Less incentive to waste time, more ability to focus on work, and a population suddenly increasing their potential time as consumers by 50%? The capitalists should be drooling over it as much as the socialists. It's like increasing the population of some markets by half for free without any additional housing costs.

And it helps with unemployment and makes more of the population productive.

I truly don’t see how doing so would adversely affect any company. If they need the additional labor an extra eight hours can provide, they can hire someone else at 32 hours/week to cover it with an overlapping schedule. If the business is smaller, they can pay overtime.

Anecdotally, my own job doesn’t require me to work eight hours every day. Shit, I’m lucky to do four hours of actual work in a day. The amount of work ebbs and flows, but I find myself more often than not watching YouTube on my work computer simply because there’s literally no more work for the day.

naturally the talking heads on fox who work 3 hours a day are upset

What would be curious to see, are effects on the wider economy (i.e. main street).

Having an extra day during the week would mean more hobbies, travel, purchases, doctor visits, etc etc....

Here is the actual bill. As far as I can tell, all it really does is make some wording substitutions and redefinitions to the original 1940 bill.

What I find interesting is that it addresses weekly pay, assuming salaries workers. What happens to hourly employees? Will the employer be required to up their hourly rate to compensate for the 8 hour loss? People are already stretched thin enough, an 8 hour loss for hourly workers would be devastating in many cases.

There would also need to be payroll tax adjustments on the employer side regarding hourly workers. Payroll taxes generally end up being about 90% of an employee's wage added on to their gross wage (at least here in California), so while employees see a great benefit of increased pay and/or reduced hours, this would absolutely screw small/medium businesses that already operate on tight margins. I operate in the construction industry, and dropping down to 4 days would delay projects even more, and having to pay overtime on a fifth day at increased hourly wages would be prohibitively expensive that most wouldn't do it.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think this is a step in the right direction, but I think there needs to be a good balance for both employees and employers. I know online communities like to paint all companies as evil, but I do my damnedest to take care of my guys and provide good jobs with great pay and benefits while also giving my customers reasonable prices in a state that's already stupid amounts of expensive to do business in, and I'm not penny pinching or being anal about my bottom line. Stuff like this without consideration of the impacts of small businesses is how you end up with mega corps that are the only ones that can afford to stay in business.

I think I recently saw an article about a trial of the 32-hour work week in the UK that most of the companies ended up sticking with.

I work at a smallish company that has to be really precise with how much time is charged to specific (mainly government) programs, but there’s a lot of downtime. I think this would really help.

John Maynard Keynes, basically the founder of modern, macroeconomic theory predicted in 1930 that his grandchildren would only be working 15 hours a week. Ironically, up until the 80’s in the US, average work hours per employee per week was trending down and had it continued would have gotten as low as 15 by now (I think, can’t perfectly recall the trend line)

id be happy if i could work 40 hours a week and not be freaking on call all the time.

maybe he could have proposed this when there was actually any chance of it passing, instead of waiting to deploy it as election fodder. who am I kidding, there was never any chance of it passing.

I love Bernie, but all his bills are so pie in the sky, they never have any chance of passing. He's the great hope, that's always dashed on the rocks. Unless we king him...

Yeah. Okay. Good.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: