Is the four-day workweek finally within our grasp?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Also, we aren't allowed to make any code changes from Thanksgiving to New Years. So nothing really happens from Thanksgiving to mid-December and then the entire company stops working the last two weeks of December - we don't even submit time off for it, you just don't show up. That is essentially 10-20 business days where no real work happens. That is almost the equivalent of a year's worth of Fridays.
This gets extended month to month based on performance, so it could stop, but if they stop it I will really try to find a job where they do a similar thing.
No meetings on Friday means that in four hours you can do as much as with normal Friday but with meetings (given the meetings produce 0 value, which is not the case of course, but also sometimes the meetings could have been an email, a tweet, or a joke).
No daily/sprint code changes, release management, emergency approvals and the like. It works pretty well, no major outages and the site kept taking orders.
Source: worked on high-traffic e-commerce infrastructure around US Black Fridays/Cyber Monday shopping days.
That's not a bad thing, it's probably a good thing. But they're definitely unneeded.
>Of course some of the salaried employees are the lifeguards at the pool, the rock climbing wall people, etc.
???
I used to be the guy who would champion efficient meeting practices. Now it's the last thing I want given that I can now work-out, make breakfast, do manual labor, etc., while listening to meeting.
4 day work week in grasp you ask ? For many I'd be surprised if they actually did 15hrs of work a week. I'd never hire a full time employee who can work remotely. I'd employ a contractor who has to itemize their invoice.
bartenders, repair staff, custodial, fast food and construction have never offered a solid 40 hour week. many of these roles are highly automated and simply do not need a full 40 woman or man hours of work anymore. farming has been this way for a very long time and as such, most farmers wives would take jobs as lunchroom staff for the local elementary school to provide health insurance for the family that a farming job simply couldnt.
what i wonder now is that if this affects 'white' collar workers, will the rules change? will nail-swatters in the construction yard see benefits and retirement? or will an elaborate machination take place to ensure only the cloistered ass-in-seat see affordable flu shots and checkups.
That's the point lol
Me, I'd be tempted to hook the microphone to the speakers and create a "crossover" meeting and seeing how long it took till someone noticed.
I could only listen to two simultaneously… so I would modulate the volume.
I'm just curious as I've been the employer and the contractor in this scenario - do you think the output between a FTE and a contractor would be different? Do you think it would be different financially?
In my experience, developers tend to behave like a gas that expands to fill their container - people tend to work up to their compensation (whether it's hourly contracting or some form of salary + comp), and no more.
As a contractor, I would just charge you for the time it takes to itemize an invoice while I do it sitting on a call for another job I’m also billing for. And I would be very thorough with my itemization so you know exactly what you’re getting…
The non-itemized invoice is free. We can argue over contract terms if you want to or come to an arrangement if you don’t feel you got your money’s worth, but if I disagree the result is going to be completion of the terms of the contract and we go our separate ways. I’m not hurting for work, I can fire an obnoxious customer if it buys me QoL.
The pandemic tipped the balance of power from the money men to the workers. We’re going to watch this dynamic play out in ways large and small, but the net is that employees have a lot more power to set the terms of engagement than employers do right now.
0.5hr chats, code reviews, time-audit
1.25hr Bug#12345
...
So I have captured the ~15 minutes I spent itemizing/cleaning up my invoice for the past day or two in a "time-audit"/misc line item.
"very thorough with my itemization" implying you'll just over bill your customer because they have the nerve to have you professionally account for your time ?
"tipped the balance of power from the money men to the workers"
Right so if they weren't operating with integrity that doesn't mean the worker shouldn't either. Tit-fot-tat might be an optimal game theory but better to optimize for a clear conscience.
Note, I realize I am being unfair to your comment. When my customer first asked me to itemize my invoice it was an annoyance, but now I am efficient at it and see it as win-win. I just keep adding to it in real time as I work through out the day and then do a periodic clean up and aggregation.
Send me a text a minute after I've finished working for the day to check on the status and it takes me a minute to read and reply? No problem, I just billed the client for 15 minutes. Takes them 15 minutes to come up with and send a response that I need to respond to ASAP? Another 15 minutes billed. Want me to spend 3 minutes at the end of the day itemizing the bill? Perfect, that's another 15 minutes billed!
The more granular the itemizing, the more opportunity to shove the minimum billable increment in their face. Called me for a two minute chat while I'm in the zone on their project? Gotta itemize it! 15 minutes billed and I restart the work (out of the zone) at the top of the next interval.
The main difference is that at the end of the day I try to just stop when I have "enough" hours, since I don't get paid for overtime like I would as a contractor.
To the original topic: roughly 40% of my week is wasted on pointless meetings or inter-meeting dead time. The other time is roughly equally split between useful meetings, actual work, and admin or training tasks.
The issue with the pointless meetings is that they are generally a series, where one 10-minute slot out of every four one-hour meetings is genuinely useful - but you don't know in advance when that slot will occur. The other kind of pointless meetings generally involve customers who are unprepared.
That's double billing and afaik illegal, you can not (and rightly so) bill your customer twice for the same time.
Consulting is a relationship business. You’ll make way more money focusing on the people rather than the work. You can cover up sloppy execution with a good relationship, but stellar execution won’t save a project where you fuck up the client relationship.
That's not going to save you any money though.
A FT developer who makes $75 an hour only accepts that pay because it's closer to $300/hr in practice (if you only count the hours they are actually productive, which maxes out at 2-3 per day for knowledge work).
A freelance developer of similar skill, who accurately bills per hour worked, will simply charge $300 per hour.
All you're doing by requiring a certain amount of hours is ensuring the employee stretches out the time it takes to get things done.
