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Comment by Padding | Hacker News Reader

> What do you propose?

For starters, rational discourse. I don't see much point in being cynical.

If there is demand for those overtime hours and people willing to supply them .. and society as a whole is better off for it in the end, but our rules prohibit it, then clearly there's adequate reason to question the rules.

We need to conduct research on how both alternatives - i.e. either enforcing the rules or changing them - would affect everyday life, and then, as a democratic society, let people make a deliberate decision as to which alternative they prefer.

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Hold on there.

Society has already made a judgement that those overtime hours only make society better off when an employer is willing to pay extra for them. Implicit in that is a judgment that neither employers nor employees properly account for the social cost of that overtime (because of short-run vs. long-run considerations, impacts on third parties like the employee's friends and family and so on).

Making the case that the social costs have changed and revisiting that judgment democratically is one thing. Evading that judgment by trickery (especially when that can involve tricking the employee) is something very different - cheating the system by shifting the social costs of overtime where they do not belong.

> Evading that judgment by trickery (especially when that can involve tricking the employee) is something very different

Yes, agreed.

My point was that if it's a wide-spread issue, as the article claims, then employees engaging in those activities probably knew what was expected of them beforehand, and still went ahead with it.

If on the other hand it indeed is "trickery", then it's not a wide-spread issue (since tricking people relies on the practice being uncommon enough to not be anticipated), and is thus something that can be sensibly dealt with in courts on a case-by-case basis.

Your argument seems to rely on the assumption that the employees have much of a choice. In theory there's supposed to be a free labor market, but in practice employers hold a much stronger hand than employees. It's hard for employees to vote with their feet when facing the threat of unemployment. Thus their "engaging in those activities" can not exactly be counted as any kind of approval.

Some solutions for this could be stronger unions protecting worker's rights, stronger punishments against employers who take advantage of the weak bargaining position of workers, or providing basic income to tip the balance of power a bit more in the worker's favour.

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