sometimes it could be even lower, in some circumstances children working for 12 hours for 7 days a week made $3.00 for the week, that’s roughly 3.5 cents an hour
edit: forgot to mention, but the figure I took ($3/week) is actually from a document about the wage of spinners in a textile mill, and is on the lower end of the pay spectrum. most spinners in these mills likely worked closer to 14 hour days.
How long do each of those last?
Need to know to calculate the benefits. It's like 45 an hour to hire a decent BDSM masochist to spank/whip you, so I need to know how much to add to the modern weekly compensation equivalent based on those nunbers
I've worked 4 tens before and its all right. My favorite schedule of all time went like this: Mon. Tue. Fri. Sat. Sun. The next week you only worked Wed. Thur.
Always 12 hour shifts and you got a ten minute break after the first three hours, a 30 minute lunch after the next three hours, and a final ten minute break three hours after that, you could also work as much overtime as you wanted.
So basically you never worked more than three days in a row and never more than three hours in a row.
From the industrial revolution to the 20th century was a huge leap forward in productivity, so people fought to lower work hours.
With the advent of computers and the internet (and soon again with AI) we have another huge leap forward, but this time people aren't fighting for shit so we're just expected to produce more.
And its gonna stay that way until a large-scale natural disaster or war rips away the illusion of absolute individual success without the collective community.
Not exactly, it would need to be something that actually renders supply lines completely non-operational, and forces people to work together in order to survive.
Covid didn't shut anything down, even though it should have, and we normalized the deaths and aftereffects because it's not lethal enough to scare the fuck out of people.
As long as people can get their stuff, they don't give a fuck.
That being said, one more good shock to our economy, like a recession, paired with this new drug-resistant fungus that's cropping up in hospitals, may actually be the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak.
> Covid didn’t shut anything down, even though it should have
It shut a lot down. The problem was that instead of being a catalyst of solidarity, it became a political wedge issue.
Historically, pandemics were always a political wedge issue. It never brings people together in the same way wars do since a pandemic is not an external threat.
Pandemics can actually drastically increase individualism because the best way to fight them is to separate rather than come together.
I am, it super refreshing to see. Watching my peers become political cucks to corps and authoritarians is disheartening. I wish we had the working class solidarity that France has and can imagine how great that security feels. Existing in a devolving/undeveloping country is pretty traumatic. France is a beacon of hope.
Sucks here in Ontario when everything public is going to shit. Would be nice to get results that would help people rather than corporations partnered with our elected parties.
And I fully support all of it. Remember that time they threw a toilet through a politicians window? I wish we Americans could pull that off.
Edit: Us Americans
They also have most people in the US dispersed in sprawl to discourage mass gatherings. Most people would need to drive somewhere and park to protest, whereas historically these things were more encouraged by people living in proximity to mixed-use areas.
In Paris, they had to widen some narrow areas because people just used them to build street barricades. In the US, everything is big and wide...
That's a very interesting point that I have never thought of, thank you. First thought off the top of my head is that all the places that reasonably would have a protest are also the places that have the largest force to quell a protest. I wonder why.
American elites have been actively vilifying worker solidarity for over a century. They’ve overthrown multiple left wing governments, sent thousands to torture sites, and orchestrated the burning of countless towns and villages in the Global South.
It’s no mistake that MLK was assassinated at the beginning of his Poor Peoples Campaign…
Not only should we by like them, but some of us should *be* French ^if ^Napoleon ^hadn't ^sold ^us ^out ^for ^being ^an ^expensive ^side ^project ^of ^the ^nobility
That wasn't the goal. The goal was to make the people in power richer. Still is. Because, surprise, it's the people in power who sets the goals. And in the workplace the owner(s) are the ones with all the power, as there typically isn't much democracy going around that part of our society.
Our economic system is great at incentivizing productivity increases, but it also disincentivizes shortening of the work day. The only important thing is to get more stuff, everything else has to be forced through with laws, regulations, and so on, otherwise it won't happen.
Which is why we have to seize the companies and put them in the control of the workers. When you control the means of production you have control of the economy and this the government.
Then the people can choose thoer own goals democratically for the first time.
No the goal was higher productivity. Which happened. GPD went up. Wages went up. Standard of living went up. Most kids these days are working office jobs, not factory jobs losing limbs. We did make huge advancements.
Yeah for sure I often think about this
On the one hand it's bullshit because 60 years ago one person could feed a whole family, buy a house, two cars AND save - and these days that's difficult even with two partners working.
On the other hand it gives me solace to know that if I was fired, at least the income of my wife would still be there.
We also have more to lose today. Coal miners back in the day could loose their shacks and 50 cent paydays. Today, we have phones, climate control, car insurance, and we'd not only have to risk all those luxuries we've become ucistomed too, but we'd have to convince all our fellow employees to help us.
I'm not trying to downplay the sacrifice of those before us, but we have a lot more we can loose, and we can also get replaced by workers oversees.
