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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

#81

Post by sam0x17 »

sokoloff wrote: post #48
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 slightly worse than that. If you have 90 units of work to be done you might hire 9 workers at 10 units each. If the standard work goes down by 10%, you now need 10 workers at 9 units each. Your workers have increased by 11.1% (given by 1-1/(1-0.1)) A reduction from 40 to 32 would reduce hours per worker by 20% but increase workers and total health care costs by 25%.

Not all companies are going to decrease wages in response to this legislation. In fact I'd be willing to bet it's less than 50% of companies. Right now we are already in a huge labor shortage because employers aren't paying enough to attract the workers they need. Companies that don't decrease wages in this situation will out-compete companies that do decrease wages if the primary scarce resource right now is workers.

This is similar to what's happening right now with companies that try to do locality adjustments for remote workers -- they get out-competed by companies willing to pay full price regardless of location. Eventually this will cause locality adjustments to vanish completely imo.

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

#82

Post by cestith »

hedora wrote: post #17
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…

The most obvious fix is to make employers offer the same benefits (prorated by hours worked) for all employees. That’d radically change the structure of the health insurance industry, since working full time hours by combining two part time jobs would imply that you’d get health insurance just like full time workers at either company.

Unfortunately if you're covered by two different group health plans you're going to need that extra day a week just to coordinate the fight over who pays for what. Just have Medicate (or maybe better Medicaid) for all and be done with tying that to an employer.

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

#83

Post by hourislate »

Ripe for "The Law of Unintended Consequences". Without changes to what is classified as Part Time Work (usually 30 hours), employers will get rid of full time staff and in some cases be able to avoid paying almost all benefits. UPS comes to mind, they would only hire part time drivers to avoid paying benefits.

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/workhours/parttimeemployme...

The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not address part-time employment.

I wouldn't be surprised if employers jump all over this to allow them to save billions by getting rid of full time work.

Edit: Spelling/Grammar

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

#84

Post by bluejekyll »

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'…

> 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 missing.

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

#85

Post by ncallaway »

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…

> you just pay each worker 10% less and hire 10% more workers, right?

While the rest of your comment is a fair concern, I want to push back on this default assumption.

While I'm sure there are roles that are pretty much 1:1 with output to hours worked, I don't think it's always true.

I think for software developers, for example, I get 90% of the productivity out of the first 32 hours of work that I would get out of 40 hours of work.

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

#86

Post by sofixa »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #2

I'd be perfectly happy with 35 hours, so that an eight hour workday is actually eight hours and not nine because your lunch break doesn't count.

You should move to France then :p

The work week here is 35hrs/week, with exceptions allowed for up to 40hrs/week, but the extra has to be compensated 1:1 with extra paid vacation time ( on top of the minimum of 30 days paid time off).

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

#87

Post by gurleen_s »

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'…

> 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).

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

#88

Post by dec0dedab0de »

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.

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

#89

Post by thoughtstheseus »

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.

Sorta, I view taxing labor as bad policy. We should not disincentivized labor. But… just saying stop this tax usually has people upset at bigger deficits. So if we tax consumption instead the end result is lower (or no) taxes for income and higher taxes on wealth (indirectly).

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

#90

Post by Cd00d »

ChicagoBoy11 wrote: post #78
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…

My wife is a high-powered attorney who makes an obscene amount of money in NY. We both ended up working from home during the pandemic, and it was amusing to see her work schedule. She absolutely did a lot of really strenuous work which often would demand lots (and sometimes ungodly!) hours, but there was also plenty of time where... there wasn't any work. Or she was simply worn out, and was taking a break, etc. And n…

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.

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