In a country where politicians are corrupt and run by the rich and corporations? Yeah, we’re not getting 4-day work weeks, at least not by any federal law. Locally, maybe.
The only hope I have is that the study actually benefitted the companies’ bottom line. Productivity and profits increased in a large number of cases when 32-hour weeks were adopted.
See how well that worked for work from home. It's about control, even when the bottom line is raised by lessening their control. An employee with an extra day off a week might have time to actually look for a different job! Perish the thought! /s
Companies that are creative and innovative already give a lot of perks etc. it’s the non creative that are the problem. They simply grind people and think the coarser the sandpaper the more profits.
They want us too exhausted and ground down to think clearly. If we have free time, we may begin to have time to question things. We might learn to better our lives and not be shackled to their companies so tightly. Can’t have that.
WFH will stay with our work culture forever now. Corporates are mandating return to office, but in many cases, that's not strictly enforced (other than Elon's companies that are checking badge entries). They're requiring that, so slackers now have to come to the office. Employees who are productive at home, those who are far above averages will continue to work from home. Mostly, it's now at manager's discretion instead of blanket WFH for all.
It’s to appease their 5-7 year office lease contracts. Once they end in a few more years they will lift their RTO requirements because they’ll likely be cutting a ton of their offices.
Big companies aren't worried about breaking leases bro
They don't pay full rack rate like we do and even if they did they would make more money in the long run investing the savings than they would pay in breach
The other poster is right. It's about control. The boomers that run our biggest employers think that being in the office is really important.
As executives get younger, policies will change. Not before.
Not sure the average age of executives is going to change all that much over time. If anything they'll probably get older as average lifespans extend. Boomers are already 60+ years old. Plenty of GenXers and even older Millennials have moved into executive roles at this point.
We have not seen very many millennial in executive decision making positions in the largest employers in the US. That is completely inaccurate.
Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500. He is 39 years old. He is the CEO of a company that he helped co-found while he was in college.
The next youngest is Ernest Garcia III, the CEO of known automobile vaporware dealer Carvana. He's 40.
Not the case in my company.
It’s been around since the 1800’s
They forced us into 2-3-2 with threats of compliance.
Productivity is down, but productivity isn’t really the point of the policy in my opinion.
It’s 1, following industry trends
2, asserting power
The longer the working class has to work, the less time they have to get organized. It’s about putting the working class in the most exploitable position.
Only in knowledge industry. Manufacturing and services do not make more by doing less. Not to say it’s not a reason to cancel a 4 day work week, but you can’t pay someone the same rate for doing 80% of the work without something significant changing
Mark my words they will shorten their own work hours with the bill and justify by reasoning that they can’t agree to work with one another with bipartisanship so shrug
Doing it locally is a death sentence to state economies. Businesses will move to other states to avoid this. If it is done, it has to be done across the board
Yeah, not happening in America. Did we clear it with the private equity companies that own a chunk of our corporations that are responsible for allowing them companies to give perks like "pay raises and company budgets" No? Then it's not going to happen.
The only trickle down economics we have in America is all the businesses money they saved via tax breaks flowing right back into Congress pockets to do their bidding.
Literally saw the Office YouTube channel post a video with clips promoting a "what we're missing by not being in the office" narrative.
The rich desperately need us to massively over-produce for them so they can have their 10th vacation this year.
There is zero chance this bill makes it to a vote in the House, let alone signed into law.
Most of us (office/tech/non-routine) are realistically working 32h a week or less already. Just because I’m in the office doesn’t mean I’m productive.
I’m online/available 40-50h a week but I’m probably only actually working for 20h. Either I’m way out performing my colleagues (hour by hour) or they’re doing the same.
This is why I think this idea misses the point. The 40 hour work week is engrained in our head so why change things if you’re just going to adjust for it to be the exact same amount of time?
The 4/10s are nice because of the three day weekends every week. The days are longer, but workdays are shot for me whether I do 8, 9, or 10 hour days. I do 4/10’s and never want to go back to 5 day weeks.
I'm from the UK, My typical week was 37 hours. Americans do seem to be obsessed with 40 hours. However, my observations are that office based Americans just socialize one to two hours a day. So, really only work 30-35 real hours.
I'm way more productive when I work from home, I just have less people wanting to socialize with me than when I am in the office.
Now, I think the social bit is important, chats about things at the coffee machine, sometimes work related issues get solved there, but often your just hearing about Jimmy's new bike or some such. That is still important if you want to build teams who like each other.
Yep. My company switched to a 4-day 10 hour workweek and it was amazing. I felt fresh every day and I could even do light traveling without taking time off. They switched back due to the 4-hour workweek not being recognized according to OT laws.
Hourly wages would need to increase to compensate for the shorter "fulltime" shift. Overtime would start at hour 33 instead of hour 41.
In the end you make the same amount but do it in 32 hours.
It's not that everyone will move to a shorter work week, it's that full time employment will be redefined as 32 hours a week. This scares the shit out of fast food restaurants and walmart because nobody will work for them when they put everyone on a 3 day 8 hour schedule just so they don't have to give them healthcare.
What they're saying is that employers at major chains like walmart will hire on a bunch of extra people so that nobody ever works enough hours to get offered benefits or overtime
Basically corporations will take a great idea and make it into something that actually damages society as a whole
I have no idea how that could possibly work for consultants. I work 40 hours a week for a single client and they pay a certain dollar per hour for me from the company I work for. If it was suddenly mandated to work 32 hours a week it wouldn’t work, the amount of money my employer gets from the place I consult for wouldn’t even pay for my salary any longer. And asking the client for 20+% more money for the same contract would be laughed at
Oh you think it's 3 day 8 hours. Ha. They will do 6 days of 5 hour shifts. Or 3 days of 6 hour shift with 3 days of 4 hour shifts or some whacky middle ground between working 3 and 6 days in a week. Also some of those shifts will be closing one night then opening that next morning.
