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Comment by oompydoompy74 | Hacker News Reader

Speaking as an American, I don’t give a shit if it increases productivity or not. Productivity has gone up exponentially with technological advancement since the advent of the 5 day work week. We, as a species, should be minimizing work to 3 or 4 days a week with equal overall pay. Corporations should be fined heavily for contacting an employee after working hours. On call should require corporations to pay hefty overtime. This is a compromise because really and truly corporations should be illegal. Employee owned co-ops are more humane.

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Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US, largely due to the availability of cheap labour (attributed by economists to foreign students)[2].

I heard one economist on the ABC give the example of carwashes[2]. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, car washes in Australia were largely automated and hand-wash car washes were relatively uncommon. However, the abundance of cheap labour has since led to a proliferation of hand-wash car washes.

1. https://files.littlebird.com.au/SCR-20260525-ietj.png

2. https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-news-daily/the-pr...

The car wash example is interesting, as something I’ve seen and experienced but never thought about in that way.

I wonder how it truly factors into productivity, though. How is productivity measured, and does that measurement capture what is true?

You mention automated car washes as a baseline. I never used those in the past because I figured they’d be rubbish or would scratch the car or whatever. So I’d occasionally wash the car myself, and that’s it. Now that we have manual car washes available, I use them from time to time. They clearly (I assert) do a better job than anything automated. And they do it inside and out.

So I find the comparison interesting, but in need of elaboration.

It's a tautology, if productivity is measured as GDP per worker. Productivity, so defined, is down because each worker is moving money around less, although there may be more workers. Which is the same thing as them being paid less. Question is, if they accept that, and cars still get washed, does it matter?

Cheap labour is one part of it, but also if you were a wealthy foreigner looking to get residency/citizenship, there are a few visa classes for 'business owners' who met certain job creation/investment thresholds. Car washes were a popular vehicle for this.

As a fellow Australian, this is likely an early window on what the next 5 to 10 years will yield with our recent mass immigration. Economically speaking we could well see a race to the bottom in wages whilst we continue to experience exceptional housing pressure.

> Speaking as an Australian, our productivity has been lagging[1] compared to the US

Good.

Developed countries should not aim to emulate the US. To get the same productivity you’d have to lower the standard of living of all the employees to the same level as those in the US.

No. Don’t do it.

Quality of life matters much more than profits.

That would be ok in a non-globalized world. In our world, any country that implements those laws will see a lot more offshoring.

Hey, if fuel gets expensive enough this will be much less of a problem! Let's all thank Trump and Iran for their great work on bringing the four day work week closer to fruition. This isn't how I would've imagined bringing industry back to the States, but it's a promise made, promise kept.

Has the promise been kept? Is industry on-shoring in any significant sense? Or just making photo ops for Trump and fam, then slow walking the implementation until it's quietly canceled or scaled back to a token effort?

The joke is that onshoring will be forced to occur when global trade becomes prohibitively expensive for most goods. A promise kept despite not planning to, and with catastrophic consequences.

Not if that country also legislates heavy penalties for companies that produce their goods in countries with worse labor laws.

The economic motive for offshoring would remain (though slightly mitigated), unless that country’s demand (in each regulated sector) was much more than rest of the world’s. I personally doubt that most places are even willing to implement such legislation, given that they’re not even willing to protest PRoC’s use of slave labor and prison camps.

You're just going to Galapagos your economy. Consumers won't put up with high prices and inferior goods. Unless you want to restrict internet/information access so your consumers don't know what they are missing out on.

I dunno. Consumers put up with a lot. Why can't I buy a cheap Chinese EV again?

Well the short version is that Robert Rubin and company sold our industries for parts years and years ago. And now we have to rebuild the industrial base from scratch

That should make it possible to buy a cheap Chinese EV.

You can't because they didn't sell out completely. In fact they still have some power to protect the companies from foreign products.

The result is a mishmash of protectionism and globalization.

Nah, I live in the UK, prices are higher than eu, public service is much worse, but public are voting for the party with members that brought this about.

Humans are weird.

Voting for someone else would mean admitting you were wrong.

Paying high prices and losing your job are bad, but not as bad as changing your mind.

Almost like we needed some international worker's organization to put pressure on all relevant countries at the same time...

Hey don’t go talking crazy about some kind of global labor solidarity and collective bargaining

So then all the productivity improvements are nothing more than boosting the hashrate of your crypto miner? You have to do it to not fall behind, but once everyone has done it, we all end up back in the same spot where we started?

