Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours
fisherphillips.com
fisherphillips.com
Most of the discussion here is about whether mandating business practice would be a good or a bad business move, but hardly anyone is questioning whether this is a good or legitimate role for those in government to decree and mandate. More and more, I see governments mandating changes that already appear to be underway, but in a way that accrues the praise and rewards to themselves. Most Americans seem to be complicit in this transformation, continually voting greater and greater control and authority away from the people and toward government powers.
Put another way: Of course it's a good thing to force businesses to make work more humane and sustainable for the humans who have to do it.
Have you heard of the Great Resignation?
Isn’t the Great Resignation driven at least in part by the government’s influence? COVID lockdowns and regulations heavily incentivized employers to offer more flexibility around remote work, and COVID economic relief policies helped provide folks with the financial stability needed to look for better employment. I’m not sure this would have occurred organically without any government intervention.
Government policies are never the correct way to solve societal problems, even taking the premise the the "evil profit motive" is the actual reason we have seen abuse in the past (which I disagree with), the resolution to that is NEVER government as any honestly look at government policies requires one to conclused that at best the government policy just takes credit for something that was happening anyway, but more often the government policy slows or stopps the trend to improving lives
Just look at the "War on Poverty", at the start of that poverty was dropping FAST, then the government steps in to "solve" the problem of poverty that the evil free market could not (even though it was), and poverty rates flatlined.
Trillions and trillions of dollars spent later, and the government still has not solved that problem, where the free market likely would have if allowed to continue...
Which ones? Point to some examples of government resolving these to the detriment of corporations?
The examples I could provide would be government shielding corporations from these negative externalities, limiting their liability, and socializing the costs to the tax payers of that government....
I can point to no examples of govermment resolving the problem of externalities
(we now consider that period to be a giant mistake specifically because the government did not do enough and left free markets to their own accord)
There is LOTS of scholarly economics works that shows government intervention in the markets not only lets to the crash, completely extended the length the crash.
Specifically the fed actions in 1929 lead to prolonged pain not seen in other nations that recovered faster because their central bank did not try to "solvable the problem"
To state that is a forgone conclusion that everyone agrees that "free market capitalism" was the cause of the great depression is highly ignorant
I'm not saying your wrong, it's just that it took a pandemic for people to realize that working in a shitty job for 20 years may not be the best use of their lives.
In reality workers, unions and even industry leaders themselves were already pushing for this decades before the government codified it in the Fair Labor Standards Act.
When child labour was legal, lots of children worked.
Which is how it should be; I don't think anyone would doubt that GP is correct in this regard. But - very sadly - not how it works in most of the reality.
Its pretty sad that this ideology exists, we need people to do jobs and we shouldn't shit on them for it. We should support people in what every job they're doing because we're all part of the same societal machine
I don't see the corps giving up all the advantages they have such as mandatory arbitration and the like. It wouldn't be an equal negotiating table for the vast majority of people.
That's because you are in the wrong forum. I would think that there are forums out there where unpopular or less common opinions are the norm. Your original point is still true, far less people care less about their freedom, welcome to life.
PS: This applies to every company, so the playground is fair to compete against.
The idea that the establishment of a working week is government tyranny is obvious to one side and bizarre to the other.
The government is the only coordinating mechanism we have to enforce something like this, otherwise everyone is playing the prisoner’s dilemma.
If you don't care about whether or not government should be able to do things, and are only concerned with whether or not it does things you like, you end up with a government that can do whatever it wants. Eventually, that power will be wielded by someone you find detestable, or even worse, someone who finds you detestable.
It's easy to lose sight of the fact that the government is--in its ideal essence--just a way for a population to collectively enforce compliance with / contribution to a social good.
I don't think it's controversial to say that if 100% of people wanted a 32 hour work week, the government should probably pass a law mandating that. Separately we can argue about the tendency for the aims of government to diverge from the aims of the citizenry or there being a slippery slope, but the "legitimate role" of government is representing the people.
