Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours | Hacker News Reader

Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

takano.house.gov

211 pointstoomuchtodo153 comments

Decades ago the U.S. tied healthcare to employment. It had some big positives at the time. I think it has proven to have more negatives as time has unfolded. Here is one of them.

If you reduce hours per worker by, say, 10% you just pay each worker 10% less and hire 10% more workers, right? It's not so simple. If you try to cut the health insurance premium of each worker by 10% the policy becomes unattractive. If you keep the same policy, you increase your health insurance costs by 10%.

For this and other reasons, it's time to separate health insurance from employer.

It's time to tie health insurance to being alive.

But that means the poor would have affordable healthcare.

It’s slightly worse than that.

If you have 90 units of work to be done you might hire 9 workers at 10 units each. If the standard work goes down by 10%, you now need 10 workers at 9 units each. Your workers have increased by 11.1% (given by 1-1/(1-0.1))

A reduction from 40 to 32 would reduce hours per worker by 20% but increase workers and total health care costs by 25%.

The research around shorter work weeks and productivity indicates "units of work" don't work that way.

https://www.npr.org/2021/07/06/1013348626/iceland-finds-majo...

> Now, research out of Iceland has found that working fewer hours for the same pay led to improved well-being among workers, with no loss in productivity. In fact, in some places, workers were more productive after cutting back their hours.

If the task is coverage-related (“be available to run a cash register” or “answer any phone call that comes in” or “watch this area for security purposes”), it’s exactly that ratio.

> If the task is coverage-related (“be available to run a cash register” or “answer any phone call that comes in” or “watch this area for security purposes”), it’s exactly that ratio.

But no task that actually needs done is purely coverage related. If you want someone to watch dor security purposes, you want them to actually effectively secure it to some level, and if average ability to do that drops from overwork you need more people; if you want someone to run a cash register, just having a body next to it isn't enough, they have to actually perform correctly.

Many coverage-related jobs don't require a person's full potential productivity, so the fact that their productivity goes down with hours worked is irrelevant. If a cashier at a low-volume store only rings up a customer every 10 minutes but you've decided that they need to stay parked by the register all day rather than doing other tasks between customers, it doesn't matter if it takes them twice as long to ring up a customer at the end of their shift as at the start.

That's true in the sort of desk jobs most of the people who inhabit Hacker News do. It's patently not true of things like manufacturing line work, delivery drivers, chefs, and call centre operators. A chef can't drop 8 hours a week and still expect to serve the same number of meals because of efficiency gains, and a call centre needs to be accessible at the times people are calling.

For the record I fully support any push to reduce the amount of work people are expected to do, but claiming there's no impact because of productivity gains just doesn't add up in many cases.

> That's true in the sort of desk jobs most of the people who inhabit Hacker News do. It's patently not true of things like manufacturing line work, delivery drivers, chefs, and call centre operators.

The study wasn't restricted to desk jobs. Broader studies and international comparisons lead to a similar though weaker conclusion; in general more working hours over the range seen in most of the world (from about the mid-20s average hours worked per week, including both full workweek length and time off up) leads to a dramatic fall off in per-hour productivity.

> A chef can't drop 8 hours a week and still expect to serve the same number of meals because of efficiency gains...

Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps being better rested makes them collaborate better with the other chefs. Maybe the improved morale helps come up with a new menu item, or a more efficient way to make a dish. Maybe they wind up staving off carpal tunnel.

Actually, this is largely true even for other professions. A chef for example will slow down significantly after 5 hours of work and make more mistakes, so will manufacturing line workers and call center operators.

For sure, some jobs are more affected than others. But there are few jobs that aren't affected at all, and we shouldn't cut off the nose to spite the face.

It's worse because you have more management overhead all the way to the chain, more HR and support needs, and more office space required.

A rule of thumb is a worker's full cost is 2x their salary in the US. This varies, but it makes the math easy.

So costs would increase about double that. But if your workers are doing creative work, they might be more productive now per hour and that might offset the costs.

Not all companies are going to decrease wages in response to this legislation. In fact I'd be willing to bet it's less than 50% of companies. Right now we are already in a huge labor shortage because employers aren't paying enough to attract the workers they need. Companies that don't decrease wages in this situation will out-compete companies that do decrease wages if the primary scarce resource right now is workers.

This is similar to what's happening right now with companies that try to do locality adjustments for remote workers -- they get out-competed by companies willing to pay full price regardless of location. Eventually this will cause locality adjustments to vanish completely imo.

> If you have 90 units of work to be done you might hire 9 workers at 10 units each. If the standard work goes down by 10%, you now need 10 workers at 9 units each.

Assuming per-hour productivity is constant, which it is not; productivity goes down with more hours worked (both in a “full work week” and in the annual number of full work weeks.)

"Unit of work" is not really a thing for anything other than repetitive physical labor. There's a reason why putting 2x the resources on a problem won't get it solved twice as fast.

> "Unit of work" is not really a thing for anything other than repetitive physical labor.

Declining marginal productivity by hours worked per unit time definitely applies to repetitive physical labor past, too.

