A 32-Hour Workweek Is Long Overdue: Bernie Sanders is calling for a reduction | Hacker News Reader

A 32-Hour Workweek Is Long Overdue: Bernie Sanders is calling for a reduction

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81 pointswahnfrieden30 comments

I think there should be a lot more focus on getting people to work only 40 hours. There are lots of people who have to work overtime without getting paid extra for it. There are lots of "managers" who aren't or managers who are paid little that have to work overtime. The exempt salary limit should be much higher. I think the software development exemption should be removed but at least we get well paid. Some countries have maximum hours.

Equally bad, there are lots of hourly employees who work 32 hours and would like to work 40 hours and get benefits.

Pushing 32 hour work week feels tone deaf when lots of people aren't working 40 hours.

I'd argue that one comes with the other though. Once 32 hours is normalized, 40+ hours becomes an outlier, which means that 50+ becomes an extreme outlier.

Within a few decades culture changes and working 40 hours would be looked at in much the same way we work at 50+ hours. Even then there will still be people working 80+ hours to make ends meet but fixing that is basically fixing poverty which is definitely much harder.

Agreed

> there are lots of hourly employees who work 32 hours and would like to work 40 hours and get benefits.

benefits should not depend on how many hours your work

>benefits should not depend on how many hours your work

Ideally, yes. However, there are many small businesses and franchises who cannot afford to offer benefits to all their part-time workers. This would result in a marked decrease/elimination of part-time employment opportunities -- opportunities often essential to the livelihood of the working class, who work part-time to supplement their full-time income. For many of these people, who are among the hardest workers in our society, that part-time job is the only thing holding preventing them from sinking under. They don't want, or need, benefits from their part-time job when they already receive benefits from their full-time job, receive federal/state sponsored health insurance OR pay for their own especially when said benefits come at the cost of their ability to financially support themselves. Most people would rather be able to provide for themselves than exist in an inescapable state of welfare-dependency brought on by well-intentioned but damaging initiatives.

Can't a legislature mandate that the benefits currently available to full-time workers (currently defined as ~40h/wk) are suddenly now available to full-time workers (newly redefined as 32h/wk) ? No new assertions of power, just a redefinition of a threshold.

yep: multiple things can in fact improve

A 32-hour workweek is the kind of idea that sounds like it comes from someone who is extremely out of touch with the bottom 50% of Americans. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 55.8% of Americans over the age of 16 work hourly positions.[0]

These workers, which include me, work by the hour. We make our living by working more hours, not less. If suddenly every hour above 32 became payable as overtime, it would be harder and not easier for us to get by. Let me explain.

Some of us are lucky enough to get by with a ~40hr/wk full-time job. Many, many people for whom their hourly wage is not high enough to meet their financial situation even at 40hr/wk, take on a second, part-time job to take on some extra hours and make some extra money. Scheduling both these jobs simultaneously is already hard as it stands.

If, as Sanders proposes, every hour above 32/wk is counted as overtime, many of our employers would promptly cut down our hours to 32/wk. Thus, we'd have to pick up _at least 8 hours_ a week more at our second job (presuming they were available) just to break even as we used to. While 8 hours may not sound like much, for an already tedious balance between two job schedules, this would, for many, be the straw that broke the camel's back.

This measure would, in short, severely hurt the working class. I have no doubt that the white collar workers pulling in a six-figure salary would welcome the shortened work week, at the expense of the majority in whose name this damaging measure is being proposed.

[0]: https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2021/pdf/home....

Do it with a significant bump in the minimum wage, then peg it to CPI.

Even aside from that, most employers for hourly jobs — restaurants, retail, factories, whatever — will still need to operate the same amount of hours, so they’ll either hire more people or have to pay overtime.

This wouldn’t cause a competitive disadvantage, because just like the original shortening from 12 to 8 hour workdays, everyone is in the same boat. Companies will adapt to higher costs and lower profit per employee, in the same way modern workers have adapted to automation+a decreasing real dollar pay per hour (i.e. inflation).

Not that all of this wouldn’t cause a shock to the system, because it would, but there is absolutely nothing magical about the 40hr/week threshold.

