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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

#151

Post by kodah »

dec0dedab0de wrote: post #88
the_lonely_road wrote: post #52

Can we get the almost infinite list of "overtime exceptions" for salary employees removed while we are at it? There are so many Americans that never saw a 40 hour a week expectation because of these and most of those people were not paid overtime due to 'salary' expectations. Every fast food/retail store manager I have ever spoken to faces this dilemma and all of my friends in 'professional firms' like architecture/l…

Some developers may have avoided it, but IT definitely hasn't. Network engineers, server admins, and DBAs routinely have to work a full schedule, plus change windows, and have to be on call. Some are on call 24/7 with no extra pay. When I switched companies almost a decade ago I went from being a network guy who knew how to code, to a coder who knew networking. My quality of life increased over night.

When my company started standardizing pay I was an SRE. There were no additional benefits for being an SRE despite a massive on-call commitment with highly disruptive false positives that required investigation as we were trying to tune the alerting system. I made the exact same pay as a SWE that never had to do this extra work and were often annoyed if they were paged to act as a SME. This moment is when I transitioned out of SRE work and into SWE work.

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

#152

Post by throwaway6734 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #150
throwaway6734 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you're in the US, perhaps. The solution to the problem you're describing is single payer healthcare.

I'm not disagreeing

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

#153

Post by awillen »

Jtsummers wrote: post #18
awillen wrote: post #4

"Today, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) introduced legislation that would reduce the standard workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours by lowering the maximum hours threshold for overtime compensation for non-exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)." It seems like this would just lead to businesses who employee non-exempt employees hiring more of them but scheduling for fewer hours to stay under the 32 hour…

https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?path=/prelim@title29/cha... Section 213 is what you want to look at. It’s not really a matter of choice but industry, role, and hourly rate that determines if someone is considered exempt.

Right, and the classifications it provides are outdated for the reality of today.

I didn't say that employers would try to reclassify their employees - I said that they would keep their non-exempt ones under the 32 hour threshold.

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

#154

Post by mrtranscendence »

the_lonely_road wrote: post #52

Can we get the almost infinite list of "overtime exceptions" for salary employees removed while we are at it? There are so many Americans that never saw a 40 hour a week expectation because of these and most of those people were not paid overtime due to 'salary' expectations. Every fast food/retail store manager I have ever spoken to faces this dilemma and all of my friends in 'professional firms' like architecture/l…

At a contracting firm, I always thought it was annoying to bill hourly but be denied overtime. Luckily it didn't happen often (we worked for the government, what can I say).

On the whole I've been deeply fortunate to work only for companies that expect 40 hours a week. Maybe it's my field -- data science -- but either way I hope it continues. I'd do my part to make sure it does, if I knew what my part consisted of.

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

#155

Post by unethical_ban »

palmtree3000 wrote: post #123
opheliate wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts, correct me if I'm wrong here: If I'm on a very low income, likely 100% (or more) of my monthly earnings will go to buying food, paying rent/utilities, etc, so under a consumption tax, a higher proportion of my income will be taxed than under income tax (people in the lowest tax bracket generally won't pay income tax at all). Of course, you could exclude these necessities from tax, but then I find it diff…

You can make a consumption tax progressive! You'd probably want to make it a bit more progressive than the current income tax brackets, to cancel out the effect you're describing. Re: implementation: make putting money into a bank account tax deductible and pulling money out taxable, then continue to use the existing income tax system. Any money you earn that you don't spend is a tax write-off, any money you spend th…

Why would you want to encourage money to be hoarded? The modern economy is like a shark - if it stops moving, it dies. Exceptions include retirement savings plans, but that is just to keep the government from having to spend more money on old people.

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

#156

Post by imtringued »

unethical_ban wrote: post #155
palmtree3000 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make a consumption tax progressive! You'd probably want to make it a bit more progressive than the current income tax brackets, to cancel out the effect you're describing. Re: implementation: make putting money into a bank account tax deductible and pulling money out taxable, then continue to use the existing income tax system. Any money you earn that you don't spend is a tax write-off, any money you spend th…

Why would you want to encourage money to be hoarded? The modern economy is like a shark - if it stops moving, it dies. Exceptions include retirement savings plans, but that is just to keep the government from having to spend more money on old people.

