Bernie Sanders clocks in with 4-day workweek bill thanks to AI and productivity tech AI, automation, and other new technologies have made the American worker far more productive than ever before, says US Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), which is why he introduced a bill this week to shorten the US workweek to 32 hours without a commensurate drop in worker pay. Sanders, along with Senator Laphonza Butler (D-CA …
""Twenty-eight-and-a-half million Americans, 18 percent of our workforce, now work over 60 hours a week, and 40 percent of employees in America now work at least 50 hours a week," Sanders said during the hearing."
Then American politics has worked. We've all been brought back to the design and ethics of the 1870's - heck, a few years ago they were trying to bring back child labor under the guise of "Freedom to work!".
I'm...pleased...that I am much closer to the end of my days than to [my] beginning. It isn't worth being here any more.
Sadly most people are unable to see that most of the regulations being pushed by the politicians who've never had a real job in their lives are designed to make people dependant on the state. Similar in the UK with all the tax credits and the such that allow companies to underpay in the knowledge that the taxpayer will stump up the rest. We've got a bonkers system where if you work more you get less...
Living in government housing and buying from the government shop is no different from the old factory towns. You become a serf of the state.
Fast food is already moving to automation which is removing a large number of low skill jobs. Soon there will be none as automation takes over coupled with large numbers of store closures due to soaring crime (even though the quoted numbers are going down due to the redefinition of 'crime'). So far every minimum wage increase has led to more automation. Self checkouts, the touchscreen ordering at McD's or having to use an app rather than talk to a waiter.
The 4 day working week has been tested on the sort of people who only need a flat space for their laptop and a wifi signal to work. Middle management paper pushers who read a few docs, look at a spreadsheet and occasionally answer emails. I have no doubt that these people would be very upset if they could not get their overpriced starbucks or their uber eats 24/7 during their 3 day weekends.
I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
You are of course conflating two completely different things to object to one of them, a classic straw man.
Firstly the "state aid" you decry, well yes to a degree, if a company can pay below subsistence and have the state pick up the balance they will. There are circumstances where this is necessary but it should never be by design. If a company can pay a dividend, if a company can pay outrageous amounts to the C suite then they can meet the wage bill and any state aid given to underpaid staff should be clawed back from the company once they are profitable. The government should never subsidise badly or maliciously run companies and they should definitely prosecute if such schemes are exploited.
This is mainly a US problem, in most countries workers have rights and enforceable minimum wages and things like tips are extras not an undefined part of the wages.
As for coverage, that's dumb argument. With people working 40 hour weeks companies manage 24/7 or 9 to 5 for 5 to 7 days with out any problems so reducing the individual hours should present no problems whatsoever.
No straw involved and this is not limited to the USA. Govts in Europe are more likely to have topup benefits for working people compare to the US. Work should pay enough and not require tax money to top it up.
"As for coverage, that's dumb argument. With people working 40 hour weeks companies manage 24/7"
Every employee has a a fixed overhead to a company so more people = more overhead. This is why uber etc. have gone with the 'contractor' model as suddenly those overheads have gone away. Almost every attempt by govts, usually of the 'progressive' variety, to improve workers rights and conditions results in some unintended mess that actually makes life worse.
Remember California and their AB5 to try and put the squeeze on big corps for using gig workers? Suddenly the media orgs who used to use a lot of freelance journos switched to a much smaller number of employed staff writers. The freelancers who would normally write for a number of publications ended up jobless and a little upset.
Suddenly the media orgs who used to use a lot of freelance journos switched to a much smaller number of employed staff writers. The freelancers who would normally write for a number of publications ended up jobless and a little upset.
Happened at the same time as collapsing advertising revenue, closures and layoffs.
Looks to me more like business just taking the opportunity to be blaming the gummint for the world changing.