The 8 hour workday was itself a shortening from the 12 hour workday. I think we can all agree society as a whole, including hourly workers, is better off in every regard working less than 12hrs/day— even if technically an hourly employee would make more if they worked 12 hours.

If this happens, which I doubt, I think it's just going to ensure that companies hire overseas instead.

That threat holds zero weight as anything that could be so flippantly and easily offshored to save money and avoid regulation likely already has been. What's left must instead be jobs that don't exactly translate well to offshoring. This would have much broader implications in the modern service economy where the jobs can't exactly be moved elsewhere easily.

Cross border labor tariffs can be used to blunt the benefit of offshoring to overseas labor markets with lesser regulations, in similar fashion to what the EU is doing with carbon tariffs [1]. Internalize the externalities. Regulation is an iterative process.

[1] https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu/green-taxation-0/carbo...

How will that even work with multinational companies?

It's a good question and I am not a domain expert; I will bring it up with legislators the next time I speak with those I speak with to inquire as to what a reasonable statute implementation would look like when tied to a reduction in the work week via amending the FLSA [1]. Some flexibility for multinationals is warranted (as there are intangibles besides profit for international investment), but not "ship all work to where it's done with the cheapest labor while being permitted to extract as much as you can from the market you operate in."

[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/flsa

"We added a rule, to stop you from avoiding our other rule."

Either way a 32 hour work week isn't gonna happen in the US. So many highly paid people are losing their jobs and are getting desperate to the point that 48 hours a week is sounding good.

Any HNers have personal experience with 32 hour work weeks in tech or otherwise?

I did 4-days-a-week for a few years at a startup. I was as-productive, or potentially moreso (difficult to determine, since I started the job on that schedule). Initially I intended my day off to be flexible, but it was easiest for me and people I worked with, to be off the same day every week. I tried a few things, and Friday worked the best, for consistent 3-day weekends. Wednesday did not work for me, as it broke up my week too much and made it difficult to get into the flow.

I remember having a realization one Tuesday early on, that I "only" had 2 more days until the end of the week, so I better get cracking! This was a striking contrast to the 5-day workweek, in which I would take more breaks and goof off more. Also, with a 2-day weekend, I feel like I spent 1.5 days recovering and doing life errands, and only by Sunday evening did I have any energy for my personal projects, and then of course it's hard to get into anything because I only had a few hours and had to get reasonable sleep before the workweek started the next morning.

With consistent 3-day weekends, I would still need the same 1.5 days to catch up on life, but errands were easier to squeeze in on Fridays, and I would have the same energy for personal side projects...but starting on Saturday evening instead. Now I could get into something for a few hours on Saturday evening, stay up late hacking if I wanted, and spend all Sunday continuing with it. Enough time to make some real progress. The difference in my personal satisfaction between 4- and 5- day weeks was night-and-day.

The common assumption for someone who wants to work 4-day-a-week is that they want to work as little as possible, and 4-days is what they think they can get away with (either socially or salary-wise). Well, I tried 3-day weeks briefly, and it wasn't really that great. 3 days wasn't quite enough to get fully absorbed into my paid work each week, and I felt like (and was treated more like) a part-timer. I also tried 32 hours over 5 days (~6 hours a day, or 3x 8 + 2x 4), and it felt more like an "easier" traditional work schedule, but it didn't leave me the same capacity for my personal endeavors, even though the hours should have been similar. (Maybe because I'm a night owl, so being able to stay up late and sleep in completely changes the tone of the day for me.)

4-days a week with consistent 3-day weekends was definitively the best work schedule I've ever had.

While not fully matching your question: I've done 4/10's (We did Mon-Thur with a full 3-day weekend) for long stints and both myself and my crews loved it. That extra day at home was a huge boon especially for the parents wanting more time with their kids, or anyone who had some time consuming crafty kind of hobbies. One of my guys finished a hand-made canoe about 3 months faster than he'd figured he would.

As for the working side of it, we found ourselves more efficient as we got more done in longer days than we would have with less time each day.

For me, just the plain business day available to do errands that would have otherwise required me to pull long lunches or half days at work was a huge help. And on a more personal note: an extra weekend day gave my introvert ass a day to myself to catch up on the reading I wanted to do, or study something, whatever, while still having the 'normal' weekend to attend a bbq or party or some other thing my more social friends were always organizing.

