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Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

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Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#141

Post by CameronNemo »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #119
qiskit wrote: post #115

Instead of all these regulations, why not institute basic income. If every adult was given $2000 ( or whatever figure we come up with ) you wouldn't have to create so many laws. Minimum wage, work hours, retirement, diversity, etc laws would be unnecessary because it would be difficult to exploit people whose needs are met. Why pass hundreds of laws when you can pass 1 that solves all the problem?

$2000 barely covers rent ( 1 br LA/SF). We’d also need rent control legislation to prevent rents from rising to absorb the UBI. Apart from that I agree - UBI is the simplest, cheapest way to lift the population out of poverty. The outcomes are fantastic - I recommend Rutger Bregman’s book on it.

You can definitely get a studio in the LA area for like 1400. Close to public transit too.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#142

Post by [deleted] »

tanaros wrote: post #132
superfunny wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> while the labor market has very little flexibility that would allow workers to "vote with their feet" and move to "better" employers without outside influence Have you heard of the Great Resignation?

>> Have you heard of the Great Resignation? Isn’t the Great Resignation driven at least in part by the government’s influence? COVID lockdowns and regulations heavily incentivized employers to offer more flexibility around remote work, and COVID economic relief policies helped provide folks with the financial stability needed to look for better employment. I’m not sure this would have occurred organically without any…

[deleted]

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#143

Post by syshum »

tanaros wrote: post #132
superfunny wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> while the labor market has very little flexibility that would allow workers to "vote with their feet" and move to "better" employers without outside influence Have you heard of the Great Resignation?

>> Have you heard of the Great Resignation? Isn’t the Great Resignation driven at least in part by the government’s influence? COVID lockdowns and regulations heavily incentivized employers to offer more flexibility around remote work, and COVID economic relief policies helped provide folks with the financial stability needed to look for better employment. I’m not sure this would have occurred organically without any…

That would only explain remtoe workers, However non-remote jobs are having the same problems. Hell the MCD's in my area now has signs wanting people at up to $16/hr (min starting is $13 now)

Government policies are never the correct way to solve societal problems, even taking the premise the the "evil profit motive" is the actual reason we have seen abuse in the past (which I disagree with), the resolution to that is NEVER government as any honestly look at government policies requires one to conclused that at best the government policy just takes credit for something that was happening anyway, but more often the government policy slows or stopps the trend to improving lives

Just look at the "War on Poverty", at the start of that poverty was dropping FAST, then the government steps in to "solve" the problem of poverty that the evil free market could not (even though it was), and poverty rates flatlined.

Trillions and trillions of dollars spent later, and the government still has not solved that problem, where the free market likely would have if allowed to continue...

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#144

Post by redisman »

hemreldop wrote: post #128
andrei_says_ wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2000 barely covers rent ( 1 br LA/SF). We’d also need rent control legislation to prevent rents from rising to absorb the UBI. Apart from that I agree - UBI is the simplest, cheapest way to lift the population out of poverty. The outcomes are fantastic - I recommend Rutger Bregman’s book on it.

California is a huge state, you don’t have to live in the heart of LA or San Fran

Also even in my wildest communist fantasies it’s completely infeasible for UBI to cover a 1br market rent in a big city without that immediately causing completely ridiculous inflation. Fiddling with monetary policy doesn’t magically 3x the housing supply.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#145

Post by syshum »

thot_experiment wrote: post #42
Animats wrote: post #35

What we need is more enforcement of existing labor laws. A 40-hour work week with teeth. No "unpaid overtime". No "time shaving". Out of hours phone calls count as work time, with a minimum time for a call. (3 hours in the movie industry).

Yes, I mean we should also have a 32 hour work week but the laws surrounding it need teeth for sure. We should hold executives/managers criminally liable with the potential for jail time for repeat offenses. It's absolutely fucking absurd that shoplifting, especially when performed by disadvantaged folks carries harsher penalties than systematic wage theft. It's upside down clown world out there, abusing your positio…

I did not think shoplifting was punished at all in California.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#146

Post by Retric »

User23 wrote: post #135
camdat wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As should children! Why should the pesky government step in the way of my child working in a factory.

