H.R.1332 – Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act | Hacker News Reader

H.R.1332 – Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act

congress.gov

45 pointscebert41 comments

It's actually a decent bill. It basically says overtime starts at 32 hours instead of 40, and says that you can't cut salary because of this bill.

I suspect if it actually passed (highly unlikely) that it would lead to wage stagnation for a few years as companies would say "well you got a 20% raise because of this law so you're good for a few years".

The other issue is that most white collar careers are already considered overtime-exempt, so it doesn’t really matter if the cutoff is 32 hours or 40 hours. Given employment structure in the US a company can require you to work 100 hour weeks and the only thing employees can do is quit.

IMO the real battle here is the cultural normalization of working 32 hours. The legal structure is just one part of it.

>> a company can require you to work 100 hour weeks and the only thing employees can do is quit.

Or the employee can stick to the 32 and force the company to fire them.

I'd be fine with wage stagnation for awhile if I got a day back a week.

I suspect people will work two hours less on Monday-Wednesday and one hour less on Thursday and Friday. Meanwhile wage theft by way of "long lunch breaks" and "volunteer" hours will increase by eight hours per week.

You simply keep applying force until the opposition fails. Structural demographics don’t hurt either [1] (perpetual labor shortages empowers labor [2]). You must start somewhere to anchor [3]; this bill is that anchor. You then pull with policy through a proverbial ratchet as politics and the zeitgeist allows (like entitlements, once the work week is reduced, it will be very hard, if not impossible, to go back).

Mitch McConnell is retiring and the Affordable Care Act remains in place [4] [5], and the Inflation Reduction Act was passed. Good policy can both get done and be locked in. Time is the variable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35549039 (citations)

[2] https://archive.today/h1Oya

[3] https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/negotiation-skills-daily/w...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_repeal_the_Affordab...

[5] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4527053-mcconnell-battle...

https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/three-things-to-know-abo...

> A survey of 5,458 Americans that Bentley University recently conducted with Gallup shows that your own employees’ answers — their attitudes and expectations — might vary widely depending on the generational cohort.

…

> Everyone wants a four-day workweek. The survey asked what actions employers could take to increase employees’ well-being. The No. 1 answer was to offer a four-day 40-hour workweek in place of a five-day 40-hour workweek. Overall, 77% of respondents said this would improve their well-being. But among younger workers ages 18 to 29, a whopping 82% favored a shorter workweek.

> That finding was presented to a group of 25 CEOs, none of whom saw a four-day workweek as viable. However, some companies that have participated in experiments with four-day 32-hour workweeks have seen good results for well-being and productivity and have made the change permanent. Older executives might not see employee wellness quite the same way as younger employees — and leaders who figure out how to successfully manage in ways that better support well-being might have a recruitment edge.

Feels like it would be worth it, at least eventually. Time is worth so much more than money

Salaried employees are exempt from overtime regulation, so I'm not sure how a provision saying "You can't cut salaries because of this bill" is any help. The bill doesn't impact salaried employees at all.

It wouldn’t be instant. But eventually Friday would be a weekend and people would no longer be expected to work on Fridays. Just like when the five day work week was passed.

wonder if it will push back on companies that only hire part-time workers

This is barely even policy. It will never happen. A list of problems:

* Fundamentally what this does is offer some workers doing a 40-hour non-exempt workweek an additional 4 billable hours. But all that does is take a snapshot of current wages and offers a temporary benefit; prevailing wages will adjust to capture this phenomenon. Remember that very few full-time workers in the US make the minimum wage.

* The economy is not set up to run on a 4-day workweek, most especially for the non-exempt employees who are the only people this bill applies to. A doctor's office is not going to shift from 5-day weeks to 4-day weeks to accommodate this, so either the non-exempt intake person is going to get converted to two non-exempt part-time intake people, or they're going to work a 40 day workweek anyways.

* There is a huge swath of the economy that is in the same economic class as the median non-exempt worker but makes a salary, and, for no reason anybody backing this has explained, they get no benefit from this at all.

Honestly I think such bills are an immediate answer to the problem of more of the workforce being automated. And at if we get to a point where technology has reduced the need for labor by 50% they are almost inevitable. In such a scenario, mandating a 20-hour work-week for example would be a reasonable solution to what would otherwise turn into mass unemployment and poverty.

I don't think it's the best solution, but it's a decent one that requires less of a fundamental shift to society.

You can say that a real policy to shift the economy to 4-day workweeks would be an answer to automation. But you can't reasonably say this policy is, because it doesn't do anything meaningful. It will give, for a period of some months, a ~10% pay raise to a fraction of US workers.

Every one of these arguments were made when the five day workweek was introduced. Turns out the economy adjusted.

That the economy will adjust is my whole point.

(I do not think that the exempt/non-exempt argument was made at the time, since the 5-day work week long predates the FLSA).

How about government mind its own business and let the free market hash it out?

