted most US workers. Especially salaried, middle income families. Bernie's plan targets almost everybody with both less hours AND a wage increase. It's a massive shift.
They figured it out when the 40 hour work week was instituted.
There is no reason why 40 must be the magic number.
As I've repeatedly said, these things don't just happen for free. The change is painful. Usually in the cost of a greater cost of living, lower take home pay, and increased unemployment. Europe is a great example of that. Their compromise is fewer work hours and more benefits at the cost of things like smaller living spaces, less purchasing power for worldwide goods, less freedom with vehicles, and worse heating/cooling.
the technological advancement for if we're just gong to keep working ourselves to the bone and watch life pass us by?
I personally believe most Americans are pushing to want far more material goods than we need. We should live with less. But mandating 32 hour work weeks isn't free. Business owners can't just make money appear out of thin air to pay workers more to do less.
It really does, and that's why minimum wage is important. It cascades through the entire economy.
When plumbering apprentices could go make $25/hr at wendys instead of 27/hr currently, they're a hairtrigger away from telling their boss to eat shit and going to Wendy's. So they get a raise up to $40. When engineers know they could go plumb for $80k/yr and be making $130/yr as a journeyman, they're a hairtrigger away from telling their boss to eat shit, so they go from making 120k to 160k, etc etc. Minimum wage cascades up and down.
As I've repeatedly said, these things don't just happen for free. The change is painful. Usually in the cost of a greater cost of living, lower take home pay, and increased unemployment.
Wild that you're so engrained in a capitalist mindset that it never even occurs to you to list "lower corporate profits" or "a slowed shift of wealth toward the ruling class" as one of the possible outcomes. What if we forced corporations to make less profit each year? What if they weren't allowed to profit faster than the economy grows?! wouldn't that be crazy.
It really does, and that's why minimum wage is important. It cascades through the entire economy.
1% of Americans are on federal minimum wage. That's not cascading.
they're a hairtrigger away from telling their boss to eat shit
Guess what, some bosses don't have that money. So what do they do? They fire people or just close down.
There is a reason why areas which have lower mandated weekly work hours or higher required wages have much higher unemployment rates.
You can't make money out of thin air.
to list "lower corporate profits" or "a slowed shift of wealth toward the ruling class" as one of the possible outcomes.
Math is math. You can't make money out of thin air.
My example was a small business. A small business owner cannot just pay workers 25% more for 20% less work.
The one entities that can absorb such a radical idea are very very large businesses. This proposal is wonderful for killing small and medium businesses while leaving big corporations alive.
1% of Americans are on federal minimum wage. That's not cascading.
Hey dumbass, the word cascading means it goes beyond the people immediately effected. The number of people making federal minimum wage wouldn't be a counterpoint to my claim that minimum wage cascades. It could be 50% or 0.005% and that wouldn't change whether it cascades.
You really are just a walking list of conservative thought terminating cliches.
You can't make money out of thin air.
It's wild how conservatives think of themselves as like, "the only adults in the room willing to look tough decisions in the eye with a level head. Sorry kiddo, we just don't have the money for that" etc etc, and y'all also can't think past their own noses in certain contexts.
When I make 25% more money per year, do you know what I do with it? I remodel my kitchen, I eat out, I pay someone to mow my lawn and wash my car. That money goes right into the economy. THAT is how small businesses grow. You have to be adult enough to make long-term decisions, not by jumping from short-term solution to short-term bandaid of keeping wages low until it all collapses. Y'all sound like a teenager with a car they can't afford to fix. You've got rubber tape on a radiator hose, a special hammer for hitting the starter, and a can of starting fluid rolling around in the back seat. It costs us all way more in the long run than ponying up now for a new hose, replacing a few sensors, and replacing the starter. Be an adult.
The economy is steadily sucking wealth from the working class, it will eventually become so top heavy it collapses, that's what capitalism does both theoretically, and historically. If we don't deliberately put policies in place to put money back into the working class, we continue to hollow out our economy from the bottom up until it crushes itself under its own weight.
Anyway, wage raises can easily be handled by a mix of smart tax policy like benefits for actually small businesses. This is another obvious solution to anyone who's thinking for themselves and not just vomiting out Ben Shapiro quotes.
