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Comment by supercollision | Hacker News Reader

+1 to your post and links. I'm also surprised by how much anti-union sentiment exists in the US; things like the 40-hour workweek and concept of overtime were paid for in blood.

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The US works hard to surpress labor history education. We even celebrate Labor Day in September, and as a result most Americans have never heard of the Haymarket Massacre, which is the whole reason it exists everywhere else in the world.

Now the work week is less than 30 hours. Yay! All it took was requiring health insurance for employees with 30 hours.

By that strategy, we could have a 10-hour work week if we wanted it.

I'm sorry if I'm misunderstanding your point, but might a union actually help in this case?

The 30 hour mandate is from the federal government as part of the Affordable Care Act. If someone was moved from 40 hours to 29 hours because of this, that's bad, but they were likely not a union member, right? Unions would have a negotiated contract for however many hours they wanted (either more or less than the norm), and would have also already negotiated benefits on the side so the incentive for the employer to cut to 30 hours would be gone.

Regarding the fewer hours points - I wasn't advocating that shorter weeks are always better, but rather that unions are responsible for, or at least contributed to, many of the gains that workers got over the last 150 years, and that IMO have been eroding.

Pretending we lived in the early 20th century, isn't the benefit of 40 hours a week in a factory over >60 hours a week in a factory clear? In terms of health and safety, unions have also made sure that e.g. you were less likely to become trapped and burn alive during the workday [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

The burden of health insurance shouldn't fall to the business anyway. It is the responsibility of the federal government.

This is an important argument that people miss. Cost increases in health care for government systems are managed at the government level, not at the level of individual companies. That's a pretty desirable situation for companies. Not only do companies make targets of themselves when they downgrade coverage, but the overall compensation is also less transparent to the worker when insurance is tied to the workplace. You get rid of all that stuff in a single payer system.

Withholding health insurance is also a powerful tool for breaking/preventing strikes. While it would save employers money, it would also reduce their leverage, and workers would be able to move on to other demands, or quit

huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5d814caae4b0ddcef50a1460

i agree, although it's easy to withhold health insurance by maintaining a part-time, contractor, and gig workforce. That's a much stronger power-play. If anything, single payer alleviates some of their political exposure on gig workers. The pressure to classify gig workers as full employees is, in many corners, driven by the health insurance problem.

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