Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday introduced a bill to establish a standard four-day workweek in the United States without any reduction in pay. The bill, over a four-year period, would lowe…
IMO pay should be by the week not by the hour, set minimum wage at $1,062.50 a week for up to 32 hours of work, then another $2,656.25 for up to 64 hours of work, then $6,640.63 to an absolute maximum of allowed work in one week of 96 hours.
Makes hours the check against the employer instead of their check against the worker, caps the maximum allowed work in a single pay period, and most importantly I think, turns overtime into something that is more expensive to the employer than hiring an additional worker, putting a financial penalty in for riding your workers until they break instead of properly staffing for the work required.
You can still bring someone in for extra work if you absolutely need to get a crisis set aside, but it’s unfeasible to build your business strategy on just continuing to do that forever.
I like the concept but I don’t like the hours. Nobody should ever work 96 hours in one week. That’s either seven 13.7 hour days or six 16 hour days. Add morning routine, commute, meals, chores, errands, etc. Seven 12 hour workdays (84 hour week) should be the absolute maximum and it should be extremely costly to employers to ever get close to it. I say that as somebody who has done many 84 hour weeks in his life. It’s not fucking safe. Really anything past 50 hours gets really unsafe really quickly.
There should also be federal legislation that requires OT pay past a certain number of daily hours (preferably 8, but I’d accept 10) AND guarantee some amount of PTO for workers. The US is one of the only developed countries that has no minimum paid time off requirement for employers.
96 hours are plausible if you work on a remote site (e.g. oil rig) and are practically always on the clock. Just because it is insane from a normal person’s pov doesn’t mean it does not exist.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t, I’m saying that it shouldn’t. I’ve never worked on an oil rig, but I’ve traveled to support refueling outages at nuclear plants, so I understand to some extent. Fatigue is a motherfucker. Even if you don’t make a mistake, the exhaustion and lack of sleep still will take years off of your life. Money can’t buy that back. That’s why I’m saying there should be a lower cap in the first place. 84 hours is exactly half of the week, which is why that’s the number I threw out there. Companies shouldn’t get to be exempt just because their exploitative model has already been accepted. If a proposed change doesn’t change anything, then what’s the point?
It’s meant to be an absolute cap that you’re a lunatic for even needing to get in range of, because any time past the 64th hour gets you that 2.5^2 multiplier, not the full extra 32 hours
Like I said, the time is the worker’s check in this system, it’s not the maximum they can juice you for, it’s how much they can get out of you before you get to juice them.
Arguably we just have to make it to net profit asteroid mining
From that point the numbers are always going to work out that there’s just more resources than we could ever hope to outstrip, and the question becomes much more about what human society and economy looks like in a world where all scarcity is inherently artificial.
IMO pay should be by the week not by the hour, set minimum wage at $1,062.50 a week for up to 32 hours of work, then another $2,656.25 for up to 64 hours of work, then $6,640.63 to an absolute maximum of allowed work in one week of 96 hours.
Makes hours the check against the employer instead of their check against the worker, caps the maximum allowed work in a single pay period, and most importantly I think, turns overtime into something that is more expensive to the employer than hiring an additional worker, putting a financial penalty in for riding your workers until they break instead of properly staffing for the work required.
You can still bring someone in for extra work if you absolutely need to get a crisis set aside, but it’s unfeasible to build your business strategy on just continuing to do that forever.
I like the concept but I don’t like the hours. Nobody should ever work 96 hours in one week. That’s either seven 13.7 hour days or six 16 hour days. Add morning routine, commute, meals, chores, errands, etc. Seven 12 hour workdays (84 hour week) should be the absolute maximum and it should be extremely costly to employers to ever get close to it. I say that as somebody who has done many 84 hour weeks in his life. It’s not fucking safe. Really anything past 50 hours gets really unsafe really quickly.
There should also be federal legislation that requires OT pay past a certain number of daily hours (preferably 8, but I’d accept 10) AND guarantee some amount of PTO for workers. The US is one of the only developed countries that has no minimum paid time off requirement for employers.
96 hours are plausible if you work on a remote site (e.g. oil rig) and are practically always on the clock. Just because it is insane from a normal person’s pov doesn’t mean it does not exist.
I’m not saying that it doesn’t, I’m saying that it shouldn’t. I’ve never worked on an oil rig, but I’ve traveled to support refueling outages at nuclear plants, so I understand to some extent. Fatigue is a motherfucker. Even if you don’t make a mistake, the exhaustion and lack of sleep still will take years off of your life. Money can’t buy that back. That’s why I’m saying there should be a lower cap in the first place. 84 hours is exactly half of the week, which is why that’s the number I threw out there. Companies shouldn’t get to be exempt just because their exploitative model has already been accepted. If a proposed change doesn’t change anything, then what’s the point?
It’s meant to be an absolute cap that you’re a lunatic for even needing to get in range of, because any time past the 64th hour gets you that 2.5^2 multiplier, not the full extra 32 hours
Like I said, the time is the worker’s check in this system, it’s not the maximum they can juice you for, it’s how much they can get out of you before you get to juice them.
How are businesses supposed to turn a profit if they can’t bleed their workers dry?
It’s not even about turning a profit anymore. It’s about always making record profits.
And the powers that be either don’t see this as totally unsustainable or just don’t care.
Infinite growth with finite resources. Our economic system is a metaphor for entropy and the heat death of the universe.
Arguably we just have to make it to net profit asteroid mining
From that point the numbers are always going to work out that there’s just more resources than we could ever hope to outstrip, and the question becomes much more about what human society and economy looks like in a world where all scarcity is inherently artificial.
Numbers go up, morale goes down
That’s why no one loves me and I’m treated like a clown