Is the role of government to maximize social good or individual liberty? I'd rather the latter because the examples of the former are abundant and dreadful. Anyone who thinks this isn't a race to the bottom where lawmakers trade "happiness" for votes at the cost of liberty is lying to themselves. Let's not kid ourselves, a 40 hour work week is not the same as child labor in the coal mines; such laws exist only to win votes. When will it be 20 hours a week? 16? At what point do we descend into the madness that embraced Rome where the role of government became appeasement of the populace to keep them from revolting?
Not everyone wants the same thing in the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoners all want one thing and the prosecutors want something different. If everyone wanted the same thing here, there would be no dilemma.
That's the case with 32 hour work weeks. Employees want them - but employers don't. So there is a misalignment of incentives. And employers specifically have much more power in the situation because there is a significant imbalance in risk between the two. The external mechanism is needed here in order to accommodate and mitigate that power balance.
The mechanism could be legislation, it could be collective action in the form of a union, etc. But it's specifically because not everyone agrees, and the disagreement comes with a power imbalance that the law is necessary.
Thats why it is a good toy example of this issue.
It is a confusing name for it, since in reality there are often mechanism to punish "snitches".
I prefer to think if it as two people wanting to make a trade without a framework to enforce any contract law. You both want to swap your items that are valued more by the other party, but since there's no mechanism to force you to be honest, you're both motivated to steal the other person's goods and not deliver yours. And so you both do that, and the trade doesn't happen, leaving you both poorer.
And before you say "well not if the company and union entered into a contract that said the company would only hire union workers", that's not how it works today. The laws we have today give unions the power to unilaterally say that without the company agreeing, and this is what's bad and needs to go away.
Can you give examples? My impression was closed shop and union shop was negotiated, not dictated by law.
Put another way, if employees disagree with something the union does, they have no recourse other than founding their own union and trying to get all their coworkers to vote to force every one to switch to the new union.
In particular, employees are not able to call strikes in the US. In some sense, unions solved the "problem" of employee walk outs by redirecting grievances away from employers and to large unions that are (in practice) unresponsive to employee requests.
When they do get things done, it's unclear what constituency they are serving, or who made the decision.
For example, the California statewide teachers union managed to block vaccine mandates for teachers. All the teachers I've talked to in Silicon Valley are vaccinated and support mandates.
Those teachers have no hope of joining a union that's not controlled by anti-vaxxers.
Employees can strike. Taft-Hartley illegalizes wildcat or secondary striking.
I still disagree with it because I don't think the Network Effect pruning was equal between Capital and Labor, but Strikes can absolutely be organized by private employees/unions.
Public sector unions are a different beast as far as I'm aware. See the Air Traffic Controller strike and how that flopped. But you've had some teacher's Union successes recently too.
Just as there is nothing forcing a worker to join a Union. The only thing is, if you don't join, you don't get the benefit of collective bargaining.
This is only true in states with right-to-work laws.
Sounds like they're doing exactly what you want.
Seems like you only want to prevent unions from doing this, but not employers. You also want to prevent them entering into contracts with employers. It's not really a consistent argument is it?
"I want people to be allowed to freely contract with each other without government intervention except when I don't" is a fundamentally ridiculous position for someone to take and pretend they're just following some noble universal law.
If I've not conveyed that message with my replies, then I've failed in my attempt to communicate. But that's the fundamental problem with their stance, quibbling within their bizarre framing is pointless if they still believe they're arguing consistently.
The government isn't an interloper inserting itself. The government is US. We are negotiating with employers in a fashion where we actually possess enough influence to make a difference.
- Everyone believes that if they and everyone else had a 32 hour work week, they'd be happier
- Everyone stays at 40 hours per week when given the choice of independently moving to a 32 hour work week due to social / economic pressures
In this case a government law helps everyone coordinate to get out of a local maximum.
What I have never understood so far, is that all the advocates of markets simply declare them free, as if reducing government involvement is going to solve inherent imbalances in power. The end result is branded "free market" when it is anything but.
If it really is good for companies, then more will move there. If not, they will move out - better to do the experiment on a small scale first!
