Decades ago the U.S. tied healthcare to employment. It had some big positives at the time. I think it has proven to have more negatives as time has unfolded. Here is one of them.
If you reduce hours per worker by, say, 10% you just pay each worker 10% less and hire 10% more workers, right? It's not so simple. If you try to cut the health insurance premium of each worker by 10% the policy becomes unattractive. If you keep the same policy, you increase your health insurance costs by 10%.
For this and other reasons, it's time to separate health insurance from employer.
It's interesting that my ACA (Obamacare) premiums are lower than the premiums were at my last employer for similar coverage (using COBRA numbers for comparison). This might be because my last employer was bad at negotiating but I think it's mostly because they had an aging Rustbelt workforce and lots of people in roles that were unhealthy long term (linesmen and call centers). Because rates are set based on the pool's group risk, the risk in the public ACA pool is lower than the employer's pool of employees. So even though my job was white collar work at a desk, my premiums were based on an unhealthy pool of workers. If I went to work for a startup made up mostly of 20 somethings, I (and my employer) would likely be paying less than my old employer and less than ACA.
So this is another way that tying health insurance to employment creates pockets of unfairness and undesirable outcomes. While I'm not sold on having a government run healthcare system (the pandemic only reinforces this), there are plenty of hybrid systems out there in other industrialized nations that might (must recognize each country's situation is unique) have better outcomes.
If you have 90 units of work to be done you might hire 9 workers at 10 units each. If the standard work goes down by 10%, you now need 10 workers at 9 units each. Your workers have increased by 11.1% (given by 1-1/(1-0.1))
A reduction from 40 to 32 would reduce hours per worker by 20% but increase workers and total health care costs by 25%.
> you just pay each worker 10% less and hire 10% more workers, right?
While the rest of your comment is a fair concern, I want to push back on this default assumption.
While I'm sure there are roles that are pretty much 1:1 with output to hours worked, I don't think it's always true.
I think for software developers, for example, I get 90% of the productivity out of the first 32 hours of work that I would get out of 40 hours of work.
"I’d Say, In A Given Week, I Probably Only Do About Fifteen Minutes Of Real, Actual Work.” -- Peter, Office Space
I've worked in lots of offices and watched people, especially "important" ones. It's fun to watch. They're so busy the strain is enormous. But if you pay attention, they spend lots of time calling their sister, talking to the Schwann's man.. "I work so hard I never leave work" but little actual work is done, but much is made of the number of hours spent there.
My wife is a high-powered attorney who makes an obscene amount of money in NY. We both ended up working from home during the pandemic, and it was amusing to see her work schedule. She absolutely did a lot of really strenuous work which often would demand lots (and sometimes ungodly!) hours, but there was also plenty of time where... there wasn't any work. Or she was simply worn out, and was taking a break, etc. And not too infrequently a day would go by like that. It just really hit home for me what a waste office culture is, generally, because I'm sure this is no different when she's at the office, but she's just subjected to a commute, halogen lighting, uncomfy atmosphere, etc., for evidently no benefit at all.
I really hope that the pandemic finally makes us realize that the 9-5, 40 hours/week office culture we have set up over the decades is a total sham. Very few people are really working that much, but it isn't socially acceptable for anyone to admit it.
Up until I retired a few months ago, I routinely worked 50-60 hours a week as a team lead because I wrote code full time + meetings for several hours a day plus communicating with other teams, product and execs all day long. I rarely took vacations during the years I worked there as the work never slacked off at all. Most of my colleagues also did extra hours every week (I tried to keep my team from overworking, others did not). At least working at home I could avoid another hour a day in commuting. I did not get paid anything more to work longer, but deadlines were often arbitrary so stress was high. You could reduce the standard hours to zero and it would change nothing about that job.
If a job is more defined, like flying a plane, or operating a cash register, hours are equal to work, so limiting hours is possible.
If I could have worked just 40 every week with 3 weeks actual taken vacation, it would have been nice.
Can we get the almost infinite list of "overtime exceptions" for salary employees removed while we are at it? There are so many Americans that never saw a 40 hour a week expectation because of these and most of those people were not paid overtime due to 'salary' expectations. Every fast food/retail store manager I have ever spoken to faces this dilemma and all of my friends in 'professional firms' like architecture/law/accounting face this. Tech has been able to avoid it almost certainly only because of how scarce the labor is to begin with. I would assume in 100 years (if we are not all on fire) that tech workers working 40 hours (let alone less) will also be a small minority if we cant get this fixed.
