Nothing has hurt quality of life for the average person in this country more than the mindless pursuit of "freedom from government regulation". In reality, all it means is our lifestyle is regulated by industry rather than our elected representatives.
The article ends with the statement that "Sometimes you just need to draw a line in the sand and say “enough is enough”." That's all well and good, but who can do that without the law on their side? Not many people can afford to be fired.
An alternative to government regulations is to organize in unions. Then you can have somewhat equal partners negotiating.
Of course there are disadvantages to unions, as there are to all large organizations. They tend to take on a life of their own, with its own agenda which may not represent the will of its members.
I feel like if employees attempted to assemble into some kind of union, employers would immediately lay them off. There are thousands of other people waiting to get the jobs of the professionals who try to organize. It doesn't make sense to risk your job for a chance to have a little better pay, a few fewer hours, or another couple days of paid vacation.
Yes, but that happened when the U.S. was going through tremendous economic growth and labor was in demand. These days, there are tens of millions of unemployed workers ready to take your place if you start doing things your employer doesn't like.
Or the average person is easily brainwashed by propaganda and can be easily manipulated to vote against their own interests.
I like how "death panels" became a favorite PR slogan during the healthcare debate, while the same people don't realize their employers and the insurance companies are already functioning as the effectively the same "death panels".
There is also another element to it: everyone seems to be wondering how come we are "coming out of the recession", profits are up, and yet the unemployment is so high !? The economists are just baffled and writing long essays discussing this phenomenon. To me it seems that Americans are seeing their co-workers laid off, they have their health insurance tied with their employment, they have large mortgages that they cannot afford (yes, it is their fault for taking on those depts), large credit card bills, no savings -- these are not people who will protest and demand more vacation time and higher pay. They will be working 60 hour weeks doing the work of their laid off co-workers, trying not to be next. If they lose their job, most will end up losing their home and health insurance for their children.
I understand this probably doesn't affect the average HN-ers, who are running successful startups, or would have 2 job offers the minute they walk out of their work place. But unfortunately that is not true for most Americans.
It's somewhat true that insurance coverage can determine what treatment someone will get. But, one always has the (perhaps theoretical) option of switching insurance companies or paying for treatment out of one's own pocket. When the government is your one and only insurer, that option disappears.
You seem for government regulation yet mention high unemployment, health insurance tied to employment, large mortgage debt, large credit card debt, and no savings. All of these problems are caused or worsened by government.
Government tax rules make it more expensive and complex to hire. Government minimum wage requirements make it outright illegal to profitably hire the lowest-skilled workers. Government unemployment benefits provide workers with incentives not to find a job.
Employers did not normally offer health insurance until government tax rules encouraged them to do so by not subjecting health insurance benefits to the normal income tax. Government is responsible for making it more expensive for a worker to purchase insurance himself rather than through his employer.
Large mortgages are encouraged by special tax treatment for mortgage interest and by tax breaks associated with home ownership.
Government's inflationary monetary policy and its prohibition/discouragement on citizen's use of other money encourage people into debt and discourage saving. In an era when everyone seems to be in debt, interest rates should be very high, encouraging savers. Yet interest rates are at or near all time lows.
Would that more people would vote against government regulation. Unfortunately, most seem to have been brainwashed by government propaganda.
"When the government is your one and only insurer, that option disappears."
This is never likely to be the case. In the UK, the state provides a high standard of free universal healthcare in the form of the NHS. There is also a huge network of private hospitals and clinics that you can pay for in cash or using insurance. Many employers offer private health insurance as a benefit.
