A.I. aside, we should get 4 day work weeks regardless.
employees in some sectors could easily make do with a 3 day work week, 4 hours per day, no payment reduction. all the rest is just surplus value being generated. however we know that the capitalists will never allow that, and that’s the reason we need to, while pushing for work week reductions, agitate the working class today in order to build the revolution of tomorrow.
All the productivity gains in the past have helped us reduced the work load so much, there’s no reason AI shouldn’t…
Wait, that never happened, only people forcefully getting reductions in work time have ever gotten results.Also it’s still not clear whether AI makes any sense or not. Yes, I know it is useful to some, but once you consider all the externalities (which nobody ever does, because “not my problem”), it might not be such a great deal.
In fact, forget the AI
Yea more like if CEOs want their company to be more successful pay people overtime to work five days a week.
*20 hour work week.
Corporate will do anything but. Part time pay, no full time benefits, no pay raise, and now you need a second job.
As a non American can I say, does bernie ever actually propose plans or ideas or does he just go around shitting on bad ones?
Edit: why am I getting downvoted as an outside observer asking a question. It’s concerning that Americans have this NEED to be part of a cult. The right has Trump and many on the left have Bernie. If you dare to question Bernie even a little, or simply ask an unbiased question, and you get piled on.
Both
Thw American workers productivity has gone astronomically high without AI. We should have 4 day week yes but we need the money from all this productivity first.
I think the plan is to lay us off altogether.
And support their lives through robust social programs, right?
To save the working man you’ve got to put him out to pasture.
Soup is Good Food - Dead Kennedys
I recall one of the ways to enforce a 4 day workweek was to enforce OT starting at 32 hours.
You could keep working 40+ hrs a week but it would hit the owners wallets.
Combine that with raising minimum wage and you’re getting closer to UBI.
Neither one would help me I think being salary and around medium working class.
They don’t even enforce OT over 40 for salaried positions.
That’s my point…
That’ll just make employers hire more employees with less hours.
The offset is ypu need to pay for overhead like benefits/HR/payroll/licenses/training for more employees. So there’s a breakeven somewhere in there.
If anything it’s more jobs.
We are already more productive than any other time in history and we don’t have a 4 day work week.
If we did get a 4 day work week, the owners would not scale our pay to accommodate for less hours on the job. 15/hr over 50 hours would turn into 15/hr over 40 hours, not 18.75/hr over 40 hours.
Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
–Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
my favorite part of this comment is framing 50 hours like a standard work week
A 4 day work week wouldn’t change anything for people working an hourly wage.
This is talking about redefining ‘full-time’ at a legislative level from being 36 hours to something less.
So would this not be worse for, for example, people on partial disability benefits who are allowed to retain benefits while working part time but not full time employment?
If nothing changes for them but they are now registered as full time employees, they lose their benefits for nothing in return. Who would this help?
I don’t think the work requirements for disability work that way, or are tied to the same legislation.
It would help people who work full-time. People who work hourly already don’t work M-F 8-5 most of the time.
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Interesting. I was under the belief that disability benefit requiments basically meant “unable obtain and maintain full time employment due to a disability”. After some research it seems it’s more about how much money you earn than how many hours you work.
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Are you not conflating Part Time/Hourly and Full time/Salary?
70% of Americans work full time and just under 60% of American workers are paid hourly wage.
For example, every factory I’ve worked in has been Full Time hours with hourly wage pay.
It’s mostly Managerial/corporate positions that are salaried afaik.
AFAIK there is no such thing as hourly full-time in the US. Some places do the paychecks that way, but you are either part-time, full-time exempt, or full-time non-exempt.
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Not what is happening in Spain, nor would it make any sense to mandate that… And you work 50 hours a week?
I’m not saying that the law would require all wages to stay the same, I’m saying that without the law specifically stating that wages MUST raise to accommodate, they will stay the same, resulting in overall less payment. We can’t even get a federal minimum wage increase, certainly not a full wage increase tied to an hours reduction.
Yes, why? The example would still ring true with a reduction from 40 to 32 hours.
But… like… do you think someone would openly campaign with a plan that fucks everyone over? I… I just remembered that Trump is a thing…
But yea, such law would necessitate that
how does a law force companies to scale wages instead of firing? At-will employment is a thing. How does a law also retroactively make all at-will employment subject to investigation if they dont scale wages and fire instead? What laws around the world accomodate this kind of situation?
Lots of people advocate for things that have unforseen consequences. Its not impossible for that to happen, no?
Dude…
Company needs x amounts of work done for which it requires y amounts of employees. An av employee is not going to take exponentially more work on its shoulders all so that the companys profit line, so the company will keep all its employees it requires plus a few ceos…
Could some companies tittering on bankruption go up? Yes, but their and their owners/shareholders interest is to be secondary of that of the greater public
Based Bernie
He doesn’t get it at all. AI making people more productive means they can work more and you don’t have to pay them as much.
Sincerely, billionaires
😒
Just like the industrial revolution and introduction of computers, right?
Improved efficiencies should mean we all benefit across all sectors and ways of life.
But improved efficiencies actually mean none of us benefit except those at the top. We should all of us be paid more, have more time off, and have more excess - but at a high level we are all paid no extra, we get no extra time off, we get no excess - that all gets enjoyed by those at the top.
This is one of many reasons this should be a class war, not a culture war.
Sounds like what unions are for.
My local union is working six 10 hour days and then bragging how well they are taken care of. That’s not out of the norm either.
Keynes: work hours will diminish as production scale up
Bitcoiner: mining will be environmental friendly as we transition to green.
Bernie SSander: AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day workweek
