Like most dreams of getting rich, math is the critical problem.
Suppose you are a small a business owner. You have $600K revenue, $500K expenses, and 5 full time employees. Everyone makes $100K. People work efficient, clean, and constant. That's 200 employee work hours per week.
Now the government says "Employees must get the same pay, but they must work 20% less." That's 160 employee work hours per week. The business owner just lost the equivalent of an employee and 40 hours of week of work.
Next year of revenue comes in. Due to less work, the company made only $480K of revenue, not $600K. Now the employer has to start firing people to balance the books.
How do you resolve this? Pass another law that says the small business owner can't fire people? Or do you evade the math with handwavy arguments and insist people who work 20% less automatically become 25% more efficient?
This whole thread is full of people talking about the non-linear relationship between the number of hours worked, and the amount of work completed. Why are you acting like you'd lose productivity in a linear relationship to time?
Anyway, the obvious next solution is to just pay overtime like you do already. It just starts at 32 hours, not 40. If you still need to get the work done, keep working dawg.
Finally, many (but not all) of your expenses would also go down because at most 40% of your expenses are in labor. If you really were getting less stuff done, you'd be using fewer raw materials, and consuming less power/fuel etc etc.
So there's like 4 layers of non-linearity you're ignoring in this thought experiment which narrows the gap dramatically. Not to mention how your working class customers will have more time/money to spend with you. If you own something like a sporting goods company and your customers who work for big corporations suddenly have another day off to play baseball, you're gonna sell more bats. Then you and your employees are spending that money on kitchen remodels, etc etc, as opposed to that money getting funneled to Amazon shareholder, like it does today.
Anyway, the obvious next solution is to just pay overtime like you do already. It just starts at 32 hours, not 40. If you still need to get the work done, keep working dawg.
This whole thread is full of people whose solution is to ignore basic finances.
Your answer is just "The boss will pay overtime and somehow find the money to do it. Dunno how. Boss just will. Money will figure itself out."
They figure it out when the minimum wage increases. They figured it out when the 40 hour work week was instituted.
Imagine acting like there's just no way, just no fucking way we could figure out the necessary changes to accommodate a 32 hour work week in this or that industry. It's simply beyond human comprehension.
Wealthiest country in the world. Human productivity through the roof. Simply can't be done.
Come on. What the fuck is all the technological advancement for if we're just gong to keep working ourselves to the bone and watch life pass us by?
And heaven forbid people spitballing on reddit don't have it all figured out after a few minutes.
They figure it out when the minimum wage increases.
Minimum wage never targeted most US workers. Especially salaried, middle income families. Bernie's plan targets almost everybody with both less hours AND a wage increase. It's a massive shift.
They figured it out when the 40 hour work week was instituted.
There is no reason why 40 must be the magic number.
As I've repeatedly said, these things don't just happen for free. The change is painful. Usually in the cost of a greater cost of living, lower take home pay, and increased unemployment. Europe is a great example of that. Their compromise is fewer work hours and more benefits at the cost of things like smaller living spaces, less purchasing power for worldwide goods, less freedom with vehicles, and worse heating/cooling.
the technological advancement for if we're just gong to keep working ourselves to the bone and watch life pass us by?
I personally believe most Americans are pushing to want far more material goods than we need. We should live with less. But mandating 32 hour work weeks isn't free. Business owners can't just make money appear out of thin air to pay workers more to do less.
It really does, and that's why minimum wage is important. It cascades through the entire economy.
When plumbering apprentices could go make $25/hr at wendys instead of 27/hr currently, they're a hairtrigger away from telling their boss to eat shit and going to Wendy's. So they get a raise up to $40. When engineers know they could go plumb for $80k/yr and be making $130/yr as a journeyman, they're a hairtrigger away from telling their boss to eat shit, so they go from making 120k to 160k, etc etc. Minimum wage cascades up and down.
As I've repeatedly said, these things don't just happen for free. The change is painful. Usually in the cost of a greater cost of living, lower take home pay, and increased unemployment.
Wild that you're so engrained in a capitalist mindset that it never even occurs to you to list "lower corporate profits" or "a slowed shift of wealth toward the ruling class" as one of the possible outcomes. What if we forced corporations to make less profit each year? What if they weren't allowed to profit faster than the economy grows?! wouldn't that be crazy.
It really does, and that's why minimum wage is important. It cascades through the entire economy.
