But that doesn’t mean that I can demand more money [1], a 32 hour work week etc. if I had still been at AWS at the beginning of the year, I couldn’t have demanded to work from home.
[1] Well I could make more money if I were willing to work in an office and/or go back to BigTech. I’m not willing to do either.
What alternative are these factory workers going to do? “Learn to code and found a successful startup”?
A. You are born into wealth
B. You inherit wealth
Most of us don't fall into either of those two things under an economic system that is designed to extract the most value from the people working in it, the profits of which bubble to the top and never trickle back down.
This is why things like overtime are such an easy sell. If the company can afford to pay overtime, then there's no reason they can't afford to raise their workers hourly wages so they make the same money at 40 hours or less that they would working 50/60 hours. I'm here to tell you first hand that there's no increase in productive output of the company as a whole when everyone is working overtime versus when everyone is on 40 hours. That's a myth that needs to be quashed, especially with production being increasingly automated. As someone who visits our automtive and aerospace factories across the US frequently, the amount of guys I see standing around looking at smartphones is astounding, but so long as the company can post higher valuations by making it look like they're flush with both work and cash by offering copious overtime, they're happy. Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime and all that.
Sorry, I forgot to address your part about investments. Those are another bit of snake oil sold to the middle class to sooth their financial woes. Fact is, unless you have a considerable amount of upfront capital, all you're doing is lending money for various fund managers to gamble with. They profit more than you do, even when you do see the marginal increases you might see.
I graduated from a no name state college in 1996 with a degree in computer science and have worked for everything from startups, to small and medium lifestyle companies, to BigTech to now customer facing consulting.
While my mom got a pension, my dad just slowly saved and invested through his career. They’ve been living a good life that didn’t require working for over 30 years.
What my parents didn’t do was try to keep up with the Jones - they had their house built in 1978 and have been there ever since and added on to it in 2002. My mom has a few more cars only because she has given older ones to relatives when she felt a slight itch to get a new one. But my dad has had only three cars his entire life.
But simple math that I’m sure you have seen shows how continued automated investing over years won’t make you “rich” but will give you a comfortable retirement.
And it’s no “myth” especially for producing physical goods, that keeping the factory open longer and producing more widgets to sell increases profits. Paying people more money won’t have them producing more widgets when there is a constant amount of factory capacity that someone has.
People in all industries get promoted all of the time and make more money eve. Adjusted for inflation. You can find plenty of statistics where older workers make more than younger workers.
Other people making more than you do, doesn’t mean that you don’t make more money than you would by not investing.
[1 she was willing to volunteer for various education programs to help at risk students. But the grants were required to pay her but she negotiated a lower pay so she could work more hours and still not affect her pensions. She could have cared less about the money.
The company can be a government entity that finances overtimes not with profit, but by collecting more taxes and/or issuing debt obligations.
Think of NY police dept, which I'm sure is still rife with fraud to this day. They don't care about being able to "afford" to pay their force, since they have a money faucet and political influence.
> As someone who visits our automtive and aerospace factories across the US frequently, the amount of guys I see standing around looking at smartphones is astounding
You and everyone else who thinks like that needs to get out of this mentality that if you can't observe someone working actively for 8 hours out of an 8 hour day, that time is "waste". There are plenty of reasons to be on standby, some of which (e.g. blockers) are non-productive, and some that are.
You're supposed to be taking breaks (not lunch breaks) every hour anyway, to stretch your limbs and maybe ask a coworker a couple of questions.
This comment is probably going to come off weird, because you're posting in a forum full of people who have found such an alternative.
> the profits of which bubble to the top and never trickle back down.
this is also quite wrong for many here.
You want me in the office every day? I have a one hour commute. Pay me for 9 hours. Or let me WFH, and pay me for 8.
I'd be all about 32-hour work week, but provided either employers were required to pay us all more, or the price of _literally everything_ in the US consumer economy came down. Cutting my paycheck by 25% would be devastating to the arguably modest lifestyle I have built for myself, so I can't see that ever being offset by just being generally happier because I'm not wasting the single life I have making someone else rich.
