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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

#31

Post by toomuchtodo »

jacob2484 wrote: post #27

Why 32? Why not 22? Why not 10? What's the reasoning here.

A 4 day workweek (8 * 4 = 32) to distribute the last few decades of productivity gains [1] to the working class. Very similar to how unions were how the working class received a weekend [2]. Why would we not expand the weekend/time for leisure and other non work related time as productivity increases?

[1] https://economics.stackexchange.com/questions/15558/producti...

[2] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/sep/09/viral-imag...

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

#34

Post by caturopath »

It's weird to see all the comments taking this as a meaningful piece of legislation rather than the symbolic stunt that it is. Nothing wrong with Takano promoting his political views that way, but it's a little silly to act like this is something it's not.

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

#35

Post by willio58 »

bigmattystyles wrote: post #10

For 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'm convinced I would get more done in the shorter work week. After 3 day weekends I tend to get more done the following week, I think due to being more well-rested.

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

#36

Post by lovich »

natas wrote: post #15

So 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.

Did the poor get poorer when the 40 hour work week was adopted?

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

#38

Post by BitwiseFool »

Miner49er wrote: post #12
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.

One study found it's only about 3 hours for the average office worker: https://www.vouchercloud.com/resources/office-worker-product...

Sounds about right. At my employer, DevOps expects that we fill in our time sheets completely in order to represent the whole eight hour workday. So we do. Things like taking breaks, talking to coworkers, waiting around for answers from other teams, meetings, etc., all of that goes towards active project work. However, the projects are estimated using effort hours and they do not include inflated 'we need to look productive the whole day' tasks.

If an individual goes under the full eight hours, it reflects poorly on them during evaluations. If the division goes overtime on project hours, nothing bad happens. So naturally each developer is incentivized to jot down extra time and disincentivized from tracking time truthfully. And yet management wonders why we go overtime on so many buckets!

And everyone knows the numbers aren't real, yet the song and dance must go on. I really wish we had a term for this in English. I suppose 'Potemkin' sort of applies?

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

#39

Post by thoughtstheseus »

JoeQuery wrote: post #7
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…

I agree with you here. I'm honestly not educated on history enough to know if such a reform is feasible in a single pass - an entire redesign vs incremental change. It would be cool if a major rework could happen all at once.

The best approach I know of is for the government or other large employers to make the shift to a 4 day workweek. Once 10s of millions are doing it, it’ll become more of a cultural norm.

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

#40

Post by chapium »

bitwize wrote: post #29
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 time to tie health insurance to being alive.

But that means the poor would have affordable healthcare.
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