Tightening up rules on exempt employment would be a good step too. Exempt was meant to be just that, an special case exemption for a few high level professionals, not the default for all white collar (and even some blue collar) work. My last job required that I fill out a timesheet each week. On an average day, I assigned hours to about four different time codes. For positions that bill by time such as attorneys and doctors, this might be reasonable but for inhouse software development, it felt a lot more like an hourly job.
Even though I was salaried, failing to have 40 hours on my timesheet each week would result in a proportional reduction in pay (there was no increase in pay if I went over 40). I mentioned this to higher ups and was told that it wasn't actually a timesheet, it was so they could determine "resource allocation", which sounded like an flimsy excuse. Using it to track PTO seems reasonable. Using it to track hours at my computer doesn't.
This wasn't a small inexperienced company. Its roots go back to the 1940s and it had over 20,000 employees, so they probably knew the relevant labor laws and either were allowed to do this or thought they'd never get called on it. Either way, exempt doesn't seem to mean much anymore other than another way for employers to squeeze employees harder.
100 years? It’s already happening today. There are definitely salaried tech workers who are being pushed to work more than 40 hours right now. Some may not know any better, others may feel pressured because they don’t want to look for other work (when they probably should), and so on. These protections would help workers today.
Some developers may have avoided it, but IT definitely hasn't. Network engineers, server admins, and DBAs routinely have to work a full schedule, plus change windows, and have to be on call. Some are on call 24/7 with no extra pay. When I switched companies almost a decade ago I went from being a network guy who knew how to code, to a coder who knew networking. My quality of life increased over night.
At a contracting firm, I always thought it was annoying to bill hourly but be denied overtime. Luckily it didn't happen often (we worked for the government, what can I say).
On the whole I've been deeply fortunate to work only for companies that expect 40 hours a week. Maybe it's my field -- data science -- but either way I hope it continues. I'd do my part to make sure it does, if I knew what my part consisted of.
For manual labor this would make a big difference. For intellectual work, I suspect it would probably not lead to much less work being done. Just because people are at the office 8 hours a day, doesn’t mean they’re getting 8 hours of work done. I would be curious if people would get as much done and waste less time sitting there or if the sitting there time is the same, percentage wise.
This is what I've been trying to tell people for awhile. In "knowledge work" areas I suspect most people work around 5-6 hours a day and the rest is spent doing whatever other stuff they do.
My current job I only work 35 hours a week and it's great. They pay us for an hour lunch basically and I just take it at the end of my day, thus shortening my day to 7 hours.
Something to take into account for manual labor is a great deal of it happens outside. Due to climate change, many parts of the USA will experience dangerous heat in the middle of the day, and even some indoor locations like Amazon warehouses have inadequate cooling. https://gizmodo.com/amazons-new-safety-crisis-could-be-heat-...
If workers took a siesta in the middle of the day, they would avoid the heat to some degree, which would be better for the workers' health and may not greatly change how much work gets done. Workers operating in dangerous heat will either reduce their physical exertions in order to moderate their body temperature, take frequent breaks, or collapse (in which case they are getting no work done, and depending on how badly injured they are, they may need to be replaced, which requires training etc.).
In other words, depending on the weather/climate in the future, reducing the work week to 32 hours may not negatively affect results from manual labor either.
I have a 4 day workweek and that made me the most efficient version of myself as I have to do the same amount of work but in less time, and I'm loving it, having 3 days weekends is amazing and every Monday I have lots of energy for the week.
I'm convinced I would get more done in the shorter work week. After 3 day weekends I tend to get more done the following week, I think due to being more well-rested.
> For intellectual work, I suspect it would probably not lead to much less work being done.
I think the other big thing is, hasn't overtime only ever applied to people below a given salary level? I wonder, if this passed would it actually change norms at places that have institutionally always had people working a lot of hours? I'm thinking not just of some tech companies, but e.g. lawyers racking up billable hours etc.
I've been wondering what stops politicians from gaming the democratic system by introducing legislation that has short-term benefits for the electorate and long-term negative consequences for the country as a whole. I know that I wouldn't vote for someone like that, but I can't think of many people around me who wouldn't.
I suppose many would think of it this way: "what's good for the long-term future of the country is good for my kids, but that's not going to help them much if I can't pay the next month's rent, or if I have to work so much that I never get to see them and raise them properly. So why not vote for someone who will help me get more money and spend more time with my kids now?"