That'd be fine by me if wages had also kept up with those productivity gains, and they have not.
Right now there are some cultural barriers to this. Many employers aren't willing to be that flexible, and I think that's a shame. I'd love to see 32-hour or even 24-hour workweeks become more normalized as possible options on the job market. There are also probably some legal barriers to this, with a lot of employment laws counting 40 hours as "full time" but I'm not sure how significant a factor that is.
32 hour work weeks are difficult to apply in many industries. Health care is already insanely expensive.
Decreasing number of workers means buildings are built slower and more expensively (resulting higher housing costs).
Along with productivity gains, we also have quality gains. Previously all houses did not need air conditioning, but because things are more efficient, more people can afford one.
no thanks.
I think it will help your case if you can acknowledge how far we've come already.
But that's not what happened, for various reasons relating to the nature of how capital grows and how that impacts increasing production volumes.
We won't win that fight 10 years from now, we might as well try winning the fight now.
This will be a repeat of manufacturing going outside of US due to reduced standards (labor and pollution) and therefore cheaper manufacturing in China. And due to that blue collar work got destroyed in the long term.
Logically, unless there are high trade barriers for software/services/goods from countries that don't have similar standards, long-term, these jobs will just shift there.
There will always be someone willing to undercut. Should that be reason for us all to race each other to the bottom?
I personally don’t think the negative consequences of working a little less (on paper!) are proportional to the positives.
Denmark has 37 hours/week. Netherlands is around 32-33 on average AFAIK. Switzerland is ~35 hours/week. Ireland and Austria are also well below 40 to my knowledge.
Most research shows that non-mechanical work (i.e. where you have to think a little), gets a lower work-output above 40 hours/week than below. If sustained, it’s not just diminishing returns, but lower absolute output, even at just 3-5hours weekly overtime.
What? Switzerland is 40-42 hours for a full time employee.
I read that the average working hours is ~31/week. Digging further into that, it was the number of actual working hours on average (including part time and self-employeds), not what constitutes full-time employment.
For example, once the maternity leave runs out, in finance a lot of couples go to 80% so that with 1-2 days of home office you can always have someone watching the child. It's less money but the nurseries are so crazy expensive in Switzerland that it can actually even be positive in terms of total (edit:net) income.
I am not sure if we are in disagreement, but I believe my point stands: that Switzerland is a rich country despite working less than 40 hours/week on avg (actual hours).
And that there’s no B. So we’re thriving on debt.
But it's a fiction built on U.S. force projection. It's become apparent that none of these countries could defend themselves against an aggressive competitor.
There may or may not be a connection to work habits, but we should find out and then decide if we’re okay with the consequences (like the lowest GDP per capita state (AL) being on par with Germany). Maybe we’re okay with playing second fiddle. But we should know what we’re in for.
May I have the list of such countries with a level of prosperity comparable to the US (which seriously consider an $85k tax-free minimum wage)?
Your "everything is still thriving" on paper turns out to be "everyone except the elite is drowning in poverty and they can't complain about it because then their totalitarian government will declare them terrorists or something" in practice. All the time.
California is the only state I’ve visited in the US, but I would say Scandinavians are wealthier on average/higher quality of life.
I'm not even surprised.
Socialist politics are extremely good at ensuring a high standard of living for the elite and shutting everyone else up. Look at any North Korean media outlet (of two or however many) - they're the best in the world, and everyone else is envious of them.
European social democratic politics are usually characterized by the opposite outcome, where high taxes and redistribution means the top 10% is much closer to the average Joe than in ultra capitalist countries. Less inequality in general.
> Look at any North Korean media outlet
If you seriously compare NK to any country in Europe, you have no clue, sorry.
If that is the case, then adding trade barriers also doesn't fix anything. Adding the trade barriers would ultimately just produce a lower standard of living. You'd essentially have an isolated system and the system is now producing less, so necessarily there will be less for everyone in the system.
