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Comment by ClassyJacket | Hacker News Reader

No they won't. We'll work 5 days a week for less money and the rich will get richer.

I don't know why this is getting downvoted. This is exactly how the system works.

Every productivity gain is only meant to make workers faster which earns profits faster for the executives and shareholders.

With the prospect of faster work, execs and shareholders are salivating at the thought of grinding workers more in the same 40 hours/week but earn more profits for the same amount of hours.

If we want our children to live a better life than us, we need massive changes in laws (healthcare, exempt workers etc.).

We were thought to work three days a week because of all the productivity gains we made. The time we'd be down to three days? The 1970s. Wealth always demands more wealth and the rest of us need to be good labor-piggies and do that work. Yeah, they can get away with doing more with less because AI but they'll keep on with the skeleton crew they can and carry on. Rinse repeat capitalism.

You speak as if execs are some depersonalized force of nature. But they are people and there aren't that many of them. JPMorgan CEO is one of them, and he seems to be saying he supports a shorter work week, but not a complete abolishment of work as some thinkers have proposed. If he says those are his views, do you have an argument for why we shouldn't take his word for it?

Execs are people. They are not uniformly the same.

JPMorgan's billionaire CEO does not speak for the many decamillionaire CEOs who want to get into the billionaire club.

He's not going to accept a 3.5 hour workweek for JP Morgan and neither will his successor. Owners and managers will always squeeze hard. It's the nature of competition and he knows it.

His children won't need to work. He's not looking at the rest of us.

Unless people vote otherwise!

That's how we got the work week down to 40 hours.

There's a bill in California to decrease it down to 32 hours.

We could already be at 28 hours if we voted for it, theoretically.

How can the rich get richer than they already are? Don’t the bottom half already have only like 1% of the wealth?

The bottom half could easily have 0.1% of the wealth in 20 years.

Everything that grows the pie makes the richer even more rich. Given the unequal capture of economic growth, anything that makes the poor 1% better off will make the rich 50% better off (more money to influence governments, more toys, better health care, faster jets, nicer food, etc.). Feels like a disincentive to make anything better.

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