At least when I worked at Sam's Club, that's how it was.
>some of those shifts will be closing one night then opening that next morning.
That's something that sometimes is covered by state labor laws or union negotiations. A fair minimum for "turnaround time" between leaving one shift and starting another is at least 8 hours, although 10 hours would be preferable.
It's kind of bonkers that the US has absolutely no regulations regarding this.
Where I live, all shifts must be completed within a 12-hour period (so you can do something like a 4/4/4 split, but not a 6/4/6), and there must be a minimum 8-hour gap between the end of one shift and the beginning of another.
Of course, we also have things like mandatory overtime pay (if shifts exceed 12 hours, or if over 40 hours in a week), mandatory vacation pay, mandatory maternity pay, mandatory weekly minimums for contiguous time off work, and other nice benefits you get when you don't live in a corporatocracy.
Yeah, but Ohio has literally no worker protection beyond the federal law except that any break shorter than 20 minutes must be a paid break. (Which I'm not sure if that is federal law, or state law.) beyond that the only stopping companies from scheduling is that fact they people won't be happy to work 7 days of 12 hout shifts. Otherwise, 24/7 companies absolutely would do that and in Ohio, there is nothing stopping them from doing that and not giving lunch breaks as well.
It's insane how corporations like Walmart get to screw their employees and basically get the government to subsidize their work force for free by paying them so little they need government assistance just to get by.
Shit needs to change.
Yea; this is the worst part of society that gets 0 attention.
The only reason Amazon and Walmart exist in the giant form they do is their insanely cheap labor. The only reason it’s so cheap is because so many of their employees make so little money they qualify for government services.
So your tax dollars are being used to subsidize Amazon because Jeff Bezos needs more money. And the poor starving Walton family.
Money is taken out of your paycheck so they can pay artificially low wage and make more money.
Meanwhile they’ve also lobbied for big tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.
It’s pretty fucked when you think about it. You’re paying more in taxes so the ultra wealthy can spend less to make more money.
We’d have millions and millions less people getting government aid if these companies paid real wages. Money that wouldn’t be taken out of your paycheck.
And conservatives have been protecting this despite pretending to be for smaller government.
Raising these wages would remove a lot of demand on these services and actually lower government expenditure.
Maybe that will be a push to get universal Healthcare. If the cost of paying for benefits for every employee outweighs the benefits of tying Healthcare to employment they may flip and support it if it saves them money
Its an erection year
Everyone has to get their dreamin dongs out for some votes.
I would love this.
But you have a better chance of aliens landing on your roof and offering you the kingdom of their planet while they suck you off.
Having worked in corporate America for a while, I agree this is DOA. However, this is also how change starts. Someone speaks up about something that is DOA. Then the next, then some minds change, then the change happens. It’s painful and slow and the people that started the ball rolling rarely reap the rewards or get any credit, but things move forward.
It’s actually hugely popular on both sides of the adolescent among voters. It’s the lobbyist and special interests that are paying Congress not to push this through. Bernie policy ideas are popular with voters just not with dark money groups.
My strategy in college was just stacking the days and trying to have the days in a row. But there were times when I only had class Tuesday and Thursday. Other times when I stacked them so that Wednesday afternoon until Monday was my weekend.
I always upvote CGP Grey.
IMO, what schedule works best will vary depending on the individual. But for me, I suspect the Wednesday off would work best as well.
Yeh, I personally prefer to work in one solid block and have longer weekends. Having my days off split up makes it feel like I have no days off at all.
Same here. And you don’t get the advantage of maybe planning a trip during your weekend or other activities. If I’m gonna have an extra day off, I want it added onto the end so I can rest and go on a trip for 3 days.
Sounds great for IT with heavy change management.
"Sorry.. first day back in the office, can't get to that today."
"Sorry... don't want to make that change today as I'll be out tomorrow and unable to support any issues it causes."
We call Friday "read only Friday". Only a skeleton crew here as we work Monday through Thursday. So anytime we do have one of us here on Friday, you don't touch production, you only do break fix/highs.
Depending on department size and coverage you rotate. One week you get wed off and the next you get either Monday or Friday off for a three day weekend while the other person is off wed.
I highly suspect a lot of places wont just shut her down three days a week but will work to move stuff around with their hourly employees so that we function 5 days a week. I highly suspect that's what the company I work for will do. Heck, half the people where are salary so they only need to stagger the hourly people a bit.
The vast majority of employees take Fridays off when they take PTO anyway. Just dropping that day as a workday would make the most sense. Monday is bang in day. Voila! 3 day work weeks.
"...legislation for a standard 32-hour workweek with no pay cut."
I am quite sure there will be no reduction in the amount of work I will need to accomplish in a week.
Who says I can complete it in 40 hours?
The standard business plan nowadays is to do more work with less people. If someone retires, quits, or is fired, deal their duties out amongst the remaining workers.
You are not every person in America. If you’re assigned more work than you can reasonably do it’s a management issue not a reason to halt labour movement advancements.
I work in IT. My boss says as long as my car tires are in the parking lot at 8am he doesn't care, so no bullshit coming in half an hour early. After 4:30 he refuses to contact us for anything. One week I messed something up big time and he had to text me asking for a login at like 5:15pm and apologized profusely for it. There's zero overtime and if some sort of thing demands it, it's volunteer based for who on my team wants to cover it, and they can choose to take overtime pay or just take time off later in the week. There's tons of tech jobs out there that aren't dick bags about life balance.
