This story was on the TPM morning reading list:
The idea of a four-day workweek might sound crazy, especially in America, where the number of hours worked has been climbing and where cellphones and email remind us of our jobs 24/7.
But in some places, the four-day concept is taking off like a viral meme. Many employers aren’t just moving to 10-hour shifts, four days a week, as companies like Shake Shack are doing; they’re going to a 32-hour week — without cutting pay. In exchange, employers are asking their workers to get their jobs done in a compressed amount of time.
Last month, a Washington state senator introduced a bill to reduce the standard workweek to 32 hours. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev is backing a parliamentary proposal to shift to a four-day week. Politicians in Britain and Finland are considering something similar.
I went to the grocery store this morning, since I work from home and have a flexible schedule, and it’s a big hassle to go when everyone else is out of work. It’s school break week here in Rochester, so a lot of kids were shopping with both of their parents, which of course isn’t the case on school days. The younger kids were just loving life: no school, and time with Mom and Dad, a very precious commodity when both parents work 40 hour weeks. It’s even worse for children of parents who have to work multiple jobs because of the shitty low wages and crap benefits.
In our robot manufacturing and service economy future, less time worked for more pay, and semi-skilled jobs that pay enough so only one parent has to work, would mean that we would have enough jobs to go around, and that parents could spend more time with their kids. But it’s kind of like a Presidential candidate saying he or she is an atheist, or perhaps even worse, for one of them to say we all need to work less. How would the Waltons and Jeff Bezos survive if they paid their employees more for less work? It’s simply unimaginable.
Playing to Win: Day 2
Soprano2
Lots of the rural schools here in SWMO are doing this to save money. It also helps them attract teachers, since the extra day off every week compensates for the lower pay the small schools offer.
Yutsano
You want to make this change stick? Get the federal government on board. Once the largest employer in the country gets on track with a 32 hour work week industry should rapidly follow. The real trick is to not reduce services at the same time.
EDIT: Of course 218-60-1-5 applies.
Wapiti
Related, I was in one of the local coffee shops this morning (Caffe Ladro), and while I waited for my coffee I read their company letter explaining the recent 7% cost increase, which covers this year’s $1.50 rise in the minimum wage. They explain that the wage is company wide, not just in Seattle which is moving to a $15 minimum. I think it’s good that companies are spreading the better wages further afield. It might make a statewide minimum more palatable down the road.
gene108
@Yutsano:
In the U.S. we are more likely to have a 4 day work week based on states changing their labor laws.
It won’t be universal, but like Medicaid expansion, if it looks like it’s working, we will eventually have most states on board.
I have little hope for places like Alabama (no state minimum wage) deciding to do this.
gene108
@Wapiti:
Tight labor market is doing what it’s supposed to do and drive wages up, though probably not enough across the board to offset inflation.
Aimai
I work a 43 hour week for 40 hrs of pay. My dream would be to work three 9 hour days and have one day for private practice but I don’t think my organization will permit that.
guachi
I’ve had shifts in the Navy with four 10-hour shifts and I didn’t like it.
I’d rather have four 9-hour days or five 7-hour days.
Mike in NC
If Fat Bastard “works” from 11 AM to 4 PM, then takes a four-day weekend at one of his shitty properties, why can’t the rest of us???
cmorenc
Hospital nurses already typically only work 3 days per week (but they are 12-hour shifts, plus often an extra half- hour on the handoff of cases to the next oncoming shift of nurses to bring them up to speed on what’s happened with particular patients).
so it winds up being more like a 37 or 38 hour very intensive work week, particularly if a nurse has a 3-day-in-tow schedule with 4 consecutive days off, and so often the first day off winds up being mostly s recovery day. But for nurses who can sustain that 3 in a row scheduling, it gives max flexibility for lifr outside eork, and usually comrs with good benefits
Served
I’ve heard of factories that do the 4-day/10-hour week during some times of the year. I think it has to do with a slower time of year? IIRC it saves costs and time since the firing up all the machinery and closing things out for the day are vastly more intensive than the efficient process that goes on in between. I could be wrong, though.