What's "productive", though? Typing at a keyboard? For creative knowledge work (like designing stuff, not answering technical email queries) sometimes the back of your mind just needs time to chew on something.
That's a knee-jerk reaction that you probably already know has some serious problems ;)
People who are working 40 hours a week have no capacity to take on some important task with no notice unless they go past 40 hours a week. Which generally doesn't cost any extra money.
Hiring a contractor to work 40 hours per week is going to get really expensive really fast when you need them to suddenly ramp up beyond 40 hours on no notice. If you can even get them to do it!
If you're any kind of normal modern business, this is going to eat all your cost savings and probably even cause you to unnecessarily miss a lot of deadlines.
Which is the problem. What we need is overtime for all. Time and a half after 8 hours in a day. Time and a half after 40 hours in a week. Time and a half after 5 days in a week. Double time on Sunday. Minimum of 4 hours of pay per workday or if called in. Those factors multiply. That's not at all unusual in union shops.
That cost is far more transparent when dealing with hourly contractors, and maybe the employer prefers this! But, you know, theory of the firm etc tells us that in the long run you are usually better off with exempt employees even if they are frequently working less than the 40 hours you expect from them.
The volume of work I have to get done in 40 hours has roughly multiplied by ten since I now have to justify every hour spent.
It’s pretty easy to ten times almost-nothing though!
Very quickly I got 15-20 hours a week back.
(And my hourly billing rate was in the 4 figures.)
I don't understand this. Doesn't your full time employee itemise their time? Don't you do timesheets or something? Does the full time employee not have deliverables that you track with deadlines that they need to meet?
"Hours of work" is a terrible measure of productivity. I'll take an employee who gets the job done in four hours, goes to walk the dogs, and then spends the afternoon coming up with neat improvements, over a "hardworking" employee who spends 15 hours trying to get the job done.
As an engineering manager- an actual one- I'm not paying for hours, I'm paying for output. I couldn't care less if my employee was working 15 hours or 40, as long as they got an appropriate amount of work done for my investment in them.
Are we praising someone for demanding itemized timesheets? How absolutely toxic.
Preparing/eating a meal during a meeting is admittedly perk but it doesn't affect my focus or participation.
If they are working 15h/week and delivering what is expected from them, who are you to guilt those into working the schedule you judge as "right"? My employer pays me to deliver them value, if I deliver the expected value for my salary in 10h instead of 40h am I in the wrong? Should I be forcing myself to work harder just because? Nah.
> I am probably also culturally biased from working class roots that overpraises hours worked and that mindset is admittedly self-defeating.
Yes, you are. I came from the same roots, had the same twisted view about "hard work" and judging others when I worked my ass off and saw some other people relaxing. After 17 years of career, this is all bullshit. I'm being paid for my expertise and my results, if my employer is happy with my results why the fuck should I bust my ass longer than needed? I have a life outside of work that I care much more about.
I do have a work ethic, I do my work with a lot of care, craft and thought, I deliver value and improve products and processes. I don't fucking care if I do that in 10 or 40 hours a week, it's a motivation for me to allow my laziness to be a driver for being more and more efficient and effective, so I can work less hours while delivering more value, being paid more per hour in the process.
> Preparing/eating a meal during a meeting is admittedly perk but it doesn't affect my focus or participation.
It's also a perk to have enough time (1h-1h30m) in the middle of the day to go enjoy your meal fully, to prepare it with care, without multitasking in some bullshit meeting just because you feel you need to be hyper-efficient.
The best perk I have of being a software engineer is that, comparatively to many other fields, our careers allow us to take back a lot of control of our own schedule and time.
One level above manager (basically Director and above), it's practically all you do, i.e. 80% meetings and emails because that's the mechanics of the job.
Imagine a fisherman fishing at the dock: he is paying attention to signals, and then being super active for short moments, that's the nature of fishing. Managing is a lot of fodder communicating and hyper action / participation in some instances.
Imagine how much time you have to spend interviewing, listening to multiple vendors, talking to the legal department about the 'why you can't use some SaaS and how to get around it', the commercial guys trying to get under budget, your IP lawyers worried about the wording of the license, the DevOps team who are totally understaffed to release your product, the HR team pressuring you to hire 'the other person' in order to meet some strategic staffing targets, or their launch of the new HR portal which is a mess, prepping your slides for the conf. talk next month and the marketing team wants you to tweak your language, the Research Agency completely missed their objectives and you have to get them to re-do part of the research and you're not going to pay them extra, and you have to get your managers to focus on that. It's a lot of meetings.
FYI it's perfectly reasonable to listen to meetings while doing labour if the situation allows for it!
"It will be found, I believe, in every sort of trade, that the man who works so moderately, as to be able to work constantly, not only preserves his health the longest, but, in the course of the year, executes the greatest quantity of work."
"Great labour, either of mind or body, continued for several days together is, in most men, naturally followed by a great desire of relaxation, which, if not restrained by force, or by some strong necessity, is almost irresistible. It is the call of nature, which requires to be relieved by some indulgence, sometimes of ease only, but sometimes too of dissipation and diversion. If it is not complied with, the consequences are often dangerous and sometimes fatal, and such as almost always, sooner or later, bring on the peculiar infirmity of the trade. If masters would always listen to the dictates of reason and humanity, they have frequently occasion rather to moderate, than to animate the application of many of their workmen."
This is all from Chapter VIII: Of The Wages Of Labour.
As others have said the ratios are awesome. I have 15 days off every 20 days instead of 8. For a 20% pay cut, while getting full benefits.
Is Job-Sharing a potential solution?