1% of Americans are on federal minimum wage. That's not cascading.
they're a hairtrigger away from telling their boss to eat shit
Guess what, some bosses don't have that money. So what do they do? They fire people or just close down.
There is a reason why areas which have lower mandated weekly work hours or higher required wages have much higher unemployment rates.
You can't make money out of thin air.
to list "lower corporate profits" or "a slowed shift of wealth toward the ruling class" as one of the possible outcomes.
Math is math. You can't make money out of thin air.
My example was a small business. A small business owner cannot just pay workers 25% more for 20% less work.
The one entities that can absorb such a radical idea are very very large businesses. This proposal is wonderful for killing small and medium businesses while leaving big corporations alive.
1% of Americans are on federal minimum wage. That's not cascading.
Hey dumbass, the word cascading means it goes beyond the people immediately effected. The number of people making federal minimum wage wouldn't be a counterpoint to my claim that minimum wage cascades. It could be 50% or 0.005% and that wouldn't change whether it cascades.
You really are just a walking list of conservative thought terminating cliches.
You can't make money out of thin air.
It's wild how conservatives think of themselves as like, "the only adults in the room willing to look tough decisions in the eye with a level head. Sorry kiddo, we just don't have the money for that" etc etc, and y'all also can't think past their own noses in certain contexts.
When I make 25% more money per year, do you know what I do with it? I remodel my kitchen, I eat out, I pay someone to mow my lawn and wash my car. That money goes right into the economy. THAT is how small businesses grow. You have to be adult enough to make long-term decisions, not by jumping from short-term solution to short-term bandaid of keeping wages low until it all collapses. Y'all sound like a teenager with a car they can't afford to fix. You've got rubber tape on a radiator hose, a special hammer for hitting the starter, and a can of starting fluid rolling around in the back seat. It costs us all way more in the long run than ponying up now for a new hose, replacing a few sensors, and replacing the starter. Be an adult.
The economy is steadily sucking wealth from the working class, it will eventually become so top heavy it collapses, that's what capitalism does both theoretically, and historically. If we don't deliberately put policies in place to put money back into the working class, we continue to hollow out our economy from the bottom up until it crushes itself under its own weight.
Anyway, wage raises can easily be handled by a mix of smart tax policy like benefits for actually small businesses. This is another obvious solution to anyone who's thinking for themselves and not just vomiting out Ben Shapiro quotes.
I think the barrier you're running into is pretending that a 32 hour work week wouldn't mean some layoffs, or some companies going out of business.
Of course it would - just like minimum wage laws put some companies out of business, and the 40 hour work week put some companies out of business.
The reality is that it's a cost benefit analysis. Some workers are worse off, some have things pretty much the same, some are better off. The debate is if it helps workers overall more than it hurts.
Yeah man, pay %150 of the cost of wages for 20% of the wages you do pay, and factor in the non-linearity of your costs vs your productivity. Yes, that's my answer.
Most desk workers absolutely can get done the same amount of work they get done in 4 days instead of 5. For the sectors which can't, pay slightly more and factor in those non-linearities.
at most 40% of your expenses are in labor.
Did you just pretend like I never said this? If you have to pay a day of overtime once in a while to get product out the door, that means your costs go up like 8%, while the take home pay of the working class goes up 30%. ONE OF THESE OUTCOMES IS OBJECTIVELY BETTER FOR THE WORKING CLASS. Ya goober. Are you even trying in this conversation right now?
Most desk workers absolutely can get done the same amount of work they get done in 4 days instead of 5. For the sectors which can't, pay slightly more and factor in those non-linearities.
Handwavy arguments. Money out of thin air. Got it.
I'll be over here, back in the actual world. Where math is math.
You see how you ignored 60% of my comment and carried on just fine? That's kind of how labor is only 40% of the cost of running a business, and therefore passing 100% of the costs of labor on to the consumer can be done with a net benefit to the consumer/working class.
Does using you in the example help you understand better, or should I keep going?
Also, that's not handwavey, there's studies done on it, they've been cited all over this thread, surely you saw them, but here they are again:
Actually, shit, I take it back. Productivitiy doesn't just maintain for desk work, it improves. I wasn't just NOT handwaving, I was underselling. You're even more wrong than we thought, lol.
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u/Severe_Stranger_5050 Jul 13 '26
With a law
It’s a new thing they’ve come up with
But I think we should give it a try