We will truly have a 4-day work week only when the NY stock exchange is closed on Fridays.
Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
21–30 of 163 posts
Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
#22For manual labor this would make a big difference. For intellectual work, I suspect it would probably not lead to much less work being done. Just because people are at the office 8 hours a day, doesn’t mean they’re getting 8 hours of work done. I would be curious if people would get as much done and waste less time sitting there or if the sitting there time is the same, percentage wise.
I have a 4 day workweek and that made me the most efficient version of myself as I have to do the same amount of work but in less time, and I'm loving it, having 3 days weekends is amazing and every Monday I have lots of energy for the week.
Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
#23So that means people will earn even less? how is that a good thing? This won't reduce the money supply or the discrepancy between poor and rich, it will just make the poor even poorer.
This incentivizes employers to pay more per hour, otherwise people won’t work reduced hours for the same rate
Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
#24For manual labor this would make a big difference. For intellectual work, I suspect it would probably not lead to much less work being done. Just because people are at the office 8 hours a day, doesn’t mean they’re getting 8 hours of work done. I would be curious if people would get as much done and waste less time sitting there or if the sitting there time is the same, percentage wise.
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.
Maybe for menial knowledge work. During crunch time, nights and weekends get completely filled with work.
Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
#25Somewhat 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…
Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
#26I wonder if this will have any impact on jobs that are exempt from overtime, such as software development (see https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fact-sheets/17e-overtime-co...).
Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
#27Why 32? Why not 22? Why not 10? What's the reasoning here.
Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
#28For manual labor this would make a big difference. For intellectual work, I suspect it would probably not lead to much less work being done. Just because people are at the office 8 hours a day, doesn’t mean they’re getting 8 hours of work done. I would be curious if people would get as much done and waste less time sitting there or if the sitting there time is the same, percentage wise.
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 really fundamentally salaried work, where the employer/client should be paying for output, perhaps with contractual milestone deadlines that determine a boundary that the employee/contractor schedule their work to happen within — but with no contractual constraints on how or when the work happen within each milestone/sprint should happen, as long as the milestone deadline is satisfied.
This is already the universal expectation for “knowledge work” where the knowledge-worker is generally respected for their talent and is seen as hard to replace — e.g. in the working contracts between fiction authors and their publishers. Nobody gets paid a wage to write books. (We even distinguish this particular type of knowledge-worker, calling them a “creative”, as if that meant anything more than “a knowledge-worker, but, y’know, a respectable one.”)
Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
#29Decades 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 time to tie health insurance to being alive.
Re: Rep. Takano Introduces Legislation to Reduce the Standard Workweek to 32 Hours
#30Would sure be nice if they included the name of the bill so it was easier to track progress.
EDIT: Found it. For the curious: H.R.4728 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4728