"In any case, after making this broad promise in favor of individual liberty, Hillarycare went on to limit individual liberties. It attempted to do this in the Fraud and Abuse section of the proposed law, which sought to dry up most of private medical practice, and criminalize the rest. It provided for strict governmental controls over the fees that could be charged by fee-for-service doctors or private practitioners. And if the feds decided that a private doctor’s fees were too high, they could charge him/her with bribe-taking, a serious federal crime under the new law. Indeed, Hillarycare attempted to make illegal most of the ways patients could go outside the approved system to get “extra” healthcare. Criminal penalties could accrue to both the doctor and patient. According to Paul Craig Roberts, writing in the Washington Times in December, 1993, “Mr. Clinton’s plan turns normal patient advocacy into a federal criminal offense. For example, a doctor who wants an earlier date for surgery for a needful patient can be accused of using wrongful influence and accepting a bribe and sentenced, along with the patient, to 15 years in prison.”
According to the source above, Obamacare is modeled on Hillarycare, except that it's less organized and twice as long (2700 pages vs 1368 pages.)
The reason why people object to government interference in the marketplace is because government involvement necessarily implies coercion, otherwise whatever government is doing could be done privately. If you have a scheme to provide affordable healthcare that is a "win" to all parties involved, you're welcome to do it privately, without relying on coercion.
The search for highest profits / lowest costs is a race to the bottom. Regulations, whether they be for child labor, working conditions, or product safety, determine where that bottom is located.
The bottom right now are starving children in many parts of Asia and Africa, and homeless people shivering outside. But that's not the case for most people being discussed here. If we want to take parental leave, then save a little while you're working so you can live on the savings when you need to. I am as guilty as anyone else, but we can't deny the reality. The US is also very high in per capita resource consumption, and we don't need the government, or a small private cartel telling us how much to work and how to spend our money. Yes, there are problems, but I don't think regulation is going to solve them.
Why do you cast fewer working hours as left-wing? Being able to have a good life without having to work yourself to death doesn't sound left-wing to me; it sounds sensible and surely should be a dream of the right-wing?
If you think not being a wage-slave is left-wing, I think you've been fooled by the people who need you to work yourself to death so they can take it easy.
The article is advocating more government intervention in the economy, which is generally associated with left-wing political thought. I think that accusing this article of being left-wing is intellectually sound, though the GP's comment, and particularly the tone, did little to advance the conversation.
In fact, my central problem with this article was that ignored the fact that markets in the United States are generally less well-regulated than those in other industrialized nations. Many of the differences the author brings up can be traced back to that. The author clearly would like that changed, but it's a much bigger argument than the one the author is making. It can't be taken for granted that just because these regulations are desirable, and would make things better, then they should be enacted. The Overton window on government intervention in the economy in the US is different than in other industrialized nations, and that needed to be addressed in the author's argument.
I tried to negotiate more holiday time (25 days rather than 10 days) when I was planning to move to the US. They wouldn't budge; but they were willing to employ me as a remote worker living in London, UK, rather than locally in CA. (I didn't move, in part because of this, even though I had a H-1B visa at a time they were handed out by lottery.) So now, I get the extra holidays (but less pay), as well as having frequent transatlantic flights to get up to date with the US folks.
Why was that? Could it possibly be because the willing partners in that private agreement aren't as free to choose the terms of their agreement as you seem to think they are? The extra holidays aren't just a line item in the contract, with appropriately reduced pay etc. They are perceived to cause jealousy problems, for one thing. They're also structured as a status perk for long-term employees ("earn a whole extra day for every year of service!" they said).
The issue is even bigger for someone contemplating emigrating to the US, because longer holidays increase the cost effectiveness of transatlantic trip home. Only having 10 days holiday effectively means saying (relatively) permanent goodbye to all your friends and relatives if you also want to have e.g. a Christmas holiday and a summer break.
If I was going to guess: They didn't want you in the office with 2.5x the vacation of the rest of their workers. By stashing you in London, if anyone took issue, they just point out that it's customary.
Well actually I don't care much whether it's left, right, liber-, fasco-, crypto- or theo-, it's definitely plain ol' politics, though, and that's what I'm objecting to. I only mention left-wing because we seem to have been getting a lot of that here lately. Like roaches, if you don't stomp on political stories then they breed.