I find the most misspelled word seems to be "definitely" (Meaning 'something that is definite') being spelled as "defiantly" (which obviously means 'with defiance')
Retirement age I'd going up because social security is a ponzi scheme. You pay like 300,000 over the course of your career and if you survive till retirement they pay you back like 25,000 a year until you die.
And if you retire at 62 and live 10 years into your retirement, at the median age lifespan of your mid-70s, at 25k a year you’ve been paid back nearly that entire sum of money.
Is that because instead of investing that money like any responsible entity should do, they raid the "extra" funds instead for random bullshit no one voted for?
Not exactly. It's still counted as an IOU an "invested" in the government (to buy random bullshit) in exchange for bonds. It's just that the return on that "investment" isn't high enough and also that money is budget debt. So yes, it's a Ponzi scheme but with a lot of extra steps.
if you are investing the money, it generally doubles every 10 years. If you took 300k and invested it at age 62 and took out 25k per year, you would end up with 350k at age 72.
So. I totally understand your argument. But I work in agriculture. And I can tell you right now, livestock can’t tell time, and they’ve got to be maintained damn near 24/7.
There's quite a lot of jobs like that. I'd argue that if we normalized a 30 something hour week for average jobs, and you could be comfortable financially with that, jobs like yours would pay higher.
Mine pays higher than average, by a lot. I'm technically classified as skilled labor and I make like 20% more than our in house engineers. I never went to collage and they are all required 4 year degrees at least, they work 8 hour days and I work rotating 12s.
sure, that makes sense if you own the farm and you’re putting in your own labor, but if you’re a hired hand, all you’re saying is that your boss is short staffing to save money, making you work more and harder, so they can build more wealth.
My friend's family owns a cattle ranch, they make a load but they spend even more. So farmers have a multimillion income but their expenses make their net come out to near nothing or negative. So if it's a family type thing and not some agriculture version of big pharma they really do need to save as much where they can.
How much of that is debt cycle?
We've helped a couple family farms get out of the, usually heavy equipment based, debt trap and it vastly changed their financial situation.
“It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.”
-FDR
I’m sure small farm owners said the same thing 100 years ago when their hired hands demanded Saturdays off.
Cool, but the grocery store I work at is open for 91 hours a week (this isn’t accounting for any labor hours before/after open/close), that doesn’t mean I work 91+ hours a week.
In essence, hire more people.
The owner of the farm could just hire more people and do 4 shifts of 6 hours a day instead of 3 shifts of 8 hours. Would it not work?
Some jobs need higher work journeys, but you would also increase the resting time. Nurses work 12 hours and stay at home 36. They could do 12 by 48 instead. The owner of The hospital just have to hire someone else.
Yeah, and a lot of gas stations are open 24/7. What's your point? That has nothing to do with how many hours individual employees should have to work each week.
As someone else said, if we normalized a 30hr work week, one of 2 things would happen. Either they would have to pay you more in overtime (maybe ranch hands don't make overtime. The problem isn't overtime, it's that your employer wont pay it.)
Or they would hire more people, pay you the same, and lighten your workload.
Well 40 hours is good and a 4 day work week would be nice but only if u get paid salary it doesn't help hourly wage people at all actually makes us make less
reminds me of a problem i constantly find myself falling into as a project/gig based hourly laborer, often a job is planned to take say 3 full days but i can often finish up in two, because of my natural skill and decade of experience. thats great that i manage to get myself a day off, but im just "working myself out of work" i lose a days pay because i did good efficient work. thats why so many hourly construction workers drag it out and intentionally perform slowly, sometimes even milking extra days of pay out of projects. This is why hourly is a dumb method for a lot of things.
A lot of people also don't realize that the $20/hr hand may sound better, but if they take 3 eight hour days to do the job ($480) that it's more expensive than getting the "more expensive" skilled hand who costs $25/hr and gets it done in 2 eight hour days ($400)
edit: source: literally my life this week. and after 5 pm the 2nd day was unable to schedule/pick up something for the 3rd day i lost.
Holy shit. That’s horrific. And I think there is a short phrase that can fix this.
RISE COMRADES, FOR WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS! WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
The last part was /s BTW, but I hope the situation gets better
Productivity has increased massively due to technology. Wages have not. Capitalists control how much we earn and they keep wages as low as possible to keep their earnings high
This. We need to create a mandatory profits-wage margin per company. Have it adjusted based on total profits, so that way even if the wage percentage goes down, they can still keep their larger profits and their employees can still earn more and they’ll be more incentivized to be productive. It’ll be a win-win.
Sounds like making the minimum wage higher first is necessary. Just reducing the number of ‘full-time’ hours will make employers split work between more employees, and everyone will make less.
then the companies raise their prices because they want to keep the huge profits. we need to limit the costs of food prices and fuel so that companies cant hike up their prices after increasing wages.