"The government should never subsidise badly or maliciously run companies"
Governments should NEVER bail out private companies. If the private companies are in trouble and need cash, they got to stump up the corresponding amount of equity. There should be limits on both how much equity the government can hold (it's emergency help, not nationalisation), and the "bailout" should include plans of how to repay the government (buy back the equity), have the government resell it's equity on the market, or unwind the company if it's still failing.
Short version:
Sen Sanders' proposal is a good idea but will fail to address the reasons of *why* so many people are working themselves to death.
Long version:
I am still recovering from about two months of working six days a week. Even the massive overtime I was getting wasn't worth it. I'm thankfully not in a situation where I normally need to just to keep fed and a roof over my head, but many people are, and they would not be impacted at all by Sen Sanders' proposal, even if it *is* a good idea overall.[1] And it doesn't matter if minimum wage is $100 (or £100 or €100 or whatever) an hour if the cost of living wasn't out of control, and a substantial portion of the population will still have to work 50+ hours a week just to survive.
Only part of this necessity, albeit a rather large one has to do with normal supply/demand[2]. It's also a matter of monopolies, whether in essential communications services, or housing. A relative handful of entities own roughly 80% of the rental housing market in the Bay Area, and as the lawsuits against that Texas company's rental pricing software show, collude to jack rents beyond the stratosphere. These companies also place bids on new homes that very few people could even hope to match, convert various units to AirBnBs, and would rather keep vacancies for tax reasons than lower rents. And I'm not even getting into the "everything is an ever-increasing subscription" model for so many other things in life. At some point, government intervention to control the cost of living has to happen. Breaking up these monopolies, encouraging "work from home" where possible and converting now vacant office spaces into housing, and doing away with zoning restrictions in the way of denser construction could make a significant dent in that cost, and, I'd argue, are better options than price-controls.
[1] Even though it won't benefit me personally, and I do think that the US needs to improve the work/life balance of its people overall, this idea doesn't address those driven by necessity.
[2] Housing construction, especially the denser sort is often blocked by zoning/NIMBYs and nowhere near enough to meet needs.
The same problem is everywhere, housing costs are out of control. Massive housebuilding programs are needed but politicians can't allow that to happen because while houses should be cheaper, the ones owned by their voters which must continue to inflate.
Ludicrous property prices are entrenched and many peoples entire worth is locked in property so if there was a (much needed) revaluation downwards of all property these people would have a lower book wealth, it probably wouldn't actually affect them much but they would think it did because the bottom line figures would be smaller.
Again you miss some key details. You can't just build more houses at a whim. It has to be part of a large scale plan that involves schools, doctors, transport, power, water, drainage...
In the 50s and 60s the UK built vertically and the US built the projects and look how well that worked out. The plan was to move people from slums into nice new accommodation and it promptly turned into new slums due to poor planning.
Yes. Poor planning is a big factor. Others are ongoing costs and politics. Officials are going to build something like that, and pat themselves on the backs. Once the shine wears off, or there's a new government (even from the same party), priorities are going to shift and neglect follows. This is especially true if such housing requires ongoing subsidies. I suppose one thing that could help tackle both of those issues would be mixing residential and commercial, with shops and businesses at street level and flats above that, with the commercial leases covering the subsidies and perhaps even giving other residents a bit of a break with any excess. Hypothetically, such a scenario could be at least mostly self-sustaining. But then, there's the question of ownership.
A private landlord will almost invariably loot/neglect it out of greed; if the original one doesn't do it, with time, they'll probably sell to some person or group who would. If it was owned by a municipality/local council, said looting would probably happen to fund someone's pet project, perhaps with some worthless IOUs, or be raided if there was a budget shortfall. I suppose that running a collection of resident-owned cooperatives, each small enough that not all the eggs were in one basket could work, or at least limit the extent of single major fuck-ups. Even then, planning and up-front costs on a pretty big gamble would be a hard sell.
...one thing that could help tackle both of those issues would be mixing residential and commercial, with shops and businesses at street level and flats above that
That's the one thing that's stopping me selling up my shop&flat. Because I *believe* that retail centres should be mixed with residential above and I should be participating in the community by helping to support the community.