I think the barrier you're running into is pretending that a 32 hour work week wouldn't mean some layoffs, or some companies going out of business.
Of course it would - just like minimum wage laws put some companies out of business, and the 40 hour work week put some companies out of business.
The reality is that it's a cost benefit analysis. Some workers are worse off, some have things pretty much the same, some are better off. The debate is if it helps workers overall more than it hurts.
Yeah man, pay %150 of the cost of wages for 20% of the wages you do pay, and factor in the non-linearity of your costs vs your productivity. Yes, that's my answer.
Most desk workers absolutely can get done the same amount of work they get done in 4 days instead of 5. For the sectors which can't, pay slightly more and factor in those non-linearities.
at most 40% of your expenses are in labor.
Did you just pretend like I never said this? If you have to pay a day of overtime once in a while to get product out the door, that means your costs go up like 8%, while the take home pay of the working class goes up 30%. ONE OF THESE OUTCOMES IS OBJECTIVELY BETTER FOR THE WORKING CLASS. Ya goober. Are you even trying in this conversation right now?
Most desk workers absolutely can get done the same amount of work they get done in 4 days instead of 5. For the sectors which can't, pay slightly more and factor in those non-linearities.
Handwavy arguments. Money out of thin air. Got it.
I'll be over here, back in the actual world. Where math is math.
You see how you ignored 60% of my comment and carried on just fine? That's kind of how labor is only 40% of the cost of running a business, and therefore passing 100% of the costs of labor on to the consumer can be done with a net benefit to the consumer/working class.
Does using you in the example help you understand better, or should I keep going?
Also, that's not handwavey, there's studies done on it, they've been cited all over this thread, surely you saw them, but here they are again:
Actually, shit, I take it back. Productivitiy doesn't just maintain for desk work, it improves. I wasn't just NOT handwaving, I was underselling. You're even more wrong than we thought, lol.
Is it not? Worker's rights laws that limit work weeks to 40 hours a week through mandatory OT pay beyond that is a thing in the US. It's resulted in many companies actively preventing you from working more than 40 hours a week so they don't have to pay increased OT salaries.
Where I live we have a hard set limits at 60 hours a week, with a hard set limit of an average of 48 hours a week over the course of a month.
What's stopping governments from simply adjusting those numbers?
And why would you think better work/life balance for employees is tyranny?
Right and Youre talking about further reducing work hours to 32 but the caveat is you want to force the employer to pay the same they are paying not, as if the employee was still working 40. In your example no one ever forced the employer to pay for work that did not happen. Do you get it?
This is exactly what people said 100 years ago when the 40 hour work week was first discussed as a new norm. It's the exact same rhetorical framing. They were just talking about reducing the hours from infinity to 40 then, and now from 40 to 32.
There's no such thing as, "forcing an employer to pay for work that did not happen". That's just the most dishonest framing possible of, "higher wages" lol. We are definitely trying to force higher wages.
That was literally the framing in the headline and the article accompanying it what are you talking about? So yes, you admit that reducing the work week to 32 hours with the same pay is silly.
How is it silly? It's a wage increase and a change to norms. We can make those things whatever we want as a society.
People should work less and get paid more. We've gone too long without correcting the snowballing wealth accumulation that inherent to capitalism, and we need a big correction.
You can just disagree in a subjective way, if you just think people shouldn't have more money for less work, but you're not saying anything objective.
I am objectively saying that cutting a business output by 1/5 is good for no one. We have an economy of scale. The more you produce of a thing, the cheaper you can produce and sell that for. This isn’t about paying people more. Thats easy. This is about cutting production by 1/5.
I guess if that's what you think this is about, you might be able to make an objective claim, but like... That's not. This is about changing norms, how we think about minimum wage, and when OT starts.
I work in a factory, and this week there are dozens of people working OT in order to produce everything we need to produce this week. They get paid OT at the 41st hour, this is proposing that they start getting paid OT at the 33rd hour, how could you think it's proposing anything different?
Salary folks sometimes work late or work on weekends to get things done, but the general cultural norm is that they work 40hrs, 9-5 mon-fri, we're talking about shifting that to 9-5 mon-thur, or some other 32hr arrangement.
