TO STATE: The IRS recognizes anyone working an avg of 30hrs per week as full time. There is no piece of evidence that states that 40hrs is the standard beyond what an employer considers full time.
This is also not a post about raising a minimum wage or avg salary. This is about the reduction of work hours/days at the same level of pay.
Bernie Sanders has proposed moving the U.S. lifestyle/economy to a 32hr work week. While to most this does not seem feasible and logical due to our hyper capitalistic status, it can be done with net positives but there are also other manners that could be better transitions as well such as 4x10hr standard or moving to a 36hr work week.
Economist will say this would cripple the economy and it is not feasible but I think this would bolster our economy and be able to allow for new jobs in blue collar areas as well as in while collar areas.
I think we have all seen the way companies are responding to various economic factors but its always the people at the bottom that are effected before the executives look at taking pay cuts off there multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses - referencing Boeing for example where the company had layoffs but the CEO had a $33M bonus in 2023.
I have worked hard labor in construction and warehousing and now work a white collar job for an automotive manufacturer, I think it is time that we take the real step of wanting a genuine work life balance while we are in the earlier part of our lives instead of needing to wait till we are 65.
Thats great, maybe focus on the concept instead of the person as that is the topic of the post. I only referenced that he had brought a bill to congress not that Bernie was the key to it all.
And I am someone that worked both blue collar and now white collar for an international manufacturing company. I get my stuff done in a matter of hours each day and then am at my desk waiting for something to come in.
And from the blue collar work side, sure things become more “costly” cause you have to pay people but the more people working means things get done quicker and more efficiently unless wherever you work you have a lot of empty workers but then the company you work for is already paying the “additional cost” that you are referring to which would mean that you are already seeing whatever extra expense you are speculating.
I wish all the time that Bernie’s 32 hour work week bill would pass. It would give back just enough leisure and family time that people need to have a healthy lifestyle and work-life balance. It would improve parenting relationships, and allow more time for parents to do their job with teaching their kids basic behavioral and coping skills. There would be a lot less toxic stress in this world. This would also create more jobs and help us manage the AI crisis (people are afraid AI is taking people’s jobs).
I would also appreciate the flexibility of working 5-6 hour days, so that you don’t have to find a ten hour babysitter when your kids are still babies, and when they go to school, if I get off a little early to pick my kids off from school.
OTOH, the 32 hour work week is still controversial. Workers complain that they would lose 8 hours weekly pay. Companies complain about the increase of overhead costs. Even your own link says that Bernie’s bill has only a 8-11% chance of passing.
I have an alternative idea in my proposal, which would give certain full time working parents, in certain situations, the right to request 8 hours unpaid time off, in exchange for the government paying for part of the company’s portion of the health insurance costs. We could set limitations similar to FMLA (for example, the worker must have been employed there for at least one year, and the employer has to have at least 50 employees in a 75 mile radius, something like that).
An alternative idea could help get more support for 32 hour work weeks. It would help give more people access to a 32 hour workweek, while simultaneously encourage fence-sitters to warm up to the idea and consider further legislation on an official 32 hour work week.
Here’s my proposal. It’s probably too liberal, but I just throw this out there because I truly believe in it:
Not necessarily.
If you make work weeks shorter you can have a tiered type of schedule.
Say, Bob, Nancy and jason work mondays tuesday and Wednesdays,
Carla, john and Mark can work Thursday, Friday and Saturdays. Everyone has Sundays off ( and 4 days off in a row) .
Not only would your employees have more time with their families and better rested it would bring down the unemployment rate.
Its a decent idea.
Also, people can volunteer to work more if needed.
Exactly. People will have less burnout and there will be less turnover through companies. There are more studies showing majority positive results than any that show a negative result.
I think to start off the government should have its hours changed, that would lead to bank hours changing and that would give companies the opportunity to reap the benefits of offering more time off to employees
“Creating more jobs” is not an inherently universally good thing.