Wait, what? How does working one day less a week get you to 15 days off?
15 days off / 20 days worked (5 weeks of 4 day workweeks)
8 days off / 20 days worked (4 weeks of 5 day workweeks)
Another way of saying it would be: in a 4 day work week you have 4/3 (1.33) ratio of work days to days off whereas in a traditional workweek is 5/2 (2.5). So although it is just one day it dramatically shifts the balance between work and time off.
disclaimer: I haven't read the linked article, apologies if the comment is slightly off-topic.
Our biggest hiring institutions (e.g. LinkedIn) for the most part don't provide a way to specify that you are only willing to consider "full-time but not 40+ hours". So I indicate "part-time only", but I still tend to get recruiters who ignore that and ping me for 40+ hour jobs.
The four-day workweek will be within our grasp when we can actually specify it in a job search.
My point is, even if we did reduce our primary employment to 4 days, there are still a lot of people who will simply take this as an opportunity to work an additional part time job or side hustle. Then the bar for standard of living rises with them and we're back to where we started. Until we actually value rest, relationships etc, the maximal output mindset will endure.
The people in the world working 2 jobs don't tend to be affluent because of it. There are exceptions among the 3-letter elites, such as Jack Dorsey and his multiple CEO-ships, but those people /already/ represent a standard of living that is all but unachievable for the rest of us.
Probably 10-4 or 10-5 would be more healthy and liberating in some sense.
And I am just as productive as when I worked 5 days a week!
Startups trying to compete for talent should probably take note of the fact that it took 3x more pay for them to poach staff, not 20% more. I'm not saying you'll get away with paying 3x less but you also won't have to worry about losing staff if you're in the ballpark since the 4 day work week is that valuable to anyone lucky enough to have experienced it.
It should probably be a norm but right now it's ad-hoc for companies to support it in order to retain staff.
My current and prior jobs have people in 3-4 day a week roles. But the people in those roles are senior contributors whose value to the company is as much knowledge as it is contributions.
For 20% less compensation! I'd rather do the 4-10s for full pay, without the pressure to get 40 hours of work done in 32 hours.
If you sleep 8 hours a day and work for 8 hours Mon-Fri, that's:
- work: 40hrs
- personal: 72hrs
- sleep: 56hrs
Switching to a four day work week would thus result in a 20% reduction in work hours but only a 10% increase in personal time.
I'm going to assume you weren't including non-work hours if they were on "work days", but that seems silly if you have a 9-5 job.
Weekends are the only days where I generally "plan" to do things, and even then, Sundays are half reserved for chores like mowing/shopping. Having an additional weekend day that I can plan for hobbies would be amazing. For me, it's honestly akin to doubling my free time.
[0] https://blog.gingerlime.com/2020/how-we-switched-to-4-day-we...
It's just not worth the effort of even considering these companies without salary ranges. 4-day work weeks mean nothing if it means getting paid <80% market rate.
I'd do four 10-hour days. if that's what it takes.
But it's not worth the effort and time to research dozens of companies if they're all going to tell me that I'd need to take a significant pay cut. And if a listing on that site doesn't have the salary range, that's what I'm going to assume is going to happen.
If, as others have seen, productivity goes up, then it might not matter. It's a risky bet for companies with highly paid staff.
So I'm very skeptical that this trend will grow. It took the IWW to get us the concepts of The Weekend and Sick Days, and I expect it will take nothing less extreme to claw back any more of our time from the corporate slave-driving overlords. Absent a few easily-dismissed outliers, of course.
[0] Which is directly responsible for infecting my household with COVID. Literally everyone in the company has had it.
If we shorten the nominal workweek to 36 hours before overtime is required (and encourage this to be in the form of 4x9 or 9/2 * 8):
* Supply of labor will fall, increasing equilibrium pay for everyone
* Everyone's quality of life goes up
* Traffic and environmental impacts from commuting should improve (a little).
* It's a better hedge against automation and outsourcing than artificially increasing the minimum price of labor.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2021-02/56975-Minimum-Wage....
[3] https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965483266/-15-minimum-wage-wo...
But a minimum wage is useful to the extent that there are jobs for your lowest skill, least desirable workers. And ensuring that may take reducing the work week.
Paying some a lower wage because it delays another machine purchase is not a long term solutiom
And those companies will calculate the ROI for moving into a lower tax burdensome area. After the company leaves the people wont have a job or the tax revenue.
Living off of redistributed hand outs sounds like a horrible way to live. How do you improve your life? How do you find meaning?
I live in a country that has 3rd generation beneficiaries. Their lives don't appear enjoyable. Once in that mind set it's so hard to get out. They often turn to drugs and mindless entertainment.
Most of us also probably live in countries where a significant fraction of the population would choose Playstation/Netflix/heroin instead. That's their choice, but you're probably right that much of it is learned behavior. Perhaps some significant resources (government funded or volunteered) should be applied toward teaching people how to make better use of their free time, if that's what they want.
It's certainly a better vision than making widgets 40 hours a week for a company with dubious social impact.
Self checkout came regardless of whether the state had a minimum wage increase or not. As soon as the technology was mature enough it was rolled out.
Why do the workers have the lowest negotiating power in these jobs? It's because they are the most easily replaced and the net benefit from employing them is smallest.
[There are some edge cases, where a field is swamped from people doing the job for the love of it... But this is not the typical case.]
I.e. people with minimum wage jobs would be paid even less, but for the government using its power to negotiate for them
Yes. And it's a necessary thing to have.
On the other hand... if someone is doing work that returns $15.50/hour on average to the business, and is employed at $10/hour, raising the minimum wage to $15/hour doesn't get that person a raise: it gets them laid off.