Adding trade barriers also doesn't fix the threat of an adversarial country working 50% more than you for the next 50 years and as a result having the infrastructure to dominate you in numerous ways.
Maybe certain people think they are made of better clay than the average consumer and should determine what everyone else can buy; that path is a dangerous one...
Maybe certain people shouldn't be so quick to call other people fascists just because they voiced a thought on capitalism's need for infinite growth. Ironically enough, certain people are the thought police here, with a dangerous path...
Nobody did that here, though.
That’s a pretty big assumption. From what perspective, since the “working less” is only the perspective of the worker?
Production is not a zero-sum game that assumes companies make zero effort to invest in more manpower rather than profits.
Profit rates, however, are a significant part of the problem as each US company in the chain attempts to maximize profits they obtain from the next and avoid any competition (often using the legal system for protection). That doesn’t occur in the areas you mention because competition is the name of the game in those countries, which is why they have maximized production and flexibility.
Per capita, let's say yes, though I think there are people that assert that individual productivity is higher when working less hours.
But as a whole, probably not. In aggregate companies will pay more people less money, to do the same amount of work, so I think it should balance itself out.
Neither am I. But how do you prevent countries doing 996 from dominating the market like they did in manufacturing without strict regulation and barriers?
Why do you need to? Is this a manifestation of American exceptionalism, or do you think that overall as a nation you get a better life for your citizens when you're at the economic top?
My competitor has a contracting factory in Pakistan that has the same labor costs as me, but works for 50 hours, instead of 32 hours. He can produce 36% more per week, while paying the same cost of capital, opex and other costs, even if he pays the same per hour as me.
But if he has 1/10 of the cost of labor and labor is a high % of end product cost, I can't compete and my business is bust, my employees are on the street and we all live from 1. the taxes of the productive people in the society who can sell something competitively outside (to have currency to buy imports) 2. governmental loans to be paid in the future by the people from 1.
[1] Sorry, I said that in a different comment in this thread.
In terms of hours worked per week, I have rarely worked more than 40 hours per week (and I mean by that that I'm contracted for 40 hours and rarely work overtime). I know people who work more than that, and sometimes much more than that, which is a function of their skills and what kind of job they can secure (as well as their appetite for overtime), but I'd say my situation is fairly normal for people with ze skills. I also worked at a company which did 32 hour work weeks (which they did as a perk to retain people, not because they were forced to).
Software dev skills are quite scarce here, and South African devs are already cheap enough that it is difficult to try and offshore that work (although I know a few SA companies which have contracted companies in India for work). I also know many SA devs who have emmigrated to other countries which themselves have scarce software developers, but where the salaries and "standard of living" is perhaps better.
When you start overtaxing, you are just milking the cow and not feeding her enough. She'd last for some time but then't you won't have a cow and milk.
You're absolutely correct, but most people don't understand how even a simple "village-size" economy works. They think money is just "printed" and "government will enforce our standard of living".
I am never going back to 5 days a week, if I can help it.
Still, these numbers all seem arbitrary. More flexible opt-in work arrangements would be nice. My wife is a nurse and she can work "per diem" which is just amazing. She opts-in and chooses her schedule. I think society as a whole would be a bit healthier if that flexibility was extended to more of the population.
My friend managed to do it by boiling that frog via taking Friday afternoons off. Everyone was happy with that arrangement, so he started taking entire Fridays off. Then he switched to Mondays.
Meanwhile my SO got a hard "no" on any amount of reduction. She's looking for a part time job, but it's not something employers normally advertise.
For sticky-downward values of "full time".
Of course I like the idea of having more options in the workplace but sometimes the down sides are too obvious to get worked up over it. Be thankful we can work five 8 hour days (or less). We could have the 9 to 9, 6 day a week culture that exists in some places.
Having that extra day off for Whatever I Want is invaluable, and there's nothing that anyone can offer me that would make me give this up.