But the aim of a lot of federal or state level proposed legislation is so that people can't escape nirvana...
That's because it's been discussed and the current status quo is the result. Check out the history of the labor movement.
> The nature and power of organized labor is the outcome of historical tensions among counter-acting forces involving workplace rights, wages, working hours, political expression, labor laws, and other working conditions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...
> More and more, I see governments mandating changes that already appear to be underway, but in a way that accrues the praise and rewards to themselves.
That's pretty much the definition of "politician", eh?
> Most Americans seem to be complicit in this transformation,
What transformation?
> continually voting greater and greater control and authority away from the people and toward government powers.
Without concrete examples it's difficult to say anything useful.
The US government doesn't do nearly enough to ensure the welfare of workers. If not being treated like shit by your employer bothers you have plenty of options.
Isn't the Government already limiting the workweek to 40h?
The only mechanism I'm aware of to change that is government and it needs more power to do so. Government is elected and democratic. Capital is neither.
Your comments sounds very much like an American with limited experience outside of the US. The scary part is that especially post pandemic, this is a very global phenomenon.
Source: American expat
No, most of us are independent and lie to our friends for employment and sex
[1] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/how-stop-white-collar-...
Though I also believe punishments should be proportional to your means, see for example speeding tickets in Finland. You shouldn't be able to afford to ignore the rules.
Punishment doesn't fix the need to shoplift.
Maybe if we stop trying to solve everything with cops we'd actually make some social progress?
And I'll point out that you might be a grown up, but you live in a society. Simply taking care of yourself isn't enough, not only because other people are obviously doing things that benefit you greatly. You know, like treat patients in emergency rooms and uphold wiring standards so your air conditioner doesn't burn your house down, and even if it does the fire department puts the fire out without even forcing you to sell it for cheap or show proof of fire insurance.
You couldn't help where you were born, nor did you have a choice in your own primary education, nor whether or not your parents were rich or poor. You might be responsible for yourself now, but you don't fully take care of yourself, your starting level got chosen by others, and you are at the mercy of the actions of others, which can greatly affect your day to day life.
If you want to talk about coercion, my employer gives me money for my services and I have the ability to walk away at any time. My government takes my money, and if I resist, they will put me in jail or kill me if I resist.
I am indeed at the mercy of the actions of others, but I am by far most helpless against the government.
If you don’t remember why unions and OSHA exist then you are doomed to repeat it. Captains industry have no problems oiling their machines with human blood.
You seem to have absolutely no clue what life is like for most working people, combined with a frightening lack of historical context. Can you describe in precise detail how you expect an unskilled laborer to successfully negotiate an agreement in their favor when the employer can wield their vastly greater power without any government hindrance?
Since those are deemed untouchable they will keep doing whatever they want.
Right now with the 0% interest subsidy on cash people will work 40 hours to save themselves into an early retirement that won't be possible in the future and then they complain that the government stole their money through inflation by letting them save money that has no reason to exist.
Two, FTA "the proposed bill would require these employers to compensate employees who work in excess of 32 hours per week at 1 ½ times the employee’s regular rate of pay" - it's unclear to me how this impacts exempt vs. non-exempt workers. If you're salaried in California and you work 50 hours a week it's not like you get paid any more. Those are 10 hours of unpaid overtime. This doesn't seem to change that concept. If they're only talking about hourly workers, then it's a pay cut no matter what. In the "Disadvantages" section of the article it further implies that these changes would mostly impact hourly/non-exempt workers.
Three, why the differentiation between <=500 and >500 workers? If I'm an hourly worker someplace with ~490ish employees who works 40h/wk I'm going to have to worry about my hours being cut because of hiring I have nothing to do with. If I'm consistently getting overtime for a larger employer at ~40 hours a week, I'm going to receive a pay cut if they downsize and that work is no longer considered overtime.
Four, and perhaps most importantly, this is never getting signed into law. It's a publicity/donor stunt by some politicians and nothing more.