Roger Moore
@Mike in NC:
If you want a short work week, you should have been born rich. Peons need to work longer weeks so we don’t have time to ponder how to supplant our betters.
Gin & Tonic
I am a year away from having a zero-day workweek, and wondering how I’ll handle that.
Baud
One of the problems with candidates talking about working less is that people get worried that you are going to take away their overtime or reduce their salary. For that reason, this particular change to workplace culture will probably have to happen more gradually.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic: More Balloon Juice!
MagdaInBlack
I cant imagine having time to have a life. I am at work from 7:30 til 5:30 5 days a week, no time for lunch, with an hour commute each way.
Four 10’s would be lovely
John Revolta
Isn’t the 32 hour week mainly a dodge to keep employers from having to pay benefits? Or is that already a dead issue?
Kent
By work you mean sit in on the couch watching fox news while you rage tweet and tear up papers you don’t like?
cmorenc
@Gin & Tonic:
if you have a solidly worthwhile sense of worth aside from your job, and you can get past feeling guilty about every day being saturday for you – you’ll do just fine, especially if you use that freedom to pursue non (or minimally) renumerative things you didnt have adequTe time for while still working full time, such as getting really good at guitar or more involvement in politicsl activism
Yutsano
@gene108: Normally I would agree, but the feds got paid family leave before most states. Washington State did just finally get mandatory sick leave for employers, so that’s something.
gene108
@John Revolta:
30 hours per week is usually the cut off for qualifying for employer insurance
Kent
More good reasons for M4A and beefing up social security, or de-linking retirement benefits from your employer. Under a M4A type plan everyone is covered regardless of who they work for or where they work or how many hours they work. I think it’s a dumb political strategy right now in the Dem primaries, but it is obviously the superior policy, Liz is right about that.
As for retirement benefits, Currently you can contribute $19,500 of tax deferred dollars to a 401(k) controlled by your employer, but only $6,000 to an IRA controlled by you if you have no employer plan. There is no rational reason for that except that the financial services industry desperately wants it that way as they can extract MUCH higher fees from employers than they can from individuals. Because employers just pass them on anyway and don’t really care. A fairer system would be to de-link your retirement savings from your employer and just give everyone the same $20,000 of tax deferred space which you can fill with 401(k) money or IRA money or any combination of the two so you aren’t tied to your employer to choose your retirement savings plan.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@guachi: For a while in the Navy I had four twelve hour days 6am to 6pm and then 3 days off and then four twelve hour nights 6pm to 6am. Also worked a scatter-shot schedule where we worked a specific shift three months at a time but it was random days so you never knew what days you worked….Blech!
Would love 4 day week, even if it was 10 hours a day. I work a forty hour week now, theoretically, but I have a cell and email and am on call 24/7…
Mary G
My housemates who are caregivers work insane hours. K works 8 hours during the day and 4 hours in the evening Mon-Fri. B works 5 graveyard shifts and 3-4 day shifts a week. In between they take care of me, my house and garden. It’s terrible for their health and the teen. A 40-hour week would be heaven for them.
rekoob
@Yutsano: Some Federal agencies already offer a 9/80 work schedule, which means alternate four-day (10 hrs.) and five-day (8 hrs.) work weeks. It has the salutary benefit of no more meetings on Fridays, since half the team is gone at the end of any given week. You’re also allowed to switch between weeks occasionally. Certain continuous functions (security) have different schedules, of course. Not quite the ideal of reducing overall hours, but it might be a bridging strategy to get there. That, plus more teleworking.
Roger Moore
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
It’s hard to express how much I have benefited from our IT department changing things in a way that made it effectively impossible for me to get work email on my personal phone. My weekends are much more relaxed when my phone isn’t reminding me of everything I have to do when I get back to work.
Baud
@Kent:
You can have both, but I think only if you don’t deduct the IRA contribution (at least under the old tax law).
