Nor should we. We should expect the company to prioritize safety and hire more people to avoid such mistakes.
Or even if you want to keep that awful 12h shift practice, at the very least have good procedures and quality control to ensure failures from those "lazy" workers don't leave the factory.
Fun to watch from the distance, just not grokking all those early adopters. I have small kids, there are risks I take also with them but they are always calculated and control is on our side. This is just blindly trusting some startup mentality scales well into giga factories level.
The alternative is that someone who wants to make more money takes a second job somewhere else. Then they're working 16 hours a day and have two commutes. What does 16 hours of work and 6 hours of sleep do for quality?
Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package.
Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money.
So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
So then we're back to it being a competitive market. If the company gets e.g. $60B in value from having Elon Musk, and he knows this and demands $56B, the company can either pay the market price or have a net loss of $4B relative to the alternative. And then have even less money to pay employees.
Or maybe he isn't worth that much and if the shareholders give it to him then it's costing the company money. But then that's maladaptive and the company will lose business to some other company that pays its executives less and uses the money to lower the price of their cars and gain a competitive advantage while still paying the market rate for other types of labor.
Either way it doesn't change the market price for those other types of labor, which are much easier to estimate than the value of certain unusual executives.
Well, if you're following that drama, that is how it is supposed to work and how the Delaware judge said it needs to work.
So, now Musk just want to move the incorporation to TX, where he can order the board to pay him whatever he wants without oversight.
Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
Employees can (and most often are) paid in those company shares as well, so no difference.
Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance. For example, my brother in law will boast about working 100 hours in a week and in the same breath complain about having no time for himself or his family.
A strong labor force is only true when it is mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy.
Less than 2% of people make minimum wage and the few who do wouldn't be making significantly less if it didn't exist. The primary effect of minimum wage laws is to eliminate internship opportunities. The primary effect of raising them to the point that they applied to a non-trivial percentage of workers would be to accelerate automation and offshoring.
This is why workers keep getting screwed. People ask for the wrong things.
> Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance.
These are individual choices, and this is the problem with most feel good regulations. If someone is working 12 hours, maybe it's because they can't otherwise afford rent -- but then instead of doing something about high rents, you want to prohibit them from working enough hours to pay their bills.
> Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%.
Younger generations are struggling because things cost more, specifically housing, medicine and education. These all have regulatory causes.
Zoning rules, licensing rules and building codes inhibit housing construction, keeping supply low and prices high.
The law promotes employer-provided health insurance, preventing employees from choosing not only where to get healthcare but even where to get insurance, since that's chosen by their employer. Then we pretend this is a market-based system even though we've disconnected choices from costs through the law, and wonder why Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else.
The government promotes student loans. It doesn't pay for tuition, it subsidizes loan interest and prohibits the loans from being discharged in bankruptcy, allowing colleges to raise tuition into the sky without losing students. Then people have to repay that debt for decades, instead of using the money to buy a house.
"Deregulation" is a nonsense word with no specific meaning. If the state government passed a law removing local zoning restrictions, is that regulation or deregulation? It doesn't matter. What matters is that they haven't done it and now housing is unaffordable.
It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)
The problem is not regulation / deregulation. The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)
Not actually that hard. You build a machine that does the work of 1000 sweat shop workers, then you have a domestic job maintaining the machine, and paying one salary when it used to be 1000 causes the transportation cost to dominate over the cost of labor so now you're back to domestic manufacturing being cheaper.
But only if you don't pass dumb laws that discourage the automation and convert it into offshoring.
> It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)
Why is that hard? The majority of the population is already doing it. You learn to do skilled labor and then earn more money.
> The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)
The problem is that people think these kinds of laws are the problem. If you can't afford rent working 8 hours and have to work 12, how is prohibiting you from working 12 going to help you make rent? It's misdirection to keep people from solving the actual problem, which is high cost of living.
You know how you’re mentally checked out of a job after 4 to 6 hours? That doesn’t get better after 8.
A 12 hour shift means you’re in a bit of a mental fog half the day.
I think you're operating on too many hypotheticals and not quite enough personal experience.
Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens. The cost of mistakes you make from being tired can be less than the cost of waiting 16 hours before responding to the emergency or leaving it to someone unqualified.
Generically anything where the cost of occasional mistakes is low or they can be detected before they have a major impact.
But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
Do you have any idea how much those machines cost, how easy it is to destroy them, or how quickly they'll remove the skin from your body? If some exhausted bonehead crashes a line how long will it take for repairs? Do you have spare parts on hand? Do they still make spares?
> Many types of emergency response or on-call work. You just got off an 8 hour shift when an emergency happens.
That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.
> But also, the point is that different people have different levels of endurance. Some people will be making more mistakes after 6 hours than someone else would be making after 12.
I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.
Sewing machines? Not that expensive, not that easy to destroy and the typical injury would be that you get stuck with a sewing needle.
It seems like you want to assume that every job involves some kind of delicate yet fatality-inducing industrial equipment. It doesn't.
> That's not a 12 hour shift, that's an 8 hour shift moving into triple overtime. Everyone involved in your scenario is fully aware that they're rolling the dice on people's lives due to an emergency.
It's a person working for 12 contiguous hours, because the benefits outweigh the costs.