Same here, I imagine other industries are this way, but software (or maybe let's say clumsy giant enterprise software) benefits a lot from one person working 60 hours rather than 2 working 30 since so much of the effort is actually keeping the cruft and procedures in your head, which is a fixed cost. Clients want to meet with your development lead, who you also need to be doing actually development; and if meetings take up 20 hours a week, 60 hours is actually 4 times as many working hours as 30 not just double.
Not to say it isn't a little bit of a sad state of affairs.
You're only overworked if you do activities each day at work that don't strengthen you. If you're doing stuff you love why would you want to go home and try to find a hobby or something else to do in the rest of your time that you also enjoy as much?
This is why you see many people "lost" in retirement. Not because they didn't have hobbies but because those hobbies were never as fun to them as what they were able to do at work.
Coming from the uk, whilst I'd love to work for a US based tech company something that would strongly make me reconsider is the terrible lack of paid vacation. 20 days is the minimum here - many (including me) get 25 and that allows for some proper breaks: a weeks skiing, two weeks for a long vacation, a long stretch off at Christmas and still enough for the odd day here and there. I'd be lucky to get half of that in the US, a big disincentive.
Funny - I'm in the US, and I get a comparable amount of vacation.
If you want vacation, negotiate for it. Your pay might be lowered commensurately, but there is no free lunch. Why would you care if other people choose money over time?
this is not obvious to most people in America; Culturally, it's expected that we choose money over time.
On the other hand, of the last 5 years I worked for other people, 2 of them were working 3 days a week. Most of the time, if you ask (and are willing to take the hit in wages) /my/ experience has been that employers are surprised when you ask, but they seem to be happy enough to accommodate.
note, usually you have to work more than 30 hours a week to get employer-paid health insurance.
See Barrkel's post below http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022642 - it's not something you can always negotiate. I don't care if others choose money over time - I'm saying many just don't have that choice.
Well there's also the other side of the spectrum as well. IBM for instance has essentially no vacation policy, and it's up to you to determine how much vacation you take. Of course some people claim that this ends up giving you less actual vacation time because the work culture promotes using the relaxed rules for a lot of remote work stuff, so you're more likely to get dirty looks if you were to try to tell them "Yeah, I'm going on vacation and I won't be on call"
25 isn't exactly on the high side - I get 33 and I would be very reluctant to go to fewer.
Even in the UK some employers can be very "macho" about vacation - regarding holidays as something for wimps. I had someone trying to recruit me for an investment bank a while back and he got quite upset when I refused to consider the 22 days they were offering.... he more or less accused me of being soft for wanting so much holiday time! Given that they approached me I regarded this as a very odd way of trying to attract new employees.
I haven't met anyone who thinks US has any decent work/balance. The reality is that US is a great place to make money and lots of it. Then you spend it on the beaches of Brazil or Thailand.
Misleading stats: ...“in 1960, only 20 percent of mothers worked. Today, 70 percent of American children live in households where all adults are employed.”
"All adults"? That's a nice way of obscuring the fact that we have a lot more single parent households (with 100% of the adults working) than we did in 1960.
One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not.
I'm not sure why it is so obvious. 80% of the poor don't work at all (another 10% work only part time) and they enjoy a standard of living similar to the average 1950's American. For example, as of 1950, only 75% of the US had a flush toilet. Today (and even as far back as 1980) >99% did.
Before 20% of mothers worked.
Now 70% of guardians (including both adults if there are two) work
That actually indicates a net increase even greater than indicated in the article since households where there is a working mother but non-working father would not be included in the 70%.
There's also the "graph on average paid vacation time in industrialized countries:" which is actually mandated vacation. I'd be very interested in seeing the 'average' graph to compare.
Note that the source study driving this blog post is from a left think tank, the Center for American Progress. Their policy goals can be fairly characterized as adopting in the U.S. more European-style employment regulations on wages, benefits, leave, and termination.
There's some evidence Americans are working fewer hours; for example figure 1 on p. 9 of this survey shows a slight decline in hours worked from 1975-2003:
When considering such issues, the important question to ask is: do you want people to be forced to work fewer hours (as in some other countries), or simply to have the option?