This is one of those circumstances where “It creates more jobs” is not a good thing.
You’re creating unnecessary cost increases.
I specified “and/or” for each item.
There is no guarantee that there would be more jobs created, as some companies might decide to respond to these new restrictions and save money by simply making the job take longer, especially if they are in a field where they can be more selective about such things.
It sounds like you’re applying a ‘bubble approach’, where you look at your own personal situation and assume that because you have a job where you sit at your desk and wait for something to happen, then that’s how it must be for everyone.
No, that’s not how it will work.
The additional jobs will not be to make things happen faster or more efficiently, the new jobs will be to to make up for the maximum hours employees are allowed to work before their employers are required to pay overtime.
You’re writing this as if jobs are just a thing that happen.
While cutting the earnings for everyone who works a job that pays by the hour.
Not all jobs are created equal. This proposal is basically insisting that everyone be shifted to part-time employment status.
It’s right in line with the idea that somehow there’s no downside to just arbitrarily increasing the minimum wage while forgetting that the true minimum wage is always $0 (as has been most notably demonstrated as of late with all the restaurants that have closed in California as result of their massive minimum wage increase).
Here in Western Colorado, everyone works different hours and different days already. This is evident by the lack of a real traffic “rush hour”. Maybe in bigger cities, the white collar workers outnumber the blue collar works so this reduced work week may make sense for larger cities. Additionally, since the pandemic, many white collar workers are doing tele-work with great success and it contributes to the home/work life balance that this Policies For The People suggestion seems to seek.
In short, no, I don’t really see a need for a change to the work week in our Western Colorado community but I can imagine it may be a positive change in larger cities.
What percentage of America keeps Bankers hours? This is not realiatic. Skilled trade, manufacturing, medical field, first responders, truck drivers, retail, most jobs are not 9 to 5 Mon-Fri.
People who are paid hourly would take a MASSIVE financial hit and hourly workers already don’t make much money. The national average hourly rate is $17.
Workers today I do not have anywhere near the work ethic that people my age had. I would love to have gotten even one of the mini benefits that we give our workers today. We had none of them, we just had to plow through. 40 hours a week is not too much to work.
We’ve already seen companies reduce employees’ hours when the definition of full time work was reduced from 40 hrs/wk to 32. Companies wouldn’t let employees work more than 32 hrs/wk so that they didn’t need to pay benefits. Hired more people at the reduced hours per week. Problem solved, still managed to avoid paying benefits. More people on the job will in some situations result in three guys standing around watching while one guy digs the hole. Efficiency and speed will not necessarily make giant leaps forward.
Your point is that they dont already follow the bankers hours so whats the difference in changing that? Truck drivers already have a set number of hours they are allowed to drive. My gf is an icu nurse a hospital and working 3 12hr shifts so that would be 36 hours… manufacturing just literally shifts the schedule from 3 shifts style to 4 or 5… skilled trades are hours usually set by the person doing the job and if its for a established company they are still working a 8-5 schedule and whether that runs over the usual 8hrs they don’t care. So I think you fail to look at the actual structure of how they operate and just think that they all work on free hours that they choose.
So because we are choosing to find a better way than what it was its wrong and we don’t work hard enough? Did I not work hard enough before or after I worked 14+hr shifts in a warehouse or construction during the winter? Doing all that while playing college soccer and balancing working to receive a professional contract. Just because the older generation had to “plow through” doesn’t mean that the younger generation has to follow in your steps. Just because you did it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a better way.
What I have noticed from the older generation is that its more so because you want us to have to suffer as you feel that you did instead of actually wanting to create and nurture a better manner for the following generation.
Hate to burst your bubble on this but many companies still do this even with the structure that there is now. And technically the full time benefit is 36hrs per week. People just think and companies have created the standard that 40hrs is full time. So you would just shift the hours down to 32 as the basis of full time and it would be the same thing now just less hours.