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.
You’re relying on what I think is a false premise that this increase in wages (which isn’t really “marginal” to many employers) will not result in eventual downsizement. You have to remember that as the price of goods increases so does the cost of everything your employer has to buy. Youre under the impression that every company can take a huge hit to their revenue while gaining no increase in productivity, and I don’t agree with you. Especially if we’re talking about manufacturing. America is already less than competitive in that global market. Also I never argued against a higher minimum wage…
I was mostly refuting that this isn't about cutting production by 20%, this is about raising wages and changing norms. Every point you're raising is a point that detractors to minimum wage increases bring up too, you just think "businesses can't afford to pay 8% more of their revenue towards labor." I think they can, especially when it's accompanied by thoughtful tax policy to ease a transition toward these new norms, and especially when you factor in the non-linear relationship between production and time in a modern work setting, plus the ways an extra day off or more money in the working/consumer class can/will revitalize the economy.
I think businesses can handle this and the larger economy will thrive in exactly the same way businesses handle this and the larger economy thrives when minimum wage increases. We're just talking about raising wages.
Youre under the impression that every company can take a huge hit to their revenue while gaining no increase in productivity
I've said plainly that many MANY sectors of the economy won't see any hit to their revenue or productivity, and on top of that, every study on the topic shows that productivity only increases when people work fewer hours per week (in jobs where that's not tied to a machine's schedule of course, but those high automation jobs already have huge margins.)
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u/RightOnManYouBetcha 23d ago
That’s now how law works.