As saulpw said in a sister comment:

> 4-days a week with consistent 3-day weekends was definitively the best work schedule I've ever had.

Totally, 110% agree.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=philmcp runs https://4dayweek.io

Appreciate the shoutout!

Over 300 companies now have some form of reduced working week :)

https://4dayweek.io/companies

At one point I had so much PTO built up that I was asked to reduce it. I took 6 months of Mondays off.

It was great, I got so much done on personal projects, and it was convenient having a day off during business hours too. It sucked going back to 5 day weeks.

I didn't track my work productivity, but I'm usually a very productive person anyway.

At one of my first jobs I negotiated two raises into less hours (i.e. taking less hours instead of more money), so going from 40 hours/week to 36 hours/week and then 32 hours/week for the same salary.

For me the change from 40 to 36 was more significant, in that that was enough to schedule all my errands on the one afternoon per week I was off, ensuring that my weekend was always a real weekend with time to relax and hang out with friends.

Even stuff where your employer should just give you time off for (e.g. going to the dentist and stuff like that), is just less hassle if you can just schedule that in your errand day/afternoon.

I am doing it mandated by my city.

Valencia, Spain, has tweaked the local bank holidays to have at least one bank holiday in 5 consecutive weeks.

I am in the 4th one and I love it. Less stressed, more rest. One more day to get more time with family and finish those home related tasks that are always postponed.

We can’t even get minimum vacation days, good luck on this.

I usually work 50 hours and doesn't feel bad at all, wake up 5:30 by 6:00 I'm checking emails, at noon I go for a run, then do 1-6pm at that's already 10-11 hours. Fridays are shorter usually done by 4pm, I go golfing, join happy hour, whatever but work, I don't touch a computer until Monday. So in my experience 32 hours sounds like a part time job and would never like the idea as I get paid 1.5 times after 40 hours. One thing though is I have no commute as my office is literally next door so that helps a lot. Perhaps the key would be to encourage shorter or no commutes and fair compensation for overtime. I bet the majority of people would rather make the extra money than taking time off. Also it is kind of ironic that Bernie Sanders never held a job himself.

My initial thought was: 'Why does this need to be top-down mandated by the law?' but it turns out the article addresses this:

> Critics argue that it’s fine if technological advances deliver the shorter workweek without government intervention, but that “top-down” interference in the free market is a bad idea. This idea doesn’t stand up to even cursory scrutiny. If the reduction in hours was going to happen without being mandated, it would have happened long ago.

But that doesn't actually answer the question of whether people want this. It could be that we would rather put increasing gains towards more money, rather than towards reducing working hours.

The second reason I am skeptical is that higher income people apparently work more than the average. Presumably, those with high incomes have the negotiating power to reduce their hours. So we would expect this change to start at the top and trickle down, if that is what people wanted.

I also came across a bunch of people arguing that reducing work hours will lead to more inequality, if that's a thing you care about.

Ofcourse, I realise a lot of this libertarian work week is an ideal, and most people don't feel like they have a choice.

Labor market is a competitive environment. It's not "I'll work less hours and buy a new car less often". It's "I need to save for a down-payment and I'm competing with people that work 40 hours or more" on top of "and don't have kids", and "both partners are working". The employer is thinking "I can hire someone that I have pay the insurance and other costs that works 40 hours, or someone I have to pay the same insurance and costs and works 32 hours".

In a world in which labor was always scarce, and anyone is always in demand, it might have happened, but that's not the world we live in. It's actually a world in which having a good job is scarce, and home ownership is scarce, and a lot of other resources (services) are also scarce.

Now - from a libertian-ish perspective - why jobs are scarce is another story, but we would first need to fix that.

I know I'll be downvoted for this, but if you don't like a 40 hour workweek, make your own company. You'll be doing 60 - 80.

I'm not going to downvote you but you're comparing apples and oranges. You own the company. You decide if it lives or dies. And on that, you reap all the rewards.

The people working for you don't have the upside that you do, so why should they care to invest as much time?

60 - 80 is much worse than 40.

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