It really does make sense. My old neighbourhood in SF (circa early-mid 2000s) had a fair bit of that, and it meant that, unless I was looking for something specific not available in the area, I could access most necessary goods, from food, convenience items, haircuts, renting those odd films even DVD service Netflix didn't have, hardware, clothing, the all important coffee and beer, silly curios, and so on within a short walk. It was a pretty thriving community before so many people who worked in said shops got priced out entirely. And commuters aren't going to care as much about where they work when they can't even afford to live nearby.
Blackrock and Vanguard are very good donors to politics in the US (and Canada I believe) so they won't be doing much to fix that problem any time soon. Plus it makes for good campaign rhetoric along with climate change and abortion.
Another issue is the 'never worked a real job' Marxist activist types HATE small businesses and especially hate private landlords (petite bourgeoisie/kulak) which has led to a lot of this consolidation. The ACA did this for medicine.
WFH has its own problems as a HUGE amount of money has been put into commercial real estate and a crash of that market would be horrific. Not helped by the 'everything is an investment' culture which has seen people who bought EVs with the plan of selling them for profit burnt horribly.
《a HUGE amount of money has been put into commercial real estate and a crash of that market would be horrific》
An economics commentor here (AU) stated that the extremely high levels of debt held in commercial real estate by banks, pension funds, private equity, etc etc dwarfs that of the subprime mortgages before the GFC (2008.)
The vacancy rates which were quite high before the pandemic have soared to levels that make the asset as a class pretty much on a par with subprime mortgages - so the writer claimed.
This with other problems could precipitate a financial crisis of GFC+ magnitude.
If this were the case I can understand the sometimes incomprehensible deprecation of WFH and the unsubtle coercion of employees back to the office. Pure fear.
Its not 'a claim' or 'pure fear'. Billions of currency units have been poured into commercial real estate as in the before times this provided a pretty good ROI which keeps your pension going up. Now we see companies like HSBC walking away from their building in London or big hotel chains and retailers abandoning their prime locations.
The whole system of continual growth was very finely balanced and now the money-go-round has been very firmly put off axis.
Continuous growth never works, we need periodic recessions to reset prices, and most importantly mindset. When people believe things can only go up they make a lot of stupid investment decisions and all asset classes become overvalued.
Commercial real estate is in for a major correction. With trillions tied up offices that are not likely to return to pre-pandemic occupancy rates for as much as a couple decades there are a lot of banks that will have problems in the next few years as leases start coming up for renewal
Don't worry, they're still hard at work bringing back child labor, even though there are already horror stories of children being killed inside industrial machinery after labor laws were loosened. There are even relaxation of laws dictating how much and how late children can work on school nights. And also attacking from the other side by destroying public education with book bans, mandatory theology, and school vouchers for private/charter/religious schools.
Oh hell -- is that four times or five times as productive? The prevalence of using percentages instead of multiples both forces us to do rapid mental arithmetic and results in ambiguities of this kind. But I suppose it sounds much more impressive to say "1000 per cent" than "ten times", or even "200 per cent" rather than "double".
I'm a bit puzzled as to how this is going to work. Working 5 days a week is largely a convention that those who don't work shifts live by. Are they going to make working 5 days a week illegal or are they going to enforce a cap on hours per week that anyone can work? What about those who sometimes need to work overtime?
There are solid reasons why some occupations have a daily limit on activity (truck drivers etc) but for many jobs this is not the case. I know that many Americans are effectively wage slaves but I'm not sure that this is really aimed at them anyway.
This ridiculous demands of the workshy for a 5 and 1/2 day week is being led by that arch communist Henry Ford
If workers expect almost 2 days a week off the world will collapse, this is unreasonable government interference in true American capitalism
The woke mob will be stopping me sending children up the chimney next
"Next thing you know workers will demand that they have money left after buying bread & water from the company store! Damn communists!"
