201–210 of 364 posts
I would rather have a 6 day work week with 2 months of paid holidays every year. There isn't much you can do on a 3 day break that you can't do in a 1 day or 2 day break. But a month long break and you can do crazy stuff like hiking in Papua New Guinea or sailing across an ocean.
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The real rationale is to remove a metric shitton of accrued PTO from their books if paying out PTO on employee departure is something the company does.
How does shutting down the office remove PTO obligations? I worked at a company where we had 10 days of vacation + the office shut down for the last week of the year. Nobody had to use vacation time during that 1-week shutdown. If anything, it increased PTO accrued obligations because nobody had to use their PTO for time off during that week.
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> Isn't the whole point of the minimum wage that the federal / state / local governments are the negotiator of last resort? Yes. And it's a necessary thing to have. On the other hand... if someone is doing work that returns $15.50/hour on average to the business, and is employed at $10/hour, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour doesn't get that person a raise: it gets them laid off. The things that IMO really help th…
> On the other hand... if someone is doing work that returns $15.50/hour on average to the business, and is employed at $10/hour, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour doesn't get that person a raise: it gets them laid off. No, what it does is it causes prices to go up, which are amortized across all of society - between both people who are paid $15/hour, and people who are paid $150/hour. On average, it is a small we…
It does both of these things. Some jobs are lost and some prices go up.
Some tasks are better off outsourced, automated, or not even done at all as the floor price on labor increases. Raising minimum wages here hurts. Shortening the work week helps.
The demand for some tasks is inelastic but easily performed by many different people. The price of these tasks increases in proportion to minimum wage. Raising minimum wages here helps the employees, and shortening the work week is a small hurt.
Some tasks already have an equilibrium price well above minimum wage due to a supply limitation of the capable labor. Raising minimum wages here is relatively neutral. Shortening the work week should increase compensation here and increase the motivation for employers to find ways to bring more lower skill people into the field.
Most things are somewhere between these extremes.
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On the opposite end of the spectrum, the company I work for shuts our offices down from the 24th to the 2nd. Engineers submit availability for on-call schedules, and get a gift card for each on-call day they're responsible for. I feel very spoiled, but I think this is generally a trend amongst west-coast tech companies? I've had a similar experience at previous places, and it seemed like the rationale for the holiday…
It isn't uncommon in industrial situations to shut the plant down for two weeks or so around Christmas/New Years. Since A: The staff want it off and B: It gives a good window to do heavy maintaince and such
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I switched to a 4-day work week several years ago (maybe 7 or 8, forget), taking. 20% pay cut. Ot really does feel like such a better work-life balance - as you say, it's a much bigger increase in personal time than it is a decrease in working hours. And I am just as productive as when I worked 5 days a week!
I did the exact same thing. It was amazing and well worth the 4/5ths pay. My mental health was improved and the only thing that made me eventually leave was that i was offered 3x the pay to work at a FAANG. Startups trying to compete for talent should probably take note of the fact that it took 3x more pay for them to poach staff, not 20% more. I'm not saying you'll get away with paying 3x less but you also won't hav…
4 day work weeks as a concept real clicked for me when put into ratios. It's a 50% increase in personal time and only a 20% reduction in work hours.
If you sleep 8 hours a day and work for 8 hours Mon-Fri, that's:
- work: 40hrs
- personal: 72hrs
- sleep: 56hrs
Switching to a four day work week would thus result in a 20% reduction in work hours but only a 10% increase in personal time.
I'm going to assume you weren't including non-work hours if they were on "work days", but that seems silly if you have a 9-5 job.
I work a 4 day week; just don’t tell my boss.
You and everyone else "working from home."
Though actually it's more like 2-3 days of not working, spread out, more often than not.
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The old - One's employment options often severely diminish as they approach retirement. With health insurance (and those costly prescriptions) tied to employment, how little do you think some are willing to work for? Would you work for free if your life depended on it?
I feel like you avoided engaging at all with my comment. I explicitly commented that the safety nets and retirement system are not perfect and could be better, but that I believed minimum wage was not a solution. Increasing the minimum wage isn't going to get more people just short of retirement health insurance.
I'm currently working for a company that forces office staff to work a half day on christmas eve with the additional stipulation, of course, that you must burn a full day of vacation to skip it. This despite the fact that no one in the company can ever remember a customer calling on christmas eve. So I'm very skeptical that this trend will grow. It took the IWW to get us the concepts of The Weekend and Sick Days, and…
Why would you expect to get Christmas eve off? It's not a holiday and not everyone celebrates Christmas.
Schools are off during this time. And many professions take a break during this time as well, not just office workers, but factories often use this down time for maintenance, and trades use it as reprieve from working in the cold.
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It is a win-win. They force other businesses who can't buy a machine to pay a higher floor. If no jobs exist at all those voters will bring in someone who will tax companies like yours and spread the wealth. Your company gets more productive. Paying some a lower wage because it delays another machine purchase is not a long term solutiom
> If no jobs exist at all those voters will bring in someone who will tax companies like yours and spread the wealth. And those companies will calculate the ROI for moving into a lower tax burdensome area. After the company leaves the people wont have a job or the tax revenue.