Unironically, yes. One saving grace is in some ways, such as medicine and technology, more will be available to you, but not for less effort.

It's kind of understandable then that parts of the younger generations aren't motivated to continue that system? (Not just in the West, also in China, see "lying flat")

Normal people, yes. The oligarchic class gets more and more bloated as you can plainly see.

This has the same energy as "if we tax the billionaires, they'll leave". That statement and yours are wrong. Why? Because if it was profitable, they would've done it already. Pretty much any employer would use you as fertilizer if there was an uptick in the stock price.

But let's say it's true. Great. Punish them with tariffs. They also have diminished political power because they're no longer a local employer.

We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society that will soon mint its first trillionaire. This is beyond even French revolution levels of wealth inequality.

Fully agreed.

“Oh but businesses will leave”

Yeah so what, if they do, we either didn’t want them, or they _actually won’t_ despite the squealing, or they will go, and if their segment of the market is useful, will get snapped up by new/local versions which do respect local constraints from the get-go.

All of these are better outcomes than not doing anything because “what if”.

That only works with tariffs, which are widely considered evil apparently.

> We are colletively at a breaking point as a society where people legitimately can't afford to exist in a society

Aren't poverty rates being reduced basically everywhere and people getting richer across all deciles? The truth is that even if 90% tax rate was enforceable it would not change much - many problems plaguing societies right now are due to bad legislation and NIMBYs, with housing being the prime example. Somehow people want at same time: more houses, cheaper housing and as little new housing development as possible.

> Employee owned co-ops are more humane

Speaking as someone born in Yugoslavia.

That's almost how it was in Yugoslavia. Companies where "owned by society", but workers had voting rights. Whenever there was a vote to decide whether extra profit should be used for capital investments and/or operational improvements or assigned to salaries budget, everyone voted to increase their salaries.

Not every employ should be a co-owner, or at least not everyone should have voting rights.

Did you know that public market shareholders almost always vote for stock buybacks

You still need free market economics. If consumers have enough choices then the company with comfortable employees that refuse to invest profits into their operation will lose to the better organized competitor prioritizing a balance between the two.

An employee-owned co-op results in extremely high risk concentration. If your co-op experiences a downturn, you are likely to lose your job and see the value of your share of the co-op decrease.

There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs. - Thomas Sowell

This will never happen for the simple reason that there are some countries whose members are poor and so they are rightfully ready to work harder and longer for opportunities.

A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?

> A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?

I thought about this a lot. Some of it is expectation wrapped up in the American Dream. You work hard, and get those rewards. But that isn’t true because life isn’t fair and capitalism isn’t particularly humane or ethical.

Some of it is perceived. The people who strike gold without hard work expect to keep striking more gold, and when the yield shrinks you’re appalled because that’s not how things should be.

US is a deeply individualistic society, now more so than ever. We don’t always sacrifice for the common good, because they’re supposed to work hard just like me.

Anyway if you read all that, thank you.

>"You work hard, and get those rewards."

For a relatively short period it was true. Now majority works hard, lives from paycheck to paycheck and can not even own a house. Most results of what they produce goes to feed ever growing appetites of Musks

on the whole, most americans are not being compensated for the amount of value their work produces

But, if there exist poorer countries, why is there a five-day work week instead of a seven-day one? Why aren't we all just working 24/7?

There are Americans working 24/7, though. Surely you have heard of people working multiple menial full time jobs? Jobs are being offshored and cheaper immigrants are being imported who can be paid less. What more evidence do you need?

In most poor countries workers are doing 10 hours per day 6 days a week. With a significant number of them doing 7 days a week.

The argument (maybe in a sibling comment) was that, if the US switched to a 4-day workweek, companies would simply offshore their work to poorer countries who work 5 days, so my question is, then why isn't the current workweek 7 days?

Trillions of dollars spend on wars which don't need to exist doesn't help.

Depends what your comparison is. Are you comparing with the EU, China or Ethiopia?

Seems to me, the question is more why all that supposed prosperity doesn't translate to the living quality improvements one would expect.

Lot of shoulds, oughts, etc. How about this: do whatever you want. Nothing is stopping you from setting up a 3 day workweek co-op. More power to any group that wants to. There are a number out there already. But it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".

How did the 40-hour workweek come about?

(Certainly not "naturally")

Unions.

More completely the 8 hour work day movement. Loosely, 8hrs each for work, sleep, and everything else with everything else often being called recreation. Add in a 5 day work week and 40hrs. There's monument in Melbourne commemorating stonemasons winning an 8 hour work day in 1856 but they were working 6 days a week.