It's interesting that my ACA (Obamacare) premiums are lower than the premiums were at my last employer for similar coverage (using COBRA numbers for comparison). This might be because my last employer was bad at negotiating but I think it's mostly because they had an aging Rustbelt workforce and lots of people in roles that were unhealthy long term (linesmen and call centers). Because rates are set based on the pool's group risk, the risk in the public ACA pool is lower than the employer's pool of employees. So even though my job was white collar work at a desk, my premiums were based on an unhealthy pool of workers. If I went to work for a startup made up mostly of 20 somethings, I (and my employer) would likely be paying less than my old employer and less than ACA.

So this is another way that tying health insurance to employment creates pockets of unfairness and undesirable outcomes. While I'm not sold on having a government run healthcare system (the pandemic only reinforces this), there are plenty of hybrid systems out there in other industrialized nations that might (must recognize each country's situation is unique) have better outcomes.

> While I'm not sold on having a government run healthcare system (the pandemic only reinforces this)

Would you mind elaborating on that? From my own perspective the federal government’s ability to help fund and drive the vaccine development and then to purchase in quantities to get the entire population vaccinated is actually proof of how powerful a single payer system could be. I’m curious as to what I might be missing.

You offer two examples of value:

1. Fund and drive vaccine development

2. Purchase large quantities

Neither of those is what I want from my insurance company. How much are those two things costing me? If my taxes just went up $100/year for the next 3 years to pay for that vaccine, that maybe wasn't ideal. If my taxes went up $10 total, that was an awesome deal. If I have no idea how much that vaccine cost me, and nobody else seems to have a way to figure it out, that's really bad. One of my biggest complaints about health insurance in general is the lack of transparency. If government control reduces transparency, that would be bad.

It seems that you believe government is less transparent than private companies. There are laws which require transparency in government, and your elected officials can make those stronger. Private companies don’t have this inherent obligation and in fact desire to keep as much private as possible in order to compete better.

Are governments or private companies more transparent?

Did you see the sentence about current lack of transparency with insurance companies?

> While I'm not sold on having a government run healthcare system (the pandemic only reinforces this)

A reminder that government services suck on purpose. There is no reason for government healthcare to be ineffective other than the malicious intent of those who run our government (D or R).

> A reminder that government services suck on purpose. There is no reason for government healthcare to be ineffective other than the malicious intent of those who run our government (D or R).

Yes. Government employees and elected officials have weekly meetings with a standing question: Where are we doing things well? And then they coordinate to fuck it up and make it suck. /s

Some republicans, yes.

I have been reading comments like yours on the internet for quite a while now. I am from Europe, so I have no horse in this race.

I have these 2 questions/thoughts:

1) Do you think it's a good idea to have all the branches of the government controlled by 1 party? We actually had this a few decades ago in the Czech republic and we refer to that period as "totalita" or dictatorship. Let's say the wet dream (based on comments like yourself) of all Democrats becomes real and they control everything from communal level to presidency. How is it different than China, USSR or Czechoslovak Socialist Republic?

2) What has changed in the past half a year? If I am not mistaken, Democrats have had control of the presidency and house for over half a year now. I admit HN is my only source of news, but it seems like there are still ICE camps. There is still half-built wall between US and Mexico. The US still drones countries on the other side of the world. From the statistics people are still living paycheck to paycheck and can't afford healthcare (I understand the plague has its fair share here too). The US still helps Israel, which is IMO a rogue state at this point, as per the Pegasus scandal.

1) China, USSR, etc had/have more government involvement in running business but also controlling people’s movement and freedom of expression. That’s a different situation than American politics, because even the most progressive democrats don’t necessarily want the government limiting people’s freedoms so much as forcing rich entities to pay higher taxes and to provide more socialized services.

1b) We don’t really need 1 party. More than 2 parties would be great as well. But really we just need the Republican party to not be obstructionist nor actively harmful to democracy.

2) Democrats have the presidency, which, while having greatly expanded powers over the last 50ish years, is still a relatively weak executive. The Democrats have a narrow majority in the House and Senate; due to parliamentary rules, the narrow majority that they have does not allow them to pass or amend laws as freely as you may think. The Supreme Court, while notionally non-partisan, is filled with a majority of conservative Justices which can dissuade or reverse policy made by more liberal branches of the government (federally, or at state levels).

2b) 6 months is not a long time for governments the size of the US. Barrack Obama likened it to a large ocean-liner: there’s a lot of built up momentum, so it takes a long time to stop it or change direction.

To elaborate a bit on what another commenter said, the Republican party's whole premise is that government is bad, and we should have less of it. Since they are the government, it is easy to obstruct and oppose any attempt to actually help people. Essentially, the worse a job they do running the country, the more compelling their platform becomes. So yes, I really do think some Republicans are worried that the government might do too good of a job.

Well, there's no reason for the govt Healthcare to be effective either. The gov makes money either way, malicious intent or no it is hard to keep a system running effeciently when there is no real compelling reason to do so. Even for profit corporations start to bloat and become ineffective when they are making too much money, and they arnt garunteed that money either way unlike the government.

That is an interesting situation. I’m surprised your employer didn’t seek out a consortium to improve the group; it would’ve been a huge financial benefit to them, assuming they were paying a share of premiums.

Sounds like you are young and because you are young you are receiving the privilege of paying less premium for health care. Health Insurance for better or worse heavily discriminates against the older folks.

>> the risk in the public ACA pool is lower than the employer's pool of employees

as a general rule, the public pool is substandard rating.