> I'm assuming everyone has the same level of endurance because I'm not willing to gamble my livelihood on the self-awareness of some random asshole off the street. It doesn't matter how much they want to work if their output isn't making us money.
And if they're willing to work and the output is making you money?
The proposal is to ban people from working for more than 8 hours. You don't need a law for any of the cases where it isn't in the employer's interests to do it anyway. They just won't choose to do it in those cases then.
Your concerns are a corner case.
It could just be a job that isn't that tiring.
And why does it have to be three days out of five? Paying time and a half for four out of twelve hours could be worth it over paying benefits and overhead for another employee.
> A little unclear on the last part since you don’t seem to understand how overtime is calculated.
How are overtime calculations even relevant? If it isn't worth it for the employer to pay overtime in some context it would be required then banning 12 hour shifts would be irrelevant there because they wouldn't be happening to begin with.
> Your concerns are a corner case.
12 hour shifts are a corner case. Stop trying to ban everything atypical.
Worker protections exist partly to prevent low-wage earners from having their economic desperation exploited by the unscrupulous to their detriment.
[1] It's only through a pure miracle that I didn't lose a finger. The specific miracle being I was so tired setting up the saw that this one time I set the depth of cut wrong meaning that instead of chopping my fingers completely off as would have happened had I set the saw up correctly, it just sliced through the very top of my fingernail.
"Worker protections" exist mainly because people misunderstand the causes and solutions to economic desperation.
How does it benefit you to have to take a second job and work 16 hours a day instead of allowing your first employer to give you overtime that you actually want? Would you have been less tired by adding a second commute to your day?
Sure, you can let people work as many hours as they possibly want, you're just making a decision that someone other than those workers and the companies that employ them is going to pay the externalities for all of their quality deficiencies. We have hour restrictions because people can't consent to being killed by a tired truck driver.
Any kind of sound research is going to conclude that a physically fit and healthy person has more endurance than a sickly and out of shape person. The former can work more hours than the latter in actual fact.
> Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain amount of hours in a given period because if their performance suffers, people die.
Truck drivers and pilots are legally prohibited from working more than a certain number of hours because some of them are sickly and out of shape, if those ones were to work 12 hour shifts then people would die, and that provides a convenient excuse for their lobbyists to demand rules that reduce the labor supply.
There is also the question of where to stop. Suppose that the average person's performance is degraded by 5% after 4 hours. Should everyone stop after 4 hours then? They're not at peak performance anymore. But 95% is often good enough. And maybe 90% is good enough. Maybe 80% is good enough. Maybe 75% is good enough and one person is at 75% after 8 hours. Maybe only 90% is good enough but it's a different kind of work and then the same person is still at 90% after 14 hours. Maybe you're at 85% after 8 hours but get back to 90% with a cup of coffee.
There is no one size fits all.
Secondly, even if someone was to show that some workers are still able to function well, make good decisions and not make manufacturing errors that would likely impact safety after 12 hours it might still be reasonable to not have such long shifts because the length for some workers would tend to compell all workers (including some for whom that shift length would be too much) to work the long shift if they want to keep their job. There is lots of research associating long shifts with chronic health problems[2] and poor wellbeing for example[3] .
[1] https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/12/6540
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7117719/
[3] https://journals.lww.com/joem/Fulltext/2020/04000/A_Qualitat...
That study attributes much of the deficit to interrupting circadian rhythms, which is the thing that isn't required with 12 hour shifts, because the other 12 hours a day can contain a consistent 8 hour block for sleeping at night. Whereas the alternative where you bring on a second shift with different workers does exactly that, because now the second shift is e.g 5PM-1AM and by the time those workers go home, eat a meal and get ready for bed, they're sleeping in the daylight. Or if the business is one that operates 24 hours, using 8 hours shifts causes there to be two night shifts instead of one.
> Secondly, even if someone was to show that some workers are still able to function well, make good decisions and not make manufacturing errors that would likely impact safety after 12 hours it might still be reasonable to not have such long shifts because the length for some workers would tend to compell all workers (including some for whom that shift length would be too much) to work the long shift if they want to keep their job.
This is a fully generic argument. Maybe some workers have heart disease and shouldn't do a job that involves lifting. Does that mean no one should be able to do it? People over 65 disproportionately suffer from various forms of dementia. Should they be prohibited from working if they want to, even the ones who are healthy?
Most jobs don't use 12 hour shifts because they don't want to pay overtime, so it's hard to see how anyone who prefers a job with 8 hour shifts could be forced to take one of those instead of the majority of other jobs that use 8 hour shifts.
> There is lots of research associating long shifts with chronic health problems[2] and poor wellbeing for example[3] .
We need to be extremely careful with correlational studies. There is evidence that all kinds of negative outcomes are associated with poverty, and the people working long hours are typically doing it because they don't have enough money. What happens when you say they can't work that much and make them even poorer?
If long shifts impact production quality (and they do) run shorter shifts.
2. "I worked twelve hours today [not including unlimited bathroom breaks, social breaks, snack breaks, drink breaks, YouTube breaks, going on a walk to clear my head breaks]"
3. To the extent that anyone actually does this with any consistency, it's a laughable example of poor self-management and company leadership
4. It's an example of poor self-management and leadership for the same reason it's bad on assembly lines: it produces bad work
5. They're not building safety-critical devices they're putting out onto public roads
In the big picture, of course, everything has defects.