I work 70 hours a week. Surely you wouldn’t outlaw my ethic?
And if a run a company, surely I could require my employees to work 5 days, 40 hours?
The solution is to let business owners switch to 4 day weeks and then let the free market sort it out.
And if a run a company, surely I could require my employees to work 5 days, 40 hours?
The solution is to let business owners switch to 4 day weeks and then let the free market sort it out.
If labor regulations ratchet the work week down, you’d be free to offer 32 hour work weeks to employees, and pay them for overtime beyond that. Productivity has exploded over the last four decades (across various economies, developed and developing), it just hasn’t been shared equitably with labor. This effort contributes towards correcting that. Unions in the US brought about the 8 hour day and weekend, for example.
https://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html
High level, humans exist to live, not to work. The work is a means to economically support one’s life.
Different people have different relations to work in different stages of life. E.g. it makes sense to work your ass off while saving for downpayment for a home. Or saving for XYZ. Same people may scale down when kids come up.
I for one, choose to not take the 20% pay cut and will happily work a 40 hour work week. That's my choice.
The world libertarians describe of “everyone is free to enter into contracts” is the modern day version of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” We’re currently trying it, and to be frank, it’s pretty fucking terrible for a majority of workers. Perhaps that’s why support of unions in the US is at record highs (since 1965); the beatings continued until we were all out of morale.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2014.html (Refer to Key findings)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle
https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-hi...
(crafted as politely as possible and not intended as a personal attack; my belief system is a natural result of robust amounts of consumed data, actively collected ground truth, and an overwhelming amount of empathy)
We can have a free and open market and legislation to protect individuals from abuse by employers. Setting a required number of hours to work to qualify as "full-time" and a minimum wage are dictating what an individual is allowed to negotiate for themselves. A high number of work hours or extremely low pay are not abusing individuals if they agreed to work for a company knowing full well what they got in return.
Allow people to make their own choices, whether you agree with them or not, and you will be surprised by the result.
Those companies are lobbying for higher minimum wages which will make it impossible for any company to compete with them. If you think their treatment of employees is bad now just wait until their employees truly have no where else to work.
Most people in the US live paycheck to paycheck as is, and it's not that they're spending frivolously. Our standards of living are based on what's needed for subsistence, yes, but also cultural and historical. Based on how we grew up and how our parents grew up, and how culture (e.g. hollywood) tells us we should be living. So most people are trying to live according to established standards.
It's already much harder for the present generation to live at the standard of the previous generation or two (e.g. buying a home is less of a possibility). Choosing, then, according to our "freedom", 20% less pay would require also choosing poverty according to established standards of living (i.e. it would look like poverty).
The narrative of "the individual" is a nice narrative from the perspective of the elites of our society to distract from the fact that, as always, there is class conflict and systematic forces in place. Of course, don't get me wrong: it is nice that there is some legitimate freedom on an individual level in the US. But for one, that legitimacy is overblown via mass media marketing (e.g. of course Jeff Bezos is going to tell his rags-to-riches story for everyone to hear). And more importantly, there is also the question of the overall structural forces that establish the population level structure.
Big business protectionism results in big business abuse of employees because a "where else are the going to go" mentality sets in. Competition is required to allow people to build businesses that put the "employee abusing" companies out of business.
Protectionism comes in many forms but all of it comes from government. Big businesses are currently supporting an increase in the national minimum wage. They can afford to pay their employees more. Their competitors can't. With no competition the big business are free to abuse their employees. Nearly every business that has lobbied for government regulation is playing this same game to secure their place as king of the hill.
With China aging very rapidly and a total fertility rate that will decline below 1 in the next 2-5 years, doesn’t make much sense to save for a future with limited returns (time value of life vs money and so forth).
https://archive.ph/2022.05.23-232226/https://www.bloomberg.c...
> Home prices in China have been falling since September, Chinese stocks and mutual funds aren’t great bets these days either, there’s little access to international markets and cryptocurrencies are officially illegal. Instead, people are increasingly shelving their money in savings accounts, despite benchmark deposit rates staying at record low levels.
> “No matter if you’re high net-worth or not that rich, the golden time of parking your money and letting your wealth grow, it’s gone,” said Wei He, an economist at Gavekal Research Ltd. in Beijing.
> “There’s no other investment options,” said Clawde Yin, a 45-year-old Shanghai resident. “I’ve got no choice but to wait and see.”
Also, dumping your money into savings accounts is definitely better than dumping it into 30% APR BNPL offers for designer clothing and electronics. Or gas guzzling, expensive SUVs and trucks. Ask yourself why Apple has a 50% market share in the US.
> doesn’t make much sense to save for a future with limited returns (time value of life vs money and so forth).
Saving doesn't mean saving until retirement, it just means not spending beyond your means.
The point is, though, that the population level class structure and socioeconomic mobility/opportunity would remain. As would the fact that the current generation cannot (as a whole) afford housing the way two generations ago could.
The narrative of “the individual” encourages non-elites to compete amongst themselves for a progressively shrinking portion of the pie. From the perspective of elites it has a twofold benefit: discourage worker solidarity and encourage productivity. From the perspective of workers, the latter benefit is good (we all should strive for competence and contribution), but the former is not good (even just in terms of life enjoyment). Also, at some point the pie needs a drastic and more balanced reallocation.
Difficulty: their counter-parties are often creations of "arbitrary government regulations" (corporations).
That's interesting, because it's not free market capitalists advocating for importing billions of people and cramming everyone into urban centers in the name of efficiency.
So the "free market" for workers says they should unionize as soon as they have the power to, because they can drive the price of their services up. Monopolies happen even in free markets.
We do "let" business owners switch to 4 day weeks, most don't. The free market has sorted it out.