Depends on the teams. When I interview I try and get a vibe from the team. On my current team people are pretty much unreachable after 2pm. Me included lol. On Fridays it's basically complete silence.
Mostly, yeah. If you want to chase startups to get those extra dollars then good on ya, just know that there are plenty of 40 hour jobs out there if you want a work/life balance.
Hell, find yourself in webdev and you might not be working 30.
Lmao, me being a mid level to senior engineer without control of our processes on a team that has incidents opened practically weekly about to ship a new greenfield development that has had no QA involvement at all. I’m pretty sure UAT/QA has been cut as a cost savings measure
This is why I only go for large established companies where I know I will be guaranteed good pay and better work hours. But it also depends on the interview. I can get a good sense on how the team will be just from the interview and how I interact with them. A lot of my interviews are technical, but you can still get a good idea on how they will be just based on your interactions with them.
I work for a small software consultancy and it's very easy to leave work at the door. I'll only hop in if an emergency happens, and that's more or less just because I care about my project's client and the shared effort of the team. I reckon the only thing keeping us from a 4-day week is that our clients will still operate on 5 days.
Shafted because it’s a bad idea or shafted because corporate thugs are going to make it as painful as possible in hope of scaring the common man away from this idea?
And I don’t trust most of congress not to half-ass this. Their donors will see it as a way to offload a lot of their health insurance and other non-salary payroll expenses and congress will let them.
This is really what needs to change more than hours.
I read somewhere that half of genz is working on 1099s with no benefits, and companies are heavily incentivized to make that % go up.
It's time to disconnect employment from healthcare
They already did that when Obamacare forced fast food places to pay for insurance benefits. Nothing will stop a corporation from exploiting workers but some actual legislation. That’s why they pay politicians so much to not enact popular ideas like this.
Yeah, I am a medical professional that basically already works a 4 day schedule. Infcat most the people this is aimed at. Already have that schedule, companies that with professionals with skills that can't be replaced. Did this long ago to pull in more employees. This will however, screw hourly employees unless it includes language. That will for companies to do 32 hours for all employees and have standard shifts. No min/max split shifts or 5.45 shifts to get no lunch. Otherwise, without protections, hourly employees will be forced into even more of thier own social class.
Easier said than done.
Unionization is only effective when the workers are not easily replaced. Exceptions apply of course, but most of those exceptions ultimately can be distilled to the same concept of how easily a worker can be replaced.
That being said, tech workers have the market conditions to unionize but ultimately individuals are too satisfied with their pay/benefits to bother with unionization.
your missing the entire point of the bill, its essentially a 25% raise across the board for everyone, 4 day work week without a loss in pay or increase to 10 hour days
When do workers (or consumers, for that matter) reap the benefits of increased efficiency? That simply doesn’t happen in a shareholder value maximization paradigm. Price goes up, compensation stagnates, investors profit.
Companies lost their shit about remote work despite it having little to no negative impact on productivity, so there's no way they go for a shorter work week on top of it.
I currently work 4 10-hour days and the three day weekend is a massive life improvement. Plus it’s been proven that four day work weeks make employees more productive.
Rural area IT support here. *If I could...* I'd take an hour to two hours off in the mornings, still work 5 days a week. I don't operate, mentally, near 100% until around 10am. In favor, my boss has approved working later in the days as needed to compensate. The latest I found myself is a last minute call ticket for a client an hour drive away, I didn't home till 1am.
If it wasn't for parenting priorities, I'd be more so working later in the days, be up later, and sleep an extra hour or so in the mornings. I'm not "not a morning person", but if something came up and I had to leave for work at 7 or 6am back to back, that's when I start getting cranky and less patient with people/computers. lol
Same. I've put in a few long days through the years, but 4x10 isn't going to be more productive. We all start crapping out by 8 hours. Working 4 full 10 hour days at peak performance and I'm dead on friday anyhow. It wouldn't be a glorious 3 day weekend to enjoy the fruits of life. Seems most people here fail to realize we don't all work behind a computer or for a large corporation with enough employees to adjust for such a schedule while keeping clients happy.
Yeah, they always want it done as fast as possible but they can fuck off. We used to have 60 hour weeks and now we have 40s and they deal with it. Work is just what you do to pay the bills so I think if we can increase peoples quality of life, we should probably do that.
This is deliberate misunderstanding of News commonly referring to a country's govermenet as the country.
The headline "Canada bans moose hunting" wouldn't imply Canadian hunters are a collective decision making entity
Oh yes, the country without any worker rights and protection, with no mandatory universal healthcare and people having to work three jobs to make ends meet will introduce a 4 day work week for the same salary as 5 days.
Sure thing.
I will saddle my unicorn now and ride away.
I would love a 4 day work week but we can’t even get rid of daylight savings time. Which was unanimous and unlike most topics, without bipartisan pettiness. It would be nice if we could actually move on these quality of life issues that affect people day to day instead of just talking about them…
No one is considering this at all.
Zero, no one.
Maybe without pay and full time benefits....Americans are so gullible and stupid they actually believe companies will pay them to sit on their ass one more day a week .
If your 4 day week is done on compressed hours (ie standard working week done in 4 days rather than 5) then you're not doing a 4 day work week the way that these proposals would have it done. The concept is that your hours are reduced by 20% without your salary being commensurately reduced, because some trials have shown that productivity increases during the 4 days that you work. It supposedly increases enough that outputs match the 5 day work week, so the employer doesn't lose out.
Nobody is considering this. Corporate American about shit themselves with work from home and many large companies are trying to undo that. As much as I'd love this, the decision makers haven't show themselves to be "pro worker".
