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Comment by deburo | Hacker News Reader

working over 40h is only « forbidden » where i live because paying 1.5x/h is not acceptable from the employer’s pov. it’s annoying from the worker’s pov since you’re necessarily capped at 40h if your employer doesn’t want to pay that rate.

i don’t understand your race to the bottom argument.

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> i don’t understand your race to the bottom argument.

Look at work culture in the United States or parts of Asia, where the goal is to extract as much production out of the workers as possible and if it grinds them to dust, that's their own personal failing and you will just swap out the faulty cog for a fresh one.

It gets absurd when you look at Japan's performative long hours. It's not even financially beneficial by that point.

> i don’t understand your race to the bottom argument.

Being able to voluntarily work more than 40h/week also means being able to be voluntold to work more than 40h/week.

People say that, but I don't think our culture would permit it at this point.

Unfortunately, culture follows economic conditions, not the other way around. So without a legal limit, I believe not only that culture would permit it, but also it would find a way to justify it.

(See e.g. US work ethics/protestant work culture.)

There is a workaround against that: Have a legal requirement that overtime should average to zero or less (to allow for part-time employees) over the course of a year across all employees of the workplace.

Lots of jobs require mandatory overtime, whether salaried office jobs which expect folks to finish unreasonable workloads or hourly physical jobs which have artificially limited the number of workers (by regulations or union contracts) but have minimum staffing levels, e.g. police, prisons, assembly line workers, etc.

There isn't one single culture here. Plenty of cultures not just permit it, they expect it.

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