> worse heavily discriminates against the older folks

The ACA is actually a wealth transfer from the young to the old, like social security, because the young pay much more than their portion of healthcare costs, while the old have a ceiling on their healthcare costs.

Whether this is good policy is for the think tanks and politicians, but after the ACA it is not true that health insurance discriminates against older Americans.

> because you are young you are receiving the privilege of paying less premium for health care

That's a weird way of putting it. Young people are getting far less value from their healthcare premiums than the old. That's how the entire system is able to work.

Health insurance, social security, medicare etc. all discriminate against the young in favor of the old. And I'm not passing judgement for or against such a system. That's just how it is.

> Health Insurance for better or worse heavily discriminates against the older folks.

Medicare exists only for the elderly.

As it should. It's incredibly unfair that as a young person I'm forced to subsidize the healthcare costs of older colleagues

Well, not really. Unless you die young very rapidly in a way that won't incur major medical costs, you're going to get your money's worth eventually, with the added benefit of stability.

That's assuming I'd work at the same company forever. Different places of work have different insurance plans

If you're in the US, perhaps. The solution to the problem you're describing is single payer healthcare.

I'm not disagreeing

Premiums are part of the cost of insurance not the entire cost. Sometimes there are co-pays that can be large. I know that the ACA comes in bronze/silver/gold varieties and I seem to remember reading somewhere that the premiums were the same and what was covered was the same among all the "metal" categories but the deductable/co-pay amounts were different. If you had bronze you had a bigger deductable or co-pay then silver or gold.

From personal experience I had the same carrier (blue cross) with the same deductible and same copay (the “gold” level PPO) but I currently pay $800 to buy it independently for my wife and I while at my old job the premiums were $1200 a month.

COBRA numbers are and have always been absolutely nuts, in fact I've come to the conclusion that they exist simply as a disincentive for employees to leave (along with non-competes).

> you just pay each worker 10% less and hire 10% more workers, right?

While the rest of your comment is a fair concern, I want to push back on this default assumption.

While I'm sure there are roles that are pretty much 1:1 with output to hours worked, I don't think it's always true.

I think for software developers, for example, I get 90% of the productivity out of the first 32 hours of work that I would get out of 40 hours of work.

"I’d Say, In A Given Week, I Probably Only Do About Fifteen Minutes Of Real, Actual Work.” -- Peter, Office Space

I've worked in lots of offices and watched people, especially "important" ones. It's fun to watch. They're so busy the strain is enormous. But if you pay attention, they spend lots of time calling their sister, talking to the Schwann's man.. "I work so hard I never leave work" but little actual work is done, but much is made of the number of hours spent there.

My wife is a high-powered attorney who makes an obscene amount of money in NY. We both ended up working from home during the pandemic, and it was amusing to see her work schedule. She absolutely did a lot of really strenuous work which often would demand lots (and sometimes ungodly!) hours, but there was also plenty of time where... there wasn't any work. Or she was simply worn out, and was taking a break, etc. And not too infrequently a day would go by like that. It just really hit home for me what a waste office culture is, generally, because I'm sure this is no different when she's at the office, but she's just subjected to a commute, halogen lighting, uncomfy atmosphere, etc., for evidently no benefit at all.

Yet, she probably still needs to bill hours during those down times.

I've always been amazed that those fancy attorneys manage to bill the same $1k per hour when they're super focused as when they're eating a sandwich or shopping for engagement rings online.

Can you not think while eating? Do you never do some mindless fidgeting or surfing while contemplating some kind of hard or complex situation?

Meh. If you're going to insist on billing in 6 minute increments, I'll let you pay for the lunch and toilet breaks.

I really hope that the pandemic finally makes us realize that the 9-5, 40 hours/week office culture we have set up over the decades is a total sham. Very few people are really working that much, but it isn't socially acceptable for anyone to admit it.

Up until I retired a few months ago, I routinely worked 50-60 hours a week as a team lead because I wrote code full time + meetings for several hours a day plus communicating with other teams, product and execs all day long. I rarely took vacations during the years I worked there as the work never slacked off at all. Most of my colleagues also did extra hours every week (I tried to keep my team from overworking, others did not). At least working at home I could avoid another hour a day in commuting. I did not get paid anything more to work longer, but deadlines were often arbitrary so stress was high. You could reduce the standard hours to zero and it would change nothing about that job.

If a job is more defined, like flying a plane, or operating a cash register, hours are equal to work, so limiting hours is possible.

If I could have worked just 40 every week with 3 weeks actual taken vacation, it would have been nice.

Can we get the almost infinite list of "overtime exceptions" for salary employees removed while we are at it? There are so many Americans that never saw a 40 hour a week expectation because of these and most of those people were not paid overtime due to 'salary' expectations. Every fast food/retail store manager I have ever spoken to faces this dilemma and all of my friends in 'professional firms' like architecture/law/accounting face this. Tech has been able to avoid it almost certainly only because of how scarce the labor is to begin with. I would assume in 100 years (if we are not all on fire) that tech workers working 40 hours (let alone less) will also be a small minority if we cant get this fixed.

100 years? It’s already happening today. There are definitely salaried tech workers who are being pushed to work more than 40 hours right now. Some may not know any better, others may feel pressured because they don’t want to look for other work (when they probably should), and so on. These protections would help workers today.