Baud
I assume most of their workers are wage earners, so they should get overtime at least.
different-church-lady
That’s some catch, that Catch-22.
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Wouldn’t you give up going to the bathroom for a 32 hour work week?
Duane
@Soprano2: Hi fellow city dweller! The schools are doing this because tightwad Republicans won’t provide proper funding. Teachers will work just as much, students lose valuable class time, parents have to find childcare. If I lived in one of those towns I’d move to a proper school district. Another nail in the coffin for these dying communities.
robmassing
Maybe in the long run Keynes will be right. https://blog.decoded.com/keynes-automation-and-the-future-of-work-80851e260022
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud:
Depends®.
Baud
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Haha. Win.
Another Scott
@Yutsano: If you’re talking about the very recent “paid family leave” benefits for federal employees, it’s very restrictive.
It’s not nothing, and it’s more than many other organizations, but it’s much less than it should have been.
Cheers,
Scott.
Yutsano
@Baud: The deduction still exists. The 2019 limits on the amounts are $14,000 for married filing joint and $7000 for all other tax statuses. So it doesn’t cover the whole amount. I didn’t see a rule on what the source was. Oh and it’s income sensitive, so most people who manage to have both (I actually do) can’t actually take the deduction.
Jeffro
Back when I was a principal, once school let out, our summer schedule was to work four 10-hour days and close the school offices on Fridays.
I asked my superintendent if I could ‘flex’ my summer work schedule down to two 20-hour days and then take Wednesday-Sunday off. “Think of how helpful that would be for working parents – they could call me up or stop by at 10:00 p.m. in the evening!” (albeit only on Monday and Tuesday evenings)
He was pretty patient guy with me over the years, I must say. ;)
sdhays
@Yutsano: I think that would be an incredibly unpopular thing to do. People already have a (unfair) view of government workers being lazy leeches. If government workers get to take another day off, there will be blood.
This idea is going to have to get into the mainstream another way first.
trollhattan
Have worked 9×9 and 9×4+4. Kind of liked the first one, due to the alternating 3-day weekend, but the second seemed more bother than it was worth. I’d do a 9×4 in a heartbeat and feel it’s a decent halfway gesture from employers, at least in a salaried setting.
PenAndKey
@MagdaInBlack: “I cant imagine having time to have a life. I am at work from 7:30 til 5:30 5 days a week, no time for lunch, with an hour commute each way.”
Shift that to 6am-4pm and you’ve got my schedule. I make more than I ever have in my life in this job, but it’s definitely irritating knowing I’m working 50hr a week (60 if I factor in commuting) for 40hr of pay. As it is, if I want to do things like have “me time” or go to the gym I either need to do it at 3am or 8pm and cut into time I should be sleeping.
I’m not going to complain too much, though. It sure as hell beats the 3 on 4 off 16hr work weeks I used to do in my 20’s when I worked in furniture warehousing. Life tip? Don’t ever work in furniture warehousing if you value your back.
James E Powell
So for law firms, it will be a 56 hour week?
Mart
@Served: Large factories I have been to will run three 12 hour days, then three 12 hour nights with three to four days off in between work cycles. Nasty.
PenAndKey
@Mart: Many labs run the same sort of idiotic shifting schedule. It’s a sure-fire way to burn employees out and/or wreck their health, even if the usual excuse for the practice is that it’s “not fair” for people to be stuck on night shift.
Brachiator
I’ve seen assertions of the value of a 32 hour work week, but not seen it clearly demonstrated.
I think I saw arguments from French activists about the joys of working 32 hours, but getting paid for 40.
I am a bit surprised that California is not experimenting more with this. The state assembly is doing some good things, but seems up for almost anything these days.
ETA: I have seen recently that commute times are increasing significantly. I guess this also spurs ideas about work hours, wages, etc.
Miss Bianca
@Soprano2: we have that here in rural CO as well – however, that Friday isn’t really a day off for teachers.
gene108
@Kent:
A lot of the tax code, and what you can put away pretax towards retirement is a tax issue, depends on how much of a hit to the federal budget it would be.