Funny, I wasted a whole day reading about freicoin and demurrage... i.e. money that is specifically designed to circulate at a roughly constant velocity.

I came up with a strange idea that is slightly better. When banks create money via loans bind the lifetime of the deposit to the lifetime of the credit. I.e. individual dollars have expiration dates that are directly tied to monthly payments. If people default then the dollars expire and the bank has to either compensate by raising its interest premium or by lowering interest rates on the deposits to compensate the loss. This means that interest rates would have to be negative sometimes and all debts can be repaid one day.

Of course the cash withdrawal scheme is equally complex because cash represents perpetual deposits which would require a perpetual government bond on the other side.

Banks would transfer their worst deposits first when you transfer to another bank which would drag all banks to roughly the same level of interest without needing a central bank to set interest rates. The equilibrium interest rate would discover itself automatically, at least that is the hope.

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

#157

Post by Cd00d »

count wrote: post #108
Cd00d wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet, she probably still needs to bill hours during those down times. I've always been amazed that those fancy attorneys manage to bill the same $1k per hour when they're super focused as when they're eating a sandwich or shopping for engagement rings online.

Can you not think while eating? Do you never do some mindless fidgeting or surfing while contemplating some kind of hard or complex situation?

Meh. If you're going to insist on billing in 6 minute increments, I'll let you pay for the lunch and toilet breaks.

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

#158

Post by lsllc »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #65
supportlocal4h wrote: post #19

Decades ago the U.S. tied healthcare to employment. It had some big positives at the time. I think it has proven to have more negatives as time has unfolded. Here is one of them. If you reduce hours per worker by, say, 10% you just pay each worker 10% less and hire 10% more workers, right? It's not so simple. If you try to cut the health insurance premium of each worker by 10% the policy becomes unattractive. If you…

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'…

COBRA numbers are and have always been absolutely nuts, in fact I've come to the conclusion that they exist simply as a disincentive for employees to leave (along with non-competes).

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

#159

Post by supportlocal4h »

bluejekyll wrote: post #84
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'…

> While I'm not sold on having a government run healthcare system (the pandemic only reinforces this) Would you mind elaborating on that? From my own perspective the federal government’s ability to help fund and drive the vaccine development and then to purchase in quantities to get the entire population vaccinated is actually proof of how powerful a single payer system could be. I’m curious as to what I might be mis…

You offer two examples of value:

1. Fund and drive vaccine development

2. Purchase large quantities

Neither of those is what I want from my insurance company. How much are those two things costing me? If my taxes just went up $100/year for the next 3 years to pay for that vaccine, that maybe wasn't ideal. If my taxes went up $10 total, that was an awesome deal. If I have no idea how much that vaccine cost me, and nobody else seems to have a way to figure it out, that's really bad. One of my biggest complaints about health insurance in general is the lack of transparency. If government control reduces transparency, that would be bad.

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

#160

Post by vladTheInhaler »

Jtsummers wrote: post #94
gurleen_s wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> While I'm not sold on having a government run healthcare system (the pandemic only reinforces this) A reminder that government services suck on purpose. There is no reason for government healthcare to be ineffective other than the malicious intent of those who run our government (D or R).

> A reminder that government services suck on purpose. There is no reason for government healthcare to be ineffective other than the malicious intent of those who run our government (D or R). Yes. Government employees and elected officials have weekly meetings with a standing question: Where are we doing things well? And then they coordinate to fuck it up and make it suck. /s

To elaborate a bit on what another commenter said, the Republican party's whole premise is that government is bad, and we should have less of it. Since they are the government, it is easy to obstruct and oppose any attempt to actually help people. Essentially, the worse a job they do running the country, the more compelling their platform becomes. So yes, I really do think some Republicans are worried that the government might do too good of a job.
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