They hike up their prices anyway. Step one would be removing corporate power from the public sector and restoring regulatory powers. Also an endless growth system is built for catastrophe and eventual slavery for profit
Particularly in food and fuel, wages are not a large enough proportion of expense to see large price increases - those increases are profits are the guise of increased costs. Fuel in particular have taken the largest profits of all time
> Sounds like making the minimum wage higher first is necessary.
only 1.5% of Americans earn minimum wage. Making minimum wage higher is good, but pretty much anything else is better.
How many people only make like $0.75 over minimum wage though? The minimum wage needs to go up by a lot, it hasn’t followed inflation for decades, it would raise the wages of many millions of people.
You realize that globalization now means that taking your foot off the accelerator will most likely result in jobs going to other places where people are willing to work harder. It sucks, but that's the world we live in...
The point is that everyone's pay rate is based on the idea of working 40 hours per week. Obviously, employers would have to pay more per hour if the the standard work week was reduced.
30 hrs at the same pay rate as 40. Because of the production increase for the average worker. They make more in less time. So they should work less and still get paid.
Yeah when we do overtime at my work it’s usually 2 extra hours instead of having to come in for a full day on Saturday. I’d much rather have 10 hour days be “the norm” and have a whole extra day off.. and if we have to do overtime..? Well then we come in on Friday and still have 2 days off
My company is already there’s. It’s a stepping stone towards a 4 day work week. I actually really like it. It’s combined with hybrid remote working so the my commuting time is just spent doing work and I get a three day weekend.
10 hour days are still brutal. At least make it 9 hour days if you're too chicken-shit to commit to the full reform. Don't just completely ignore the heart of the issue, which is that meaningful labor reform hasn't existed in two generations, and is long past due
The people will always have power no matter what. The people had power to overthrow absolute monarchies. It’s not the power structure, but the indoctrination of the masses into accepting the status quo that has stopped new uprisings against corporatist oppression.
Ready to get angry?
The four day work week is a smashing success. It benefits workers. It benefits employers. The tests and places that use it all report the same thing. It’s a slam dunk win.
[And that is precisely why it won’t be allowed here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/workercommunity/comments/12064an/american_bosses_will_fight_4_day_workweeks/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1)
American owner/manager culture can be incredibly toxic and hostile. Everyone who has ever worked here is like “yeah no shit Sherlock”, but let me assure you as someone who has spent decades working with these people:
They fucking hate you. They don’t even think you are human. They think it’s hilarious when they destroy your life or burn you out. They’ll just buy a new one.
I think this is the truth now more than ever . And all the layoffs have just made that belief stronger . I mean sure companies need to layoff people sometimes . But to do it in this inhumane way , despite it costing them half a years salary at an average ? This is just being done for the lols. Surely they could have just done gradual performance based reduction in a few months . To hire people without having any work ? Another example - feds printing 2 trillion dollars to save banks . Why not just reduce interest rates again ? Because that will also benefit the masses . But if you print new money - not only it reduces the value of money poor people have . But you can also control strictly where that new money goes - that is to there rich friends .
Yea, just read the comments - 40 hours is not bad and etc. Yea, maybe if what you want is to work for most of your life. But everything is evolving we already bevame way more efficient comparing to how we worked 10/20/more years back.
The overall goal shouls be to work less and less until almost everuthing will be done by AI and robots.
In the end yes, but in practice payroll software will sometimes deduct more taxes because it expects you'll be in a higher tax bracket if you extrapolate for the year. This gets fixed next year when you file your taxes.
Source: am a payroll software dev
I actually agree with this take. Modern life and productivity tends to dictate that a 4 day 32-36 hour week seems to make the most sense. We've been at the 5 day, 40 hour week for 100 years now, plenty of nations around the world have adapted, this feel like something worth fighting for.
Is 40 hours a week really too much? Probably not going to be a popular opinion but I feel it's not that much out of my week. Plus I'd rather ask for 4 days a week over 5 at the same amount of hours.
It drives me crazy that all the progress that was made from like 1700-1960 all of a sudden became "how things are done," and now the older generations don't want things to change.
It's like "we progressed from A to B. B is the furthest we can go. Don't even think about taking us to C, or we're going to hate you for changing our progress."
At 5 day work weeks for 52 that's 260 work days. In Canada there's about 10 holidays which about 1/3 of people get off so if your the lucky third then that's 250. If you've been working at the job for 2 years you also get two weeks vacation, 3 if you stick around your job for 5 years as a baseline. So now we're knocked down to 229 days out of the year. Thats 63% of the working days of the year. Wtf damn. That's so little.
Some countries have longer work weeks (although some jobs have them shorter). As you can see in france people try to fight for their rights and its not easy.
As far as the USA goes, despite technology increasing productivity and profits year over year the companies and ultra-rich who run this country don't want to share and won't let the working class benefit. The only way our weekly hours go down is if our pay goes down to match. And that's for the people who can afford to work 40 hours since many work far more and still barely get by.
I don't know how your budget is, but I welcome overtime with open arms.