Some developers may have avoided it, but IT definitely hasn't. Network engineers, server admins, and DBAs routinely have to work a full schedule, plus change windows, and have to be on call. Some are on call 24/7 with no extra pay. When I switched companies almost a decade ago I went from being a network guy who knew how to code, to a coder who knew networking. My quality of life increased over night.

When my company started standardizing pay I was an SRE. There were no additional benefits for being an SRE despite a massive on-call commitment with highly disruptive false positives that required investigation as we were trying to tune the alerting system. I made the exact same pay as a SWE that never had to do this extra work and were often annoyed if they were paged to act as a SME. This moment is when I transitioned out of SRE work and into SWE work.

Tightening up rules on exempt employment would be a good step too. Exempt was meant to be just that, an special case exemption for a few high level professionals, not the default for all white collar (and even some blue collar) work. My last job required that I fill out a timesheet each week. On an average day, I assigned hours to about four different time codes. For positions that bill by time such as attorneys and doctors, this might be reasonable but for inhouse software development, it felt a lot more like an hourly job.

Even though I was salaried, failing to have 40 hours on my timesheet each week would result in a proportional reduction in pay (there was no increase in pay if I went over 40). I mentioned this to higher ups and was told that it wasn't actually a timesheet, it was so they could determine "resource allocation", which sounded like an flimsy excuse. Using it to track PTO seems reasonable. Using it to track hours at my computer doesn't.

This wasn't a small inexperienced company. Its roots go back to the 1940s and it had over 20,000 employees, so they probably knew the relevant labor laws and either were allowed to do this or thought they'd never get called on it. Either way, exempt doesn't seem to mean much anymore other than another way for employers to squeeze employees harder.

At a contracting firm, I always thought it was annoying to bill hourly but be denied overtime. Luckily it didn't happen often (we worked for the government, what can I say).

On the whole I've been deeply fortunate to work only for companies that expect 40 hours a week. Maybe it's my field -- data science -- but either way I hope it continues. I'd do my part to make sure it does, if I knew what my part consisted of.

For manual labor this would make a big difference. For intellectual work, I suspect it would probably not lead to much less work being done. Just because people are at the office 8 hours a day, doesn’t mean they’re getting 8 hours of work done. I would be curious if people would get as much done and waste less time sitting there or if the sitting there time is the same, percentage wise.

This is what I've been trying to tell people for awhile. In "knowledge work" areas I suspect most people work around 5-6 hours a day and the rest is spent doing whatever other stuff they do.

My current job I only work 35 hours a week and it's great. They pay us for an hour lunch basically and I just take it at the end of my day, thus shortening my day to 7 hours.

One study found it's only about 3 hours for the average office worker: https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-product...

Sounds about right. At my employer, DevOps expects that we fill in our time sheets completely in order to represent the whole eight hour workday. So we do. Things like taking breaks, talking to coworkers, waiting around for answers from other teams, meetings, etc., all of that goes towards active project work. However, the projects are estimated using effort hours and they do not include inflated 'we need to look productive the whole day' tasks.

If an individual goes under the full eight hours, it reflects poorly on them during evaluations. If the division goes overtime on project hours, nothing bad happens. So naturally each developer is incentivized to jot down extra time and disincentivized from tracking time truthfully. And yet management wonders why we go overtime on so many buckets!

And everyone knows the numbers aren't real, yet the song and dance must go on. I really wish we had a term for this in English. I suppose 'Potemkin' sort of applies?

Maybe for menial knowledge work. During crunch time, nights and weekends get completely filled with work.

Did you intend to use the word menial? I'd say it applies much better to tech workers who are subject to "crunch time" with any kind of regularity, or who lack the ability to say "no" to weekend or evening work, than to the rest.

Crunch time is something I would absolutely switch jobs to avoid. It would be fine if it were emergency only situations and they happened once or twice a year for a couple nights. But if it's such a regular thing that it has a name "crunch time" I'd be out. I work to live my life, not live my life to work.

It feels like there’s no sensible reason that employers/contractors should be allowed to establish contracts where “knowledge work” is being compensated for time worked (i.e. to set an hourly wage, and an expected number of working hours.) No matter who thinks they benefits by such a contract, it seems to almost always turn out for the worse for both parties.

It seems like instead, almost all “knowledge work” is really fundamentally salaried work, where the employer/client should be paying for output, perhaps with contractual milestone deadlines that determine a boundary that the employee/contractor schedule their work to happen within — but with no contractual constraints on how or when the work happen within each milestone/sprint should happen, as long as the milestone deadline is satisfied.

This is already the universal expectation for “knowledge work” where the knowledge-worker is generally respected for their talent and is seen as hard to replace — e.g. in the working contracts between fiction authors and their publishers. Nobody gets paid a wage to write books. (We even distinguish this particular type of knowledge-worker, calling them a “creative”, as if that meant anything more than “a knowledge-worker, but, y’know, a respectable one.”)

The problem is that this model loses most of the benefits of the Firm (economies of scale of labor).

Let's say you have some money and want to make something happen. You find a developer and an infrastructure person. Now you have to negotiate a price with each of them for some defined output (and unless you're technical you probably need to first negotiate with the dev to get her to produce an infrastructure plan, then find the infra person and negotiate with him, and then negotiate with the dev to get the work done).