When I’m in that situation, I’m not thinking that my weekends are too short, but that my job is too stressful. I either need to change jobs or find peace in my current job.
However, generally advocates propose a blanket "mandatory 35 hours week", which have many negtive consequences:
- Why do you need to "enforce" that to other people who can't or wan't earn the same way and are more than happy to work overtime because they need to say earn more to pay medical bills or want to save to buy a house? Isn't that limiting the amount I as a person can sell my own work hours to the business?
- How can the business compete on the local market when other companies aren't forced to do work with the same cost base for the labour component in the final product?
- How can the business compete with the Mexican company across the border who can do it for even cheaper?
Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.
In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him. Societies are much wealthier now, but we shouldn't forget that starvation and poverty are the default state, not the other way around.
At first, you seem like a sensible person, but then you seem to be completely ignorant as to what "moral" means.
If you have a farm, you can't kill your chicken to feed the starving neighbour if your own chidren are starving. You need to keep the chicken alive because they will feed you and if they produce enough eggs you can help your neighbour too.
When you overtax your companies you make them uncompetitive and you have less tax to redistribute. It's just simple mathematics, no morals are needed to understand that. No tax = no social safety nets. Tax comes from profit. Profit comes from margin. Margin is destroyed by higher costs. If you increase the cost, you need to close the border so all the companies can share the same cost of labor. You'll squeeze more from the companies and make more social payments but less capital for the companies to invest and hire more people. So you're just making the stuff companies produce more expensive for all. (because you need to close the border to remove outside competition)
It's not rocket science. When societies got rich then they started having social nets, not before.
This idea leads to ungood thinking.
If true it would be equally true to senselessly say that expenses/wages come from profit?
This is clearest when you think of the variety of cases where an employee pays their own taxes.
Taxes currently are for both the busness and the employees.
On the producer side: - business pays tax on sales (or VAT)
- business pays tax on profit left
- business pays tax on each employee in the form of empolyers "contributions" (just another way to tax the work of the empolyees)
- persons pay income taxes and social contributions
- persons (owners) pay divident taxes
On the consumer side
- sales/VAT tax
- import duties on stuff you buy
- various local taxes on property, vehicles and etc
In EU many contries have on the producing side 35-39% and on consuming side around 20% VAT, e.g. the govenment takes about 50% of an average workers pay.
Who pays the worker? The business by making a profit.
I suggest doing some reading about labor movements, the Gilded Age, or about current issues - wealth inequality, housing costs, environmental impact, healthcare costs, enshittification.
The free market has failed miserably across multiple dimensions - even Trump has the government owning companies now (Intel). The “free market” has been a failed idea for a long time.
> In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him.
We have archeological evidence that contradicts this directly! What are you even talking about?
This isn’t a good way to structure a society, but your whole point about mixing morality with capitalism is perhaps the worst one.
If you can’t look at the damage to people (and the environment) under our current system and point out how it is broadly immoral, I would suggest taking a closer look at the very least.
You miss the point of the argument, that when there isn't enough food, then this happens.
You assume that if there is a price on it than there is a free market for it. It's not true at all...
Compare the freedom of the markets that are inefficient in your example:
- housing: one of the most regulated and non-transparent markets with zoning laws and NIMBYism blocking new supply to the market
- healthcare: even more regulated market for practitioners (licence to heal), medical supplies (licences for medicines) and a brocken system that incumbents can't enter (check cost+drugs Mark Cuban's post about how shitty the system is and how far away from normal free market)
- enivronmental impact: that's what the taxes are for and to have a good tax base you tax the polutants, but it's not "the market" it's "the people who consume" in any market free or not you'll get the resources used. In non-free markets you will just use more resources, because the encumbents will extract +400$ for 8Gb ram upgrade of your macbook pro or 10000 USD for a broken leg, that could've done much more if it wasn't inefficiently extorted.