It doesn’t if your family business is farming.

Acting allows actual children to work very limited hours. By comparison it’s illegal for 11 year olds to do farm work where infants can be actors.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#147

Post by notahacker »

qiskit wrote: post #115

Instead of all these regulations, why not institute basic income. If every adult was given $2000 ( or whatever figure we come up with ) you wouldn't have to create so many laws. Minimum wage, work hours, retirement, diversity, etc laws would be unnecessary because it would be difficult to exploit people whose needs are met. Why pass hundreds of laws when you can pass 1 that solves all the problem?

Because you have to fund basic income.

And if your goal is a population that pays its way and has relatively generous working conditions and less unequal income distributions, the hyper regulated Europe looks a whole lot better than, say, Saudi Arabia where citizens can live comfortable, unproductive lives topped up by monthly payments, discrimination is rife and an underclass of non-citizens do most of the work for very little money, often in truly awful conditions.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#148

Post by robbedpeter »

thomascgalvin wrote: post #92
pc86 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One, there are a lot of businesses that operate on margins well under 20%. Some percentage of these would absolutely go out of business if you somehow mandated 80% of the current hours for 100% of the current pay. Now you can argue they should go out of business anyway, and maybe you're right, but it's still the government passing a law to intentionally put a lot of people out of business and make a lot of people los…

> One, there are a lot of businesses that operate on margins well under 20%. > > Three, why the differentiation between 500 workers? I suspect that the third point is an attempt to address the first. A company with five hundred employees is (in theory) better able to absorb this cost than a mom-and-pop with ten people on staff. The exact number of five hundred is probably arbitrary, though.

It favors megacorporations, who can afford to eat any short term losses as new unfavorable conditions drive smaller businesses under, eliminating competition, and then prices adjust upwards when the local market has been sufficiently captured. This is how Wal-Mart and Starbucks and their ilk take over. It's impossible to compete against multi-billion dollar companies regardless of service, quality, or loyalty because small businesses deal with local margins and megacorps have global reserves.

Walmart doesn't need to compete with mom and pop, it simply needs to destroy them.

In that context, if we see local economies as something to be preserved, better regulations are needed. There might not be a legitimate case for that, since megacorps being massive efficiencies to bear. Deliberately reducing efficiency to placate small business owners might feel justified, but to the consumer, things are pretty good these days aside from shortages and inflation.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#149

Post by alan-hn »

drdaeman wrote: post #136
lores wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all respect, that is an astoundingly naive viewpoint in light of the fact that there is nowhere near power equality between employer and worker.

I suppose many folks here are in those blessed industries and positions where employers and employees are in much more balanced relationships than mostwhere. Which is how it should be; I don't think anyone would doubt that GP is correct in this regard. But - very sadly - not how it works in most of the reality.

I agree. I constantly see arguments in HN comments that come from the perspective of a highly paid tech worker and they either ignore anyone making minimum wage or pretend they don't exist in this dynamic or they are written off as unimportant because they should have "worked harder to change their position in life"

Its pretty sad that this ideology exists, we need people to do jobs and we shouldn't shit on them for it. We should support people in what every job they're doing because we're all part of the same societal machine

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#150

Post by ghufran_syed »

hollasch wrote: post #39

Increasingly, American political parties are most interested in seizing and wielding power, and I feel like most citizens are occupied with surrendering and assigning that power to their preferred political party. How in the world did we get here? Is there any way we can turn back? Most of the discussion here is about whether mandating business practice would be a good or a bad business move, but hardly anyone is que…

I agree - a related issue is that if indeed government should be using it's power, then it should be exercised at theost local level possible ie at the city or county level. That way you could see what happens when people have more of a choice about whether to live under those rules or not, before applying it in a way that is harder to avoid. Meaning it is easy to move cities or counties (in the US), harder to move state, almost impossible to change countries for most people's.

If it really is good for companies, then more will move there. If not, they will move out - better to do the experiment on a small scale first!

But the aim of a lot of federal or state level proposed legislation is so that people can't escape nirvana...

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