Ok, you've spent a bunch of time negotiating individually and defining exact output specs that withstand contractual scrutiny. Then you get partway through development and learn something new about your market. You decide that you need to change your product a bit, so now pause development and negotiate a change order with your dev. You come to an agreement but the change requires infra changes. So you go negotiate with the infra person but you can't come to an agreement on the changes required.

Now you're paying the infra person to finish something you don't want any more, the dev can't do the additional work she's willing to do because the infra won't be there, and you're stuck building something that you don't even need. This doesn't even take into account that this model forces every single person to be both a negotiator and marketer of their own skills, in addition to whatever technical skills they have (comparative advantage shows that they should each just do what they do best). The obvious next step is for groups of people with complimentary skills to get together and negotiate projects together and from there it's a very clear path to ending up with salaried workers again.

The advantages of the Firm are just so great that even with a ton of waste it's still better than everyone individually negotiating their output. Look at the consulting companies for an example, even though they negotiate at the project level they still pay people salary. They know exactly how much bench time each person has and they still use that model over hiring for each project based on the project's output.

I wasn't exactly suggesting that everyone work as contractors with a pre-negotiated contract.

I was more motioning toward the idea of "sprints" as being a similar thing to "milestones" — i.e. that the product of one or two weeks of labor at expected levels of productivity are "the contractual output", and that beyond that, the process by which an employee produces "the contractual output" is a black box which the Firm should not tamper with. Each "sprint" is not exactly a negotiation, because the person defining the sprints should be someone on the knowledge-worker's "side", protecting them from Firm over-exploitation with the goal of ensuring their long-term productivity.

As it happens, this is the original idea behind Extreme Programming — with an engineering manager presenting an API to the Firm where the Firm can push Tasks to be worked on, and then the Tasks will get broken up + rearranged + scheduled into Sprints, and from there allocated onto a set of knowledge-workers; and where the Firm can't know or control anything more about that "thread pool" of knowledge-workers, other than 1. knowing who is part of it, and 2. examining its aggregate output at the end of the sprint.

I have a 4 day workweek and that made me the most efficient version of myself as I have to do the same amount of work but in less time, and I'm loving it, having 3 days weekends is amazing and every Monday I have lots of energy for the week.

I'm convinced I would get more done in the shorter work week. After 3 day weekends I tend to get more done the following week, I think due to being more well-rested.

> For intellectual work, I suspect it would probably not lead to much less work being done.

I think the other big thing is, hasn't overtime only ever applied to people below a given salary level? I wonder, if this passed would it actually change norms at places that have institutionally always had people working a lot of hours? I'm thinking not just of some tech companies, but e.g. lawyers racking up billable hours etc.

Something to take into account for manual labor is a great deal of it happens outside. Due to climate change, many parts of the USA will experience dangerous heat in the middle of the day, and even some indoor locations like Amazon warehouses have inadequate cooling. https://gizmodo.com/amazons-new-safety-crisis-could-be-heat-...

If workers took a siesta in the middle of the day, they would avoid the heat to some degree, which would be better for the workers' health and may not greatly change how much work gets done. Workers operating in dangerous heat will either reduce their physical exertions in order to moderate their body temperature, take frequent breaks, or collapse (in which case they are getting no work done, and depending on how badly injured they are, they may need to be replaced, which requires training etc.).

In other words, depending on the weather/climate in the future, reducing the work week to 32 hours may not negatively affect results from manual labor either.

I've been wondering what stops politicians from gaming the democratic system by introducing legislation that has short-term benefits for the electorate and long-term negative consequences for the country as a whole. I know that I wouldn't vote for someone like that, but I can't think of many people around me who wouldn't.

I suppose many would think of it this way: "what's good for the long-term future of the country is good for my kids, but that's not going to help them much if I can't pay the next month's rent, or if I have to work so much that I never get to see them and raise them properly. So why not vote for someone who will help me get more money and spend more time with my kids now?"

I mean, it's absolutely mind-blowing that there isn't an entire line around the corner of politicians pushing for higher minimum wage, free education, free healthcare, basic income, etc. There are obviously some voices supporting all those measures, but I am surprised those individuals are not more popular. I suppose this is a very basic political science question, but I don't have any background in this field and today's topic once again made me wonder what's stopping us from adopting that and many other similar measures. Surely, those who stand to benefit something from it in the short-term outnumber the people who are going to be negatively impacted?

Isn’t that a huge portion of the bills passed? Except the horizon is ~5-10 years.

Think about lack of progress on building a sustainable energy model, protecting long term social safety net, ensuring long term stability of the country, investing in multigenerational building and infrastructure practices.

Have you not noticed corporations and the very weathy fund almost all candidates? What you are saying only happens when we get money out of politics.

I can report that our 245 year experience with democracy has us on the verge of doing just that. Any day now...

Because the politicians are not really serving their electorate; they're beholden to their donors, which are corporations and mega-rich people.

Politicians gaming the system by promising short term benefits at the cost of long term gain happens alls the time. But, it's not quite so cynical as you think.

