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Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

takano.house.gov

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Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

#131

Post by coldcode »

xen2xen1 wrote: post #41

"I’d Say, In A Given Week, I Probably Only Do About Fifteen Minutes Of Real, Actual Work.” -- Peter, Office Space I've worked in lots of offices and watched people, especially "important" ones. It's fun to watch. They're so busy the strain is enormous. But if you pay attention, they spend lots of time calling their sister, talking to the Schwann's man.. "I work so hard I never leave work" but little actual work is do…

Up until I retired a few months ago, I routinely worked 50-60 hours a week as a team lead because I wrote code full time + meetings for several hours a day plus communicating with other teams, product and execs all day long. I rarely took vacations during the years I worked there as the work never slacked off at all. Most of my colleagues also did extra hours every week (I tried to keep my team from overworking, others did not). At least working at home I could avoid another hour a day in commuting. I did not get paid anything more to work longer, but deadlines were often arbitrary so stress was high. You could reduce the standard hours to zero and it would change nothing about that job.

If a job is more defined, like flying a plane, or operating a cash register, hours are equal to work, so limiting hours is possible.

If I could have worked just 40 every week with 3 weeks actual taken vacation, it would have been nice.

Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

#132

Post by tolbish »

ecommerceguy wrote: post #92
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that my ACA (Obamacare) premiums are lower than the premiums were at my last employer for similar coverage (using COBRA numbers for comparison). This might be because my last employer was bad at negotiating but I think it's mostly because they had an aging Rustbelt workforce and lots of people in roles that were unhealthy long term (linesmen and call centers). Because rates are set based on the pool'…

Sounds like you are young and because you are young you are receiving the privilege of paying less premium for health care. Health Insurance for better or worse heavily discriminates against the older folks. >> the risk in the public ACA pool is lower than the employer's pool of employees as a general rule, the public pool is substandard rating.

> Health Insurance for better or worse heavily discriminates against the older folks.

Medicare exists only for the elderly.

Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

#133

Post by throwaway6734 »

ecommerceguy wrote: post #92
Mountain_Skies wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting that my ACA (Obamacare) premiums are lower than the premiums were at my last employer for similar coverage (using COBRA numbers for comparison). This might be because my last employer was bad at negotiating but I think it's mostly because they had an aging Rustbelt workforce and lots of people in roles that were unhealthy long term (linesmen and call centers). Because rates are set based on the pool'…

Sounds like you are young and because you are young you are receiving the privilege of paying less premium for health care. Health Insurance for better or worse heavily discriminates against the older folks. >> the risk in the public ACA pool is lower than the employer's pool of employees as a general rule, the public pool is substandard rating.

As it should. It's incredibly unfair that as a young person I'm forced to subsidize the healthcare costs of older colleagues

Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

#134

Post by sudosysgen »

throwaway6734 wrote: post #133
ecommerceguy wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you are young and because you are young you are receiving the privilege of paying less premium for health care. Health Insurance for better or worse heavily discriminates against the older folks. >> the risk in the public ACA pool is lower than the employer's pool of employees as a general rule, the public pool is substandard rating.

As it should. It's incredibly unfair that as a young person I'm forced to subsidize the healthcare costs of older colleagues

Well, not really. Unless you die young very rapidly in a way that won't incur major medical costs, you're going to get your money's worth eventually, with the added benefit of stability.

Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

#135

Post by throwaway6734 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #134
throwaway6734 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it should. It's incredibly unfair that as a young person I'm forced to subsidize the healthcare costs of older colleagues

Well, not really. Unless you die young very rapidly in a way that won't incur major medical costs, you're going to get your money's worth eventually, with the added benefit of stability.

That's assuming I'd work at the same company forever. Different places of work have different insurance plans

Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

#136

Post by diordiderot »

tudelo wrote: post #59
thoughtstheseus wrote: post #25

Somewhat of a tangent but related to labor: tell your reps to abolish personal income taxes and replace it with a consumption tax. We should not be taxing labor…

Every road having a toll is your idea of the future? Or am I misunderstanding something.

Roads contribute to massive negative externalities.

If every road was a toll road you would have more walkable cities. Better public transport options. Less emmisssions.

Sounds like a wonderful trade off.

Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

#137

Post by plorkyeran »

dragonwriter wrote: post #112
sokoloff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the task is coverage-related (“be available to run a cash register” or “answer any phone call that comes in” or “watch this area for security purposes”), it’s exactly that ratio.

