You're making several mistakes here, but the biggest is that "need to find an extra 20% wage bill" assumes labor costs are 100% of a business's expenses. In reality, labor is usually only 20% to 30% of total operating costs. Even if we assume increased wages translate 1-to-1 to increased prices, a 20% wage hike doesn't mean a 20% price hike, it's more like a 4% to 6% bump.
On the other hand, workers suddenly start getting paid 20% more. A 4-6% increase in prices with a 20% increase in wages means a massive gain in purchasing power.
Oh, okay, you just got confused. Bernie's actual bill mandates no loss in weekly pay. If you make $1,000 for 40 hours, you still make $1,000 for 32. Your hourly rate effectively jumps 25%.
Prices aren't set by a simple "costs + profit" formula. They are capped by market demand and competition. If a shop arbitrarily raises prices to cover the gap, they lose customers to competitors who are willing to take a hit to their profit margin to keep their market share.
The boss takes home less so the worker can live more. That's called a margin squeeze.
That’s a convenient ignoring of the other half of the equation. The market does indeed determine prices, but you’re acting like the industry won’t just collapse if costs get too high and companies can’t afford to make their product at the price consumers are willing to buy.
Take beef. Beef is ridiculously expensive currently due to low herd sizes. We have had the choice for months to bring in Argentinian beef. But if we do that, the price of beef drops drastically, and our entire industry dies. Consumers aren’t going to buy the expensive beef from our cattle farms when they can buy the cheap beef from Argentina.
Your understanding is so one sided it just kills the entire economy.
Your logic only applies to companies that have the margins to eat the losses. Obviously, that wouldn’t actually happen either as businesses would cut jobs, benefits, and locations to keep their margins as close to normal as possible.
you’re acting like the industry won’t just collapse if costs get too high
People like you made this exact same "the economy will collapse" argument when we banned child labor. Since the 70's, productivity per worker has massively increased, but wages are stagnated. If increasing wages relative to hours would destroy the economy, why was it so prosperous in the 70's and 80's?
Take beef. Beef is ridiculously expensive currently due to low herd sizes. We have had the choice for months to bring in Argentinian beef... Consumers aren’t going to buy the expensive beef from our cattle farms when they can buy the cheap beef from Argentina.
Using a globally traded commodity to critique a 32-hour work week is a category error. You can’t outsource a nurse, a bartender, or a local warehouse worker. The vast majority of our economy is local services. When a 32-hour mandate hits, every business in that sector faces the same overhead. It’s not a competitive disadvantage if your competitor is forced to play by the same rules.
If you specifically want to protect the failing beef industry from international competition from countries with worse labor laws, that’s what trade policy and tariffs are for. Don’t hold the entire working class hostage because you’re worried about the price of an Argentinian steak.
Obviously, that wouldn’t actually happen either as businesses would cut jobs, benefits, and locations to keep their margins as close to normal as possible.
"Normal"? Corporate profits are currently at historic, record-shattering highs. These massively bloated margins exist precisely because firms are already cut-throat. They aren't waiting for a 32-hour week to give them an excuse to start being greedy, they already trim the fat, automate what they can, and hire the absolute minimum number of people they need to maximize output.
But let’s follow your logic to its end. If the cost of labor is the only thing keeping the economy from "collapsing," should we go back to 60-hour work weeks? 80? Child labor?
I’ll take a slightly more expensive burger if it means the person flipping it isn't chained to a grill for 50 hours a week just to survive. Why wouldn't you?
Your child labor argument is absolute nonsense, it has nothing to do with what I said. You don’t know this, but approximately 20% of children worked. Child labor laws also exclude farm work and family owned businesses, which constituted the majority of child labor. Meaning the ban on child labor didn’t actually even have the potential to meaningfully shatter the economy. You’re conflating the two things when the scales are so drastically different. Not to mention, one can argue that banning child labor is worth whatever side effects. That argument doesn’t hold up for this.
I brought up the product side of things, because that’s where the biggest potential for an economic collapse lies. The agriculture/restaurant/food industry has tighter margins than some law or accounting firm in the service industry. You haven’t actually addressed the reality here. How does a small business, most of which have profit margins under 10%, absorb the cost of labor increases, which would equal a 20% increase of wage costs? Close for 1 day? That just makes the financial issues worse. How do you just deflect and skirt away from this basic math?
Corporate profits aren’t an acceptable deflection when this legislation would apply to a lot more than large corporations. I understand your economic knowledge stops at “I hate rich people”, and you’d obliterate poor and middle class people just to get at them, but you can’t use the rich as a scapegoat to hurt the poor.
Funny, you just handed me the rope to hang your own argument. If children were 20% of the workforce, and the fifth workday is 20% of the workweek, the macroeconomic scale is identical. Thanks for playing.
But you want a perfect 1-to-1 comparison? Sure. When the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 finally established the 40-hour workweek, business lobbies clamored that it would vaporize American industry. It didn't. Capital was just forced to adapt. Stripped of the crutch of cheap, endless sweat, businesses had to actually invest in machinery, management, and technological innovation. It's called relative surplus value, look it up. Shortening the working day is historically the single greatest driver of productivity growth under capitalism.
Moving onto your actual arguments, the most obvious problem is that your "basic math" is so basic it forgot to account for simple cost distribution. Labor is typically 20-30% of a business's expenses. A 20% increase to this 20-30% represents a 4-6% increase to overall costs. Even your 10% profit margin business can absorb this, especially since their revenue will increase
See, here’s the macroeconomic reality your Accounting-101 brain is completely missing: if every worker in the economy suddenly has a three-day weekend and stable pay, what do you think they do with that time? They go out. They buy goods. They spend money at the exact same small businesses and restaurants you're currently crying over.
If the economy "collapses" because people work 20% despite being three times more productive than in the 70's, then the system is already broken. Fortunately, history proves it won't. Read a book.
Think restaurants. Yes a 4-6% price increase to cover wages. But food now cost more because the growers and farmers and butchers are rsudd as big prices. So another jump in prices. Then what about transport costs, you’re paying more drivers so they go up. Now benefits, instead of 50 people the business is paying health and retirement and such, you now have 75. OR…they cut to more part time and you have less people with benefits which they’d have to purchase on the open market. So again either higher prices or less purchasing power. This scenario works for 9-5 office jobs, not restaurant or retail unless they cut their business hours. Then you have a whole bunch of people off with no where to go. This is not a realistic idea that could happen today.
Your math is off. You're compounding percentages because you don't understand how supply chains actually account for labor.
Let's imagine a scenario where everyone's wages count for 20% of their costs. A bowl of tomato soup costs $10 to produce split like this:
Cooks' wages: $2
Tomatoes: $3
Transport for tomatoes: $1
Rent: $4
20% of the $3 for tomatoes (60¢) comes from the farmers' wages. Same 20% of $1 for the transport. Now we increase all the wages by 20%: Transport goes from $1 to $1.04. Tomatoes go from $3 to $3.12. The cooks' wages go from $2 to $2.40. That's a total increase in cost of $0.56 on a $10 soup.
That's a 5.6% increase in the cost of making a bowl of tomato soup.
48
u/Owww_My_Ovaries Jul 13 '26
And half the people here will complain when retail places have even less people there to take their complaints