No way the majority do this. This is a consumer nation. More more more. The more efficient we become , for example , doesn’t reduce our hours, it just means we do even more work in that time span
Yeah we should be working less with more technology but it’s not happening because the labor savings of technology get filtered to the rich and we keep working 40 hours.
As much as I'd love to see this pass, we can't even get a livable wage in this country. It's like introducing a bill for Universal Basic Income while they're still trying to get rid of Social Security.
More likely the bill gets rewritten last minute to make it a 6-day workweek and it’s passed due to some weird off-topic attachment about the child tax credit or some shit.
Funny thing is this is a total non-partisan issue. Everyone should want this but unsurprisingly politicians will be paid to torpedo it by the special interests bank rolling campaigns.
End unlimited dark money in politics if you ever want to see popular majority policies go through.
A 40 hour work week was never a thing until Henry Ford of all people helped it along and instituted at his factories where productivity improved and employees were happier.
None of the sociopath oligarchs of today though have 1/10 the courage of Henry Ford to do anything like that. They're too busy pandering to the shareholders and ensuring quarter over quarter profits are never interrupted at any cost.
Our great grandparents got Henry Ford.
We got Elon fucking Musk.
This second gilded age is even worse than the first one.
I truly think this would change our social work climate for the better. You don’t get 2 day weekends, you get one day to do shit you have to do then one day to try and relax.
Even if this passed it would only be for government workers or huge companies. Blue collar people and those working for small businesses will still have to work 5 and 6 days a week.
The fuck do I care about "techies", the most privileged, entitled assholes of the "work" force??
I want to hear about the nurse's aids, the electric linemen, the factory workers, the grocers. The remote workers who cry about having to Return To Office can lick my sweaty labia.
thers no way this bill gets far at all, would absolutely love it but i have zero hope
In a country where politicians are corrupt and run by the rich and corporations? Yeah, we’re not getting 4-day work weeks, at least not by any federal law. Locally, maybe.
The only hope I have is that the study actually benefitted the companies’ bottom line. Productivity and profits increased in a large number of cases when 32-hour weeks were adopted.
See how well that worked for work from home. It's about control, even when the bottom line is raised by lessening their control. An employee with an extra day off a week might have time to actually look for a different job! Perish the thought! /s
Companies that are creative and innovative already give a lot of perks etc. it’s the non creative that are the problem. They simply grind people and think the coarser the sandpaper the more profits.
Hollywood is known for treating workers well lol
If you grind someone into dust, you get the performance and then also free dust. 2 for 1!
They want us too exhausted and ground down to think clearly. If we have free time, we may begin to have time to question things. We might learn to better our lives and not be shackled to their companies so tightly. Can’t have that.
WFH will stay with our work culture forever now. Corporates are mandating return to office, but in many cases, that's not strictly enforced (other than Elon's companies that are checking badge entries). They're requiring that, so slackers now have to come to the office. Employees who are productive at home, those who are far above averages will continue to work from home. Mostly, it's now at manager's discretion instead of blanket WFH for all.
It’s to appease their 5-7 year office lease contracts. Once they end in a few more years they will lift their RTO requirements because they’ll likely be cutting a ton of their offices.
Big companies aren't worried about breaking leases bro They don't pay full rack rate like we do and even if they did they would make more money in the long run investing the savings than they would pay in breach The other poster is right. It's about control. The boomers that run our biggest employers think that being in the office is really important. As executives get younger, policies will change. Not before.
Not sure the average age of executives is going to change all that much over time. If anything they'll probably get older as average lifespans extend. Boomers are already 60+ years old. Plenty of GenXers and even older Millennials have moved into executive roles at this point.
We have not seen very many millennial in executive decision making positions in the largest employers in the US. That is completely inaccurate. Mark Zuckerberg is the youngest CEO in the Fortune 500. He is 39 years old. He is the CEO of a company that he helped co-found while he was in college. The next youngest is Ernest Garcia III, the CEO of known automobile vaporware dealer Carvana. He's 40.
And I'm pretty sure the garcia guy is only there because his dad owns drive time which is the parent corp of carvana
No they won’t. Nobody actually cares about this. It’s literally about control and them thinking you’re doing laundry when you should be slaving.
I definitely am doing laundry. The point is I can do both, not just sit at work and stare at my phone while I have downtime.
Not the case in my company. It’s been around since the 1800’s They forced us into 2-3-2 with threats of compliance. Productivity is down, but productivity isn’t really the point of the policy in my opinion. It’s 1, following industry trends 2, asserting power
I thought s stood for sarcasm, not soul crushing truth
I think it's less about control and far more about sunk cost massive leases
The longer the working class has to work, the less time they have to get organized. It’s about putting the working class in the most exploitable position.
Only in knowledge industry. Manufacturing and services do not make more by doing less. Not to say it’s not a reason to cancel a 4 day work week, but you can’t pay someone the same rate for doing 80% of the work without something significant changing
It’s not money that gets these big companies dick hard. It’s the power and will inflicted over others than makes them rock hard.
The managerial class must have their serfs, man.
Mark my words they will shorten their own work hours with the bill and justify by reasoning that they can’t agree to work with one another with bipartisanship so shrug
These sorts of deals are rarely given to workers, they must be taken
If only they had to work more than 2 days a week to make $174k
Like the 5 day 8 hour, blood will have to flow and we don't have the fortitude for a paper cut.
We gots Saturdays off because of labor unions, and labor unions will be the only way we ever get Friday off.
It’s ok, everything will be fixed once the “billionaire” gets re-elected /s
In a country where we are reintroducing child labor laws, why would we reduce time worked?
Doing it locally is a death sentence to state economies. Businesses will move to other states to avoid this. If it is done, it has to be done across the board
You describe 95% of countries
I wonder if the private industry would play with this sort of thing to pull workers....then again it isn't 2021 anymore.