You are mistaken. The long lines for bread were disappointed as there was none left. Unlike the vile capitalists with a variety of different breads and bread makers making a strong supply
Yes, a full line of chalk breads (see 20:00 and after) were available to the Victorian-era workers.
How dare they expect better!!
From the news report I am recollecting, they will bring the legal definition of a "work week" down from 40 to 35 hours and increase work that is considered "overtime". So if you want or need to work 40 hours you are still considered "full time", but if you want or can work *35* hours this no longer classifies as "part-time", therefore requiring full benefits and Social Security be paid.
They are trying to change the legal classification of a 'full' work week; it is up to the worker & the employer to decide if they want to take the 4-day week. If they do take the 4-day week, you are still a "full time" employee.
It wasn't always, you know. I'm sure when the idea of a 5 day 40 hour workweek was first proposed there were a lot of people claiming it was impossible.
If they wanted a 4 day 32 hour workweek for instance they'd make 32 hours "full time" and hours beyond that would be overtime. I suppose nothing could stop them from wanting employees to come in for 6.4 hours a day M-F though unless there was some way to enforce a three day weekend. The catch here is that full time salaried positions over a certain salary range can be considered "exempt" and don't get overtime. That's where you the typical office worker who might put in 50 or 60 hours per the stats cited in the article but isn't collecting overtime. So the majority of salaried workers would be unaffected by such a change!
I think if Bernie wanted to fix things he'd be better off changing the laws around "exempt" employees so it wasn't so easy to put someone on full time status and expect them to work many more than 40 hours a week. If just about everyone was eligible for overtime pay after 40 hours it would benefit a lot more average workers than his four day workweek proposal. It probably wouldn't hit office workers too hard since while some do work more than the 40 hours they probably screw off during the workday enough that it balances out - i.e. the employer might say "well if you're only going to be here 40 hours a week from now on I don't want to see any two hour lunches, Amazon shopping on your PC, or more than a few minutes of idle chit chat about last weekend's football games when you arrive in the morning"
A law about exempt employees would really hit some sectors hard, restaurants for instance. Many restaurants have managers and people in the kitchen working 50-60 hours a week as a matter of course, it is just accepted if you have a career in that field. If that was no longer permitted they'd need to hire more people to cover what their free overtime is covering now which would mean prices going up. Maybe not a good time when the industry is still recovering from covid and inflation, but I guess there is never a good time for something like this and whenever you do it it will inevitably put some out of business. Though it could be argued that if they were only able to survive by making employees work 60 hour weeks maybe they don't deserve to survive...
It doesn't matter how they try to enforce it, it can't work as the US, Canada and many other countries are in for a couple of decades of labor shortages due to the boomers retiring and dieing off. The only way out is a massive increase in immigration, and that is a hard sell in most countries.
If you want a 3-day weekend, it's easy!
There are 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week. So remove 3 hours from each day, and we can have 8 21 hour days per week. We'll call the extra day Spartacusday - seeing as it's my idea. Problem solved.
I don't know how long we'd have to wait to have the technology to speed up the rotation of the Earth so that daylight matched our new days. But the extra day of weekend should be compensation enough in the meantime.
Alas, despite all the tech improvements, productivity in the UK has been flat since 2009. This is a big problem because the population is aging and social care needs are increasing, yet we are no longer getting the traditional growth in productivity to support this increase. Consequently living standards are falling to maintain the balance. Putting in new measures that could further reduce productivity before proving any alleged increases due to AI is a dangerous move and could just lead to further drops in the standard of living.
Ditto for farmers. This sort of state intrusion will boil down to us only getting our post three days a week. Worse, they will make us collect it from 'community post boxes' as they do in Canada, half a mile away, in pissing rain.
Our governments having broken the economy, we will need to use those days off topping up our income with side hustles just to stay afloat.
@cmdrklarg
"Agreed. Now imagine how much better it would be if people's wages had increased at the same rate instead of going to make the owner's wallets fatter."