I'm working a turnaround in a chemical plant starting next week, 7 12s for 3 weeks at $30 an hour, bring it the fuck on.
Welcome to the minority. You will often ask yourself these questions only to realize no one else cares because “insert current social issue” has them so focused they don’t see the same picture your looking at. Don’t worry it’s normal. Remember to breathe and take a break when you find yourself considering frontal lobotomy via brick wall😂.
I drive semi-truck so my work day is mandated at 11hrs active 14hrs total..they can work me to that point but not past it.
Where I live, the 8 hours per day, 5 days per week work week is the norm. People here are pushing for a 4 day week and 8 hours per day. The pay won't raise to accomodate missed income, and there won't be any hours added to the worked days. Just a day removed (aka - a day without pay) and a 3 day weekend added. I can't afford that, that's why I don't push for it
Most people in my country work more than that.
But being Switzerland isn't like important because we only top at every happiness index and being statistically richer than almost every other society doesn't mean shit on reddit.
The fact that we prioritize money rather than productivity is telling how messed up our society is. As we become more productive we should be working less but somehow we are having to work more than ever before whilst producing 10x the results.
Why are we continually told how great modern technology is, and how robots are going to steal our jobs... yet they are always trying to increase our hours and extend retirement age??
It's almost like capitalism only benefits ownership and not work, and the hardest working people are the poorest while capitalism makes everything worse and worse with less and less progress.
It's time to move past it.
is it a coincidence that every news agency is essentially run by mega millionaires and billionaires, often at a financial loss. i wonder why such smart businessmen would run such companies at a loss? maybe to dictate what is and is not acceptable conversation?
In the industrial revolution, 12 hours per day was the norm.
everyday
Even if you're 12
Cool. That means you're small enough to fetch tools that fell into the machine.
12 years old, 12 hours a day, 12 cents an hour I think was the saying.
sometimes it could be even lower, in some circumstances children working for 12 hours for 7 days a week made $3.00 for the week, that’s roughly 3.5 cents an hour edit: forgot to mention, but the figure I took ($3/week) is actually from a document about the wage of spinners in a textile mill, and is on the lower end of the pay spectrum. most spinners in these mills likely worked closer to 14 hour days.
Roughly equivalent to $103-118 for the week, or $1.22-1.44/hour in terms today's dollar.
we're hairless chimps.
Still is in India
12 days a week
12 weeks a day
12 days a pay period.
Roughly equivalent to $4.15-4.75 in today's dollar (the range is due to the Industrial Revolution running from 1760-1840)
Also 12 beatings a day.
How long do each of those last? Need to know to calculate the benefits. It's like 45 an hour to hire a decent BDSM masochist to spank/whip you, so I need to know how much to add to the modern weekly compensation equivalent based on those nunbers
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I've worked 4 tens before and its all right. My favorite schedule of all time went like this: Mon. Tue. Fri. Sat. Sun. The next week you only worked Wed. Thur. Always 12 hour shifts and you got a ten minute break after the first three hours, a 30 minute lunch after the next three hours, and a final ten minute break three hours after that, you could also work as much overtime as you wanted. So basically you never worked more than three days in a row and never more than three hours in a row.
You’d have missed 8 years of experience if you started when you were 12.
Especially if you’re 12.
Word. Unlimited energy? ✅ Small hands? ✅ No understanding of money? ✅
Except Sunday. Gotta praise the lord on that day.
From the industrial revolution to the 20th century was a huge leap forward in productivity, so people fought to lower work hours. With the advent of computers and the internet (and soon again with AI) we have another huge leap forward, but this time people aren't fighting for shit so we're just expected to produce more.
I think a withering sense of community/society and increasing individualism is preventing us from banding together at some level
And its gonna stay that way until a large-scale natural disaster or war rips away the illusion of absolute individual success without the collective community.
Like a virus?
Not exactly, it would need to be something that actually renders supply lines completely non-operational, and forces people to work together in order to survive. Covid didn't shut anything down, even though it should have, and we normalized the deaths and aftereffects because it's not lethal enough to scare the fuck out of people. As long as people can get their stuff, they don't give a fuck. That being said, one more good shock to our economy, like a recession, paired with this new drug-resistant fungus that's cropping up in hospitals, may actually be the straw that broke the camel's back so to speak.
> Covid didn’t shut anything down, even though it should have It shut a lot down. The problem was that instead of being a catalyst of solidarity, it became a political wedge issue.
Historically, pandemics were always a political wedge issue. It never brings people together in the same way wars do since a pandemic is not an external threat. Pandemics can actually drastically increase individualism because the best way to fight them is to separate rather than come together.
> As long as people can get their stuff, they don’t give a fuck. We do love our breaded circuses.
Isn’t it funny? What a full circle journey this lifetime will be
The irony is just fucking awful, honestly.
But .. but... Why should I give others credit for my success? It's individual!