Most of the world keeps working harder and harder, catching up more and more to the US. Keep it up and Americans will become uncompetitive relative to foreign labor.

> How about government mind its own business and let the free market hash it out?

Because the ultimate outcome of that is something like the Boston Tea Party, only this time with AR-15s. Daily.

> Americans uncompetitive relative to foreign labor

Waaaay too late, dude.

> Waaaay too late, dude.

Lol, I get it. I meant even more uncompetitive.

If they did that, we'd still have the 80 hour work weeks from the 1800s (with the same pay or worse).

I remember reading about steel mills. It was common for the mill to be covered by two workers. each would work 12 hours a day, and I believe they would alternate sundays off so folks could go to church ever two weeks (while the other worker would work almost all weekend)

Government protects citizens and workers from the free market.

Unfortunately many congresspeople routinely file such bills only to never get consideration.

I was curious about this, and so I found that the entire time that Bernie Sanders has been in the Senate, only two pieces of legislation he has sponsored has actually become law.

When he was a member of the House of Representatives, he only sponsored one bill that became law, which was to rename a post office

Source:

https://www.congress.gov/advanced-search/legislation?congres...

What does that mean? What’s your point? I’m not sure those facts matter much.

Still in the "Introduced" stage. Given the amount of lobbying in the US, and isn't the US senate Republican controlled(?), and lack of bipartisan cooperation, seems impossible for this to go anywhere.

With the current House majority, this bill is DOA.

This would probably hit the childcare industry very hard. Overtime-exempt employees would still need 5 days of childcare per week, but the employees of childcare facilities are much more likely to be non-exempt. So those childcare centers will have to send their prices even further into the stratosphere to either staff up, shell out for overtime, or convert their staff into salaried.

This would make life a lot worse for salaried parents.

The overall need for childcare would decrease by about 10-20%, so I don't believe this will be a problem.

Companies may stagger their 'day off' over the workweek, so people are just as likely to have tuesday, wednesday, or thursday off, though probably fridays and mondays would be more popular

Yes, some employees will be working 5-days a week and need childcare for those 5 days still, but I don't see why a company providing it can't stagger their employees' off days also to be able to meet their needs.

Also, a lot of those overtime-exempt employees realistically will have a partner who now has 1 more day off per week, so they may only need 4 days of childcare after all.

I really doubt this change, were it to go into effect, would have a positive effect on the wages of childcare workers, though they may now have more time off, so hopefully good for them overall.

Where are you getting your information? Are you just assuming everyone salaried is married to someone who is hourly or something? Because the bill does not do anything for salaried, overtime-exempt employees.

A more straightforward approach would be to completely eliminate the pay gap for tipped employees and raise the federal minimum wage, which hasn't seen an increase since the 1990's.

I assumed this bill changes the definition of 'full-time' such that full-time employees will typically be working 32-hours per week.

Not sure what the laws are in the U.S., but it's nearly unheard of for people to sign an employment contract which mandates they work 50, 60, hours/week, etc.

I assumed overtime-exempt generally referred to people in fields like nursing or medicine, essential workers so to speak.

No, overtime-exempt means that you work in specific exempt fields such as "management" or "software development" that are exempt from the overtime requirement. This applies whether you're salaried or hourly. We don't customarily sign "employment contracts" that stipulate the number of hours worked in these fields as in the US there is an expectation that a professional works as little or as much as needed to get the job done. The way this works in practice is that the company will keep adding tasks to your list until you stop getting things done as quickly. So if you work 80 hours a week they will gladly work you like that forever.

So this law does absolutely nothing for salaried employees but may slightly improve the working conditions of wait staff and others provided their employer doesn't totally ignore the law, which happens a lot anyway WRT tips. I know this law sounds good in principle but like a lot of benefits it greatly helps hourly employees at the expense of hurting salaried employees in the middle class, and the upper class is as-usual totally unaffected by it because they can just afford whatever.

~1000 US school districts have adopted a 4 day week because they can’t retain teachers otherwise. The future is already here for these parents, and this will only grow as the teacher shortage persists.

The fact that the US refuses to subsidize childcare is unfortunate for sure, but a distinct issue from a 4 day work week.

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/08/1211632901/schools-across-the...

Doesn't this just make it harder for humans to compete with machines and automation? If you had a job that was on the cusp of being done by an LLM, now it's definitely gone.

You think that 8 extra hours would be the solution for humans to compete with machines and automation?

> If you had a job that was on the cusp of being done by an LLM, now it's definitely gone.

If you have a job on the cusp of being done by an LLM, then it's already imminently gone. This changes nothing.

I feel like eight hours a day is already a bit less than twenty-four.

With 40 hour pay? That's the real question

Yes it includes a bit about no reduction in pay. Basically just changes overtime to anything after 32 hours.

If you are on salary, normally you don’t get overtime. If you’re on hourly, this potentially just means less hours

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