Wages as in the amount of money handed over? The minimum wage in the 40's (Sanders choice of year) was apparently less than 50 cent. That of course is just the numerical value on the piece of paper, would you try to suggest the standard of living has not improved since then? You mention wallets but the population seems to have grown in girth. Plentiful and abundant food, water, communication, transport, etc. I guess people could be banned from spending any money they earn so they accumulate it but that might not make them much better off.
'Bit stupid of you to say that when there are countries while you are replying to my comment "Plentiful and abundant food, water, communication, transport, etc."'
Clearly a comment by a 20%er.
Nice to be up-on-high. (But even then, most are probably only a few pay-checks away from sleeping in a dumpster.)
Enjoy the ride.
@AC
"Clearly a comment by a 20%er.
Nice to be up-on-high. (But even then, most are probably only a few pay-checks away from sleeping in a dumpster.)"
20% of what? Have a go-
https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i
You do know that people being only a few pay checks from sleeping in a dumpster is pretty damn rich in the world.
@AC
"Mine says 1%. But I already knew that. And therefore I don't make fatuous statements about people shouldn't be considered poor unless they are starving."
Wow thats lofty! I am in the top 5% and know the difference between relative and absolute poverty. I also recognise the lifestyle has vastly improved since the 1940's due to productivity growth providing that abundance and effectively eliminating absolute poverty in rich countries. I am not sure which part of that you take issue with.
It seems you are clinging to relative poverty which is the preserve of the rich. The wealthy thinking they are poor because someone has more than them.
"Charity? I'm betting you don't."
You lost your bet.
"The wealthy thinking they are poor because someone has more than them."
No. It's the wealthy thinking the poor are not poor because they are not starving to death thatI take unbrage with.
"Wow thats lofty! I am in the top 5%"
We are extremely lucky.
Enjoy life at the top. Just stop thinking it's like that for the majority of people on this big wide planet.
@AC
"No. It's the wealthy thinking the poor are not poor because they are not starving to death thatI take unbrage with."
And
"Enjoy life at the top. Just stop thinking it's like that for the majority of people on this big wide planet."
Those are two conflicting statements. You have so far been complaining about relative poverty (a benefit of the productivity growth being discussed) and I have been trying to hammer home the reality, absolute poverty (hence replying with the link and you being in the top 1%).
You have until now been arguing the first quote while I have been trying to explain to you the second.
@AC
"They are not conflictimg statements. They both highlight socioeconomic disparities, but from slightly different angles."
They are entirely conflicting statements. One is about relative poverty, one is about absolute poverty. One is about the level of comfort and the other about survival. One can never be solved without trashing everyones way of life the other can be solved and serious progress has been made. To say those are slightly different angles does not sound realistic.
"Also, by "the wealthy" I actually meant you specifically."
Noting that you say you are in the global 1% (I am not) you might wanna reread that. Then reread my comments and understand the difference between relative poverty (levels of comfort) vs actual poverty (life vs death)
"Noting that you say you are in the global 1%"
Ah. I thought that was why you provided that link. I realise how lucky I have been in life. And I try to act according. I do not look down at people and declare, "They are not starving to death so therefore they are not poor." As this is where I came in, I will now exit. Enjoy the fruits of your good fortune.
@AC
"Ah. I thought that was why you provided that link."
I provided it because it is pretty interesting to anyone having the 'poor' discussion. If the top few percent relatively are arguing they are poor those with less dont react well to it. So when the top few percent are arguing they are poor I cant imagine the rest could agree. 'Relative' poverty can never be solved unless everyone is equally poor. Actual poverty can be solved and has made great progress in being solved.
