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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> What's needed for work/life balance is an 8 hour day, a 40 hour week, paid overtime, and a strong union

There are multiple equilibria. It sounds like this is your dream. Go find it. It sounds like hell to me, but I recognise that as a personal choice.

Find a culture that works for you and prioritises what you do. For me, that’s flexibility. Including to work a lot. But also, to not work a contiguous eight-hour block on a fixed schedule. (I also have no interest in being part of a union. I get enough drama hearing about friends’ HOAs.)

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Why does the 40 hour work week sound like hell to you? Home life bad? :p Or is it the union thing? (I can understand that bit; fuck HOAs.)

> Why does the 40 hour work week sound like hell to you?

I value flexibility more than most people. Today, weather was great, so I took a mid-day break for a hike to walk off a cold. (WFH. I feel fine but my nose is still runny.) That doesn’t work for most people, but it does for me in the right culture when supported by like-minded colleagues.

If I’m passionate about something I’m working on, I also want to be able to huddle together like-minded folks and burn the midnight oil. It’s unhealthy if it becomes a habit (or expectation). But I’ve found it incredibly rewarding, and not just financially.

Importantly, however, I’m not saying that model is hellish. It’s just hell for me. If someone wanted that, I’d support them in having a place where they can find it.

> is it the union thing?

I personally think unions have failed American workers. Their aims are laudable and their supporters’ hearts in the right place. But the track record—in terms of earnings delivered to unionised workers as well as public perceptions—is poor. At worst, it distracts from meaningful and systemic reforms, like giving workers a Board seat or raising the minimum wage.

That said, while I’d probably vote against unionising, I wouldn’t shun a company for having one.

They missed the boat by first and foremost: the labor movement has a strange history of exclusion. While not nearly as true now up until the 50s and 60s labor unions where reluctant to unionize with women, people of color etc. as a united front with white male workers. In short, they screwed up here, bad.

Their second biggest mistake was not targeting middle management and white collar workers. Unions for a long time targeted only wage workers and/or workers in blue collar industries. The truth is, they would have held far more power if they were inside the office too, and middle management is key here. They treat all "management" as the enemy, instead of recognizing the potential that union members all in the management chain could be useful allies.

Thirdly, they're too antagonist when they do want to act in force. While I will fully cede its justified, because corporations are antagonists as well, it didn't have to be this way. There's a world where unions could be real business stake holders representing labor in a more direct way in the business and making workers equal partners. Seat on the board, board transparency, ability to bring board / executive issues to members etc. Those would have been far more valuable to workers than the always fighting mentality focused on extracting rather than sharing in the profits. This in particular feels like a uniquely American problem with organized labor relations though. Countries like Germany and Denmark handle this remarkably well by comparison. That said, going into these things defensively is the only thing that works in today's atmosphere, and I don't blame them, I wish though, we followed a better model on both sides.

But let's be honest here -- for all of their faults, the only reason that the workplace isn't the greater hell that it used to be is because of unions. Even workplaces that aren't unionized.

There is literally no other realistic way of improving the life of working people other than banding together and acting collectively. The power differential is too great otherwise.

The answer isn't to reject the concept of unions. Without unions, we're all hosed.

> is literally no other realistic way of improving the life of working people other than banding together and acting collectively

I agree.

> answer isn't to reject the concept of unions. Without unions, we're all hosed

Disagree. Unions are, today, a sideshow in which the fates of a falling minority of workers, most of whom don’t have the true leverage of collective action due to nonunion competition, are paraded as symbols of worker empowerment while living conditions for the vast majority pitter along.

American unions worked in the industrial age. They’re not a great model today. More problematically, their brand is trashed. Want to kill a worker’s rights bill in a federal context? Brand it as a union fight.

Unions are one mode of organisation. They seem a dead end. What we had in the early stages of open-source coöperatives and Silicon Valley start-ups strikes me as closer to the truth, albeit with European enhancements. (Simple: give the ESOP voting Board seats with e.g. merger veto power and a seat on the executive compensation committee.)

> American unions worked in the industrial age. They’re not a great model today.

You're seriously going to contend "unions don't work for knowledge workers today" right after the new WGA contract drops?

> their brand is trashed

Yeah because you're out here writing lies and borderline advocating scabbing.

I can respond to the first part: my job has a hard 40 hours per week but also flex time. They're not mutually exclusive.

I can tell my colleagues that I'll be out for the rest of the day and make up the lost hours tomorrow. Conversely, I can work with them into the wee hours and work proportionally less time the rest of the week (it just has to add up to 40 on Friday).

It's my first job, though, and I have no intuition about how common this arrangement is (or how alternatives even work; if there's no hourly cap mandated, how do you know how long to work???). :p

It can breed a culture of micromanagement. "Employee can only work X hours, we need to extract as much value as possible."

Yes, micromanagement will go against actual performance, but that's not how many managers are tempted to see it.

> Why does the 40 hour work week sound like hell to you? Home life bad?

Some people want to work more because their job is tied to a mission that they value. Imagine if you worked at a homeless shelter helping people get back on their feet. That's deeply important work. Why would want to limit that to only 40 hours a week? Did Jesus work 40 hours a week?

> Some people want to work more because their job is tied to a mission that they value

Or it’s just fun. I have close colleagues, and I have colleagues who are friends. When there is a weird idea we have, it’s great to have the option cranking at it until it cracks.

American culture elevated workaholics to iconography in the post-War era, which produced a predictable backlash. That doesn’t mean every instance of hard work is abuse or addiction.

In my job I have both the option to work 60h/week and 20h/week and nobody cares too much as long as I deliver something once in a while. Having to limit myself when I'm full of ideas or force myself when I'm out of energy sounds terrible.

There are plenty of jobs that have 40 hour workweek and meet your goals. The union just makes sure you get better (some would say fair) compensation for that extra effort

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