This is one reason you have limits on what you can contribute to an IRA is based on your income. Also, the government does look for ways to keep upper middle class people from easily avoiding taxes by putting their earnings in pretax investment options.
I think that’s a bigger issue than what 401(k) providers can charge.
Served
@Mart: That is brutal. This was not so bad, I think, and my brother liked it at the time. It was during the summer, so they got a three weekends for a few weeks and it didn’t interfere with after-school pickup and activities.
Scott
4-Day Workweek Boosted Workers’ Productivity By 40%, Microsoft Japan Says
This came out last fall:
J R in WV
@Gin & Tonic:
Wondering how you will cope with 52 zero hour work weeks?
I bet you will cope with it somehow! I did.
Kent
Yes you can have both. But you can’t deduct both. The point is that a worker with a 401k plan at work can save $19,500 in tax-deferred 401k savings, whereas a worker for a shitty employer that doesn’t have a 401k plan can only save $6000 in a tax-deferred IRA. That is a huge difference.
Yes, if you have a 401k plan at work, you can also contribute to an IRA but you can’t claim the tax deduction. Rather than distinguishing between different types of retirement savings accounts and giving them dramatically different tax treatment the much simpler an fairer way to do it would simply be to give every American the same exact amount of tax-deferred retirement savings space which they can use up with an IRA, 401k, 457 plan or whatever they want.
The reason that won’t happen is greed. Big financial firms love 401k plans because they can lard them up with fees and you are a captive to your employer’s choice of 401k providers. My wife’s last employer chose Standard Insurance as their 401k provider. It turned out that the CFO of her clinic was very close friends with the local sales rep for Standard Insurance. God only knows what kickbacks or incentives or wining and dining were done to get that contract. But the result was that my wife was locked into a 401k plan with over 1% management fees rather than say Vanguard which would have had fees over 10x lower. Multiply that times a 30-year career and you will have given 1/3 of your life savings over to your 401k manager in the form of fees.
If employees were not locked into expensive 401k plans by their employers then they could shop around and find much lower cost options like Vanguard and Fidelity and big finance would lose hundreds of billions of dollars. These are the sorts of seemingly small things that Elizabeth Warren understands. I’m not sure Bernie does, his people certainly don’t.
glory b
@cmorenc: I had a hearing with an x ray tech who worked 2 full time jobs that way, with Sundays off.
The hospitals were a few blocks from each other, so I guess she didn’t have to worry about getting them mixed up.
Incitatus for Senate
I thought there were some studies a while ago that showed productivity dropping off steeply after about 6 hours of work. Ten hour days might not be such a great idea.
Kent
You are wrong. There have been proposals before to equalize the 401k and IRA contribution limits (or make a single limit that you can fill using any combination of tax-deferred accounts that you want). The big financial firms absolutely came out of the woodwork to lobby against it because hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake. Of course, according to them it wasn’t because they wanted to charge higher fees. It was because they could provide ‘better service and advice’ through employer-based plans. But that is some pretty damn expensive service and advice. Of course in actuality they don’t want to have to compete directly with Vanguard or Prudential or the other low cost providers.
WhatsMyNym
@PenAndKey:
I’ve known plenty of people who have worked night shifts for years and didn’t seem to have any problems with it. They generally liked to have some time in the sun each day.
Constantly changing shifts is just brutal on your health.
Brachiator
@Wapiti:
Unfortunately, some restaurants are almost in a death spiral.
In California, I notice that some shops have been hit with significantly rising labor, supply and lease costs. BTW, the increased minimum wage is not to blame, not solely, by any means.
There is also the wild impact of food delivery services. People who order food for takeout spend less than people who sit and eat.
However, you cannot always pass increased costs on to diners. People are seeing living costs increase, and have less money to spend on dining out.
One favorite coffee shop eliminated some menu items, raised prices, cut hours and also cut staff. But some businesses in the area shut down, reducing breakfast and lunch traffic. Some workers who get a meal allowance were shut out by increased prices.
