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Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

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201–210 of 228 posts

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#201
post #49
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).

This! 40 hours workweek with mandatory overtime pay (usually double per hour) with a minimum duration. Reducing the workweek below that would be considered unnecessary government intervention and is liable to be bad for business and workers. No one wants a pay cut that goes with it.

Yeah it's a completely ridiculous idea. All you need to do is implement a negative interest rate on cash and people will start cutting their hours voluntarily as they notice that there is no future generation that is willing to be in debt for their early retirement.

Right now with the 0% interest subsidy on cash people will work 40 hours to save themselves into an early retirement that won't be possible in the future and then they complain that the government stole their money through inflation by letting them save money that has no reason to exist.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#202
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 a UBI is the wrong solution for this problem. Reducing the work week should be done when productivity grows faster than the economy and a UBI does not care whether that is true or not.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, if they don't like it, they can get a job somewhere else, no need for authoritarian governments preventing people freely entering contracts with groups with much more power than they do individually.... wait, this reminds me of something?

Unions having the power to force employees to join is what's authoritarian. If I want to work for a company, and the company wants to hire me, we should be free to enter into a contract. A third party shouldn't have the power to say "you can't unless you pay us dues". And before you say "well not if the company and union entered into a contract that said the company would only hire union workers", that's not how it w…

Unions don't have that power last I checked, and there is nothing that requires an employer to sign away their ability to seek unaffiliated workers.

Just as there is nothing forcing a worker to join a Union. The only thing is, if you don't join, you don't get the benefit of collective bargaining.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#204
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The laws we have today give unions the power to unilaterally say that without the company agreeing, and this is what's bad and needs to go away. Can you give examples? My impression was closed shop and union shop was negotiated, not dictated by law.

The US is closed shop. If a subset of employees don't like their union, they are not allowed to form their own union. Put another way, if employees disagree with something the union does, they have no recourse other than founding their own union and trying to get all their coworkers to vote to force every one to switch to the new union. In particular, employees are not able to call strikes in the US. In some sense, u…

Stop.

Employees can strike. Taft-Hartley illegalizes wildcat or secondary striking.

I still disagree with it because I don't think the Network Effect pruning was equal between Capital and Labor, but Strikes can absolutely be organized by private employees/unions.

Public sector unions are a different beast as far as I'm aware. See the Air Traffic Controller strike and how that flopped. But you've had some teacher's Union successes recently too.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#206
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $2000 barely covers rent ( 1 br LA/SF). The market will develop housing for basic income people or you could always move to lower cost areas. > We’d also need rent control legislation to prevent rents from rising to absorb the UBI. Nope. If people are given basic income, the market will develop housing/services to cater to them.

The market hasn't developed housing for people on the current minimum wage, so I have my doubts that it would be any different with UBI

There’s plenty of cheap housing if you don’t need to be near a competitive job market to cover the rent.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#208
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boulder is California-light. Colorado doesn’t yet have the endemic corruption you get with uniparty states like California, but with all the Californians moving there and doing the same thing, it’s coming. The rise in homelessness in Boulder in just the past few years is amazing.

I lived in Highlands Ranch, CO for roughly half a year, and man the suburban sprawl in anything outside of Boulder is on steroids. My impression of Colorado is that it's a "hot" place to be right now (very much hyped as the place to escape to), but that will in time be expended as housing costs skyrocket and no new housing can be built because everything is interconnected by a 6-8 lane highway. Reference: https://www…

[deleted]

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I’d like to see is less government power, which means they stay out of my life, which means more freedom and less coercion, which means I can negotiate my life as I see fit like a grown up who is responsible for himself.

Exactly how much are you willing to be coerced to put food on the table? Because that's what we are really looking at here: Employers having power to coerce you into lifestyles and coerce you into things just so that you can put food on the table. Laws protecting employees (most of us!) are there because employers didn't simply treat people well, and people had little choice if they wanted to eat. And I'll point out…

The government is the single most coercive entity making me work more to put food on the table. I work approximately 30% of my time to pay for services I don't want provided and mostly don't use.

If you want to talk about coercion, my employer gives me money for my services and I have the ability to walk away at any time. My government takes my money, and if I resist, they will put me in jail or kill me if I resist.

I am indeed at the mercy of the actions of others, but I am by far most helpless against the government.

Re: Proposed bill would shorten California workweek to 32 hours

#210
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do negative externalities fit into your picture?

And you believed these are resolved with government policies? Which ones? Point to some examples of government resolving these to the detriment of corporations? The examples I could provide would be government shielding corporations from these negative externalities, limiting their liability, and socializing the costs to the tax payers of that government.... I can point to no examples of govermment resolving the prob…

The Clean Air act in the US is a good example.
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