Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sdoering | Hacker News Reader

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Why should we now work 15 hours a week?

Companies have found that it is much more rewarding to keep workers working 40 hours (in Europe) or more (many parts of the world, including the US) or more, and to translate the productivity gains into bonuses for top management, dividends for shareholders and increased share prices (for shareholders and top management) [1].

Without the necessary regulation, this process will not be significantly altered either, in my opinion. I firmly believe that hardly any (large) company will be prepared to significantly improve conditions for employees without external pressure - at the expense of shareholder value.

For example, it is perfectly normal for a company like Accenture to pay a 10% higher dividend for the past fiscal year, while dismissing 5% of its employees worldwide. We don't even have to dream of wage increases for employees in the 10% range here. And ACN is just one example because I happen to know the numbers right now.

What company increases its employees' wages by the same amount as it increases the dividend for shareholders? I hardly know of any company that does that.

[1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=development+productivity+wages+us&...

This is not bad in itself. It's just the first step in the market evolution. Given a free market (barriers aside) an equilibrium will be found sooner or later, but this step needs to happen first.

Why would we expect a not free market to behave as a free market?

Talking about a free market with perfectly informed, rational actors is like talking about perfect, frictionless spheres in a vacuum in physics. It's fine for theorizing, but useless once you're building things in the real world.

We always use imperfect approximations to model real-world processes to great benefits. The map is not the territory but its still pretty damn useful.

Observe how often people say "in a free market" to justify specific, real-world policy.

If every employee knew what all other employees earn, what their training is, what their workload is and what degree of productivity they have, as well as the return on investment generated by their own labor force.

And, what this would mean in comparison with other employers (i.e. comparative salaries, etc), we could think about whether we can speak of an (ideal) free market. To do so, the possibilities to change the company as well as the actual profession would have to be transparent and open.

In addition, most theories on the free market also assume rational actors. Which has been sufficiently refuted as a model of reality.

But even this would not be the problem if the basic assumptions above were fulfilled. But in most cases they are not. I do not know what the colleague next to me earns. I don't know how much ROI my employer gets with my work performance and I certainly don't have the chance to get analogous data to other companies in the market. In addition, as an employee I am also very much tied to the local area due to family situations and therefore cannot act like capital on the free market worldwide.

All in all, in this "game" of the employee is always the weaker market participant - which is why, for example, there are facilities and institutions in consumer markets that protect the consumer, because there is an imbalance in information.

For this reason there is (at least in Germany) state intervention in the employee market just as there are trade unions or works councils. There are analogous instruments in many markets worldwide - to create a counterweight to the imbalance of information and power.

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