> If the task is coverage-related (“be available to run a cash register” or “answer any phone call that comes in” or “watch this area for security purposes”), it’s exactly that ratio. But no task that actually needs done is purely coverage related. If you want someone to watch dor security purposes, you want them to actually effectively secure it to some level, and if average ability to do that drops from overwork yo…

Many coverage-related jobs don't require a person's full potential productivity, so the fact that their productivity goes down with hours worked is irrelevant. If a cashier at a low-volume store only rings up a customer every 10 minutes but you've decided that they need to stay parked by the register all day rather than doing other tasks between customers, it doesn't matter if it takes them twice as long to ring up a customer at the end of their shift as at the start.

Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

#139

Post by mason55 »

derefr wrote: post #28
selykg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I've been trying to tell people for awhile. In "knowledge work" areas I suspect most people work around 5-6 hours a day and the rest is spent doing whatever other stuff they do. My current job I only work 35 hours a week and it's great. They pay us for an hour lunch basically and I just take it at the end of my day, thus shortening my day to 7 hours.

It feels like there’s no sensible reason that employers/contractors should be allowed to establish contracts where “knowledge work” is being compensated for time worked (i.e. to set an hourly wage, and an expected number of working hours.) No matter who thinks they benefits by such a contract, it seems to almost always turn out for the worse for both parties. It seems like instead, almost all “knowledge work” is real…

The problem is that this model loses most of the benefits of the Firm (economies of scale of labor).

Let's say you have some money and want to make something happen. You find a developer and an infrastructure person. Now you have to negotiate a price with each of them for some defined output (and unless you're technical you probably need to first negotiate with the dev to get her to produce an infrastructure plan, then find the infra person and negotiate with him, and then negotiate with the dev to get the work done).

Ok, you've spent a bunch of time negotiating individually and defining exact output specs that withstand contractual scrutiny. Then you get partway through development and learn something new about your market. You decide that you need to change your product a bit, so now pause development and negotiate a change order with your dev. You come to an agreement but the change requires infra changes. So you go negotiate with the infra person but you can't come to an agreement on the changes required.

Now you're paying the infra person to finish something you don't want any more, the dev can't do the additional work she's willing to do because the infra won't be there, and you're stuck building something that you don't even need. This doesn't even take into account that this model forces every single person to be both a negotiator and marketer of their own skills, in addition to whatever technical skills they have (comparative advantage shows that they should each just do what they do best). The obvious next step is for groups of people with complimentary skills to get together and negotiate projects together and from there it's a very clear path to ending up with salaried workers again.

The advantages of the Firm are just so great that even with a ton of waste it's still better than everyone individually negotiating their output. Look at the consulting companies for an example, even though they negotiate at the project level they still pay people salary. They know exactly how much bench time each person has and they still use that model over hiring for each project based on the project's output.

Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours

#140

Post by GcVmvNhBsU »

VelkaMorava wrote: post #127
chefkoch wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some republicans, yes.

I have been reading comments like yours on the internet for quite a while now. I am from Europe, so I have no horse in this race. I have these 2 questions/thoughts: 1) Do you think it's a good idea to have all the branches of the government controlled by 1 party? We actually had this a few decades ago in the Czech republic and we refer to that period as "totalita" or dictatorship. Let's say the wet dream (based on co…

1) China, USSR, etc had/have more government involvement in running business but also controlling people’s movement and freedom of expression. That’s a different situation than American politics, because even the most progressive democrats don’t necessarily want the government limiting people’s freedoms so much as forcing rich entities to pay higher taxes and to provide more socialized services.

1b) We don’t really need 1 party. More than 2 parties would be great as well. But really we just need the Republican party to not be obstructionist nor actively harmful to democracy.

2) Democrats have the presidency, which, while having greatly expanded powers over the last 50ish years, is still a relatively weak executive. The Democrats have a narrow majority in the House and Senate; due to parliamentary rules, the narrow majority that they have does not allow them to pass or amend laws as freely as you may think. The Supreme Court, while notionally non-partisan, is filled with a majority of conservative Justices which can dissuade or reverse policy made by more liberal branches of the government (federally, or at state levels).

2b) 6 months is not a long time for governments the size of the US. Barrack Obama likened it to a large ocean-liner: there’s a lot of built up momentum, so it takes a long time to stop it or change direction.

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