The things that IMO really help the fundamentals are:
* Raising the demand for low-skill labor (e.g. economic growth above productivity improvements)
* Raising the average skill level of the workforce, and/or
* Reducing the supply of labor.
No, what it does is it causes prices to go up, which are amortized across all of society - between both people who are paid $15/hour, and people who are paid $150/hour.
On average, it is a small wealth transfer from the average person to the working poor.
It does both of these things. Some jobs are lost and some prices go up.
Some tasks are better off outsourced, automated, or not even done at all as the floor price on labor increases. Raising minimum wages here hurts. Shortening the work week helps.
The demand for some tasks is inelastic but easily performed by many different people. The price of these tasks increases in proportion to minimum wage. Raising minimum wages here helps the employees, and shortening the work week is a small hurt.
Some tasks already have an equilibrium price well above minimum wage due to a supply limitation of the capable labor. Raising minimum wages here is relatively neutral. Shortening the work week should increase compensation here and increase the motivation for employers to find ways to bring more lower skill people into the field.
Most things are somewhere between these extremes.
Do people who are paid 10x necessarily consume 10x over a person paid minimum wage? If raising the minimum wage causes across the board price increases (aka inflation), then those whose income is lower are affected more since a higher percentage of their income is spent on essential consumption (food, water, shelter).
If the operational concept is "small wealth transfer" to the folks earning the lowest income using inflation as a stealth tax then it is a highly regressive tax.
Using polling data for 31,869 households in thirty-eight countries and allowing for country effects, we show that the poor are more likely than the rich to mention inflation as a top national concern.
Even if their consumption was 1x, my point would still stand. Most people aren't earning minimum wage, nor are their salaries affected by minimum wage increases. This means that the cost of most products does not increase as minimum wages increase.
Minimum wage increase money comes from somewhere, and since ~everyone relies on minimum wage workers, that means that ~everyone pays for that wage increase.
If you take a dollar away from 100 people, and split half the resulting money between the 10 poorest in that group, and the other half between the next 20, it's a regressive tax, with a progressive benefit that has a net benefit for the poorest. Minimum wage increases work the same way. The rich lose very little, the middle class lose some, the poor win.
Are there better ways of structuring this sort of thing? Theretically yes, but practically, the rich are really, really good at protecting themselves from wealth redistribution. If you're going to hold the poor hostage to them, you're never going to get anything done.
“It isn’t the sum you get, it's how much you can buy with it, that's the important thing; and it's that that tells whether your wages are high in fact or only high in name.”
Mark Twain A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)[0]
0. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221480431...
U.S. households with higher incomes spend more money on food, but the amount spent represents a smaller overall portion of their budgets. In 2020, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $4,099 on food (representing 27 percent of income), while households in the highest income quintile spent an average of $12,245 on food (representing 7 percent of income).
https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
That seems to support my point that raising the minimum wage disproportionately helps the working poor.
It’s akin to the company town giving a buck more in wages but charging 2 more in groceries. Sure you make “more,” but since you can buy less of what you need, you are effectively making less.
https://www.econlib.org/library/Topics/HighSchool/RealvsNomi...
This isn't really a criticism of your comment, but I've always felt that this is a convenient supporting argument that obscures so much nuance that it is actually harmful to the broader goal of more fair wages. There are three huge assumptions that a statement like "an hourly wage should be enough income for basic needs" obscures:
1. that the person is employable (I don't think it's necessarily good to economically guarantee that severely disabled people are forced out of the workplace, even if they have other support systems to guarantee their needs)
2. that the person works a certain number of hours. ($100/hr is not livable if you work one hour per week.)
3. that a person has an assumed set of needs and an assumed support system (different life circumstances require different incomes to meet basic needs)
Everyone deserves to afford their basic needs, regardless of any of these confounding factors. Much of our worst poverty is because of one of these factors, not a variable as simplistic as hourly wage. Wages should be fair, but basic needs should be for everyone regardless of their ability to work a 9-to-5. While I do think we need some upwards pressure on wages, I also think social safety nets are a more equitable way to ensure basic needs are met. And we don't need to let employers off the hook for paying the bill, we can tax them to do this.
I think the instability this would cause i the lower class would be devastating. The very people that don't have savings and that can't easily weather large financial events would have once forced on them all at the same time.
> just staffed up more for low skilled positions (and eventually for skilled positions),
There's not an infinite supply of bodies out there. It's not clear where you'd just "find 10% more people"-- at least not without raising comp. And, of course, getting closer to full employment is a good thing in itself...
> but are only making 80% of ...
36/40 = 90%, even in this worst case where someone has their hours reduced from 40 to 36 to avoid overtime pay. I think there's a lot more poor people that are getting 30-35 hours from their job who would be nowhere close to the overtime threshold before, but now that their normal workweek is closer to the max get it sometimes.
Any policy change will hit some people negatively, but I think this would be a net positive for the vast majority of lower earners.
Well, you just gave millions of low-income workers 10% less money and 10% more time, so my guess is that more people would be forced to get a second job.
* Some other people will be content working less.
* Other people who already get overtime every week will be getting more overtime.
* Exempt employees are likely to slowly evolve to working less as the 36 hour workweek becomes the norm.
* Employers faced with paying more overtime or getting less hours will need to pay more and work harder to train up lower skilled workers to fill positions.
And in the end, everyone shifts up a bit from this reallocation.
As another commenter noted, maybe from all those people that are no longer making enough to make ends meet. Now you have someone working two jobs, maybe at like 16-24 hours each, and if one of those needs more hours, well, now you're working more than 40 hours a week overall but less than 32 per job and not getting overtime for any of it.