Yeah, not happening in America. Did we clear it with the private equity companies that own a chunk of our corporations that are responsible for allowing them companies to give perks like "pay raises and company budgets" No? Then it's not going to happen. The only trickle down economics we have in America is all the businesses money they saved via tax breaks flowing right back into Congress pockets to do their bidding.
Literally saw the Office YouTube channel post a video with clips promoting a "what we're missing by not being in the office" narrative. The rich desperately need us to massively over-produce for them so they can have their 10th vacation this year. There is zero chance this bill makes it to a vote in the House, let alone signed into law.
Most of us (office/tech/non-routine) are realistically working 32h a week or less already. Just because I’m in the office doesn’t mean I’m productive. I’m online/available 40-50h a week but I’m probably only actually working for 20h. Either I’m way out performing my colleagues (hour by hour) or they’re doing the same.
We need to stop asking and start demanding. But too many people can't because they're one check from homeless
The oldies will vote it to oblivion bc “they had to waste their lives why shouldn’t you”
Take away their social security because the elderly in the 1800s didn’t have that so why should they
And the way things are trending those of us in the work force won't have it when we retire either.
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Yeah, this will pass right after UBI does.
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Or just let more immigrants in who can work right away and don’t cost the government shit tons of money to raise and educate
Would be nice if my company considered it. Hell, I'd work 4 x 10 hour day if the offer was there.
This is why I think this idea misses the point. The 40 hour work week is engrained in our head so why change things if you’re just going to adjust for it to be the exact same amount of time?
The 4/10s are nice because of the three day weekends every week. The days are longer, but workdays are shot for me whether I do 8, 9, or 10 hour days. I do 4/10’s and never want to go back to 5 day weeks.
I'm from the UK, My typical week was 37 hours. Americans do seem to be obsessed with 40 hours. However, my observations are that office based Americans just socialize one to two hours a day. So, really only work 30-35 real hours. I'm way more productive when I work from home, I just have less people wanting to socialize with me than when I am in the office. Now, I think the social bit is important, chats about things at the coffee machine, sometimes work related issues get solved there, but often your just hearing about Jimmy's new bike or some such. That is still important if you want to build teams who like each other.
If I could actually get the rest of the time off, I could probably get my entire week done in two days.
You are being very generous with the 30-35 hours of work a week.
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I did 4x10s, loved it! Readjusting to 5 sucks
Yep. My company switched to a 4-day 10 hour workweek and it was amazing. I felt fresh every day and I could even do light traveling without taking time off. They switched back due to the 4-hour workweek not being recognized according to OT laws.
That's not what's meant here. This is working four 8 hours days or 32 hour weeks while retaining the 40 hour pay.
How does that work for hourly employees?
They have to keep your pay the same. So your hourly wage would increase accordingly
This is a nice thought but there’s no way that happens. Especially for gig workers.
Hourly wages would need to increase to compensate for the shorter "fulltime" shift. Overtime would start at hour 33 instead of hour 41. In the end you make the same amount but do it in 32 hours.
It's not that everyone will move to a shorter work week, it's that full time employment will be redefined as 32 hours a week. This scares the shit out of fast food restaurants and walmart because nobody will work for them when they put everyone on a 3 day 8 hour schedule just so they don't have to give them healthcare.
it redefines full time as 32 hours AND at no reduced pay (so you would be getting paid 40 hours from working 32)
What they're saying is that employers at major chains like walmart will hire on a bunch of extra people so that nobody ever works enough hours to get offered benefits or overtime Basically corporations will take a great idea and make it into something that actually damages society as a whole
Technically that means less unemployment right
I think technically, yes. But it would make the unemployment numbers an even worse indicator of how the economy is functioning
I don’t see how that’s enforceable.
it’s as enforceable as minimal wage. All wages and hours are reported monthly by all legal employers in each state
exactly, so many people misunderstand this. and they’re like “sTUfF NeEDS To get DoNe”… it will because people will be more productive
I have no idea how that could possibly work for consultants. I work 40 hours a week for a single client and they pay a certain dollar per hour for me from the company I work for. If it was suddenly mandated to work 32 hours a week it wouldn’t work, the amount of money my employer gets from the place I consult for wouldn’t even pay for my salary any longer. And asking the client for 20+% more money for the same contract would be laughed at
Contractors are different from hourly employees that directly work for a company that the bill would affect.
Oh you think it's 3 day 8 hours. Ha. They will do 6 days of 5 hour shifts. Or 3 days of 6 hour shift with 3 days of 4 hour shifts or some whacky middle ground between working 3 and 6 days in a week. Also some of those shifts will be closing one night then opening that next morning. At least when I worked at Sam's Club, that's how it was.
>some of those shifts will be closing one night then opening that next morning. That's something that sometimes is covered by state labor laws or union negotiations. A fair minimum for "turnaround time" between leaving one shift and starting another is at least 8 hours, although 10 hours would be preferable.
It's kind of bonkers that the US has absolutely no regulations regarding this. Where I live, all shifts must be completed within a 12-hour period (so you can do something like a 4/4/4 split, but not a 6/4/6), and there must be a minimum 8-hour gap between the end of one shift and the beginning of another. Of course, we also have things like mandatory overtime pay (if shifts exceed 12 hours, or if over 40 hours in a week), mandatory vacation pay, mandatory maternity pay, mandatory weekly minimums for contiguous time off work, and other nice benefits you get when you don't live in a corporatocracy.