First, understand that while people definitely want short term gain, they also want long term gain. Most all people are decent to some extent, and want long term success for their family, community, country, planet, etc. So, keep that in mind, and then let's examine this:

> it's absolutely mind-blowing that there isn't an entire line around the corner of politicians pushing for higher minimum wage, free education, free healthcare, basic income, etc

There is widespread disagreement over whether this is a good idea in the short or long term. And, keep in mind, voters do want long term success! So, when half the country thinks policies like these would cause a descent into socialist chaos, it's not surprising that politicians can't win on these platforms.

Nevertheless, we are constantly dealing with the ramifications of policies politicians crafted for short term gain. The mortgage interest rate deduction is a great example -- politicians subsidized homeownership, which was very popular, and we are left dealing with the drastic ramifications of a totally messed up housing system. Similarly, guaranteeing loans to help people go to college -- very popular in the short term, but has led to the ballooning of education costs.

The difference between these policies, and the ones you mentioned, is that they passed during a period of relative national unity, so it was much easier to get them through Congress.

More than a dozen sitting members of Congress (of both political parties) have been in their seats for more than 36 years, so forgive me if I find these arguments about long-term and short-term interests moot.

Politicians care about getting elected and then re-elected, in that order. Somewhere much lower in their set of priorities is pushing policy.

Where do you get the idea that this isn't the very heart of every political campaign? There's a curve of course, where if you promise too much people don't see it as believable.

My first experience with this was high school. Freshman year the student body presidency was won by the fellow who promised that we would get sodas added to the machines (rather than the no-caffeine options that were then available). Bullshit. But he won. In his acceptance speech, he explained it straight out, and we all learned something.

I'd be perfectly happy with 35 hours, so that an eight hour workday is actually eight hours and not nine because your lunch break doesn't count.

It's weird how "9 to 5" is the phrase, but it is, more often, "8 to 5" for a nominally eight-hour workday.

Lots of English songs mention "9 to 5" but it's "9 to 6" in most of Asia and most stay until 8 or 9pm, especially at large firms.

You should move to France then :p

The work week here is 35hrs/week, with exceptions allowed for up to 40hrs/week, but the extra has to be compensated 1:1 with extra paid vacation time ( on top of the minimum of 30 days paid time off).

True only if your hours are counted. I don't know the ratio but I think a significant part of engineers are day-based wage, so you are just expected to work till 18h00/19h00, more if needed. Btw, legal minimum vacation time is 20 days but 25/30 days is common and some can have huge vacation time (but lower wage).

Somewhat of a tangent but related to labor: tell your reps to abolish personal income taxes and replace it with a consumption tax. We should not be taxing labor…

Every road having a toll is your idea of the future? Or am I misunderstanding something.

I'm pretty positive on this idea. Driving on roads imposes an externality on other people, why shouldn't we attempt to make drivers/companies internalize that cost by charging a toll? I'm not so positive on it that I would support it if it were clunky and imposed a big transaction cost (having to stop and pay). But if it were automatic like the tolling via camera that happens with a certain bridge near me then I would support it.

Of course it's probably low in importance compared to certain other modes of travel that have big externalities that aren't tolled/taxed appropriately...(air travel).

Sorta, I view taxing labor as bad policy. We should not disincentivized labor. But… just saying stop this tax usually has people upset at bigger deficits. So if we tax consumption instead the end result is lower (or no) taxes for income and higher taxes on wealth (indirectly).

Toll roads are a bad example IMO. We could have an entirely separate conversation about how they hurt the most disadvantaged and are typically a gigantic scam when played out on broader timelines. If you want to see the end game on toll road experience, come visit Houston sometime.

A consumption tax would be something more like "I want to buy a new hillside estate and I have to pay this special 20% fuck you tax because I'm excessively wealthy".

Consumption tax code could be fairly complex in order to minimize impact to those who are purchasing day-to-day items and other essentials. I would happily pay extra taxes on my discretionary purchases like high-end PC hardware (and probably make more of them) if it meant that on the other hand I wouldn't be penalized just for working and making money. Anything you could buy at a grocery store should probably be exempt or in a tightly-controlled tier.

Property taxes are cool too. Land is a ~fixed resource, so you have to have some counterpressure involved there. I am not saying alter property taxes to accommodate any of this, I just think they have a place.

New Zealand funds its roads via taxes on petrol, and for non-petrol vehicles "Road User Charges" which are basically a tax on oddometer kilometers. I haven't checked if how the balance between revenue generated by these taxes compares to spending on roads, etc. though.

Roads contribute to massive negative externalities.

If every road was a toll road you would have more walkable cities. Better public transport options. Less emmisssions.

Sounds like a wonderful trade off.

A consumption tax that exempts groceries, non-designer clothes and shoes, school supplies/fees, and household utilities could be much more aligned to helping out the working class than the graduated income tax.

My thoughts, correct me if I'm wrong here: If I'm on a very low income, likely 100% (or more) of my monthly earnings will go to buying food, paying rent/utilities, etc, so under a consumption tax, a higher proportion of my income will be taxed than under income tax (people in the lowest tax bracket generally won't pay income tax at all). Of course, you could exclude these necessities from tax, but then I find it difficult to see if tax revenue would be high enough from just taxing non-essential items.

IMO, any tax system where the poorest people pay a higher proportion of their income than those richer than them is flawed.

I agree. Wealth taxes seem better but are notoriously difficult to implement. We need more people to have more money… no way to get around that.