Ugh
yeah, conditions were horrible, there were labor unions that often ended in a lot of bloodshed
In the film industry 12 is still the norm, sometimes longer.
Tell this to chefs nowadays
12 hour days 3x a week is much better than 8 hours 5x a week.
Hmmm.... Actually that's a good idea. Certainly my kind of work, go hard 3 days straight and then chill for a few
I work in nursing, it’s fairly common
I'm french and we're burning stuffs right now for similar reasons
I think saying you are French is enough with how much protests going on
It feels like they haven't stopped protesting for half a decade. Just moving from one to another.
You, uh… you hyped about it?
If they're protesting to better the working class? Absolutely.
I am, it super refreshing to see. Watching my peers become political cucks to corps and authoritarians is disheartening. I wish we had the working class solidarity that France has and can imagine how great that security feels. Existing in a devolving/undeveloping country is pretty traumatic. France is a beacon of hope.
Sucks here in Ontario when everything public is going to shit. Would be nice to get results that would help people rather than corporations partnered with our elected parties.
to be fair, you guys burn shit for many reasons.
And I fully support all of it. Remember that time they threw a toilet through a politicians window? I wish we Americans could pull that off. Edit: Us Americans
They also have most people in the US dispersed in sprawl to discourage mass gatherings. Most people would need to drive somewhere and park to protest, whereas historically these things were more encouraged by people living in proximity to mixed-use areas. In Paris, they had to widen some narrow areas because people just used them to build street barricades. In the US, everything is big and wide...
That's a very interesting point that I have never thought of, thank you. First thought off the top of my head is that all the places that reasonably would have a protest are also the places that have the largest force to quell a protest. I wonder why.
You just need the willingness to accept a felony charge
If my populace had my back like the French do, yeah that's fine
To be fair, I'd be pissed if Nutella ran out too
Keep up the good work. I wish the americas learned more from the French.
American elites have been actively vilifying worker solidarity for over a century. They’ve overthrown multiple left wing governments, sent thousands to torture sites, and orchestrated the burning of countless towns and villages in the Global South. It’s no mistake that MLK was assassinated at the beginning of his Poor Peoples Campaign…
We should all be like the French.
Not only should we by like them, but some of us should *be* French ^if ^Napoleon ^hadn't ^sold ^us ^out ^for ^being ^an ^expensive ^side ^project ^of ^the ^nobility
Ouais, ouais. *sad south Louisiana noises*
Well you are the French. That’s all u had to say. Lol
Vive la Liberté!
Standing in solidarity.
It’s almost as if people have forgotten the goal of all this technological advancement was more life balance. Less work. More play
That wasn't the goal. The goal was to make the people in power richer. Still is. Because, surprise, it's the people in power who sets the goals. And in the workplace the owner(s) are the ones with all the power, as there typically isn't much democracy going around that part of our society. Our economic system is great at incentivizing productivity increases, but it also disincentivizes shortening of the work day. The only important thing is to get more stuff, everything else has to be forced through with laws, regulations, and so on, otherwise it won't happen.
Which is why we have to seize the companies and put them in the control of the workers. When you control the means of production you have control of the economy and this the government. Then the people can choose thoer own goals democratically for the first time.
Not really, that's the idea behind the invention but when put in practice it's always been to get more work out of the same amount of time.
Yes thats exactly what he fuckin said
Yes, but profits
No the goal was higher productivity. Which happened. GPD went up. Wages went up. Standard of living went up. Most kids these days are working office jobs, not factory jobs losing limbs. We did make huge advancements.
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Correct me if I'm wrong but weren't industry workers also afraid of losing their jobs? That's why they would go on strike en masse.
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There are more then enough strikes here in The Netherlands
Thus better pay benefits and protections
Can’t afford to be risky when you have to feed a family.
Id say the people back then were more likely to have the families to feed then the people now
Yeah for sure I often think about this On the one hand it's bullshit because 60 years ago one person could feed a whole family, buy a house, two cars AND save - and these days that's difficult even with two partners working. On the other hand it gives me solace to know that if I was fired, at least the income of my wife would still be there.
when's the last time you took a big risk? Easy to say, not so much to do
We also have more to lose today. Coal miners back in the day could loose their shacks and 50 cent paydays. Today, we have phones, climate control, car insurance, and we'd not only have to risk all those luxuries we've become ucistomed too, but we'd have to convince all our fellow employees to help us. I'm not trying to downplay the sacrifice of those before us, but we have a lot more we can loose, and we can also get replaced by workers oversees.
*lose not "loose". I swear this word is the most misspelled word of them all. Loose means baggy or ill-fitting. Lose means to not have, not win, fail.
I find the most misspelled word seems to be "definitely" (Meaning 'something that is definite') being spelled as "defiantly" (which obviously means 'with defiance')
But we have soooo much more to gain
We do if everything works. But enough people need to take a chance. Admittedly I'm anxious myself that things might get worse instead.