Because if you want to maximize your leisure time, you can make certain career and consumption choices to do so. For example, if you wanted to live with only the amenities people had in the 1970s or 1950s, you could choose to work significantly less than 40 hours a week in the 2010s.
43 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 83.4 ms ] threadThe article ends with the statement that "Sometimes you just need to draw a line in the sand and say “enough is enough”." That's all well and good, but who can do that without the law on their side? Not many people can afford to be fired.
Of course there are disadvantages to unions, as there are to all large organizations. They tend to take on a life of their own, with its own agenda which may not represent the will of its members.
Or the average person is easily brainwashed by propaganda and can be easily manipulated to vote against their own interests.
I like how "death panels" became a favorite PR slogan during the healthcare debate, while the same people don't realize their employers and the insurance companies are already functioning as the effectively the same "death panels".
There is also another element to it: everyone seems to be wondering how come we are "coming out of the recession", profits are up, and yet the unemployment is so high !? The economists are just baffled and writing long essays discussing this phenomenon. To me it seems that Americans are seeing their co-workers laid off, they have their health insurance tied with their employment, they have large mortgages that they cannot afford (yes, it is their fault for taking on those depts), large credit card bills, no savings -- these are not people who will protest and demand more vacation time and higher pay. They will be working 60 hour weeks doing the work of their laid off co-workers, trying not to be next. If they lose their job, most will end up losing their home and health insurance for their children.
I understand this probably doesn't affect the average HN-ers, who are running successful startups, or would have 2 job offers the minute they walk out of their work place. But unfortunately that is not true for most Americans.
You seem for government regulation yet mention high unemployment, health insurance tied to employment, large mortgage debt, large credit card debt, and no savings. All of these problems are caused or worsened by government.
Government tax rules make it more expensive and complex to hire. Government minimum wage requirements make it outright illegal to profitably hire the lowest-skilled workers. Government unemployment benefits provide workers with incentives not to find a job.
Employers did not normally offer health insurance until government tax rules encouraged them to do so by not subjecting health insurance benefits to the normal income tax. Government is responsible for making it more expensive for a worker to purchase insurance himself rather than through his employer.
Large mortgages are encouraged by special tax treatment for mortgage interest and by tax breaks associated with home ownership.
Government's inflationary monetary policy and its prohibition/discouragement on citizen's use of other money encourage people into debt and discourage saving. In an era when everyone seems to be in debt, interest rates should be very high, encouraging savers. Yet interest rates are at or near all time lows.
Would that more people would vote against government regulation. Unfortunately, most seem to have been brainwashed by government propaganda.
This is never likely to be the case. In the UK, the state provides a high standard of free universal healthcare in the form of the NHS. There is also a huge network of private hospitals and clinics that you can pay for in cash or using insurance. Many employers offer private health insurance as a benefit.
"In any case, after making this broad promise in favor of individual liberty, Hillarycare went on to limit individual liberties. It attempted to do this in the Fraud and Abuse section of the proposed law, which sought to dry up most of private medical practice, and criminalize the rest. It provided for strict governmental controls over the fees that could be charged by fee-for-service doctors or private practitioners. And if the feds decided that a private doctor’s fees were too high, they could charge him/her with bribe-taking, a serious federal crime under the new law. Indeed, Hillarycare attempted to make illegal most of the ways patients could go outside the approved system to get “extra” healthcare. Criminal penalties could accrue to both the doctor and patient. According to Paul Craig Roberts, writing in the Washington Times in December, 1993, “Mr. Clinton’s plan turns normal patient advocacy into a federal criminal offense. For example, a doctor who wants an earlier date for surgery for a needful patient can be accused of using wrongful influence and accepting a bribe and sentenced, along with the patient, to 15 years in prison.”
According to the source above, Obamacare is modeled on Hillarycare, except that it's less organized and twice as long (2700 pages vs 1368 pages.)
