Bernie Sanders unveils 32-hour workweek bill with no loss in pay for workers
Bernie Sanders unveils 32-hour workweek bill with no loss in pay for workers
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday introduced a bill to establish a standard four-day workweek in the United States without any reduction in pay. The bill, over a four-year period, would lowe…
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So let's say I run a business and I employ workers at $1000/wk and they work 5 8 hour days. Maybe I have a 10% profit margin on them and I make $1100 for each employee.
If this law passes and I need to pay my employees $1000/wk for 4 days... that means suddenly I'm losing money. Where would that extra money come from? I'd probably end up raising my prices. I'm not necessarily against this plan, I just want to understand what the proposals are to fill this gap. If I work 4 days a week but prices all go up by 20%, I'm not sure that's a good outcome.
At some point, you lose productivity and reduced work weeks have shown increases in productivity can happen.
So, basically the employees would have to cram their same workload into 20% less time for this to work. (without changing prices)
Effectively yes, however numerous studies have shown that not all work hours are actually productive. The idea is that you remove some of those unproductive hours, which makes employees happier, and productivity, employee satisfaction and retention increases naturally as a result.
The large scale trial of a shortened work week in the UK resulted in great success and 92% of companies decided to keep the new hours after the trial ended, with 30% already having committed to making it permanent.
The benefits to the employees is fairly obvious, but the employer gains by having less retraining, employees are more focused and less mentally exhausted, employees require less time off. The end result is that companies did in fact see increased productivity during the trial, and most companies reported increased YoY revenue growth.
Seems counter intuitive, but 61 companies tried it, and most liked it!
Anecdotal but i know i am way more productive when there has been or will be a holiday, for two weeks. I also noticed i feel a lot less drained working 38 hour jobs than 40 hour job, and generally do less at the 40 hour job. So i find it easy to believe this adds up. For an employer it's hard to see this of course, they just see the raw output of the one thing they've been doing.
You'd have to get rid of the least productive workload. We have work in abundance, but well paying jobs are kept tight by a minority of the population. By reducing the workweek, the medium term natural reaction of the market is getting rid of the least productive jobs, and create job opportunities that pay better all across the board to fulfill the more productive workloads that have just been left vacant, ultimately making each hour of work more productive.
This isn't a painless process: there are businesses that are going to have to rethink their finances and a few will have to shut down. But businesses aren't an end by themselves - they're useful as long as they serve to allow people to earn a living: if we're going to oppose a restructuration of the economy that benefits the vast majority of the people because businesses will suffer, we've got our priorities backwards.
I'm not necessarily opposed to this... I just expected the plan to address how the productivity gap will be filled. Looks like the plan is: "People will just work harder in the 32 hours to make up for it".
My pessimism says that if this passes, businesses will just increase their prices to cover the extra cost per hour of employee time.
I can see how this appears burdensome to some jobs/areas of employment where productivity is directly related to output such as mechanics, plumbers, veteinarians, or maybe even like food service. It's probably not an issue with many fields where productivity is achieved more through creativity/ideas/or generating more efficient workflows to save time. I suppose some fields are already at their "maximum efficiency" and will probably just need to raise prices to accommodate.
I'm actually cool with the prices of those sorts of things increasing if I get three day weekends. For one, I'll have more time to do them myself if I desire, offsetting the cost entirely. Large corporations will hopefully be forced to just eat the loss; sure, companies have no problem kicking up the prices of their services.... but I think they'll find that we won't be quite as dependant on eating out and buying garbage once we have more time to live our lives. Maybe people can learn to maintain their own cars as a swift "FU" to car manufacturers proce gouging and refusing to produce affordable automobiles for the masses.
Just throwing out some thoughts!
Large corporations will hopefully be forced to just eat the loss;
They will just increase prices and pass the expense on to the consumer.
Literally addressed this in my original comment. The key is not purchasing their products, which will be enabled by us having more time to do our own stuff. But obviously, it won't apply to things we can't replace or reduce the consumption of (gains, electricity, water)
But yeah, if Americans (for example) want to keep eating terrible, unhealthy food at exuberant expense from McDonald's because they can't be bothered to figure French fries out themselves, why wouldn't McDonald's raise their prices? Haha
which will be enabled by us having more time to do our own stuff
You may be underestimating the laziness of the average consumer. I don't think people are going to use 1 extra day a week to start refining their own gas, making their own clothes or raising their own cattle.
This is a bad faith response. Of course nobody is going to refine their own gas, since it takes a multi-billion dollar refinery to refine gas. People can definitely do the two things I specifically mentioned, as well as a myriad of other things that I did not mention, which will take load off of the economy, and price gouging power away from the specific industries I mentioned.
And if not, then they can keep paying for overpriced, unhealthy food that they will continue to be price gouged on (which I also already said).
I didn't explain that very well, but my thinking was that industries such as gas where there is no 'DIY' alternative will be immune to these positive effects.
Makes sense. But traveling to the office one day less per week, one day less per week of daycare, and having one more full day per week to do things like food prep will also help cool demand for adjacent markets. Not an expert though, obviously!
True, but keep in mind this is less revenue for the daycare center, less revenue for the coffee shop around the corner from the office, etc. That money doesn't just go into a void.