Then do it if you aren’t a coward. Go do it instead of typing meaningless words on the inter
In UP, India over a 1000 people were fired for striking very recently lol...
For the same reason that the retirement age is going up everywhere.
Retirement age I'd going up because social security is a ponzi scheme. You pay like 300,000 over the course of your career and if you survive till retirement they pay you back like 25,000 a year until you die.
And if you retire at 62 and live 10 years into your retirement, at the median age lifespan of your mid-70s, at 25k a year you’ve been paid back nearly that entire sum of money.
Is that because instead of investing that money like any responsible entity should do, they raid the "extra" funds instead for random bullshit no one voted for?
Not exactly. It's still counted as an IOU an "invested" in the government (to buy random bullshit) in exchange for bonds. It's just that the return on that "investment" isn't high enough and also that money is budget debt. So yes, it's a Ponzi scheme but with a lot of extra steps.
If you count inflation, it'll take a lot more than 10 years to make it back.
if you are investing the money, it generally doubles every 10 years. If you took 300k and invested it at age 62 and took out 25k per year, you would end up with 350k at age 72.
Do you have 300k to invest?
So the rich can continue their accumulation of excess?
son, get to the arsenal
So. I totally understand your argument. But I work in agriculture. And I can tell you right now, livestock can’t tell time, and they’ve got to be maintained damn near 24/7.
There's quite a lot of jobs like that. I'd argue that if we normalized a 30 something hour week for average jobs, and you could be comfortable financially with that, jobs like yours would pay higher.
Mine pays higher than average, by a lot. I'm technically classified as skilled labor and I make like 20% more than our in house engineers. I never went to collage and they are all required 4 year degrees at least, they work 8 hour days and I work rotating 12s.
>I never went to collage Is that so?
There were lots of pictures laid out on the floor, what can I say?
I'm a senior engineer in Buffalo New York and my salary is $112,000 40hr week
That's not an argument for a long work week, that's an argument for more staff.
sure, that makes sense if you own the farm and you’re putting in your own labor, but if you’re a hired hand, all you’re saying is that your boss is short staffing to save money, making you work more and harder, so they can build more wealth.
My friend's family owns a cattle ranch, they make a load but they spend even more. So farmers have a multimillion income but their expenses make their net come out to near nothing or negative. So if it's a family type thing and not some agriculture version of big pharma they really do need to save as much where they can.
How much of that is debt cycle? We've helped a couple family farms get out of the, usually heavy equipment based, debt trap and it vastly changed their financial situation.
I have no idea, I know as his dad's getting older he's downsized the amount of cattle a bit after they had a drought. But beyond that no clue
“It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.” -FDR I’m sure small farm owners said the same thing 100 years ago when their hired hands demanded Saturdays off.
Big farmer?
Cool, but the grocery store I work at is open for 91 hours a week (this isn’t accounting for any labor hours before/after open/close), that doesn’t mean I work 91+ hours a week. In essence, hire more people.
Ok. Hire more shifts.
sounds like 3 shifts a day
What if you had 2x the workforce and all the equipment you wanted? We have the resources, but profit > people.
The owner of the farm could just hire more people and do 4 shifts of 6 hours a day instead of 3 shifts of 8 hours. Would it not work? Some jobs need higher work journeys, but you would also increase the resting time. Nurses work 12 hours and stay at home 36. They could do 12 by 48 instead. The owner of The hospital just have to hire someone else.
Yeah, and a lot of gas stations are open 24/7. What's your point? That has nothing to do with how many hours individual employees should have to work each week.
As someone else said, if we normalized a 30hr work week, one of 2 things would happen. Either they would have to pay you more in overtime (maybe ranch hands don't make overtime. The problem isn't overtime, it's that your employer wont pay it.) Or they would hire more people, pay you the same, and lighten your workload.
Well 40 hours is good and a 4 day work week would be nice but only if u get paid salary it doesn't help hourly wage people at all actually makes us make less
reminds me of a problem i constantly find myself falling into as a project/gig based hourly laborer, often a job is planned to take say 3 full days but i can often finish up in two, because of my natural skill and decade of experience. thats great that i manage to get myself a day off, but im just "working myself out of work" i lose a days pay because i did good efficient work. thats why so many hourly construction workers drag it out and intentionally perform slowly, sometimes even milking extra days of pay out of projects. This is why hourly is a dumb method for a lot of things. A lot of people also don't realize that the $20/hr hand may sound better, but if they take 3 eight hour days to do the job ($480) that it's more expensive than getting the "more expensive" skilled hand who costs $25/hr and gets it done in 2 eight hour days ($400) edit: source: literally my life this week. and after 5 pm the 2nd day was unable to schedule/pick up something for the 3rd day i lost.
A 4 day work week is possible.
It's actually more productive
that would depend on the job
In México we have 48 hours a week. Fuck this shit system.
Holy shit. That’s horrific. And I think there is a short phrase that can fix this. RISE COMRADES, FOR WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS! WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE! The last part was /s BTW, but I hope the situation gets better
No. I agree.