I could easily see something like this being one of those well intentioned policies with major negative outcomes.
> 36/40 = 90%,
My mistake, I missed where you defined it as just dropping four hours off, and "shorter work week" sounds like cutting a day off to me, so I assumed the wrong thing.
Even so, 10% is not an amount a lot of people can sustain. You posit that there's a lot more people getting 30-35 hours, but I'm not so sure of that, so would definitely want to see some numbers before endorsing anything like this. Additionally, I think a lot of people that are working less hours are doing so because in some cases employers can get around some laws about sick time and paid time off if employees aren't "full time".
The bottom line is that if people have more money, they can choose to work less. Just make sure people are paid more and they'll choose to work less if that's actually important to them, and they'll seek out jobs that offer things they care about (such as less work hours) if that's important to them. Reducing the expected working hours is nice, but I doubt most the people that would actually need it (those working demanding or demeaning jobs) would trade that for less pay given the realities. The only people that can really make use of that are the middle and upper class, and they can already choose to prioritize that and look for work that allows it given their financial stability.
The government being involved is the most likely answer as to why a 40 hour work week is standard and why there are so many "minimum wage" jobs. A funny thing happens when you set floors or ceilings in markets, you hit them. There should be no minimum wage. People excepting jobs will set the minimum wage because people act in their own self interest. If the pay is too low, no one will take the job. This is how labor markets are set everywhere else in the economy, I don't understand how the bottom is different.
The government shouldn't have anything to do with the work week, the market should decide because what works in one sector in one region may not work in another. The government isn't as smart as the entire labor market making decisions for themselves.
But note also that there are people one might be willing to gamble on employing at $12/hour but that don't offer a positive return at capital at $15/hour.
I think minimum wage laws are important, but that reducing the supply of labor will do more to push up the wages of the lowest earners.
Right now the problem is in the power dynamic between companies and employees - the dynamic is very unbalanced in the companies favor. In "Bullshit Jobs" Graeber compares the current system to a Dom-Sub relationship with no safeword for the "fake-competitive" industries that are not unionized.
UBI is the safeword.
This is not some ideal spherical cow world, this is how literally the entire labor market works except for the mystical bottom that the government feels they have to be involved in. Why else do you think FAANG's pay so much money? Its because they want to attract the best talent.
When we are talking about minimum wage, you need to consider the people with the worst talent. Think sweatshops in China, construction camps in Dubai, prostitutes in the US. Not Google or Facebook employees.
As for sweatshops in China, these are the growing pains of a developing economy. The work conditions there suck but I bet they are better than being bent over in a rice field all day. You are also rapidly seeing this change as the economy becomes more developed there, even in the face of an oppressive government.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-is-working-its-way-up-fro...
The construction camps in Dubai is about government corruption. They lure in overseas workers then take away their passports so they can't leave. Not exactly a free labor market.
Again prostitution in the US is not a free labor market because of government interference. If you go to places where prostitution is legal, the girls there make pretty good money.
Most of the areas where you can point to the worst employment situations is because of government interference in a market place.
In some areas an Amazon warehouse job is an exceptionally good job. I grew up in a place where one of the best job you could get was working at a Walmart distribution center. Basically like an Amazon warehouse but the whole this is a freezer.
Also the government can't and shouldn't try to govern bad choices away from people. This would lead to a very authoritarian society.
https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em...
> Unions are not allowed to negotiate benefits and wages exclusively for their members.
Parent is talking about "closed shops" where a union uses its bargaining power to ensure the employer will only employ people represented by the union. On the one hand this prevents the free-rider problem you mention. On the other, this is coercive and can erode employees' ability to negotiate about things important to them.
It can also be inefficient-- I've been in workplaces where I got in trouble for moving a desk in my office a few feet, because moving furniture was a closed-shop union job, and I wasn't a member.
The usual argument for this is that while there is some efficiency gained in trying for a pure labor market here, the externalities can be brutal. So the reason that the government gets involved in the lower end is that typically they are the ones that have to deal with the fallout when things aren't working well. There are other approaches, but for whatever reasons many places find min wage more politically acceptable/expedient.
No, they would cooperate and set an informal maximum wage to replace the minimum one (or more accurately, they would lower the already informally established maximum wage.) This would be a win-win for both businesses.
It's not a coincidence that all low-wage jobs pay between 0% and 25% over the minimum wage, and it has nothing to do with labor demand. It's because a bidding war is no good for anyone, and because having the best low wage employees will not improve net revenue more than always paying as little as possible. The idea that the Burger King paying $22/hr is going to drive the McDonald's paying $14/hr out of business is a libertarian fantasy never borne out by reality.
> and it has nothing to do with labor demand.
If not having an employee costs you $30/hour in revenue-- your desire to avoid a bidding war won't prevent you from making an offer at $22/hr if it's necessary to fill the slot.
It has everything to do with labor demand (and supply). Collusion (formal or informal) between loosely coupled, adversarial entities breaks down under pressure.
And not just immigrants. Anyone with an abusive parent or partner or any situation where one person holds power over another.
Hence "this is how you get slavery".
If there were no minimum wage, you could put the person on payroll and be completely legal in your actions, allowing the employer to exploit unknowledgeable employees.
All of this bullshit free market fundamentalism relies on many nice assumptions - one being that there is plenty of good, high-paying work to go around. The actual fact spelled out in a hundred different ways, from wages to market conditions to books like Bullshit Jobs, is that the economy doesn't need nearly as many workers as we have people particularly in low wage jobs that don't require much training. There is much more supply than demand. Its perfectly possible that if McDonalds paid $1/hr, their competitors would ALSO pay $1/hr. In that situation someone with little skills would have a choice of 1. making $1/hr 2. making $0 and starving. These are the conditions 50-60% of the world works in. We've already seen collusion to keep wages low in technology, not to mention other industries and times in the past, no doubt it happens and can happen again.