You can make a consumption tax progressive! You'd probably want to make it a bit more progressive than the current income tax brackets, to cancel out the effect you're describing.

Re: implementation: make putting money into a bank account tax deductible and pulling money out taxable, then continue to use the existing income tax system. Any money you earn that you don't spend is a tax write-off, any money you spend that you didn't earn this year is something you have to pay more taxes on.

Why would you want to encourage money to be hoarded? The modern economy is like a shark - if it stops moving, it dies. Exceptions include retirement savings plans, but that is just to keep the government from having to spend more money on old people.

Funny, I wasted a whole day reading about freicoin and demurrage... i.e. money that is specifically designed to circulate at a roughly constant velocity.

I came up with a strange idea that is slightly better. When banks create money via loans bind the lifetime of the deposit to the lifetime of the credit. I.e. individual dollars have expiration dates that are directly tied to monthly payments. If people default then the dollars expire and the bank has to either compensate by raising its interest premium or by lowering interest rates on the deposits to compensate the loss. This means that interest rates would have to be negative sometimes and all debts can be repaid one day.

Of course the cash withdrawal scheme is equally complex because cash represents perpetual deposits which would require a perpetual government bond on the other side.

Banks would transfer their worst deposits first when you transfer to another bank which would drag all banks to roughly the same level of interest without needing a central bank to set interest rates. The equilibrium interest rate would discover itself automatically, at least that is the hope.

It's weird to see all the comments taking this as a meaningful piece of legislation rather than the symbolic stunt that it is. Nothing wrong with Takano promoting his political views that way, but it's a little silly to act like this is something it's not.

Ripe for "The Law of Unintended Consequences". Without changes to what is classified as Part Time Work (usually 30 hours), employers will get rid of full time staff and in some cases be able to avoid paying almost all benefits. UPS comes to mind, they would only hire part time drivers to avoid paying benefits.

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/workhours/parttimeemployme...

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not address part-time employment.

I wouldn't be surprised if employers jump all over this to allow them to save billions by getting rid of full time work.

Edit: Spelling/Grammar

>> Ripe for "The Law of Unintended Consequences".

That is what concerns me too.

Well-meaning laws that do not consider the second- and third-order effects can be easy for employers to game.

"If you want to work more than 30 hours per week, you have to become an independent contractor."

> Without changes to what is classified as Part Time Work (usually 30 hours), employers will get rid of full time staff and in some cases be able to avoid paying almost all benefits.

Yeah, I’m sure that missing out on that is the kind of thing that would fly right by AFL-CIO, SEIU, and the other labor organizations that endorsed this, who are generally completely clueless about the legal context of labor and how employers exploit it.

Unfortunately, official text for H.R. 4728 [0] is not yet available, though, so we can't really resolve this.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4728

Would this also have the side-effect of adjusting the threshold at which hourly employees become full-time? (and thus require benefits)

It impacts people being paid overtime.

In reality, this would likely push some employers to leave ~Cali~ (EDIT: mean the U.S., didn't realize this was federal) (such as SpaceX, Tesla, etc), as they wont want to pay overtime.

It would also potentially push people to hire more salary employees, but they'll only be paid for 32 hours. That could suppress salaries (as the employer will only pay say $100/hr, they wont increase it so it'll potentially be a 20% cut in pay).

Essentially, continue the drive to push all the jobs overseas.

> It would also potentially push people to hire more salary employees

That will only work for certain kinds of workers. Not all jobs can be exempt from over time (IT jobs are though).

With the political realignment, I guess it's not surprising that some politicians are trying to bring back the glory days again with New Deal ideas. Most people can probably agree the 40 hour workweek is an outdated idea. But a 32 hour workweek is just a modification of an outdated idea. Not a modernization of it. I'm not quite sure what the modern version of a 40 hour workweek is, but it's not a shortening of it. I'd guess it's a change in default pay maybe ownership structures, and probably scheduling.

Honestly in my opinion, gig apps are a great start, but they suck at the moment in a similar way jobs before the new deal sucked. The worker needs more rights, they need more control of their pay. A New, New deal in my opinion would probably be giving employee rights to gig workers, who control their own time, and pay. And probably adding a basic income floor to prevent a race to the bottom.

> But a 32 hour workweek is just a modification of an outdated idea.

Same with the $15 minimum wage. But it's a start.

Would sure be nice if they included the name of the bill so it was easier to track progress.

EDIT: Found it. For the curious: H.R.4728 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4728

This is just for shows, right? Would never actually be implemented in the US.

Why not? At one point not so long ago the 40 hour work week was just a pipe dream

~100 years is a pretty darned long time by labor standards - i think when talking about changing labor standards, anything more than 1 generation is practically ancient. If you live in the US, the pre-40 hour work week era never applied to you, or your parents, and maybe even your grandparents.

I reduced it to that by personal fiat long ago

I wonder if this will have any impact on jobs that are exempt from overtime, such as software development (see https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...).

This bill doesn’t appear to do so, but I hope the exempt occupations are revisited at some point. Companies like law firms and software consultancies have no trouble billing out many of these exempt jobs at an hourly rate. I don’t think there’s a great argument that the workers shouldn’t get the same labor protections as other employees.

We will truly have a 4-day work week only when the NY stock exchange is closed on Fridays.

