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I want more people to think though
"If this tool makes me produce double, and I get paid the same, who's keeping all that new value?"
this post was submitted on 04 May 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
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- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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- Better and fewer working hours.
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If your productivity doubles, they will lay off half the people, and all gains disappear upwards. It's already happening.
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This reminds me of this old productivity / salary chart that shows how fucked we are.
great but there are more studies about it just look up salary vs productivity
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What amazes me is how many people believe they will get universal basic income from the pedophile tech bro overlords who don’t pay taxes are actively gutting the meager safety net and worker protections we have. The cognitive dissonance is staggering
I would worry more about what conditions come with that UBI. They can make you agree to anything.
They all seem to just be lies dangled over everyone's heads to keep them working into the grave.
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30 hour workweek should have been 40 or 50 years ago. 30 would be late. We should be moving down to 20 about now.
I think you mean "we should be fighting hard for a 20 hour work week now, as hard as our ancestors fought for an 8 hour work day, and we should be willing to die for the cause, the way they died for theirs."
It should not even take that much. A big issue was unions somewhere in the 80's or even in the 70's stopped looking to shorten hours in favor of increased wages with overtime. The membership were easily swayed by time and a half. This lead to the reversal of the 40 hour week. More than 40 became more normal than 40. Of course then over time they have gotten rid of access to time and a half and more defining of roles as exempt.
Despite having full industrial machines, some workers here in a milk factory work for 24h in a row and rest for 48h, mathematically it's the same as working 8h a day but who tf does that to their workers? another tomato factory I worked at kicked most of their workers and increased work time to 12h a day, everyday, even weekends, no shitty breaks, only 30min for lunch; bosses really don't care, whether they have machines or not, they just don't care for us.
Worse, there's actual practical evidence that a 4-day workweek for the same pay as the 5-day one still makes the company more money and the workers happier and healthier, but adoption is still glacial.
Every little luxury we have with working, from safety to days off, is paid for in blood.
Even things like the 15 minute break.
Companies will begrudgingly give you the bare minimum they're mandated to, and pretend you're only getting it out of their sheer appreciation and benevolence.
Maddening.
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It's something of a joke that office workers do maybe 2-3 hours of work a day.
Or, at least, they did. And now offices are playing the "how many people can we lay off before the system collapses" game
It’s not a joke, there’s been studies done that prove it. Its closer to 50/50 iirc though. So 4 hours of an 8 hour shift is wasted.
But that also includes stuff like meetings and water cooler talk. Socializing has its benefits, but hard to quantify.
It’s not a joke, there’s been studies done that prove it.
I mean, more that it's a joke that we have to sit in an office for 8+ hours to do 3 hours of work.
So 4 hours of an 8 hour shift is wasted.
I think it's unreasonable to call it "wasted". Like telling a pro-athlete "if you're not running the ball continuously for every minute of the game you're wasting your potential".
Some of it is socializing (which has knock on benefits). Some of it is simply resting/recovery (because intellectual labor takes real energy and people get exhausted). Some of it is bureaucracy.
The real gains of IT are in the speed of data transfer and processing. That saves human labor to a degree, but it also proliferates the labor. Excel allows every Mom & Pop accounting firm to do what required an army of NASA "computers" 60 years ago. But because everyone is doing this level of rigorous, high speed accounting, it actually requires more overall work, not less.
The individuals in question are no more or less efficient today. They were taking coffee breaks, long lunches, and clocking out early to play golf at NASA, too.
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There is no war but class war.
also the increase 30-40+hrs is design to exhaust people so they are to tired to protest for reforms socially, financially and to keep people disengaged from politics/ and information.
It's not just that technology doesn't shorten labour time on it's own. It's that technology disrupts the status quo.
A union uses strikes, sabotage, work stoppages, and everything they can to get an agreement that only a master weaver is allowed to sell woven products, and that anybody who wants to become a master weaver must first serve a 7 year apprenticeship. Then weaving machines are invented. The disruption isn't merely that a master weaver can make a woven product in a much shorter time and the additional profit goes to the owner of the machine. It's that now the owner of the machine is hiring orphan children to run, clean and fix the machines and the master weavers are unemployed. And, the government, rather than enforcing the laws about 7 years apprenticeships pass new laws to make the destruction of machines punishable by the death penalty.
New technology doesn't just mean that workers have to fight to get better treatment than they currently have. It means an uphill fight just to get the same level of treatment they had before the introduction of that new technology. Just to give a simple example of something that happened within the last few decades: from 5pm to 9am people were off work, and weekends were free. Then phones, cell phones smart phones, etc. meant that it was much easier to get in touch with an employee during those hours. Now many people's time off isn't truly free time because they can be forced into working (even if it's just replying to a message) during their time off.
The bosses are much more likely to shorten the work week while shortening pay even more and then using the "not full time" to reduce any benefits. Be wary.
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They didn't just hand us the forty hour workweek. You can thank the early unions for that. Organizations like this.
If anything we're back sliding in the other direction and I think one of the most troubling things I've noticed is that workers don't see unions as workers fighting together but another organization they can complain to.
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My union had been fighting for 32 hours for years. Right when I retired, the college agreed to 36.
I'm "lucky" to have the option of a compressed 4x10 work week
the Friday off is beautiful. if I had a commute, doing that 20% less often that would be a big plus too. but the fact that this is presented as a perk and not a standard option, as well as the requirement to often work on my "weekend" (Friday aka unscheduled day) kind of makes it less of a perk
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Or Henry Ford oddly enough
That was back before it was ruled illegal to not always prioritize profit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
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*fucking
So I used to work in industrial automation, and I did see a factory owner buy a robot to automate a task because it was a brain meltingly simple task that was unpopular with his workers. The robot was slower, and more expensive than a human.
It was taking a small piece of metal from a stack and putting it in a machine and pushing a button (not sure if he had a two-hand-no-tie-down set up) then taking the now bent piece of metal out of the machine and putting it on a stack. I think they had about 8 hours production per week of demand for the part.
He didn't do it out of the kindness of his heart but because he got tired of paying recruiters to find people willing to do it.
Yup.
Workers have to fight hard for every little thing, which is why it's so sad to see us back pedal by electing born rich anti-worker dipshits into the highest offices in the land. We're losing things that will take years and a lot of struggle to get back.
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