As is usual, every time someone points out a bad situation, you say its "not really a free market". So its not, most markets aren't ideal "free markets". Employers can collude, information asymmetries do exist, power imbalances are real. There are literally zero "free markets" in the world. They don't just arise naturally. Even with all the intervention we have, I have yet to see any market where there is no information asymmetry or imbalances. Its a fucking idealized model from Econ 101, not the state of reality.
This kind of thinking is fundamentally un-empirical. It starts with a theory and insists that the world conform to it rather than looking at the world and examining which theory really does explain it best. In this world I would simply refuse to acknowledge the existence of non-spherical objects as a non-spherical boulder rolled down a hill and killed me.
lol - then you go on to complain about free markets? China is NOT a free market!
I don't care how many fast food joints colluded, no one is going to work for $1 an hour. Heck with all the COVID bucks floating around I see fast food joints advertising $15 an hour jobs and STILL not getting any takers.
Your position is utterly nonsensical. This isn't the turn of the century. Workers have never had more mobility or information. If anyone tried to set up a "Company town" in todays economy it would be empty from day one.
Several replies are addressing your wrong points but I had to bring this up: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
Spoken like a true capitalist! The young, dumb and disadvantaged should be thankful for the pennies that trickle their way. It's not like they're gonna sue if they get ripped off, they're broke. Besides, they can always move into high paying career ladders just as soon as they can afford to stop taking the bus everywhere. /s
You're arguing from an ideal situation, without taking into account that reality's average is very much less than ideal.
What skills would they be? Surely the only skill you build while flipping burgers is that of flipping burgers. Is it applicable to any other job?
Fortunately that wasn't particularly laborious, so I still had the energy to do school too. Many people are not as lucky, and these days often have to work 2 or more jobs to get by. Worse, the kind of schooling I took advantage of is increasingly turning from vocation-oriented education to cheap-university-transfer education.
Nah. He sounds like someone with class and privilege who's worked a minimum wage job.
See, a minimum wage job for someone who is a privileged youth-- is a good way to learn the last little bit of organization, focus, "eye on the ball", working with a supervisor, attention to detail skills-- that will serve them the rest of their life. It's a great skill building opportunity.
For someone who's been stuck in it 3 years--- well, it's exhausted all of its value in those respects by this point.
People who are scared of the minimum wage going up are often worried that it's going to squeeze out kids from getting these first work experiences. And it's a valid concern. But the people who spend their lives stuck in those jobs are invisible to them.
I personally favor shortening the work week because I think it will increase the compensation associated with low skill labor; provide additional incentives for employers to ramp people into higher skill positions; and leave room for kids in low skill jobs.
We have disability safety nets (that could be better). And FLSA and state regs all allow paying these groups under minimum wage (and this is a good thing).
My wife's brother is severely mentally handicapped. He lives in a nice, well-run group home (I'm aware this is not universal). He also has the option of going to "dayhab" where there's educational content and the option of working making crafts for a couple of dollars per hour of spending money.
I am not sure his labor output is worth the $2-3/hour he gets paid: a lot of this is probably charity, but it makes a difference to him to be able to earn something and work towards goals, and not just spend his entire day watching TV instead.
You don't fix these things with a minimum wage and you possibly make them worse. They've got different solutions.
> The young, ... the convicted
These are harder problems.
* How do we provide a good on-ramp to productive work and independent life for at-risk youth?
* How do we allow those who have broken the norms of society in the past to rejoin in an orderly way, with hope and better prospects from compliance than reoffending?
Note that I think we should have a minimum wage. I just think it's also a band-aid at best, and often causes a fair degree of problems as well. It's better than nothing, but one would be better off addressing the problems it's targeted at in any other available way.
Instead, I get a bunch of strawmen that have nothing to do with what I said.
What you have not addressed is the extreme imbalance in power for many employers at the expense of employees. If there is no floor on what someone can get away with paying, then it is reasonable to expect the marginalized or powerless to be fully taken advantage of. Even today, some employers try to get away with not paying by having employees work "off the clock". At least with the minimum wage, litigious employees can eventually expect something for their lost time.
???? I have stated throughout this entire conversation that I believe there should be a minimum wage. I do not know why you continue to argue with me as if I have not. Your messages have nothing to do with what I am saying. I have pointed this out to you now three times.
You haven't confused me with trcarney who said far above that there shouldn't be one, have you?
I just don't think the minimum wage is a solution to many of the problems you cite. It will not generate more employment income for the severely disabled, etc.
That's basically what Walmart abuses anyways via the welfare system; it's almost a subsidy to make their model kind of glue-together in the end. Let's just make it explicit. Pass UBI, repeal minimum wage laws.
That anyone has the guts to still be pushing UBI when we can see how a limited UBI with the current government handouts are utterly destroying the current labor market is beyond reprehensible.
It's not destroying anything, it's giving labor bargaining power back versus capital. Yes, it's harder to hire workers at $X/hour when they have alternatives. That's the whole point of UBI.