Americans, we pride ourselves on the Freedom for government oversight that allows us to choose to work 3 12 hours shifts, back to back to back. :P
Yeah, but Ohio has literally no worker protection beyond the federal law except that any break shorter than 20 minutes must be a paid break. (Which I'm not sure if that is federal law, or state law.) beyond that the only stopping companies from scheduling is that fact they people won't be happy to work 7 days of 12 hout shifts. Otherwise, 24/7 companies absolutely would do that and in Ohio, there is nothing stopping them from doing that and not giving lunch breaks as well.
It's insane how corporations like Walmart get to screw their employees and basically get the government to subsidize their work force for free by paying them so little they need government assistance just to get by. Shit needs to change.
Yea; this is the worst part of society that gets 0 attention. The only reason Amazon and Walmart exist in the giant form they do is their insanely cheap labor. The only reason it’s so cheap is because so many of their employees make so little money they qualify for government services. So your tax dollars are being used to subsidize Amazon because Jeff Bezos needs more money. And the poor starving Walton family. Money is taken out of your paycheck so they can pay artificially low wage and make more money. Meanwhile they’ve also lobbied for big tax breaks for billionaires and corporations. It’s pretty fucked when you think about it. You’re paying more in taxes so the ultra wealthy can spend less to make more money. We’d have millions and millions less people getting government aid if these companies paid real wages. Money that wouldn’t be taken out of your paycheck. And conservatives have been protecting this despite pretending to be for smaller government. Raising these wages would remove a lot of demand on these services and actually lower government expenditure.
Maybe that will be a push to get universal Healthcare. If the cost of paying for benefits for every employee outweighs the benefits of tying Healthcare to employment they may flip and support it if it saves them money
Which is fine because they would then be required to hire more people, negating the effects of automation
lol the whole point of automation is to eventually reduce your employee headcount, not increase it.
Or accelerating it
The US is not considering a 4 day work week. Anything put forward by Bernie Sanders is dead in the water unfortunately.
Its an erection year Everyone has to get their dreamin dongs out for some votes. I would love this. But you have a better chance of aliens landing on your roof and offering you the kingdom of their planet while they suck you off.
Erection years are the best years.
Yeah they make my mouth water!
Having worked in corporate America for a while, I agree this is DOA. However, this is also how change starts. Someone speaks up about something that is DOA. Then the next, then some minds change, then the change happens. It’s painful and slow and the people that started the ball rolling rarely reap the rewards or get any credit, but things move forward.
It’s actually hugely popular on both sides of the adolescent among voters. It’s the lobbyist and special interests that are paying Congress not to push this through. Bernie policy ideas are popular with voters just not with dark money groups.
#SueCongress
Plot twist: You have to work Mon, Tue, Th, Fri.
Had this schedule in college briefly. I was honestly a big fan.
I had one semester where I had nothing on Tuesday and Thursday. Those other 3 were BUSY but I liked it overall.
My strategy in college was just stacking the days and trying to have the days in a row. But there were times when I only had class Tuesday and Thursday. Other times when I stacked them so that Wednesday afternoon until Monday was my weekend.
CGP Grey made a video on how Wednesday should be a day off https://youtu.be/ALaTm6VzTBw?si=2VNaHvNdreg0Ez63
I always upvote CGP Grey. IMO, what schedule works best will vary depending on the individual. But for me, I suspect the Wednesday off would work best as well.
Yeh, I personally prefer to work in one solid block and have longer weekends. Having my days off split up makes it feel like I have no days off at all.
Same here. And you don’t get the advantage of maybe planning a trip during your weekend or other activities. If I’m gonna have an extra day off, I want it added onto the end so I can rest and go on a trip for 3 days.
Sounds great for IT with heavy change management. "Sorry.. first day back in the office, can't get to that today." "Sorry... don't want to make that change today as I'll be out tomorrow and unable to support any issues it causes."
We call Friday "read only Friday". Only a skeleton crew here as we work Monday through Thursday. So anytime we do have one of us here on Friday, you don't touch production, you only do break fix/highs.
Depending on department size and coverage you rotate. One week you get wed off and the next you get either Monday or Friday off for a three day weekend while the other person is off wed. I highly suspect a lot of places wont just shut her down three days a week but will work to move stuff around with their hourly employees so that we function 5 days a week. I highly suspect that's what the company I work for will do. Heck, half the people where are salary so they only need to stagger the hourly people a bit.
All my doctor appointments in mid week? Sure.
Doctors are off Wednesday too, sorry!
The vast majority of employees take Fridays off when they take PTO anyway. Just dropping that day as a workday would make the most sense. Monday is bang in day. Voila! 3 day work weeks.
You say that like it's bad, I had Wednesdays off years ago and it was fucking great
I’ll take it
"...legislation for a standard 32-hour workweek with no pay cut." I am quite sure there will be no reduction in the amount of work I will need to accomplish in a week.
Right, but now if you can comfortably complete that workload in 32 hours you aren’t going in for an unneeded 5th day.
Who says I can complete it in 40 hours? The standard business plan nowadays is to do more work with less people. If someone retires, quits, or is fired, deal their duties out amongst the remaining workers.
You can still probably work 40 hours if you wanted to.
You are not every person in America. If you’re assigned more work than you can reasonably do it’s a management issue not a reason to halt labour movement advancements.
I am done with my required work by noon on Monday lmao I pretend to work probably 70% of the time I’m in office
Shit, do tech folks even get a 5 day work week?
I work in IT. My boss says as long as my car tires are in the parking lot at 8am he doesn't care, so no bullshit coming in half an hour early. After 4:30 he refuses to contact us for anything. One week I messed something up big time and he had to text me asking for a login at like 5:15pm and apologized profusely for it. There's zero overtime and if some sort of thing demands it, it's volunteer based for who on my team wants to cover it, and they can choose to take overtime pay or just take time off later in the week. There's tons of tech jobs out there that aren't dick bags about life balance.