A shop that employs 40% of its folks full time will have to hire a ~10% (25% not 20%) bigger workforce in order to provide an identical number of labor hours. However labor costs while they are substantial aren't 100% of costs. It would be more normal for employee labor to be closer to 30%.
This means costs ought to increase more like 3% not 20%.
Businesses can take the additional profits from rising prices in fact only partially attributable to rising prices of inputs and probably come out even.
It ought to be noted that its also possible that many firms can't all hire 10% more labor making paying the overtime rate for some of its people the only feasible alternative to serving business. Paying 8 hours of overtime for a given employee is like paying for an extra 4 hours of pay or once again 10% of effected employees minus the additional cost of acquisition and management. This may end up being the desirable option.
> Businesses can take the additional profits from rising prices
If a business is increasing its prices, it's much more likely that it's doing so because its own COGS and other expenses are increasingly similarly.
Any change in the ground rules that makes life more expensive be it implementing health inspects, fire codes, minimum wage, over time, child labor will boot someone from barely functional to defunct to be replaced by someone smarter and better.
Such failures are disruptive but unemployment shields the employees to some degree from mischance and ultimately they don't long term care if bob's eatery goes out of business. Instead they care if there is someone they can cook serve or deliver dinner for. On average someone will be interested in serving that need and statistically the survivor will be a better business than bobs.
It's unfortunate if Bob goes under but statistically Bob as the owner of a business with 500+ employees he is well inside of the 1% and his financial well being is the last thing we ought to optimize for.
I suspect that the third point is an attempt to address the first. A company with five hundred employees is (in theory) better able to absorb this cost than a mom-and-pop with ten people on staff. The exact number of five hundred is probably arbitrary, though.
Walmart doesn't need to compete with mom and pop, it simply needs to destroy them.
In that context, if we see local economies as something to be preserved, better regulations are needed. There might not be a legitimate case for that, since megacorps being massive efficiencies to bear. Deliberately reducing efficiency to placate small business owners might feel justified, but to the consumer, things are pretty good these days aside from shortages and inflation.
Arguing about which band aid is best feels a bit like a distraction.
I personally think that this is well-intentioned but has consequences that need to be thought out before it becomes law.
I’m almost 50, and I’ve been hearing and reading lots of this my whole life.
But somehow California’s economy keeps doing well, even without being one of the places that are winning the battle to attract the firms that are optimizing for maximally emoployee-hostile labor laws.
The state’s main saving grace for business is that non-competes are not legal in the state. It’s lucky that no other state is smart enough to do the same thing yet. If Oregon or Washington did it, it would be game over.
based on 2020 census, California is still growing.
2020: 39,538,223
2010: 37,253,956
6.1% increase
https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange...
How much was it because of the pandemic causing work from home, which led to new employees joining remotely and not relocating to California, young people who lived here to move somewhere cheaper. The net growth might possibly increase in the coming years.
It’s also good to note that more and more companies are leaving due to both a combination of legislation, cost, and crime.
California has the nation's highest poverty rate when cost of living is taken in to account.
If the worst poverty rate is "doing well", what would doing poorly look like, in your opinion?
There are 48 others, can list them for you if needed.
> If the worst poverty rate is "doing well", what would doing poorly look like, in your opinion?
If your measure of pretty much anything puts Mississippi above California then maybe you've not got a great measure for doing well?
California (contrary to a lot of the images people have of what a progressive state would excel at compared to a more conservative one) is excellent at generating aggregate economic activity with great conditions for capital and a narrow elite labor segment, and very bad at distributing those aggregate gains to the rest of society. (To be fair, there is a very significant way in which that compared to other states, is because the more you fail at the first, the more the feds will ship money from the states that succeed at it to you as long as you commit to spend it on the second, so part of why Missippi looks better is that the gains of the strong aggregate economy California generates are skimmed at given to reduce local poverty in places like Mississippi, not based on relative need as measured by the SPM, but based simply on Mississippi’s weaker aggregate performance.
I live here. I'm fighting the good fight - and it isn't working. It's getting worse every day.