More specifically than Unions, it was the threat of violence (in extreme cases) and work stoppage by workers against the ownership class.

E.g. the Russian Revolution (one of the main workers' requests in the events leading up to the Revolution was the 40 hour work week and fair treatment).

The unions were just a symptom to mediate the threat of violence in exchange for a larger share of the added value generated by the worker.

Labor unions and henry ford

This is absurdly ahistorical. Corporations take as much as they can. If there were no law limiting work to 40 hours / week, they would demand far more - as they had before massive workers' protests forced the current limits.

All the more reason people would prefer to work for a co-op, no? I really don't know why there aren't more co-ops, and am inferring they just don't work all that well. But if there are any regulations or something preventing them from succeeding, I'd love to know about it.

Also, I guess it's worth noting I've been "exempt" all my life (not subject to 40 hours a week), so that particular labor win I guess didn't really cross my mind.

If everyone has 40 hours a week + overtime and you have a coop that pays competitively for 24 hours a week and no overtime you won't get as much market share, can be outcompeted. It has to be done on a large scale, historically as a matter of policy. This was true for tons of different reductions in the workday and other labor rights improvements in the past.

They can't strategize and adapt very quickly, because of all the cooperating.

Co-ops face a massive financing struggle, as most money is owned by rich investors, not by working people. Imagine running a business that can basically only get money from bank loans.

In a much more equal society this would go away to a great extent, but we don't live in anything close to that. So, if any co-op finds some useful niche, it will easily be out-competed by some company taking billionaire investors. The only exceptions are fundamentally limited businesses, where billionaires don't care to invest to outcompete, or the rare situations where it happened to not go that way before the co-op grew large enough, such as Mondragon in Spain's Basque Country.

Beyond this, there is of course the problem of the chicken and the egg. There are vanishingly few co-ops, so there are very very few people who know how to successfully lead and manage a co-op. So, many co-ops will face internal organizational issues and fail, as often happens with any other type of org run by people with little experience. But this then perpetuates the cycle. The same thing happened in the regular business world - many historically common organizational practices seem absurdly bad from today's standards, but they took time to be understood and repaired.

And finally, especially in B2B scenarios, there are real biases that the corporate owner class has against this type of organization, both personal and structural. Lots of B2B deals are built on interpersonal relationships between the owners and executives of these companies, a world in which the elected leader of a worker's co-op would not have the financial means to participate, even if the deep classism of the corporate elite wouldn't keep them out either way.

Labor has been completely defeated in the US. Capital sets the terms and has captured the political class. You know this but are using deflection to put blame on individuals who don’t actually hold power. Management can offshore anytime workers present a challenge.

What are you talking about? Minimum wage has nowadays a lot wider coverage and many unions have absurd privileges and compensations (e.g. docking unions) for which entire society has to pay. Even recently NYC hotel keepers have managed to negotiate 6 figure salary. There's lots of doomerism that doesn't really hold up when confronted with actual evidence lately.

You can ask that question in the opposite way too: Why does the weekend still exist? Why aren't people working 24/7?

> it's worth considering why it hasn't totally taken over "naturally".

Because is advantageous for employers to keep workers as close to the brink of burnout as possible as a method of control

Grandiose, ideological declarations like this are antithetical to HN’s ethos of curiosity. Please read the guidelines and make an effort to observe them if you want to participate here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

People should realise that they will be the ones paying for it. Prices will increase a lot. People need to be aware of that. Personally I'm okay with that trade-off. Also corporations - when checks and balances work properly, which is frequently not the case unfortunately - are great and net benefit for humanity.

>> Prices will increase a lot.

Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost.

Most things we buy are priced according to what the consumer is willing to pay for it, and the balance sheet of the companies that sell most of the things we buy show there’s a lot of wiggle room there.

> Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost.

Services and goods where lots of human labor is required get much more expensive with larger cost of labor. E.g. fast-food, food delivery. And there's nothing wrong with that of course - I'd rather pay 2x more for delivery than have people working on wages that are not enough to even feed them.

If labor costs are so high and such a large portion of production then how can companies afford to funnel so much money to executives? Hundreds and even thousands of times more than their cheapest workers? Often to the tune of millions and now billions?

Surely there is more slack in the system than the Epstein class wants to openly admit.

If you don't want discussion to turn into cesspool, I suggest not using terms like "Epstein class".

I wonder what would happen to costs if we had a 90%+ tax rate on the ultra wealthy... maybe if all these record profits were instead funneled back into society everyone would be better off AND prices would drop... a system like this would be good for society it seems... we should come up with a good name for that system, tho...