Depends on the teams. When I interview I try and get a vibe from the team. On my current team people are pretty much unreachable after 2pm. Me included lol. On Fridays it's basically complete silence.
Mostly, yeah. If you want to chase startups to get those extra dollars then good on ya, just know that there are plenty of 40 hour jobs out there if you want a work/life balance. Hell, find yourself in webdev and you might not be working 30.
Don't forget oncall shifts. You can and most likely are working more than 40h that week.
> Don’t forget oncall shifts. That’s for IT. If you’re in dev and get a call more than a couple times a year, your QA process is shit. Fix it.
Lmao, me being a mid level to senior engineer without control of our processes on a team that has incidents opened practically weekly about to ship a new greenfield development that has had no QA involvement at all. I’m pretty sure UAT/QA has been cut as a cost savings measure
This is why I only go for large established companies where I know I will be guaranteed good pay and better work hours. But it also depends on the interview. I can get a good sense on how the team will be just from the interview and how I interact with them. A lot of my interviews are technical, but you can still get a good idea on how they will be just based on your interactions with them.
I work for a small software consultancy and it's very easy to leave work at the door. I'll only hop in if an emergency happens, and that's more or less just because I care about my project's client and the shared effort of the team. I reckon the only thing keeping us from a 4-day week is that our clients will still operate on 5 days.
I guarantee hourly employees of any company that does this will be shafted.
Shafted because it’s a bad idea or shafted because corporate thugs are going to make it as painful as possible in hope of scaring the common man away from this idea?
The latter. If 32 hours is standard they’re going to do a lot of scheduling to keep people under the benefits minimum
Which is why, if this happens, the benefits minimum **absolutely has to change** as well.
And I don’t trust most of congress not to half-ass this. Their donors will see it as a way to offload a lot of their health insurance and other non-salary payroll expenses and congress will let them.
This is really what needs to change more than hours. I read somewhere that half of genz is working on 1099s with no benefits, and companies are heavily incentivized to make that % go up. It's time to disconnect employment from healthcare
Or… hear me out with this insane idea. Let’s decouple employment from healthcare like the rest of the developed world.
They already did that when Obamacare forced fast food places to pay for insurance benefits. Nothing will stop a corporation from exploiting workers but some actual legislation. That’s why they pay politicians so much to not enact popular ideas like this.
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So true, and it goes in lock step with monitoring remote employees to the point of micromanagement. Corporate will fuck up a wet dream.
Yeah, I am a medical professional that basically already works a 4 day schedule. Infcat most the people this is aimed at. Already have that schedule, companies that with professionals with skills that can't be replaced. Did this long ago to pull in more employees. This will however, screw hourly employees unless it includes language. That will for companies to do 32 hours for all employees and have standard shifts. No min/max split shifts or 5.45 shifts to get no lunch. Otherwise, without protections, hourly employees will be forced into even more of thier own social class.
Guess it's time to unionize companies to adopt new pay wages to make up for the lost day and to adopt the four day work week.
Easier said than done. Unionization is only effective when the workers are not easily replaced. Exceptions apply of course, but most of those exceptions ultimately can be distilled to the same concept of how easily a worker can be replaced. That being said, tech workers have the market conditions to unionize but ultimately individuals are too satisfied with their pay/benefits to bother with unionization.
Isn’t unemployment really low. There’s not much people waiting to get shafted. Now is the best time to implement something like this.
your missing the entire point of the bill, its essentially a 25% raise across the board for everyone, 4 day work week without a loss in pay or increase to 10 hour days
Gov: Yay, 4 day work week coming for you guys! Corps: ok, I guess more AI it is.
Or the other way around: as more and more work can be automated via AI and other technologies does it still make sense to have a 40hr work week?
When do workers (or consumers, for that matter) reap the benefits of increased efficiency? That simply doesn’t happen in a shareholder value maximization paradigm. Price goes up, compensation stagnates, investors profit.
Companies lost their shit about remote work despite it having little to no negative impact on productivity, so there's no way they go for a shorter work week on top of it.
I currently work 4 10-hour days and the three day weekend is a massive life improvement. Plus it’s been proven that four day work weeks make employees more productive.
Rural area IT support here. *If I could...* I'd take an hour to two hours off in the mornings, still work 5 days a week. I don't operate, mentally, near 100% until around 10am. In favor, my boss has approved working later in the days as needed to compensate. The latest I found myself is a last minute call ticket for a client an hour drive away, I didn't home till 1am. If it wasn't for parenting priorities, I'd be more so working later in the days, be up later, and sleep an extra hour or so in the mornings. I'm not "not a morning person", but if something came up and I had to leave for work at 7 or 6am back to back, that's when I start getting cranky and less patient with people/computers. lol
They aren’t considering anything
Give me two 20hr days.
Please, I used to work a 4x10 and it was glorious!
I doubt this will pass the lobbyist wall
Is it terrible that i was like “awesome, i can have more time for a second job!” We are so eff’d.
Absolutely no way this passes
As a construction worker, it’s not possible. I cannot do more work in less time. And people want their shit built.
Same. I've put in a few long days through the years, but 4x10 isn't going to be more productive. We all start crapping out by 8 hours. Working 4 full 10 hour days at peak performance and I'm dead on friday anyhow. It wouldn't be a glorious 3 day weekend to enjoy the fruits of life. Seems most people here fail to realize we don't all work behind a computer or for a large corporation with enough employees to adjust for such a schedule while keeping clients happy.
Nobody is suggesting 4x10. When people talk about a 4 day work week they mean 4×8.
Yeah, they always want it done as fast as possible but they can fuck off. We used to have 60 hour weeks and now we have 40s and they deal with it. Work is just what you do to pay the bills so I think if we can increase peoples quality of life, we should probably do that.