Seriously, just check out downtown SF if you don't believe me. It feels dead. There are more beggars than tourists. I recently went to a nice restaurant near the MacArthur BART station and not only was it dead, the area around it felt like I was visiting the hood near USC.
> why is demand so high that houses are unaffordable
It is not that demand is so high but that supply is so low. When you have SFH zoning with massive set back requirements you can't fit many people into the available space.
Some cities are better at mixing commercial and residential real estate so you feel this effect less. Downtown Chicago always felt eerie to me on nights and weekends. Everything is just closed and there are very few people around. Manhattan is less like this. (There was a time when I would leave work between 11pm and 2am. The bike ride down 2nd Ave was always chaos. The city never sleeps.) I haven't spent a ton of time in San Francisco, but it strikes be as being closer to Chicago than Manhattan. After work, everyone is out in the neighborhoods.
In my non-expert opinion, people in California go to bed earlier than in New York. I feel like everyone thinks they need to be up for work at 5am to "beat the traffic" and be in the office for calls at 9am New York time. This means they are in bed 9pm. Meanwhile, you can stay out until midnight in New York and be sentient again for the same 9am call.
Despite the positive things I said upthread about the long-term trends, there is a very acute short term issue caused by the interaction of the inadequate response to the aggregate and distributional impacts of the pandemic with the preexisting housing affordability issue that is going to become a major long term problem if it isn't addressed.
Wouldn't we attribute this more to COVID, though? This thread is talking about a hypothetical poor economy due to businesses leaving because of employee-friendly labor laws. In early 2020 downtown was pretty vibrant.
> There are more beggars than tourists.
I get that you're exaggerating for effect, but c'mon. I saw plenty of tourists/shoppers in the Powell/Market area in the middle of a weekday last week, out and about, doing their thing.
It's been my anecdotal experience that hot areas in other cities like New York and Chicago are not dead like SF and the East Bay are. Nor are they as sketchy - I'd feel comfortable walking around Millennium Park at night and be pretty confident I wouldn't get robbed. Can you say the same about the Embarcadero?
> hypothetical poor economy due to businesses leaving because of employee-friendly labor laws
Tons of small businesses are dying out and you think the poor economy is hypothetical? Just because Chipotle and McD's can afford to pay every surcharge CA/SF imposes through labor laws doesn't mean small businesses can afford to. It's ironic, because despite all those surcharges the suburbs are still more affordable for a low skill worker than SF is, primarily because the supply of housing is so much better.
2 coffee shops in my local area have closed down recently for good. Starbucks is still going strong, but that doesn't mean the local economy is vibrant.
> I saw plenty of tourists/shoppers in the Powell/Market area in the middle of a weekday last week, out and about, doing their thing
Hmm, I went last week on a weekday and I'd put it at 50/50 homeless/beggar vs tourist. Powell St. BART/Union Square area. In any case, it was certainly a lot worse than a few years ago when it would be more like 95% tourists. I saw multiple homeless sleeping in Union Square which would have been unimaginable 3 years ago.
The Bay Area experienced a massive internal-to-California (largely to the Sacramento area) outmigration during the pandemic, which removed a lot of support for businesses from locals, and tourism hasn't recovered from the pandemic and related restrictions.
This has been (on paper) great for me as a Sac area homeowner, but more to the point here it makes judging California economic health by looking at Bay Area brick-and-mortar business district vitality potentially very misleading.
> In any case, it was certainly a lot worse than a few years ago when it would be more like 95% tourists.
Federal COVID-related domestic air travel restrictions (other than masking, which continues) only just ended, and federal international air travel restrictions still exist. This impacts tourism, obviously.
I haven't been to SF, but I have been to New York. I was shocked how dead the area around the WTC was on a Monday morning (I'd just arrived and walked arround for an hour or so absorbing the city and trying to find a hardware store to get a UK-US plug as it had been so long since I travelled internationally). My local town in rural UK was busier than 8AM Monday morning downtown New York. That can't be healthy. This was about 7 weeks ago.