I think its pretty naive to thing that it'd work this way. It's really bad idea. If someone has company that debuts on stock market, and stock price increases let's say 100x times, who is he funneling the funds from? I'd say it's not funneling but creation of wealth, economy is not zero-sum game.

If someone has a company doing an IPO, it’s extremely unlikely that the company was so small that one person did all the work. Why is it a given that one person should retain nearly all of the proceeds of the sale? To answer your question, that person is funneling funds from investors who are expecting returns derived from the labor provided by the undercompensated employees.

Ok, let's follow that logic. If IPO makes CEO much, much richer but generally also makes company and workers better off (but to smaller degree), does IPO make workers more undercompensated? Nobody lost anything for the CEO to gain. Also is "funneling" (that's an interesting choice of word) investors money into company stock a bad thing? Why would it be? I'd say it's a very, very good thing and it's in almost always 100% voluntary to buy stocks.

Presumably there's some level of progressive taxation where the top rate is between 0% and 100% that most helps the median person.

The problem is that people with power are largely incentivized to push this rate lower than the optimal-for-the-median-person rate in order to benefit the wealthy at the expense of everyone else.

>If IPO makes CEO much, much richer but generally also makes company and workers better off (but to smaller degree), does IPO make workers more undercompensated?

Yes, obviously. The bulk of work of the company is done by the workers. That is to say, most of the value is generated by the labor of the workers. If a commensurate share of the profit is not returned to the employees, they’ve clearly been undercompensated.

How is it obvious? In that scenario, companies should avoid IPO even though it makes situation of workers better?

Where are you getting this idea to at IPOing makes workers situations better?! Citation needed!

Most of the time these public companies do regular mass layoffs just to make their investors happy to do short term stock price manipulation so they can get a bump in their executive salaries. This happens all the time

Sure doesn't seem like an IPO makes anyone but the tops lives easier in my book...

If you spend a month working all day every day on something and then you get paid 5¢, was that fair compensation simply because you're materially better off for having received it? BTW, I made $10,000 reselling your labor.

US had tax brackets in the 90%s for decades. It was part of a golden era for workers, for that and a variety of other reasons like strong unions.

Of course the rich tried to work around it. But culturally they also understood that paying a lot of taxes was considered their duty to society, especially in times of crisis.

This is a lazy idea that keeps getting trotted out. The 90% tax bracket only existed on paper, with an effective rate closer to 40%. Economists have shown that tax revenue remained remarkably unchanged, while having negative consequences for investment and productive use of capital. Instead, the relative prosperity of workers during that time came from a lack of global industrial competition and a massive post-war manufacturing monopoly. Without a completely sealed, loophole-free tax system and total global compliance, implementing a 90% tax rate today would simply result in widespread tax avoidance, capital flight, and a reduction in domestic investment. The rich do not make the bulk of their wealth through a salary (many taking $0 / year) like they did back then, but rather through stock options, etc.

If the higher tax rates were so ineffective then why was the divide between the richest and the workers so much smaller?

Do tell, what is the effective tax rate that the rich pay today?

If lower tax rates are so bad, then why are workers nowadays much, much richer than back then?

We have more shit, that's true. And advancements in medicine have reduced child mortality and lifespans.

Worker wealth is absolutely not relative to the overall wealth in this country; that disproportionately goes to the top 1% (we're now at 1920s levels) and it's getting worse every year.

The average first home purchase age is 40 compared to the 20s then. Getting a college degree was free or cheap for many of our parents/grandparents, now it's mostly a luxury. Healthcare costs put people into permanent debt. Most people are struggling paycheck to paycheck.

Is your argument that life is all around better for the average person now because we don't tax the wealthy/let them accumulate most the wealth in this country?

The top 0.01% payed an effective rate of 50-75% in the 40s. That is drastically higher than today. Just because the wealthy found ways out of the full 90% doesn't mean the taxation rates were a huge factor in the standard of living then.

Were there other factors? Absolutely but it's disingenuous to claim there was no difference in tax policy now vs then.

> widespread tax avoidance, capital flight, and a reduction in domestic investment

Do you not think the US has the capability to enforce their tax laws despite these efforts? It absolutely gets its tax dollars from foreign earned income, it can penalize such tax avoidance strategies (these companies operate in the unite states after all).

> The rich do not make the bulk of their wealth through a salary

Yeah, because it's a method to avoid taxation obviously. That's why we need to tax loans against assets ("buy, borrow, die") and increase capital gains to be at least above that of labor.