I mean, it's absolutely mind-blowing that there isn't an entire line around the corner of politicians pushing for higher minimum wage, free education, free healthcare, basic income, etc. There are obviously some voices supporting all those measures, but I am surprised those individuals are not more popular. I suppose this is a very basic political science question, but I don't have any background in this field and today's topic once again made me wonder what's stopping us from adopting that and many other similar measures. Surely, those who stand to benefit something from it in the short-term outnumber the people who are going to be negatively impacted?
Isn’t that a huge portion of the bills passed? Except the horizon is ~5-10 years.
Think about lack of progress on building a sustainable energy model, protecting long term social safety net, ensuring long term stability of the country, investing in multigenerational building and infrastructure practices.
Where do you get the idea that this isn't the very heart of every political campaign? There's a curve of course, where if you promise too much people don't see it as believable.
My first experience with this was high school. Freshman year the student body presidency was won by the fellow who promised that we would get sodas added to the machines (rather than the no-caffeine options that were then available). Bullshit. But he won. In his acceptance speech, he explained it straight out, and we all learned something.
The work week here is 35hrs/week, with exceptions allowed for up to 40hrs/week, but the extra has to be compensated 1:1 with extra paid vacation time ( on top of the minimum of 30 days paid time off).
Somewhat of a tangent but related to labor: tell your reps to abolish personal income taxes and replace it with a consumption tax. We should not be taxing labor…
My thoughts, correct me if I'm wrong here: If I'm on a very low income, likely 100% (or more) of my monthly earnings will go to buying food, paying rent/utilities, etc, so under a consumption tax, a higher proportion of my income will be taxed than under income tax (people in the lowest tax bracket generally won't pay income tax at all). Of course, you could exclude these necessities from tax, but then I find it difficult to see if tax revenue would be high enough from just taxing non-essential items.
IMO, any tax system where the poorest people pay a higher proportion of their income than those richer than them is flawed.
A consumption tax that exempts groceries, non-designer clothes and shoes, school supplies/fees, and household utilities could be much more aligned to helping out the working class than the graduated income tax.
It's weird to see all the comments taking this as a meaningful piece of legislation rather than the symbolic stunt that it is. Nothing wrong with Takano promoting his political views that way, but it's a little silly to act like this is something it's not.
Ripe for "The Law of Unintended Consequences". Without changes to what is classified as Part Time Work (usually 30 hours), employers will get rid of full time staff and in some cases be able to avoid paying almost all benefits. UPS comes to mind, they would only hire part time drivers to avoid paying benefits.
> Without changes to what is classified as Part Time Work (usually 30 hours), employers will get rid of full time staff and in some cases be able to avoid paying almost all benefits.
Yeah, I’m sure that missing out on that is the kind of thing that would fly right by AFL-CIO, SEIU, and the other labor organizations that endorsed this, who are generally completely clueless about the legal context of labor and how employers exploit it.
Unfortunately, official text for H.R. 4728 [0] is not yet available, though, so we can't really resolve this.
In reality, this would likely push some employers to leave ~Cali~ (EDIT: mean the U.S., didn't realize this was federal) (such as SpaceX, Tesla, etc), as they wont want to pay overtime.
It would also potentially push people to hire more salary employees, but they'll only be paid for 32 hours. That could suppress salaries (as the employer will only pay say $100/hr, they wont increase it so it'll potentially be a 20% cut in pay).
Essentially, continue the drive to push all the jobs overseas.
With the political realignment, I guess it's not surprising that some politicians are trying to bring back the glory days again with New Deal ideas. Most people can probably agree the 40 hour workweek is an outdated idea. But a 32 hour workweek is just a modification of an outdated idea. Not a modernization of it. I'm not quite sure what the modern version of a 40 hour workweek is, but it's not a shortening of it. I'd guess it's a change in default pay maybe ownership structures, and probably scheduling.
Honestly in my opinion, gig apps are a great start, but they suck at the moment in a similar way jobs before the new deal sucked. The worker needs more rights, they need more control of their pay. A New, New deal in my opinion would probably be giving employee rights to gig workers, who control their own time, and pay. And probably adding a basic income floor to prevent a race to the bottom.
"Today, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) introduced legislation that would reduce the standard workweek from 40 hours to 32 hours by lowering the maximum hours threshold for overtime compensation for non-exempt employees under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)."