The coffee shop owner has tried to do more catering to make up for lost business.
The local newspaper has done a couple of stories on the increasing number of food places that have gone under, but sadly the stories have been superficial.
Anyway, a little side ramble on this issue.
Mike in DC
30 hours a week, $25 per hour minimum wage, works out to…$39k per year. Not bad.
J R in WV
Regarding shift work, and changing work shifts often. I think a changing set of shifts is the worst. My dad worked nights all his life, consistently. At least by the time I was born… I guess he probably worked days before that. I worked nights too at the family business, as did wife, mom, and brother briefly. It was fine.
But to work a month of days, then to change to nights, that would have sucked bad.
Rotating duty shifts at sea, AND working 7 am til 5 pm plus standing watches, 4 hours on, 8 hours off 24/7 — as others have said, that gets wearying pretty fast. I was lucky enough to stand watch on the bridge while underway, which was at least interesting and kept you awake.
If it is worse than that in today’s Navy, no wonder they have warships colliding with big cargo ships at 2 or 3 am. WE never hit anything underway, but once the Captain’s ship-handling put us into the giant mole repeatedly, crushing 16×24 inch timbers like they were #2 pencils. He was xfered to command of a Navy hospital in Korea, no ship handling needed there! Better for everyone!
Brachiator
@Kent:
A bit of a dig, but I think you are probably right about this.
Roger Moore
@Incitatus for Senate:
This mirrors my personal experience. I know I tend to drag at the end of the day. What’s not clear to me is whether this can be countered by clever scheduling- move the mindless busy work and pointless meetings to the end of the day- or whether just having to be there at work for that extra time hurts productivity the next day.
The maddening part for me is that it’s very uneven. Some days I’m super productive and want to stay late to keep it going. Other days I’m useless from the beginning of the day to the end. And I can never be sure what kind of day I’m having until it’s over.
MagdaInBlack
@PenAndKey:
If we had “me time” we would have time to do things like get involved and organize and agitate…..cant have that =-)
A Ghost To Most
@Gin & Tonic: If you have a creative drive you have been suppressing to get thru the work week, you may have an eruption of creativity. The stuff I have made the last 2 years is surprising.
Gelfling 545
My daughter took a new job Sept 1. Her full time work hours are 32/week, down from 38 + mandatory overtime at her previous not-all-that-different job. From Jan 1 to May 1 she can, if she wishes & she does, work a extra 1/2 hour/day. This then entitles her to take 2 Fridays a month off in summer. Amazingly ?, all the work seems to get done and there is no mandatory overtime because people are not quitting every other week and their work being heaped onto others as was the case in her previous place. This appears to be an unusual employer who does not judge how hard employees are working by how miserable the staff is.
Catherine D.
I work two half time jobs, and using my vacation time in large blocks is hard. I’m constantly at the max accrual of vacation time, so my solution is to take Fridays off for several months running. I love it – run all the errands on Friday and veg out for two days!
Kent
It’s the difference between incremental change and big broad-sweeping changes. My perception is that Warren very much understands the cumulative effects of making good incremental changes that improve people’s lives. Many of which can actually be done through executive actions. That’s what the entire CFPB was about. The Bernie folks tend to be much more interested in big splashy tilting-at-windmill type legislative changes.
It is EXACTLY what the Bernie folks criticize Warren for That she is more interested in fixing capitalism rather than overturning it, or whatever.
Roger Moore
@Kent:
This. A thousand times this. Bernie is the candidate for the “worse is better” crowd. They don’t want incremental improvement because they see it as an obstacle to revolutionary change. Something tells me they’d be a lot more excited about incremental change if they were the ones suffering.
Brachiator
@J R in WV:
I guess I am a bit of a night person, and early on I had a job that had me working a 11:30 am to 8 pm shift. This was heaven. I could get up and putter around in the morning, and in the evening got off early enough to go on a date, have a nice dinner, catch a movie, etc.
