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The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

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Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#241

Post by azan_ »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #183
azan_ wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Citation needed. Very little of what we buy today as a consumer are commodities whose price is determined primarily by the cost of production — and even then labor costs are rarely the most significant cost. Services and goods where lots of human labor is required get much more expensive with larger cost of labor. E.g. fast-food, food delivery. And there's nothing wrong with that of course - I'd rather pay 2x more…

If labor costs are so high and such a large portion of production then how can companies afford to funnel so much money to executives? Hundreds and even thousands of times more than their cheapest workers? Often to the tune of millions and now billions? Surely there is more slack in the system than the Epstein class wants to openly admit.

If you don't want discussion to turn into cesspool, I suggest not using terms like "Epstein class".

Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#242

Post by tsimionescu »

losvedir wrote: post #113
tsimionescu wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absurdly ahistorical. Corporations take as much as they can. If there were no law limiting work to 40 hours / week, they would demand far more - as they had before massive workers' protests forced the current limits.

All the more reason people would prefer to work for a co-op, no? I really don't know why there aren't more co-ops, and am inferring they just don't work all that well. But if there are any regulations or something preventing them from succeeding, I'd love to know about it. Also, I guess it's worth noting I've been "exempt" all my life (not subject to 40 hours a week), so that particular labor win I guess didn't reall…

Co-ops face a massive financing struggle, as most money is owned by rich investors, not by working people. Imagine running a business that can basically only get money from bank loans.

In a much more equal society this would go away to a great extent, but we don't live in anything close to that. So, if any co-op finds some useful niche, it will easily be out-competed by some company taking billionaire investors. The only exceptions are fundamentally limited businesses, where billionaires don't care to invest to outcompete, or the rare situations where it happened to not go that way before the co-op grew large enough, such as Mondragon in Spain's Basque Country.

Beyond this, there is of course the problem of the chicken and the egg. There are vanishingly few co-ops, so there are very very few people who know how to successfully lead and manage a co-op. So, many co-ops will face internal organizational issues and fail, as often happens with any other type of org run by people with little experience. But this then perpetuates the cycle. The same thing happened in the regular business world - many historically common organizational practices seem absurdly bad from today's standards, but they took time to be understood and repaired.

And finally, especially in B2B scenarios, there are real biases that the corporate owner class has against this type of organization, both personal and structural. Lots of B2B deals are built on interpersonal relationships between the owners and executives of these companies, a world in which the elected leader of a worker's co-op would not have the financial means to participate, even if the deep classism of the corporate elite wouldn't keep them out either way.

Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#243

Post by ycombinator_acc »

genxy wrote: post #224
ycombinator_acc wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it’s a way for the less fortunate (geographically) to seek a better future. They more or less got rid of it last September, yet the job market has only worsened. Scapegoating minorities, whether it be trans people, brown people, Muslims or immigrants, doesn’t work. All it does is destroy lives. > You give away your bias when it is the other way around. How so?

American corporations could care less about giving anyone a better future. archagon was attempting to paint declan_roberts comment as blaming H1B workers on working conditions, which they did not do. But H1Bs will be used to suppress wages by working more hours 996 under worse conditions (oncall, etc). This is low rhetoric. To call out how H1Bs are being used is not scapegoating nor is it racist. It makes zero differ…

Now, with the $100K fee which has turned H-1B workers into indentured servants, they could and will be used for that, sure. But prior to the EO, they had the freedom to leave the country and reenter whenever they'd like to, so long as they were employed or had an offer on hand. Getting laid off wasn't the end of the world. Travelling wasn't a huge risk. Switching employers was relatively stress-free. While still not on par with that of citizens, the leverage and the bargaining power was there, preventing the longer workweeks under worse conditions issue you're referring to. The concern trolls claiming otherwise had no concrete evidence to show for their claims.

I never said it's racist, unsure where you got that from, but it absolutely is scapegoating, when the issue isn't immigrants, who are powerless and cannot fight back, but the admin that's vilifying them while being the actual villain.

Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#244

Post by ycombinator_acc »

declan_roberts wrote: post #214
ycombinator_acc wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it’s a way for the less fortunate (geographically) to seek a better future. They more or less got rid of it last September, yet the job market has only worsened. Scapegoating minorities, whether it be trans people, brown people, Muslims or immigrants, doesn’t work. All it does is destroy lives. > You give away your bias when it is the other way around. How so?