It seems like this would just lead to businesses who employee non-exempt employees hiring more of them but scheduling for fewer hours to stay under the 32 hour threshold. Simple changes to a system as complex as our labor laws are just not going to do the job. We need to look at employee classification as though we were starting from scratch to design a system that makes sense for the realities of today - gig work, remote work, side hustles, etc.
YC startups should be making 4-day 8-hour weeks part of their pitch to employees. They don't have the mature company bureaucracy holding them back from changing quickly.
[+] [-] supportlocal4h|4 years ago|reply
If you reduce hours per worker by, say, 10% you just pay each worker 10% less and hire 10% more workers, right? It's not so simple. If you try to cut the health insurance premium of each worker by 10% the policy becomes unattractive. If you keep the same policy, you increase your health insurance costs by 10%.
For this and other reasons, it's time to separate health insurance from employer.
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|4 years ago|reply
So this is another way that tying health insurance to employment creates pockets of unfairness and undesirable outcomes. While I'm not sold on having a government run healthcare system (the pandemic only reinforces this), there are plenty of hybrid systems out there in other industrialized nations that might (must recognize each country's situation is unique) have better outcomes.
[+] [-] sokoloff|4 years ago|reply
If you have 90 units of work to be done you might hire 9 workers at 10 units each. If the standard work goes down by 10%, you now need 10 workers at 9 units each. Your workers have increased by 11.1% (given by 1-1/(1-0.1))
A reduction from 40 to 32 would reduce hours per worker by 20% but increase workers and total health care costs by 25%.
[+] [-] ncallaway|4 years ago|reply
While the rest of your comment is a fair concern, I want to push back on this default assumption.
While I'm sure there are roles that are pretty much 1:1 with output to hours worked, I don't think it's always true.
I think for software developers, for example, I get 90% of the productivity out of the first 32 hours of work that I would get out of 40 hours of work.
[+] [-] bitwize|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xen2xen1|4 years ago|reply
I've worked in lots of offices and watched people, especially "important" ones. It's fun to watch. They're so busy the strain is enormous. But if you pay attention, they spend lots of time calling their sister, talking to the Schwann's man.. "I work so hard I never leave work" but little actual work is done, but much is made of the number of hours spent there.
[+] [-] ChicagoBoy11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldcode|4 years ago|reply
If a job is more defined, like flying a plane, or operating a cash register, hours are equal to work, so limiting hours is possible.
If I could have worked just 40 every week with 3 weeks actual taken vacation, it would have been nice.
[+] [-] the_lonely_road|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mountain_Skies|4 years ago|reply
Even though I was salaried, failing to have 40 hours on my timesheet each week would result in a proportional reduction in pay (there was no increase in pay if I went over 40). I mentioned this to higher ups and was told that it wasn't actually a timesheet, it was so they could determine "resource allocation", which sounded like an flimsy excuse. Using it to track PTO seems reasonable. Using it to track hours at my computer doesn't.
This wasn't a small inexperienced company. Its roots go back to the 1940s and it had over 20,000 employees, so they probably knew the relevant labor laws and either were allowed to do this or thought they'd never get called on it. Either way, exempt doesn't seem to mean much anymore other than another way for employers to squeeze employees harder.
[+] [-] whichquestion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dec0dedab0de|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtranscendence|4 years ago|reply
On the whole I've been deeply fortunate to work only for companies that expect 40 hours a week. Maybe it's my field -- data science -- but either way I hope it continues. I'd do my part to make sure it does, if I knew what my part consisted of.
[+] [-] bigmattystyles|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selykg|4 years ago|reply
My current job I only work 35 hours a week and it's great. They pay us for an hour lunch basically and I just take it at the end of my day, thus shortening my day to 7 hours.
[+] [-] skyfaller|4 years ago|reply
If workers took a siesta in the middle of the day, they would avoid the heat to some degree, which would be better for the workers' health and may not greatly change how much work gets done. Workers operating in dangerous heat will either reduce their physical exertions in order to moderate their body temperature, take frequent breaks, or collapse (in which case they are getting no work done, and depending on how badly injured they are, they may need to be replaced, which requires training etc.).
In other words, depending on the weather/climate in the future, reducing the work week to 32 hours may not negatively affect results from manual labor either.