"Today, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) introduced legislation that would reduce the standard workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours by lowering the maximum hours threshold for overtime compensation for non-exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)."

It seems like this would just lead to businesses who employee non-exempt employees hiring more of them but scheduling for fewer hours to stay under the 32 hour threshold. Simple changes to a system as complex as our labor laws are just not going to do the job. We need to look at employee classification as though we were starting from scratch to design a system that makes sense for the realities of today - gig work, remote work, side hustles, etc.

I agree with you here. I'm honestly not educated on history enough to know if such a reform is feasible in a single pass - an entire redesign vs incremental change. It would be cool if a major rework could happen all at once.

The best approach I know of is for the government or other large employers to make the shift to a 4 day workweek. Once 10s of millions are doing it, it’ll become more of a cultural norm.

Agree, that's the best course. For 24/7 types of situations, it will only be a change in use patterns.

The most obvious fix is to make employers offer the same benefits (prorated by hours worked) for all employees.

That’d radically change the structure of the health insurance industry, since working full time hours by combining two part time jobs would imply that you’d get health insurance just like full time workers at either company.

Unfortunately if you're covered by two different group health plans you're going to need that extra day a week just to coordinate the fight over who pays for what. Just have Medicate (or maybe better Medicaid) for all and be done with tying that to an employer.

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title29/cha...

Section 213 is what you want to look at. It’s not really a matter of choice but industry, role, and hourly rate that determines if someone is considered exempt.

Right, and the classifications it provides are outdated for the reality of today.

I didn't say that employers would try to reclassify their employees - I said that they would keep their non-exempt ones under the 32 hour threshold.

> It seems like this would just lead to businesses who employee non-exempt employees hiring more of them but scheduling for fewer hours to stay under the 32 hour threshold.

... I mean that's kind of the point, right? The AFL-CIO rep quote basically says that it will spread the existing hours around to more people.

There are also some cases where companies have few enough qualified candidates where they are already paying overtime, and this will not significantly affect them. For example if you are working 56 hours a week, then you are currently getting paid for 64 hours of labor (40+16 and 1.5x) and after this you would be getting paid for 68 hours of labor if you continued to work 56 hours.

YC startups should be making 4-day 8-hour weeks part of their pitch to employees. They don't have the mature company bureaucracy holding them back from changing quickly.

...why was this removed? I was looking forward to comments :(

If this passes, remind me to buy shares in robotics and ancillary like ML & AI companies.

Perhaps this is intended to improve under-employment numbers.

Why 32? Why not 22? Why not 10? What's the reasoning here.

A 4 day workweek (8 * 4 = 32) to distribute the last few decades of productivity gains [1] to the working class. Very similar to how unions were how the working class received a weekend [2]. Why would we not expand the weekend/time for leisure and other non work related time as productivity increases?

[1] https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/producti...

[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/sep/09/viral-imag...

I doubt anyone is hung up on a specific number. The policy goal is to replace one day of labor with one day of consumption or leisure.

You're not wrong, just trying to add context and some evidence versus "have to start somewhere."

So that means people will earn even less? how is that a good thing? This won't reduce the money supply or the discrepancy between poor and rich, it will just make the poor even poorer.

This incentivizes employers to pay more per hour, otherwise people won’t work reduced hours for the same rate

Don't be so sure about that.

"McDonald’s to Employees: Get a (Second) Job" https://www.motherjones.com/food/2013/07/mcdonalds-budget-mc...

Did the poor get poorer when the 40 hour work week was adopted?

Takano and other well meaning legislators reveal they have zero clue how economies work or how wealth is created. It is fairly terrifying that these sorts have become so influential.

Based on vast capital accumulation to a small cohort [1], I believe they do know how wealth is being created. They're simply improving quality of life for the people doing the actual work. Conversely, its terrifying (at least to me) that there are people who endorse the dystopian status quo.

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/open-vault/2020/december/has-weal...

What worries me is that the stagnant wages have been caused by globalization making our labor relatively unattractive compared to the rest of the world. This will only make our labor more unattractive, accelerating the loss of our dwindling manufacturing base.

This exactly. The U.S. economy doesn’t exist in a competition-free vacuum. This “solution” would hurt those at the left side of the income/wealth distribution the most, but would hurt all of the U.S. to some degree.

Or they have looked at charts like this, understand why the US is to the right but have no reason to think (and plenty of domestic research on per-working-hour productivity to support) that the factors that create the overall trend line apply to the US:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/productivity-vs-annual-ho...

It is far more terrifying that some believe you can make simple adjustments to complex systems with no unintended consequences.

Can you explain your idea further? Perhaps with data about the percentage of economic value which is the direct product of hours worked which cannot be worked by other people? Link it to some attempt at an argument that, despite high profits and the disparities we've seen between worker pay and productivity, companies are simultaneously at 100% utilization with no slack capacity and cannot possibly afford to hire additional workers?

The burden of proof is very much on your side champ

The proposed legislation describes its anticipated benefits and, since it's a law, exactly what it will do. It's totally reasonable to question that but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect someone to explain what exactly they are claiming is wrong. Those were some sweeping claims being tossed around — it'd be really important to be able to back any of them up if you expect anyone to engage with them.

> how economies work or how wealth is created

Could you point me to your preferred sources for this info?

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