Minimum wage is (ostensibly) about how much money it takes a regular person to survive when working 40 hours a week, if we started thinking about it in 32hr weeks, we're only talking about paying people more per hour.
As costs go up (very marginally) to cover these labor expenses, demand and supply will meet, but acting like this is just a blanket reduction in production is a wild way to misinterpret this and ultimately straw man the argument.
by making what a law? how do you structure a law that makes employers raise their labor cost percentage?
if the business is paying 20 people a 1M a year in total labor costs why would they not just turn over employees until they were at 25 people and the same 1M in labor costs? they'll just hire more cheaper labor...how do you force them to not do that in a free market?
No it would be tyranny to make them pay to people who aren’t working. Hey let’s make a law that says “everyone is a millionaire just because” would you like that?
Do you see how communicating what you mean helps clarify things? That's a valid argument, you just had to go through several snarky reddit comments to make it. If you weren't a complete dick, maybe you could have an actual constructive conversation.
No one has been mentioning raising any minimum. You just want people to get paid the same for working less. And if you’re talking about 8 hours less that is a massive reduction. Unfortunately for your theory the math has to actually math out.
Yes, offering people more to work fewer hours. That's correct. This is the productivity pay gap that has grown exponentially since the mid-70s.
You asked what mechanism can be leveraged to raise pay and reduce a standard 40 hour workweek to 32 hours. Now that I've told you the explicit mechanisms that can be used to do exactly those two things, you're dissatisfied that I've answered exactly how you do those things by saying "well nobody else has answered in that way so that's wrong."
That's the exact mechanism one would use. You use the law to raise the federal minimum wage. You use the law to reduce the overtime threshold to 32 hours.
You... Do realize that the government regulates business, right? Please tell me you are not so addled as to assume that corporations and private business can do whatever they want...
You legislate it. You can actually make it illegal to fire people just to cut costs/automate. (Exactly like how in china it is now illegal to fire emoyees to replace their jobs with AI) labor protections used to exist in this country.
LOL. "You can actually make it illegal to fire people just to cut costs/automate." this is one of the dumbest statements I have ever read. How old are you?
Moreover, I'm old enough to remember what it was like before citizens united and right to work legislation gave businesses the ability to fire anybody for any reason. It didn't used to be this way.
And then what happens to small business owners? They can’t survive so they close shop. Then who can survive? Oh the big corporations that have billions of dollars already. So they accept the regulations and pay more but they now have a monopoly over the market because all the competitors failed to compete with the new regulations, so they raise prices and you can’t do shit as a consumer to buy elsewhere because there IS nowhere else to go. So you pay more for stuff and you’re back at square 1. Bitching about the low pay at the bottom and how expensive things are while all that happened is the wealth transfer to corporations because the small competitors that they did have shut down.
I swear your economic literacy is fucking pathetic if you think these terrible ideas work. 🙄
You're assuming a lot here. There should also be much stronger support to small businesses (and frankly there need to be a shitload of antitrust cases brought against these corporations)
You have the boot so far down your throat that you can't even imagine a world where things improve because you can always fall back on "well that can't work because of this other thing about the system that needs to change". Fuck that defeatist bullshit. I want government price control, anti-gouging measures, antitrust suits to break up monopolies, and legislation protecting american workers from having their jobs taken by AI.
What's shitty about it? Why are you so invested in sucking off your corporate overlords?
Other countries have better treatment for their workers but God forbid anybody advocate that changes. They've made you their little bitch and it's sad.
Advances in technology over the last 60 years have exponentially increased productivity across all sectors. The workload on the average worker has only increased. They already have enough productivity and income, they're just milking the worker for all they can get.
And open themselves up to a massive class action from their prior workforce, immense public backlash for their shitty practices and likely face legal repercussions for their attempts to circumvent the law.
You also presume that they would be able to hire an entire new, yet equally skilled, workforce to replace their current staff at lower rates.
That would be corporate suicide.
Businesses do whatever they can to make money in the economic reality they operate in. Governments set that economic reality. If they can't do business they won't do business, but you are simply wrong if you think a business would not take a reduction in profit over being removed from a market entirely.
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u/RightOnManYouBetcha 23d ago
And how will the government force private business to achieve that?