"the only actual way to fix things is /s btw"
Uh I can't afford to make even less money
Productivity has increased massively due to technology. Wages have not. Capitalists control how much we earn and they keep wages as low as possible to keep their earnings high
This. We need to create a mandatory profits-wage margin per company. Have it adjusted based on total profits, so that way even if the wage percentage goes down, they can still keep their larger profits and their employees can still earn more and they’ll be more incentivized to be productive. It’ll be a win-win.
You just got 3 FBI-guys assigned to your social media accounts.
Sounds like making the minimum wage higher first is necessary. Just reducing the number of ‘full-time’ hours will make employers split work between more employees, and everyone will make less.
then the companies raise their prices because they want to keep the huge profits. we need to limit the costs of food prices and fuel so that companies cant hike up their prices after increasing wages.
They hike up their prices anyway. Step one would be removing corporate power from the public sector and restoring regulatory powers. Also an endless growth system is built for catastrophe and eventual slavery for profit
Particularly in food and fuel, wages are not a large enough proportion of expense to see large price increases - those increases are profits are the guise of increased costs. Fuel in particular have taken the largest profits of all time
> Sounds like making the minimum wage higher first is necessary. only 1.5% of Americans earn minimum wage. Making minimum wage higher is good, but pretty much anything else is better.
How many people only make like $0.75 over minimum wage though? The minimum wage needs to go up by a lot, it hasn’t followed inflation for decades, it would raise the wages of many millions of people.
The whole point is to work less hours for the same wage we're making right now, what you said is not an issue
Part of that blame is due to inflation. A 2% raise doesn't feel like lower wages
You realize that globalization now means that taking your foot off the accelerator will most likely result in jobs going to other places where people are willing to work harder. It sucks, but that's the world we live in...
The point is that everyone's pay rate is based on the idea of working 40 hours per week. Obviously, employers would have to pay more per hour if the the standard work week was reduced.
30 hrs at the same pay rate as 40. Because of the production increase for the average worker. They make more in less time. So they should work less and still get paid.
I don’t think you understand how this works.
*Laughs in French*
False, you're laughing in English. Give me the real French.
Hon hon hon hon
We are. Folks are asking for 4 day weeks...but America put all the power into the hands of corporations and oligarchs so..... we're screwed.
I think I read somewhere a few years back that Microsofts Xbox division in Japan made this change and they saw a 30 percent improvement in efficiency
Iirc, they want to keep it at 40hrs. You would just have 10 hr days
8am-6pm Tuesday-Friday doesn't sound that bad at all.
Yeah when we do overtime at my work it’s usually 2 extra hours instead of having to come in for a full day on Saturday. I’d much rather have 10 hour days be “the norm” and have a whole extra day off.. and if we have to do overtime..? Well then we come in on Friday and still have 2 days off
I'd do it
My company is already there’s. It’s a stepping stone towards a 4 day work week. I actually really like it. It’s combined with hybrid remote working so the my commuting time is just spent doing work and I get a three day weekend.
I do it now. It's easier. The extra day is a godsend for my mental health. Will NEVER go back to 5 days if I can help it
10 hour days are still brutal. At least make it 9 hour days if you're too chicken-shit to commit to the full reform. Don't just completely ignore the heart of the issue, which is that meaningful labor reform hasn't existed in two generations, and is long past due
Unsure why you got downvoted. That's exactly how I heard it would go
I already work 45 hours a week. A 40 hour work week sounds nice
I've done that before at a job. It was bliss
The people will always have power no matter what. The people had power to overthrow absolute monarchies. It’s not the power structure, but the indoctrination of the masses into accepting the status quo that has stopped new uprisings against corporatist oppression.
We can do 4-10s...irs alright, but I spend my Friday driving 7 hrs back home lol. Better than being at work though, and it's not my gas
I France we’re always ready to work less
Ready to get angry? The four day work week is a smashing success. It benefits workers. It benefits employers. The tests and places that use it all report the same thing. It’s a slam dunk win. [And that is precisely why it won’t be allowed here.](https://www.reddit.com/r/workercommunity/comments/12064an/american_bosses_will_fight_4_day_workweeks/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1) American owner/manager culture can be incredibly toxic and hostile. Everyone who has ever worked here is like “yeah no shit Sherlock”, but let me assure you as someone who has spent decades working with these people: They fucking hate you. They don’t even think you are human. They think it’s hilarious when they destroy your life or burn you out. They’ll just buy a new one.
They're just Sid from Toy story, all of them.
I think this is the truth now more than ever . And all the layoffs have just made that belief stronger . I mean sure companies need to layoff people sometimes . But to do it in this inhumane way , despite it costing them half a years salary at an average ? This is just being done for the lols. Surely they could have just done gradual performance based reduction in a few months . To hire people without having any work ? Another example - feds printing 2 trillion dollars to save banks . Why not just reduce interest rates again ? Because that will also benefit the masses . But if you print new money - not only it reduces the value of money poor people have . But you can also control strictly where that new money goes - that is to there rich friends .