- enshittification: this happens only in the "ecosystems" with no markets inside.
If you go to the freeer markets you'll see that the prices got down, not up. (check the price of computers, electronics and clothes for example).
There are some areas where the market is not the answer, but there humanity hasn't found a better way to optimize resources and ensure freedom unless the people have the ability to change their goods freely without restriction of the third party.
I can walk downstairs to work out during the middle of the day, swim almost all year (Florida), go for a jog of whatever.
On a higher level, working remotely means we can do things like spending a full year flying around the country like we did until September 2023 or going forward spending a couple of months in Costa Rica, Panama during the winter while working.
4-5 days a week doesn’t impinge on my freedom like working in an office would. I “retired my wife” in 2020 when she was 46 8 years into our marriage so she could enjoy her hobbies and passion projects.
I “decompress” between the minute I close my computer and not think about work until the next day and walk to the living room.
This math isn't just arbitrary - it's embedded deeply in how organizations function, how people work, get promoted, deliver, all that. in a vacuum, a 32 hour workweek might push meeting times lower and leave the same or more engineering productivity time. It might also stress the system so hard that non-meeting work grinds to a halt, unfortunately just at a time when there's less time to notice it.
Do you have the dataset for that? I'd be surprised by that number, unless it was all "engineers" irrespective of software taken into account.
There is no reason why we should have unemployment if machines make work more efficient -- it just means that there is enough money to be earned to give back part of it so that we do not need all the manpower.
What's wrong with this perspective?
Or it lacks a mechanism by which we can enforce the rule collectively.
By all means let's make it happen, it's a great idea, but how?
The answer (thank goodness) is: competition.
You are a consumer more than you are a worker. Every industry that brings in automation and reduced costs can offer you goods for less, or pay their workers the same for more. Competition means they tend to choose the former (or, given there's also competition for workers, actually wages go up a bit and prices come down a bit, but there are slightly fewer jobs).
Pretty much all anti-worker outcomes are just corporate competition playing out.
1900 worked 3000 hours
1950 worked 2000 hours
2023 worked 1790 hours
Maybe you are expecting even fewer hours still, which you are welcome to do. I know lots of people that work 800 hours a year. All their basic needs are easily met. I do not want to live like them, though.
data from: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
The whole point of their investment into the machines is to no longer have to pay workers.
> What's wrong with this perspective?
Morally? Nothing.
In order to affect the change you are suggesting that change must be legislated. Those who make laws are funded by these same companies extracting wealth from labor.
How would one implement such a plan without it falling apart immediately in The House or Senate?
The worker is not putting out the capital that (hopefully) pays off in increased productivity; why do they benefit from this investment - especially when it's diameterically opposite the cost/value proposition they represent? If we value an employee's contribution and pay accordingly why would I pay more per unit if they work less?
I don't necessarily (fully) agree with this counter, but you better believe that's how investors view it. Productivity is really hard to measure in IT, but I tend to think of "attention". I want to pay a salary for all of your attention, and when you start talking about reducing your... work-focused hours (?) I'm getting less for the same money.
If you want to work less, you need unions, government intervention, or some other form of organization (e.g. a change in the status quo).
If I sat down for a coffee with my favorite economics professor and they were doing a Socratic education thing, they’d ask:
- What happens if someone refuses to work less?
- Does that strike you as a stable state, or, the first turn in an assignment you gotta sketch out for that Game Theory class you’re taking.
- What happens if we automate all of someone’s job?
- What would it look like if we did this with ATMs? Would excess tellers be at home with same salary in perpetuity? Bank employment held stable with ATMs, even though tellers decreased. Under this proposal, would it have increased, as management couldn’t be automated and now can focus on loans?
- What happens in a more factory-like setting, where automation of manual work might entail constant monitoring?