"I realise how lucky I have been in life"
So back to my post you responded to out of context where I point out the workers did get the benefits of the productivity growth since 1940's and leads to our privileged position where we dont really have absolute poverty to worry about in our countries (I am UK)-
https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/03/15/sanders_four_day_week/#c_4830204
"our privileged position where we dont really have absolute poverty to worry about in our countries (I am UK)-"
@AC
From your link their definition of absolute poverty-
Absolute poverty measures how many people this year cannot afford a set standard of living. The Department for Work and Pensions currently defines it based on the living standard an average income could buy in the year ending in March 2011. If your income is 40% below this, after adjusting for rising prices since then, you are classed as living in absolute poverty.
So their version of absolute poverty is the average income minus 40% and if you are under that after adjusting prices upward, That is relative. If we are all billionaires (not Zimbabwe version) there will be people falling below average - 40% adjust prices upwards. That isnt absolute.
@AC
"Yes, one needs to use the right terms."
There are of course some people in absolute poverty, such as severe mental issues or severe addiction but outside of that absolute poverty is effectively eliminated. Unfortunately the media and politicians like to redefine poverty to mean inequality.
"Straw man."
Not really.
"There are of course some people in absolute poverty, such as severe mental issues or severe addiction but outside of that absolute poverty is effectively eliminated."
You don't believe people can be in absolute[your definition] poverty unless they have severe mental issues, a severe addiction or some other contributory factor. Correct?
@AC
Timing is everything, Here is how they get their relative poverty numbers they call absolute poverty-
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/absolute-poverty-numbers-prove-a-couple-of-things
Apparently even the relative numbers are wrong as the poverty measurement is before welfare anyway.
I have hope that you are a different AC than the straw man one, you have held a better conversation
at global megacorp have decided to move everyone onto new working arrangements.
These new arrangements will mean that on average all of you will be working a 3 day week , however this does involve moving 40% of our workforce to a zero day week and dumping all of their work on the remaining 60% who will still be doing the full 5 day week, those of you who object doing 40% more work for no rise in pay will be joining the 40% on the zero day week.
Those working the zero day week will have a pay rate in line with their new working arrangements IE zero.
The extra profits thus created will be returned to those deserving of higher rewards such as the shareholders and the C-level management.
Joke icon...... because maybe someone may take the above seriously.....
If you are not on a 35hr contract you get an almost impossible amount of vacation. ~40 days or more, depending on age, time with the company and your <<convention collective>>. (You want Métallurgie if you can.)
You could even apply for a blue EU wide visa. If you have a valuable skill set. I got one for one of my team. The process is not easy. But, you know, "Sovereignty."
I work in a European office of a US multinational so I know how they like to go "above and beyond". They probably believe he's proposing nothing less than communism.
Maybe he'd have more success attempting to introduce basic workers rights which have been available elsewhere in the world for a good few decades before trying for a 4-day week which in the US looks like it's from The Jetsons.
Here in the UK ambulance crews generally work 12 hour shifts. The same applies to many clinical hospital staff and I dare say others as well.
In some places in the US ambulance crews work that pattern, or 24 hour shifts, sleeping on station ready for nocturnal call outs. There are variations depending on local demand.
Whilst I see calls of this nature on both sides of the pond, no left wing politician (others don’t call for this reduction so don’t apply to this issue) on a visit has ever explained how this reduction in hours for the same pay would work whilst such a service is provided. I’m sure many staff would love to work a 2 1/2 day week but response times and service levels might not be maintained to even the current standards.
Let's remember that Bernie, all the DC congresscritters, mostly work a 3-day week. Monday and Friday are travel days.
Usually Tuesdays start late and Thursdays end early.
Yes, they occasionally burn midnight oil to beat a bill into (our) submission, but most days are light social sessions, not hard labor (that's for staff).
Their "off" days back with their constituents probably are a lot of schmoozing for money or votes or support, but these guys/gals LIKE to do that (it terrifies me).
I'm actually OK with legislatures working short hours. The less they are in session the freer we can be. I remember when they air-conditioned DC and also NJ; before that NObody hung around in the humid summers. Year-round legislaturing was a landmark in the enshitification of governance.
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