The idea that the East Bay somehow died in the last two years is ridiculous.
You may want to increase density in downtown SF, and that's a reasonable decision, but you are claiming fewer people are there now then there were a few years ago. I don't believe there's been any drop in the number of housing units in the city, so that must mean apartments are empty. Is that the case?
And actually, I think finding compromises is fundamentally what this tech is for, right? "How do we make decisions with neighbors we disagree with, mostly without shooting?"
But because platforms are compromises, the demand for leaders that Truly Believe in their platform gives us people pretending to be crazy and stupid. With maybe some genuinely crazy and/or stupid mixed in (but I'm not confident that I can actually distinguish) and lots of layers of "it's complicated" on top.
Yeah, our systemic duopoly and the associated requirement for backroom coalition building (and the associated papering over of differences for marketing purposes) to build viable parties is a significant defect in our structure of government compared to many other modern democracies.
The (twitter centric) left would make much more progress in America if they worked on better messaging instead of just relying on moral arguments.
The parts of that that are real long term issues, particular unaffordability problems (of which homelessness is an effect) absolutely are an effect of a strong aggregate economy that the pro-labor and redistributive policies haven't been enough to keep with; so is the “mass exodus“ (that is, the domestic out-migration mostly in lower-income segments that has for a long time been slightly above domestic in-migration that has had substantially higher average income, that only became net overall outmigration with recent federal policy and COVID-related curbs on international immigration.)
Unaffordability is a result of the enormous wealth of capitalists and elite labor that aggregate economic strength has produced driving up costs.
> I live here.
So do I.
> I'm fighting the good fight
In what way?
Also, companies might move their headquarters to Texas or whatever but people deep down (workers and probably also the company owners) prefer the lifestyle and experiences that California offers. California coast cities are amazingly beautiful and offer diverse range of activities outdoors and venue wise, and no massive McMansion in 100 degree Texas heat where you have AC blasting and Have to drive eight lane highways everywhere will ever replace the fact you can just hop on your bicycle and ride five min to the beach. I’m just going off anecdote from friends here.
I can assure you that the percentage of Californians that enjoy this lifestyle is vanishingly small. I've lived in all three coastal metros in California, was an avid user of the beach and hate driving; this lifestyle is not realistically achievable for most people that live there, even the average person in tech.
Most engineers aren't trading a house in Santa Monica for a house in Texas. They are trading a house in South San Jose. That lifestyle is much less different.
The rise in homelessness in Boulder in just the past few years is amazing.
Reference: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Highlands+Ranch,+CO/@39.55...
Whether or not you think all these things are good things for a state to have, or whether you think Texas represents your values, it most definitely offers something to run to, even in a world without California.
Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth.
The only poeple who might benefit are hourly gov employees - but that depends on budget constrains.
Obviously it would be better with a magic way to get rid of second jobs for poor workers (and stuff like UBI and JG nicely avoid these issues without magic) but it still would be win for labor.
Apart from that I agree - UBI is the simplest, cheapest way to lift the population out of poverty.
The outcomes are fantastic - I recommend Rutger Bregman’s book on it.
The market will develop housing for basic income people or you could always move to lower cost areas.
> We’d also need rent control legislation to prevent rents from rising to absorb the UBI.
Nope. If people are given basic income, the market will develop housing/services to cater to them.
And if your goal is a population that pays its way and has relatively generous working conditions and less unequal income distributions, the hyper regulated Europe looks a whole lot better than, say, Saudi Arabia where citizens can live comfortable, unproductive lives topped up by monthly payments, discrimination is rife and an underclass of non-citizens do most of the work for very little money, often in truly awful conditions.
In California, for employers of the size mentioned here, workers become exempt at around ~$62k/yr. The BLS has stats for California which annoyingly give the median hourly wage, and the average annual comp (~$65.5k), but not the median annual comp. But certainly large fraction of workers are above the 'exempt' line, possibly more than half.
Add to that a lot of workers are:
- working for employers smaller than 500 staff in CA
- some form of contractor
- working multiple jobs (perhaps less now than a few years ago)
What's the proportion of workers who would be impacted by this?