In terse form: we’re instituting a more complicated form of communism with more moral hazards, and any analysis of what happens beyond the first step reveals a nest of complicated questions that result in less efficiency any time we build tools that could make us more efficient. The only thing I can think of is it would “resolve” generationally. I.e. if we needed 4 Grugs to carry the harvest, then invent the wheel and only need 1 Greg, 3 Grugs get to do nothing till they die and the generation that invented the tool reap no benefits of the invention, only their offspring will. (Their labor can get reallocated like the 3 Grugs normally would have)
The problem now is that we're not sure what to have the other people do that will actually pay them a living wage.
Or do we? The unemployment numbers are still pretty low. Is that just because people gave up and stopped looking for jobs? Is it because the immigrants left? Or is the economy actually doing fairly well at finding things for people to do?
Traditionally we have taken the gains in terms of more stuff. (Not always, though - the 8-hour workday and 5-day week are in fact taking the gains in the form of time.) But we may be at a place where more stuff isn't going to make us that much better off.
That is, some of us may be there. Not all. There are still far too many people who don't have decent housing, nor any realistic chance of getting it. There are far too many people who can be ruined by one medical issue. There are far too many people who don't have food security. So maybe what we really ought to be spending the gains on is a better life for those people - that is, the "living wage" part. Living wage for all, first. Then we can see if we can reach the 32-hour week.
> why not lower the average work week hours accordingly?
Because workers can get more money this way.
> this could be translated back to lowering the average work load of workers.
Yeah, but workers want more money, not a lower load.
> it just means that there is enough money to be earned
More money means more agents trying to earn them, which means more competition, which mean less profit.
Not so much in IT. I've seen too many public sector tech employees atrophy and fall way behind in their skill set and productivity. Most would hardly make it past an initial tech screening at a startup or FAANG. I think it's great that those guys have a union to protect them, but we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.
Likewise for raising the retirement age. I could carry on with my email job into my 80s (health permitting). Bricklayers not so much.
Knowing FrontPage, IIS6 or RHEL4 isn’t going to carry the day for them.
I mean why would they care? If you can't get a FAANG salary due to the lack of the skills, but can laze around 32 hours a week for $85k, it sounds too good to refuse to destroy the industry.
The weird thing in the west are these MBA types who feel they must force down labor cost even if it makes no difference for the company. I've seen lots of truly absurd examples of it. My favorite are the giant factories full of state of the art machinery and near perfect automation. 90+% of the employees are gone but the business logic still instructs to squeeze them. Like trying to squeeze wine from rocks.
If LLM's live up to optimistic speculation you can "soon" have a single employee run a large complicated software project with a low bus factor. Someone somewhere will think it is their job to make sure the dev costs the absolute minimum and works day and night. To spend $100 to squeeze $1 extra out of them is a job well done.
w.r.t 'living wages', quote: "...The call for a minimum salary of $85,000 corresponds with what is considered Low Income in New York City ($87,100 for 2024). "
Yeah they're going to just offshore to the UK and Singapore or offer remote first jobs domestically. Most Kickstarter jobs are now one of those 3 instead of in NYC.
In fact, why are all the other non-SWE and Strategy roles in NYC at all?
I’m convinced that in ~10 years we’ll look back on the work-from-home movement as a major own-goal by American tech workers. I would expect a lot more of this.
100% in-person is dumb, but a 2-3 day hybrid approach was good enough to both justify retaining a domestic presence as well as train new grads.
On one of the pages the demand is written as "Codifying the 32-hour, 4-day work week that has been our reality for over three years". So they work 32-hour workweek just not codified in company policy? Are there US labour laws or health insurance agreements that doing 32 hours officially will create problems?
Peak I don’t even know what. Have these people worked a day in their life?
Like Keynes, I'm just as optimistic that such a future is possible, and that it could happen very soon if society willed it so. But just looking at the 95 years of history that have passed since Keynes wrote this essay, it is clear we are not natually, inevitably moving towards such a society. The technology is making such a future possible, but such as a society has to be demanded by the people, and it will not be gifted to us by benevolent rulers or captains of industry.
"We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate."
bn-l•5h ago