Also note that pre-handouts, the companies were hiring workers for $10/hour, now they're willing to pay $15/hour with bonus (and can't find anyone). What that means is that companies actually had room to pay much higher than they were actually paying (and still make sufficient profit) - so the previous wage was not a fair market wage, but was rather exploitation; which the article goes into below:
"Labor markets in capitalist economies are fundamentally tilted against individual workers’ ability to bargain effectively with employers. Policy does not have to be rigged for employers to give them particular clout in labor markets; instead, the very nature of these labor markets gives them clout. In the past, when economic growth was broadly shared across the population, it was because policymakers understood this basic asymmetry and used policy levers to bolster the leverage and bargaining power of workers. Conversely, recent decades’ rise of inequality and anemic wage growth has resulted from a stripping away of these policy bulwarks to workers’ labor market power."
https://www.epi.org/publication/what-labor-market-changes-ha...
(Same source)
No one is going to hire a 12 year old for a part time job if the minimum wage is $15. It just increases the minimum skill level to be hireable. But hire them for $7.50 and they might have skills worth $15 by the time they're 18.
We've already had history in the U.S. where the inflation-adjusted minimum wage was way higher than it is today and yet the labor participation rate was also higher than it is today.
But my personal preference is for UBI coupled with a repeal of the minimum wage.
I'm very capitalistic and libertarian, but reality is all systems need to manage edge cases. Minimum wage is a part of that. To believe that the market can figure everything out requires serious tunnel vision.
It's not the only way though. We have no legally defined or mandated minimum wage here in Norway (nor elsewhere in the Nordic region I think). But the effective minimum is probably higher than the mandated minimum in any other country.
Broadly speaking the way it is done here is that the national association of employers and the principal unions negotiate a tariff for each industry and type of work each year. The state is involved to the extent that it provides an official who acts as referee in the negotiations and tries to chivvy the parties to an agreement.
Employers are free to ignore the rules but risk losing employees to companies that pay according to the tariff.
Of course the difference between here and the US is that solidarity is stronger here so the negotiations are less hostile here.
It's not perfect but it seems to work quite well
> Everyone's quality of life goes up
Ideally, yes. But for those who struggle in various ways the extra free time could be dangerous. I'm definitely in favor of a shorter work week. But there are always unintended consequences.
For example I live in NJ. As the pandemic lockdown kicked off so did the adverts for gambling via your mobile device. I'm not in favor of the Nanny State but I can't help but wonder how many ppl are nursing an addiction and associated debt from this intersection.
Otherwise, businesses will continue to label employees managers with no actual management responsibilities with the sole goal of paying someone a lower hourly rate in exchange for a more certain periodic payment.
Once you remove this loophole, hourly pay will naturally rise as businesses will opt to hire more hourly workers. The biggest reason hourly workers lack negotiating power is businesses can lean in the salaried “managers” to fill in at no extra cost.
And how far does this extend? Can I not pay a contractor a fixed rate for a project? Or a fixed rate to handle _____ for me for a week? It would seem to encourage arm's-length contracting arrangement for services and coverage, which isn't ideal.
I don’t see what it would have to do with contractors. Minimum wage laws apply to employer employer relationships. Independent contractors can charge whatever they want.
So you want to pay someone for every hour they might get called, too? Even if that is a very rare responsibility?
> I don’t see what it would have to do with contractors.
It would further encourage contractor relationships, as I said. I don't see this as a good thing.
It will not encourage contractor relationships anymore than now, it will simply require businesses to pay the hourly workers more and give them steady schedules, benefits, etc.
Doubtful
> it will simply require businesses to pay the hourly workers more
Why? It seems like this is a lever you're hoping to use to get the exempt workers paid more and/or a slightly greater allocation of work away from what had formerly been exempt workers.
> benefits
Why?
The whole concept of hourly minimum wage is undercut by the ability of businesses to pay a meager salary.
The mechanism of action for increases prices paid to workers is by decreasing supply of man hours from one individual at a low price (i.e. increasing salaries minimum).
I think this is absolute rounding error on the number of additional hourly workers needed.
Yes, a reasonable percentage of salaried workers in low wage industries are exploited as you describe. In turn, with an hourly wage, they'll work a small percentage fewer hours.
I've had a similar experience at previous places, and it seemed like the rationale for the holiday shutdown was "we don't want to risk any downtime while lots of engineers are out and potentially unreachable if something breaks". All that is to say, if it's within your power to leave, the grass is potentially much greener elsewhere.
I worked at a company where we had 10 days of vacation + the office shut down for the last week of the year. Nobody had to use vacation time during that 1-week shutdown. If anything, it increased PTO accrued obligations because nobody had to use their PTO for time off during that week.
We do something like this now, and the rationale is that it's a positive experience for the staff, gives everyone a bit of a break, and you only "lose" days that nobody was very focused in anyway.
My friends in agency life used to have their office shutdown from the time of the holiday party, until the new year. Which was about 2 to 2.5 weeks.
The "suburbs" between SJ-SF-Oakland range from very dense urban areas, to very sparse (and expensive) bedroom communities, to uninhabited (protected land) areas.
I think it's fair to loosely characterize SV as a big city, from almost all US perspectives.
> big city, that grass will never be green enough for me
Take your pick, I guess. I like cities, and I certainly don't want to feel like I'm a slave.
Since A: The staff want it off and B: It gives a good window to do heavy maintaince and such
It turns out the HR books are right and pay isn't the primary consideration after a certain point. The problem is that most HR people take that and say, "We're already soooo generous, we already offer unlimited vacation (lol), so we don't have to pay people too!"
I offered unlimited vacation in every business I started or ran since 1989.
But the abusive bullshit many companies have pulled while claiming “unlimited vacation” has justifiably made people cynical. This stated policy has become a warning sign instead of a benefit.
So in my new company we have a written policy four weeks but there is no way to track it (where the law permits this). sigh
One company specifically said they we needed to get our asses out of the office because they saw people not taking at least 3 weeks a year.