No country is ever going to be able to create a functional local software economy if every good engineer get sucked out of the country. In many ways the current system is cruel to every international company which forces their local wages to compete with the United States.

I don't care about "every international company" or any company. Kicking out immigrants is cruel to people.

Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#245

Post by ycombinator_acc »

raincom wrote: post #223
ycombinator_acc wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it’s a way for the less fortunate (geographically) to seek a better future. They more or less got rid of it last September, yet the job market has only worsened. Scapegoating minorities, whether it be trans people, brown people, Muslims or immigrants, doesn’t work. All it does is destroy lives. > You give away your bias when it is the other way around. How so?

Why not both? It is a feedback loop. When the US allowed railroad/mine workers from China, it is true that Chinese labor wanted a better future and that capitalists want to use Chinese labor to suppress American wages. For instance, look at the animosity towards Chinese workers in Wyoming by European workers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Springs_massacre

Do you think the European workers were in the right? Is the solution to kick out (let alone slaughter) the Chinese, or is it to make them less exploitable by companies?

Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#246

Post by azan_ »

thfuran wrote: post #189
azan_ wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, let's follow that logic. If IPO makes CEO much, much richer but generally also makes company and workers better off (but to smaller degree), does IPO make workers more undercompensated? Nobody lost anything for the CEO to gain. Also is "funneling" (that's an interesting choice of word) investors money into company stock a bad thing? Why would it be? I'd say it's a very, very good thing and it's in almost always 1…

>If IPO makes CEO much, much richer but generally also makes company and workers better off (but to smaller degree), does IPO make workers more undercompensated? Yes, obviously. The bulk of work of the company is done by the workers. That is to say, most of the value is generated by the labor of the workers. If a commensurate share of the profit is not returned to the employees, they’ve clearly been undercompensated.

How is it obvious? In that scenario, companies should avoid IPO even though it makes situation of workers better?

Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#247

Post by paulryanrogers »

quantummagic wrote: post #210
paulryanrogers wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US had tax brackets in the 90%s for decades. It was part of a golden era for workers, for that and a variety of other reasons like strong unions. Of course the rich tried to work around it. But culturally they also understood that paying a lot of taxes was considered their duty to society, especially in times of crisis.

This is a lazy idea that keeps getting trotted out. The 90% tax bracket only existed on paper, with an effective rate closer to 40%. Economists have shown that tax revenue remained remarkably unchanged, while having negative consequences for investment and productive use of capital. Instead, the relative prosperity of workers during that time came from a lack of global industrial competition and a massive post-war ma…

If the higher tax rates were so ineffective then why was the divide between the richest and the workers so much smaller?

Do tell, what is the effective tax rate that the rich pay today?

Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#248

Post by insane_dreamer »

rented_mule wrote: post #195
declan_roberts wrote: post #132

I was contacted this week for a position that was openly 6 days a week. We need to end H1B in this country as soon as possible and keep the 996 schedule firmly out of the United States. They call you lazy for not wanting to compete against the entire world in your own country.

Chinese tech companies' 996 policies, and large Chinese tech companies in general, are newer than that ethic in the US. What I hear about 995.5 (every other Saturday off) from my friend at Xiaohongshu in Beijing sounds remarkably consistent with what I heard from my Google friends 20-25 years ago, from working hours to on-site amenities that kept you at work. You're spotting a correlation, but I think causality proba…

also companies were eager to portray themselves as "family", framing giving your all for the company as a moral choice

Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#249

Post by insane_dreamer »

given all the gains in productivity over the past 50 years thanks to technology, we should naturally have a universal (in developed countries at least) 4-day work week by now. Otherwise, what was the point of all those gains in productivity?

capital, not labor, captures almost all those gains

Re: The four-day workweek in Australia: insights from early adopters of 100:80:100

#250

Post by azan_ »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #247
quantummagic wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lazy idea that keeps getting trotted out. The 90% tax bracket only existed on paper, with an effective rate closer to 40%. Economists have shown that tax revenue remained remarkably unchanged, while having negative consequences for investment and productive use of capital. Instead, the relative prosperity of workers during that time came from a lack of global industrial competition and a massive post-war ma…

If the higher tax rates were so ineffective then why was the divide between the richest and the workers so much smaller? Do tell, what is the effective tax rate that the rich pay today?

If lower tax rates are so bad, then why are workers nowadays much, much richer than back then?
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