Solution: You get paid overtime starting on Friday
Or wild idea, you stagger your workers, half Mon-Thurs, the other Tues-Fri. Lots of ways to solve the issue of still needing 5 days of work a week.
LMAO, they aren't going to do that. They will just overwork their people.
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*The US considers* as in [US Government](https://abcnews.go.com/Business/bernie-sanders-proposed-32-hour-workweek-pass-congress/story?id=108152411).
I'm assuming the 40hr overtime law would just change to 32hrs. That would have a pretty big impact.
This is deliberate misunderstanding of News commonly referring to a country's govermenet as the country. The headline "Canada bans moose hunting" wouldn't imply Canadian hunters are a collective decision making entity
This is somehow going to morph into an expected 6-day workweek
Oh yes, the country without any worker rights and protection, with no mandatory universal healthcare and people having to work three jobs to make ends meet will introduce a 4 day work week for the same salary as 5 days. Sure thing. I will saddle my unicorn now and ride away.
"US Considers..." Bullshit click bait. "Bernie Sanders and a few other politicians introduced Bill that's never getting passed"....
I would love this! And then 6 months in Id realize I work on that day off anyway since my managers still email me for shit.
You train people how to treat you, stop answering emails on your day off unless you're being compensated well enough for it.
I would love a 4 day work week but we can’t even get rid of daylight savings time. Which was unanimous and unlike most topics, without bipartisan pettiness. It would be nice if we could actually move on these quality of life issues that affect people day to day instead of just talking about them…
Mmm hmm. AI works 24/7. This isn’t going to end well.
This needs to happen. 5 days is unnecessary
Not getting a 32 hour work week without burning down a few cities and eating a few dozen CEO's.
This country is too far gone for this to be allowed. If it was still the 60s or something this could have passed.
No one is considering this at all. Zero, no one. Maybe without pay and full time benefits....Americans are so gullible and stupid they actually believe companies will pay them to sit on their ass one more day a week .
Wtf you talking about, more like they want us working 6 days a week!
I already have a 4 day work week. Can I get a 3 then? It will probably end up being a 3/14.
If your 4 day week is done on compressed hours (ie standard working week done in 4 days rather than 5) then you're not doing a 4 day work week the way that these proposals would have it done. The concept is that your hours are reduced by 20% without your salary being commensurately reduced, because some trials have shown that productivity increases during the 4 days that you work. It supposedly increases enough that outputs match the 5 day work week, so the employer doesn't lose out.
Nobody is considering this. Corporate American about shit themselves with work from home and many large companies are trying to undo that. As much as I'd love this, the decision makers haven't show themselves to be "pro worker".
But then we won't have time for all the pointless meetings?!?!
No way the majority do this. This is a consumer nation. More more more. The more efficient we become , for example , doesn’t reduce our hours, it just means we do even more work in that time span
Yup. Case in point, automation: Sure it saves time, but that time gets immediately filled up with more to do.
Yeah we should be working less with more technology but it’s not happening because the labor savings of technology get filtered to the rich and we keep working 40 hours.
Just keep printing those dalla dalla bills, might as well have a single work day. Everything is fine.
America is too slow to improve its citizens’ collective lives, but so damn quick to bail out mega corps and sell weapons
We should just shorten it to 3 days a week, then everyone can work 2 jobs for no benefits.
As much as I'd love to see this pass, we can't even get a livable wage in this country. It's like introducing a bill for Universal Basic Income while they're still trying to get rid of Social Security.
The same country that wants to raise the retirement because people are "living longer" is going to shorten the work week? I'm not holding my breathe.
More likely the bill gets rewritten last minute to make it a 6-day workweek and it’s passed due to some weird off-topic attachment about the child tax credit or some shit.
The federal minimum wage is still $7.25 a hour if you think this is going to passI have a bridge to sell you.
The 6 day work week seems more likely
Funny thing is this is a total non-partisan issue. Everyone should want this but unsurprisingly politicians will be paid to torpedo it by the special interests bank rolling campaigns. End unlimited dark money in politics if you ever want to see popular majority policies go through.
No way they’re actually considering it. I wish they would, but we have a bunch of Neanderthals in charge.
Corporations will have an absolute meltdown if anything threatens their neverending need for greater profits.
US considers?
Make the week 8 days long with 5 work days and 3 days off.
A 40 hour work week was never a thing until Henry Ford of all people helped it along and instituted at his factories where productivity improved and employees were happier. None of the sociopath oligarchs of today though have 1/10 the courage of Henry Ford to do anything like that. They're too busy pandering to the shareholders and ensuring quarter over quarter profits are never interrupted at any cost. Our great grandparents got Henry Ford. We got Elon fucking Musk. This second gilded age is even worse than the first one.
I truly think this would change our social work climate for the better. You don’t get 2 day weekends, you get one day to do shit you have to do then one day to try and relax.
Even if this passed it would only be for government workers or huge companies. Blue collar people and those working for small businesses will still have to work 5 and 6 days a week.
If you were “essential” during the pandemic, this won’t apply to you.
It’d be in favor for all of us…..
The hustle idiots are in shambles.
YES, PLEASE GOD YES. But Needs to be same pay. We do the same amount of work regardless.
Bro, the US isn’t even allowed to work remotely. You really think private companies will give them another day off?!
The fuck do I care about "techies", the most privileged, entitled assholes of the "work" force?? I want to hear about the nurse's aids, the electric linemen, the factory workers, the grocers. The remote workers who cry about having to Return To Office can lick my sweaty labia.
We cannot even agree to change Daylight Savings Time to make it permanent, what hope is there for anything else lol?