The reason why people object to government interference in the marketplace is because government involvement necessarily implies coercion, otherwise whatever government is doing could be done privately. If you have a scheme to provide affordable healthcare that is a "win" to all parties involved, you're welcome to do it privately, without relying on coercion.
If you think not being a wage-slave is left-wing, I think you've been fooled by the people who need you to work yourself to death so they can take it easy.
Edit: Which is me. Forget I mentioned it :)
In fact, my central problem with this article was that ignored the fact that markets in the United States are generally less well-regulated than those in other industrialized nations. Many of the differences the author brings up can be traced back to that. The author clearly would like that changed, but it's a much bigger argument than the one the author is making. It can't be taken for granted that just because these regulations are desirable, and would make things better, then they should be enacted. The Overton window on government intervention in the economy in the US is different than in other industrialized nations, and that needed to be addressed in the author's argument.
Why was that? Could it possibly be because the willing partners in that private agreement aren't as free to choose the terms of their agreement as you seem to think they are? The extra holidays aren't just a line item in the contract, with appropriately reduced pay etc. They are perceived to cause jealousy problems, for one thing. They're also structured as a status perk for long-term employees ("earn a whole extra day for every year of service!" they said).
The issue is even bigger for someone contemplating emigrating to the US, because longer holidays increase the cost effectiveness of transatlantic trip home. Only having 10 days holiday effectively means saying (relatively) permanent goodbye to all your friends and relatives if you also want to have e.g. a Christmas holiday and a summer break.
Not to say it isn't a little bit of a sad state of affairs.
Of course, startups would be exempt, right?
Right?
I find this very hard to believe. Could it be that unpaid overtime work was not always declared?
This is why you see many people "lost" in retirement. Not because they didn't have hobbies but because those hobbies were never as fun to them as what they were able to do at work.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/wild-unattached-twenties-sp...
If you want vacation, negotiate for it. Your pay might be lowered commensurately, but there is no free lunch. Why would you care if other people choose money over time?
On the other hand, of the last 5 years I worked for other people, 2 of them were working 3 days a week. Most of the time, if you ask (and are willing to take the hit in wages) /my/ experience has been that employers are surprised when you ask, but they seem to be happy enough to accommodate.
note, usually you have to work more than 30 hours a week to get employer-paid health insurance.
Even in the UK some employers can be very "macho" about vacation - regarding holidays as something for wimps. I had someone trying to recruit me for an investment bank a while back and he got quite upset when I refused to consider the 22 days they were offering.... he more or less accused me of being soft for wanting so much holiday time! Given that they approached me I regarded this as a very odd way of trying to attract new employees.
Misleading stats: ...“in 1960, only 20 percent of mothers worked. Today, 70 percent of American children live in households where all adults are employed.”
"All adults"? That's a nice way of obscuring the fact that we have a lot more single parent households (with 100% of the adults working) than we did in 1960.
One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not.
I'm not sure why it is so obvious. 80% of the poor don't work at all (another 10% work only part time) and they enjoy a standard of living similar to the average 1950's American. For example, as of 1950, only 75% of the US had a flush toilet. Today (and even as far back as 1980) >99% did.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:fuZGrQqyd9QJ:w...
guardian(s) = mother and/or father
household = guardian(s) + child
Before 20% of mothers worked. Now 70% of guardians (including both adults if there are two) work
That actually indicates a net increase even greater than indicated in the article since households where there is a working mother but non-working father would not be included in the 70%.
Original source of the graph (afaik): http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/2007-05-no-vacati...
There's some evidence Americans are working fewer hours; for example figure 1 on p. 9 of this survey shows a slight decline in hours worked from 1975-2003:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1233842
When considering such issues, the important question to ask is: do you want people to be forced to work fewer hours (as in some other countries), or simply to have the option?
Because if you want to maximize your leisure time, you can make certain career and consumption choices to do so. For example, if you wanted to live with only the amenities people had in the 1970s or 1950s, you could choose to work significantly less than 40 hours a week in the 2010s.
http://www.careerfaqs.com.au/employment-news/719/Australians...