Never served in the military. In reading stuff like the Aubrey/Martin novels about the Age of Sail, I try to get some idea what the work shifts on a ship were like. I know this doesn’t come close at all to real experience.
I guess, though, I’ve worked all kinds of shifts working for a big city newspaper, which used to be a 24 hour operation. But here people did not usually change shifts from month to month.
And people who worked late shifts were often a different kind of cat. Interesting personality types.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
My former employer switched to a 4/10 workweek and I hated it because it totally shot workdays to hell.
My shift used to be 4:00 PM to 12:20 AM 5 days/week and went to 4:00 PM to 2:30 AM 4 days/week.
I used to get up about 9 AM and get things done before going to work, but after the switch I found myself not falling asleep until about 5 and sleeping til noon.
The Moar You Know
Nope. Just nope. Shake Shack might be doing this, but I know of no other business that does. But I don’t bitch about my 50. My wife is a teacher and on a light week she works 60 hours. Most weeks, north of 70. So does every teacher in her district, which is not poor. After ten years with no raises, they finally got one. 3%.
Life is getting worse for most working people. Every year.
Another Scott
+1. Good, good.
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Kent:
And yet I don’t get any sense that Sanders or his biggest supporters have a clue as to how these big changes were designed or implemented in the European countries he admires.
It’s aspiration out of ignorance.
Mart
@Gelfling 545:
“This appears to be an unusual employer who does not judge how hard employees are working by how miserable the staff is.”
Sorta reminds me of investment gurus slagging Costco for paying a living wage with benefits. They say that hurts investors with the Costco CEO saying it saves money having dedicated employees who are not quitting every six weeks.
Martin
I’ve been saying this forever. There is nothing magical about the 40 hour work week. US capitalism has a goal of maximum productivity in a bid to minimize labor costs, and US domestic policy has a goal of maximum employment. Those are relatively incompatible goals. They require constantly increasing consumption, or constantly increasing population, both of which are really difficult to square with problems like climate change. That we have a cultural moment where increasing population is being resisted, because we’d rather do racism than increase our customer bases isn’t helping.
One thing that spits out of this is a lot of pressure to create shitty jobs, and domestic policy weakened to enable those shitty jobs by eroding worker rights, etc. Liberal labor-oriented policies need to be paired with domestic economic policies that address the problem of declining labor participation rates, because that’s often going to be the result. That’s not a bad thing, but it needs to be addressed. Reducing the work week without reducing pay is one way to do that, but boy does it set up a serious class problem when salaried workers benefit while some states are still sitting at an $7.25 hourly wage.
Aziz, light!
@Gin & Tonic: I am eight months away and will handle it just fine.
Duane
@Another Scott: Marie Yovanovitch deserves the support. Bet she’s having an interesting life and it’ll be a good read. I’ll have to pry open the wallet and buy a copy.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mart: I go to Costco quite often, the same employees have been there for years.
Martin
@Kent: The problem with revolutions is that people get hurt in revolutions. In fact, that’s the point of them. We can talk about how automation or M4A won’t reduce the total number of jobs, but there’s a LOT of people out there who will lose their job, and may not be able to get one of the new jobs.
These plans need to address that to be successful. Bernie wonders why every other nation can do single payer, and neglects to note that almost all of them did the change when the existing economy was destroyed. The hard part was solved by someone else. Designing a single payer system isn’t that hard. Dismantling the existing system without harming people is really, really hard. That’s why the unions are acting up – they feel like they’ll get harmed. States with large insurers keep acting up – those are jobs that will be lost.
I agree with Warren on this one. Monopolies are a natural consequence of capitalism, and state capitalism is notoriously shitty (and monopolies are a shittier version of state capitalism) so you have to put regulatory guardrails to protect capitalism from devolving to that point. All economic systems need government guardrails – that’s true of socialism and capitalism equally. Its why many heavy socialist states were so terrible, and why many of them improved dramatically with more capitalism. The balance is the key. Warren gets that, and gets that radical change hurts people. Bernie does not.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Roger Moore: They give us a work iPhone… I have been called while sitting in a bar in Montreal (am not Canadian) while I was on vacation…I am jealous of my husband, he has a union IT job(which is pretty much a unicorn) and a 37.5 hour work week.