[+] [-] chudi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] willio58|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abeppu|4 years ago|reply
I think the other big thing is, hasn't overtime only ever applied to people below a given salary level? I wonder, if this passed would it actually change norms at places that have institutionally always had people working a lot of hours? I'm thinking not just of some tech companies, but e.g. lawyers racking up billable hours etc.
[+] [-] aerosmile|4 years ago|reply
I suppose many would think of it this way: "what's good for the long-term future of the country is good for my kids, but that's not going to help them much if I can't pay the next month's rent, or if I have to work so much that I never get to see them and raise them properly. So why not vote for someone who will help me get more money and spend more time with my kids now?"
I mean, it's absolutely mind-blowing that there isn't an entire line around the corner of politicians pushing for higher minimum wage, free education, free healthcare, basic income, etc. There are obviously some voices supporting all those measures, but I am surprised those individuals are not more popular. I suppose this is a very basic political science question, but I don't have any background in this field and today's topic once again made me wonder what's stopping us from adopting that and many other similar measures. Surely, those who stand to benefit something from it in the short-term outnumber the people who are going to be negatively impacted?
[+] [-] mcot2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foreigner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] totoglazer|4 years ago|reply
Think about lack of progress on building a sustainable energy model, protecting long term social safety net, ensuring long term stability of the country, investing in multigenerational building and infrastructure practices.
[+] [-] splistud|4 years ago|reply
My first experience with this was high school. Freshman year the student body presidency was won by the fellow who promised that we would get sodas added to the machines (rather than the no-caffeine options that were then available). Bullshit. But he won. In his acceptance speech, he explained it straight out, and we all learned something.
[+] [-] BitwiseFool|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] handrous|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sofixa|4 years ago|reply
The work week here is 35hrs/week, with exceptions allowed for up to 40hrs/week, but the extra has to be compensated 1:1 with extra paid vacation time ( on top of the minimum of 30 days paid time off).
[+] [-] thoughtstheseus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opheliate|4 years ago|reply
IMO, any tax system where the poorest people pay a higher proportion of their income than those richer than them is flawed.
[+] [-] cestith|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tudelo|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caturopath|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hourislate|4 years ago|reply
https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/workhours/parttimeemployme...
The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not address part-time employment.
I wouldn't be surprised if employers jump all over this to allow them to save billions by getting rid of full time work.
Edit: Spelling/Grammar
[+] [-] dragonwriter|4 years ago|reply
Yeah, I’m sure that missing out on that is the kind of thing that would fly right by AFL-CIO, SEIU, and the other labor organizations that endorsed this, who are generally completely clueless about the legal context of labor and how employers exploit it.
Unfortunately, official text for H.R. 4728 [0] is not yet available, though, so we can't really resolve this.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4728
[+] [-] thesuperbigfrog|4 years ago|reply
That is what concerns me too.
Well-meaning laws that do not consider the second- and third-order effects can be easy for employers to game.
"If you want to work more than 30 hours per week, you have to become an independent contractor."
[+] [-] teeray|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] citilife|4 years ago|reply
In reality, this would likely push some employers to leave ~Cali~ (EDIT: mean the U.S., didn't realize this was federal) (such as SpaceX, Tesla, etc), as they wont want to pay overtime.
It would also potentially push people to hire more salary employees, but they'll only be paid for 32 hours. That could suppress salaries (as the employer will only pay say $100/hr, they wont increase it so it'll potentially be a 20% cut in pay).
Essentially, continue the drive to push all the jobs overseas.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] swalsh|4 years ago|reply
Honestly in my opinion, gig apps are a great start, but they suck at the moment in a similar way jobs before the new deal sucked. The worker needs more rights, they need more control of their pay. A New, New deal in my opinion would probably be giving employee rights to gig workers, who control their own time, and pay. And probably adding a basic income floor to prevent a race to the bottom.
[+] [-] intrepidhero|4 years ago|reply
EDIT: Found it. For the curious: H.R.4728 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/4728
[+] [-] throwaway4good|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] wly_cdgr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thayne|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ProjectArcturis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awillen|4 years ago|reply
It seems like this would just lead to businesses who employee non-exempt employees hiring more of them but scheduling for fewer hours to stay under the 32 hour threshold. Simple changes to a system as complex as our labor laws are just not going to do the job. We need to look at employee classification as though we were starting from scratch to design a system that makes sense for the realities of today - gig work, remote work, side hustles, etc.
[+] [-] 1270018080|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kevmo|4 years ago|reply