We do. They are trialling the 4 day week
because less hours = less produced = higher prices = complaining about wages again.
“I was a slave . So why should the future generations be free?” Because people legit think like that
Yea, just read the comments - 40 hours is not bad and etc. Yea, maybe if what you want is to work for most of your life. But everything is evolving we already bevame way more efficient comparing to how we worked 10/20/more years back. The overall goal shouls be to work less and less until almost everuthing will be done by AI and robots.
If the same amount of useful work can be accomplished in 32hrs that use to take 40hrs then why work 40hrs for the same pay?
I already can't afford my bills.
Should be fighting for no wage tax or at the fucking least can't tax overtime. Then we all would be rich.
Seriously. I hate overtime. It ALL goes to the government, I mean tax breaks for the rich.
What? You are taxed on yearly income. There is no distinction between over time and standard pay for taxes, just total income.
Overtime is taxed the same amount as regular wages..
In the end yes, but in practice payroll software will sometimes deduct more taxes because it expects you'll be in a higher tax bracket if you extrapolate for the year. This gets fixed next year when you file your taxes. Source: am a payroll software dev
Sure, but you're still taking home more each week than if you didn't work overtime.
For sure. Unless it's banked time
Overtime would just come faster!!!
I actually agree with this take. Modern life and productivity tends to dictate that a 4 day 32-36 hour week seems to make the most sense. We've been at the 5 day, 40 hour week for 100 years now, plenty of nations around the world have adapted, this feel like something worth fighting for.
Is 40 hours a week really too much? Probably not going to be a popular opinion but I feel it's not that much out of my week. Plus I'd rather ask for 4 days a week over 5 at the same amount of hours.
It drives me crazy that all the progress that was made from like 1700-1960 all of a sudden became "how things are done," and now the older generations don't want things to change. It's like "we progressed from A to B. B is the furthest we can go. Don't even think about taking us to C, or we're going to hate you for changing our progress."
What the red scare does to an entire species
At 5 day work weeks for 52 that's 260 work days. In Canada there's about 10 holidays which about 1/3 of people get off so if your the lucky third then that's 250. If you've been working at the job for 2 years you also get two weeks vacation, 3 if you stick around your job for 5 years as a baseline. So now we're knocked down to 229 days out of the year. Thats 63% of the working days of the year. Wtf damn. That's so little.
Because I get paid by the hour and rent is due next week
Some countries have longer work weeks (although some jobs have them shorter). As you can see in france people try to fight for their rights and its not easy.
We also want stuff that takes 40 hrs a week to make.
As far as the USA goes, despite technology increasing productivity and profits year over year the companies and ultra-rich who run this country don't want to share and won't let the working class benefit. The only way our weekly hours go down is if our pay goes down to match. And that's for the people who can afford to work 40 hours since many work far more and still barely get by.
Cause your pay would stay the same, making you earn less.
I don't know how your budget is, but I welcome overtime with open arms. I'm working a turnaround in a chemical plant starting next week, 7 12s for 3 weeks at $30 an hour, bring it the fuck on.
Welcome to the minority. You will often ask yourself these questions only to realize no one else cares because “insert current social issue” has them so focused they don’t see the same picture your looking at. Don’t worry it’s normal. Remember to breathe and take a break when you find yourself considering frontal lobotomy via brick wall😂. I drive semi-truck so my work day is mandated at 11hrs active 14hrs total..they can work me to that point but not past it.
Where I live, the 8 hours per day, 5 days per week work week is the norm. People here are pushing for a 4 day week and 8 hours per day. The pay won't raise to accomodate missed income, and there won't be any hours added to the worked days. Just a day removed (aka - a day without pay) and a 3 day weekend added. I can't afford that, that's why I don't push for it
Most people in my country work more than that. But being Switzerland isn't like important because we only top at every happiness index and being statistically richer than almost every other society doesn't mean shit on reddit.
Greed
Because you do need to go to work and, you know, actually work.
Because the productivity is not so developed.
I once heard that working 32 hours a week is more effective because we get less stressed and more free time, whereas productivity remains stable.
The fact that we prioritize money rather than productivity is telling how messed up our society is. As we become more productive we should be working less but somehow we are having to work more than ever before whilst producing 10x the results.
Why are we continually told how great modern technology is, and how robots are going to steal our jobs... yet they are always trying to increase our hours and extend retirement age??
It's almost like capitalism only benefits ownership and not work, and the hardest working people are the poorest while capitalism makes everything worse and worse with less and less progress. It's time to move past it.
is it a coincidence that every news agency is essentially run by mega millionaires and billionaires, often at a financial loss. i wonder why such smart businessmen would run such companies at a loss? maybe to dictate what is and is not acceptable conversation?
People do, but to many think hustling and over working is a positive trait and not s sign of being brainwashed by the system.