And how many workers are not yet exempt, but are close enough to the exempt line that employers will be better off giving them a raise to an exempt salary and then demanding more hours per week?
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/labor/wage-and-hour/salary-laws... https://www.bls.gov/oes/2020/may/oes_ca.htm#00-0000
Shorter workweeks makes people focus.
Of course those were all desk jobs, where it's not about exactly how many hours you're typing code or writing ideas but about the output. I expect it to be less applicable for assembly line kind of work.
I think you hit the nail right on the head there my guy.
Also once the agricultural revolution happened peasants likely had much more unallocated than the typical office worker in the united states, probably by at least an order of magnitude. I'm not claiming it was a better life but there was a greater amount of self determination which is absolutely something we should strive toward.
Also your slippery slope argument is silly.
I would be surprised if individuals in a hunter/gatherer tribe used to work more than 8 hours every single day.
Most people also used to be in survival mode for their entire lives. That shouldn't be what we are aiming for today.
Then doing work isn't needed to survive anymore but instead only because you want to achieve something. That could be many different things for many people.
Who builds the houses? Who handles the power generation? Who maintains the roads?
Who builds, and who flies, the airplanes in case people would like to travel?
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of work goes into a functioning society.
We've largely automated and optimised many jobs into minimal work or non existance across industrial production, agriculture, all sorts of areas. There's no reason not to think we don't keep automating to solve the problems you've mentioned.
Crap! And i thought i was anonymous here.
What’s disappointing is wasting that time on social media, when those extra 8 hours could be to improve a process, do some self-learning, mentoring, research… at least, that’s what I do if what I need to get done doesn’t fill the week.
Would everyone take a 20% pay cut? Would people try to keep the same pay for fewer hours.
Keep in mind that wages and salaries have been largely stagnant for decades. Companies and corporations owe their workers a hell of a lot more than "same pay at fewer hours" by now.
Not sure that's true, unless the bill also mandates that employers continue paying the same amount to salaried employees. I assume what'll happen instead is that salaries go down to compensate, and wage employees get fewer hours. Personally, I'd be okay with that, but many people wouldn't want to take that hit.
Worth noting that this article is written by Fisher Phillips, a law firm that, according to Wikipedia, represents management exclusively, so they are not an unbiased source.
Does anyone actually "work" close to that amount? I've got mine down to about 8 hours with an additional 8 of meetings where i sit on mute and contribute nothing.
I would love a 4 day work week, but only if it meant my job is secure. This is the worst way to go about it.
https://de-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Auseinanderse...
This is the German wikipedia entry on the conflicts that trade unions and employers' associations in Germany have fought over the reduction of weekly working hours since the late 1970s.
You know what I do to offset the after hours stuff? I slack the fuck off all day. It's not like anyone knows what I do anyway. "Hey Alar, what you up to today? -Oh y'know, just getting these switches up to date, gotta keep the packets flowing! Also have some phone stuff to do and getting the servers ready for patching this weekend! -Wow great job!"
Wake up at 8, "check email" until 9. Head to the office to show some face and actually check emails and do communication til 10. From 10-12 follow up with requests and put out any actual fires. 12-130 lunch. 130-330 knock out a meeting or two and then head home to "get my notes together and plan the next day" aka crack open a 6 pack.
I know this isn't always possible, but as long as you deliver SOMETHING every day, no one questions the infra "wizard".
> It's a great thought, but I'd be fired pretty quickly if I tried that.
Hence the call for unionization.
100% of my experience is that its rare for someone to ping me out of work hours, and if they do, I completely understand that its an emergency. Since I also care about the company's well being, (that's where I get my paycheck from), Im happy to help.
In 20 years as an employee or employer this has happened maybe 5 times.
I don't know where people are working that this is even an issue, but if at all possible consider switching jobs because youre working with sociopaths.
32 is too low, employers are going to leave California even more if this is approved.
If I worked standing up at a factory Im sure I would want 32 hours
Not shocked.