It's so incredibly obvious the wealthy do whatever they can to avoid taxation. Why are you so dead-set on furthering their agenda?

I'm curious, what's your solution to wealth inequality or do you think we should just let the super wealthy return to the robber barons/kings of yesteryear?

What are you even talking about?

So if someone (you mean an entire, large company with many employees) offers public shares and people buy them, then what happens in your mind? I'm genuinely curious.

If I, this newly IPOed founder, 100x my company, now my paper wealth has 100x correct? Now, with that wealth I can follow "buy, borrow, die" so I pay near 0% taxation on these shares. Then, when I do need to liquidate some of my wealth I just pay capital gains. I pay myself $1y in salary so I pay no income tax. I now am 100x wealthier but pay little to no tax on that wealth while all my employees pay 30%+ on nearly every dollar they earn via their salaries.

This seems a bit... unfair... don't you think? The employees of this now very wealthy persons company are required for his wealth to continue but they pay at least 2-3x the taxes on a per dollar basis. Add to that the corporation also probably pays a 0% tax rate.

A reasonable bare minimum would be to make sure the wealthy and the companies they run pay their fair share in taxes as everyone including these companies benefit from the systems that taxation pays for.

It's amazing how many people are falling for billionaire taxation propaganda despite how blatantly obvious it is now...

You would get some version of the Soviet Union. Where all the rich people would be connected to government rather than industry. And industry would become enfeebled and unable to produce efficiently, and the average person would be much poorer than people currently are in the USA.

Wait, you mean like how all the rich people work for the US government, own all its popular media and pay near 0% tax?

I didn't realize the US was the Soviet Union, how ironic!

Thank you for making my point, even though you thought you were doing the opposite. The government is bad already, we shouldn't be making it worse with stupid irrational policies.

Prices are already obscene, and we’re all being ripped off.

I’d much rather pay the prices corrected-for-supporting-livelihoods, than the artificially inflated prices used to line the pockets of the rich.

> I’d much rather pay the prices corrected-for-supporting-livelihoods, than the artificially inflated prices used to line the pockets of the rich.

But unless you do central planning (which doesn't work) you can't really separate these two, can you?

This all sounds great until you've actually had your own small business and experienced things from the other side.

Employees are expensive, good employees are hard to find, and sometimes things need to be fixed outside 9-5 to avoid having an angry client on your hands.

You should hire people to cover those hours outside of the 9-5 then. Or do you expect your employees to slave away for your benefit without getting anything but the bare minimum from you?

Speaking as an exhausted Australian...

I would love a three day weekend every weekend. in fact I'd even "pay" for that (My father used his LSL one day a week every week.. a genius idea imho).

But I dont see it happening any time soon.

We need mutual disarmament

Someone doesn’t understand why we have nice things. “Increased productivity”, the thing you don’t give a shit about, is the only reason you’re not living in the dirt and dying of a tooth infection before 35.

If you wanted to live with a QoL of the 1940s you could do so today working 2 days a week. Of course you’d have no air conditioning, shitty food, no running water, etc etc.

You don’t have to LIKE corps but you should at least understand your world before calling for the guys with guns to get involved.

I'd pretty happily work e.g. a 4-day work week for the QoL of 20 years ago - but I can't actually do so, it's not a option with most employers.

Do workers really care about productivity? As long as I get paid that's what matters.

I like to feel that I'm spending my time productively, yeah. Not all of my time, mind you. People generally like to feel their work impacting their environment. Many consider it the most fulfilling part of their lives. Working purely for compensation is a great way to kill most positive energy for a solid half of your waking hours most days. People react differently, of course. For some the knowledge that they're making money alone provides the psychological reward, others find enjoyment in the moment-to-moment of things, even if they're not part of a meaningful goal, and yet others offset the meaninglessness of their work with a fulfilling home life or hobbies.

On the whole though, I'd say yes, people do care about productivity so long as they feel it's connected to their world and oriented in the right-ish direction.

I work remotely at companies until they fire me for doing the minimum. I still get paid for the two to three weeks, so I couldn't care less because the money goes towards my hobbies.

Do you feel like maybe we could do a better job of constructing a world where people don't feel they need to do this objectively worthless activity?

It is meaningless, yes. It's not any more meaningful than trading crypto or betting on whether the basketball player will tie his shoe.

This is why we can't have nice things.

a good number do, I've been surprised by how many low level fast food managers actually care about how well the store's performing due to owner pressure despite seeing little to no wage improvement regardless

As long as they feel growth of productivity results to increase in their standard of living then why not?

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