I'm so stockholm-syndromed into typical corporate apathy, I'd probably feel so weirded out if I found out myself in such an environment I wouldn't be able to handle it like somebody who spent 50 years in prison is unable to cope with the reality of life on the outside.
...or that traditionally lets people go home at lunch? This is pretty common but you frame it pretty negatively.
But if you want some justifications: christmas is the biggest holiday in the (once?) christian-dominated west, and in the US in particular it is quite common for family to be separated by hundreds or even thousands of miles of travel. It is also common practice for people to celebrate christmas eve with one side of the family and christmas day with the other, if they live closely enough to each.
All that aside, it is less about not getting christmas eve off than it is about there being absolutely no reason for us to be there at all. The company recognizes that there is some importance to the day for its employees by cutting the day in half in the first place, yet even though all evidence shows that there is no reason whatsoever to be there and it's costing the company more to have people there than it will ever make from it, they still insist that people show up. It's not even rational slave-driving.
Schools are off during this time. And many professions take a break during this time as well, not just office workers, but factories often use this down time for maintenance, and trades use it as reprieve from working in the cold.
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/08/where-t...
In fact, I cannot find any source at all that says the IWW caused the weekend.
I'm a little jealous of it, honestly; it's pretty rare that I work less than ten hours a day anyway, so I think economically it would be better for me.
Based on the stereotypical 9-to-5 office job in the UK or elsewhere, a "40" hour work week in those countries must obviously include some amount of paid lunch break (at a guess at least half an hour, maybe even one hour, giving somewhere between 35 and at worst 37.5 actually worked hours)
In Germany on the other hand lunch breaks are typically unpaid, so 40 hours means 40 actually worked hours, plus however long your lunch break is (at least half an hour is the legal minimum when working between six and nine hours per day).
But otherwise, I agree. That’s a wonderful schedule along with usually great WLB in defense.
The other risk is that defense has been overfunded and high flying for years and years now. Usually goes in cycles with massive layoffs, and we haven’t had one in a long, long time.
40 hour per week with 40 days PTO is not very common but in larger companies in Europe is not unheard of specially for senior ICs.
I'm not saying a load more PTO isn't worth it, but there are definitely ways to do this kind of thing, and it's worth asking your company about it.
A 6-day work week means you basically have to take time off to go away for weekends at all.
That said, I'm not convinced a 3 day weekend is much better than a 2 day weekend on a routine basis, certainly compared to have the same time allocated more flexibly.
I expect to deliver about 80% of the value I do today - by having a good excuse to jettison the low value stuff, feel more motivated and engaged in the time I do have, feel more refreshed with more mental energy
Time will show if that proves the case…
This is correlated first to workplace morale and second to the individual worker. The workers who would do this from home are the same workers who would do it in the office. And employers who make their workers' lives miserable will have endemic problems with people not putting in effort.
Though actually it's more like 2-3 days of not working, spread out, more often than not.
That's the tipping point: >50% of the week is now mine.
That said, had to subscribe to answering services to cover off hours including Friday afternoon.
You’ll be surprised how many people call at 5pm on Friday.
Plus there are now many companies offering this benefit, which is one of the most powerful hiring selling points for companies who cannot compete with FAANG salaries:
Also as your hours worked per worker goes down, the number of workers goes up, and your communication and coordination costs for a project are at least quadratic in the number of workers on that project.
As a consequence, it costs more than twice as much to run a project with two half-time workers as it does to run the same project with one full-time worker.
Here’s an example: https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/22807858/tiktok-influe...
The founder makes >100k per month as mostly passive income.
“We’re asking you to come in three days a week if you are within committing distance of the office, oh by the way, enjoy a half day on Friday!” is the common theme of the message right now.
I’m usually hesitant to make predictions but I really think this is going to be a losing POV if we look two years out. The cat is out of the bag - good talent is going to gravitate toward employers who give their folks autonomy and optionality. This is the moment when the corporate world finally realizes that having a reputation for treating people well actually matters.
You also avoid commute overhead if you work from the office.
I switched to a 4-day work week years ago, and still work 7.5h each day. I found that I'm much more focused during working hours, and spend less time procrastinating - I'm just as productive as I was before.
Also, money.
But first I got a "DNS Probe Possbile" in Brave, and after 4 refreshes I just got a Privacy error with "NET::ERR_CERT_COMMON_NAME_INVALID".
4 Days x 8 Hours = 32 Hours per Week
In general though I observe that I'm seeing a lot fewer scheduled Friday meetings than on other days and, while things sometimes need to get handled on Friday afternoon, people are often pretty apologetic is they schedule a Friday PM meeting.
I think 4x9 as a nominal workweek makes a whole lot of sense. (9 days x 8 hours) / (2 weeks) is almost as good.
We can barely get a small percentage of jobs converted to remote. What makes people even hope for 4-day work weeks to be common?
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
This hope looks to be pregnant with the promise that shorter work hours would leave more time to pursue work that feels meaningful to us while allowing us to support ourselves... But a question worth asking is how much of it would just get absorbed into the indolence that most of us have let ourselves slip too much time and energy into. I contend that the hope for shorter hours is indeed not pregnant, but simply sporting a beer gut.
EDIT: I went through the struggle of clinging to this hope. I'm still stressed by exhausting time management problems and there seems to be no systematic panacea approach that will make them go away. But fully letting go of this hope, and the tacit resentfulness that comes with its unfulfillment was one of the best things I've done in the last few months and I would whole heartedly recommend it. My psychological resources can be re-distributed to something better; I could dedicate that mental energy to finding or performing work I do consider meaningful.
Sincerely, your ruling oligarchs.