Kent
@Martin: Also, the notion that things have to get worse before they can get better (looking at you Susan Sarandon) is the most wrong-headed notion in the history of American political change.
When things get worse they are just worse and it often takes a hell of a lot of time and effort just to get back to where you were before. Change has always been incremental in this country. It hasn’t ever happened any other way. At least without a civil war that killed upwards of 2% of the total population and left much of the country in ruins.
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Kent: People like Susan Sarandon think about “revolution” like it was a movie, they seem to not know or care that social upheaval and wrenching political change hurt the people on the fringes first and most.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
He also ignores that almost every other country has universal coverage, but that only a minority have single payer. Most of them have some cobbled together system with private, non-profit insurance companies and subsidized coverage for the poor. There are a lot of ways of providing universal coverage, and single payer is not necessarily the best approach.
The Moar You Know
WRT to alternative scheduling:
I’ve done 9/9. That was OK, sort of.
4/10 was the absolute worst. You spend day five sacked out in a waking coma trying to recover from the last four.
H.E.Wolf
Here’s an article about the 30-hour work week which was adopted in some US industries during the Great Depression.
https://www.alternet.org/2013/04/when-america-came-close-establishing-30-hour-workweek/
Roger Moore
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
My employer does provide work phones for some people, but not for people in my position. For quite a while, they let people connect to the work email using the ordinary email app, and I did. Then they decided that didn’t provide good enough security, so they added a bunch of requirements that were supposed to make it more secure. Eventually, their security requirements basically required you to install a separate, secure email app for work email, as well as a bunch of stuff to let them remote wipe your phone. At that point, I gave up and decided to stop bothering. It helps that my boss has the same attitude. When the boss says, “I’ll install their crapware when they buy me a phone,” it makes it a lot easier for the worker bees to do the same thing.
Roger Moore
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
I think it’s less about not knowing that revolution hurts the little guy and more about not caring. They want their revolution, and if it happens to hurt the little guys along the way, tough luck. They’ll be better off after the revolution is over, so they should be glad to suffer to bring it about.
Kent
He also ignores that most European countries are parliamentary systems rather than presidential systems which essentially guarantees that a prime minister has a legislative majority to implement large-scale reforms. The US political system has a lot more veto points and it is frequently the case that the Presidency and Congress are held by different parties.
Daddio7
Would the goods and services provided by these people still stay the same price? If so who would eat the loss?
Daddio7
@Incitatus for Senate: When I farmed my tractor maintained a steady 2200 rpm no matter how many hours I drove it. I worked for 10 years at a produce packing plant. I made sure the bagging machines turned out 50 packs a minute from 7:30 AM to 7:30 PM during the Thanksgiving rush.
Most hourly workers have to maintain 100% output no matter how many hours they work in a row. And who can save $20,000 a year? That is over half of most people’s income. White privilege showing?
Ruckus
My own retail business and the job I currently hold, which goes back in time for 15 of the 58+ yrs I’ve been working, are the shortest work days I’ve ever had. The standard minimum when I started was 50 hrs a 5 day week with Saturdays added about 50-60% of the time. For my 11yrs in pro sports my average week was 60 hrs. Now maybe my lines of work were different but telling me that we now work longer hours than ever before is not logical. I’ll buy that there are many who have to work 2 or 3 part time jobs to make ends meet, or a full time and part time jobs because wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living and that many are actually working more than 40 hrs. And getting paid crap.
Ruckus
@Mike in NC:
You want to spent a 4 day weekend at one of the fat bastard’s properties?
I’m going to believe that this is just quick sentence construction, not a desire for self flagellation.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
I think the longer work week and crappier wages is so that we don’t have time and money to gather pitchforks, ropes and torches.
Ruckus
@Gin & Tonic:
I’m around the same timeline to not filling out a time card. I’m looking forward to it, even if it means doing fuck all.