I admire the spirit but I think fighting for a 32 hour or 4 day or etc workweek needs to be a broader fight than in just one sector. The 40 day week wasn't established just for scribes on their own right
Going forward, if we're going to be competing more and more with AI as tech workers, we do need to establish some kind of basis of agreeable working hours for humans.
We won't win that fight 10 years from now, we might as well try winning the fight now.
How does this work with other countries not enacting 32-hour workweeks?
This will be a repeat of manufacturing going outside of US due to reduced standards (labor and pollution) and therefore cheaper manufacturing in China. And due to that blue collar work got destroyed in the long term.
Logically, unless there are high trade barriers for software/services/goods from countries that don't have similar standards, long-term, these jobs will just shift there.
Look at Germany, their highly profitable companies have moved so much outside of the country, because they can't produce a competitive product inside with the strong unions, well-meaning green taxes and giving too much to the unemployed imigrants coming as social security and benefits.
When you start overtaxing, you are just milking the cow and not feeding her enough. She'd last for some time but then't you won't have a cow and milk.
You're absolutely correct, but most people don't understand how even a simple "village-size" economy works. They think money is just "printed" and "government will enforce our standard of living".
I mean, other countries are working their employees to the bone. Some employee children, some have slavery.
Should we go ahead and bring back slavery for "competition"? I mean, you can't compete with free labor, right?
We have to draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere is arbitrary. We're not changing any decisions here - 32 hours/week is equally as arbitrary as 40.
I work 32 hours per week. Rather, I work 4 days a week. This means I have 50% more free time than I used to. I fill that free time with dates with my wife while my kids are at school, or hiking, or just goofing at home doing whatever I feel like. One day a week is MINE. I cannot understate just how much this has improved my mental health and quality of life. Not to mention, when holidays fall on certain days of the week, I get 4 day weekends which is like a mini vacation. 48 hours is not enough time to fully decompress and feel human again.
I am never going back to 5 days a week, if I can help it.
Still, these numbers all seem arbitrary. More flexible opt-in work arrangements would be nice. My wife is a nurse and she can work "per diem" which is just amazing. She opts-in and chooses her schedule. I think society as a whole would be a bit healthier if that flexibility was extended to more of the population.
Counterpoint: I do work 5 days a week 40 hours remotely. I wake up around 7 or 8. I never set my alarm clock. I hang out with my wife before finally getting up, I roll over, get ready for the day and walk to my home office.
I can walk downstairs to work out during the middle of the day, swim almost all year (Florida), go for a jog of whatever.
On a higher level, working remotely means we can do things like spending a full year flying around the country like we did until September 2023 or going forward spending a couple of months in Costa Rica, Panama during the winter while working.
4-5 days a week doesn’t impinge on my freedom like working in an office would. I “retired my wife” in 2020 when she was 46 8 years into our marriage so she could enjoy her hobbies and passion projects.
I “decompress” between the minute I close my computer and not think about work until the next day and walk to the living room.
Productivity matters, both to the companies that pay these workers, and to people's wellbeing and mental health. I don't know the numbers today but in the 2000s, on average, corporate engineers had 35 hours a week of meetings. At 40 hours, this left 5 hours a week for coding. If you were willing to work 60 hours a week, then voila - you would be a 5x coder! Not to mention most coders get into it for the coding, not the meeting.
This math isn't just arbitrary - it's embedded deeply in how organizations function, how people work, get promoted, deliver, all that. in a vacuum, a 32 hour workweek might push meeting times lower and leave the same or more engineering productivity time. It might also stress the system so hard that non-meeting work grinds to a halt, unfortunately just at a time when there's less time to notice it.
Every time a robot or AI or whatever machine takes over the work of many workers, why not lower the average work week hours accordingly? The machine made the process more efficient, and the machine works instead of the worker. So less work is needed for the worker, and this could be averaged to pay out as a bonus for all workers. If you want to calculate this is money, you could also say that the machine does not work for free, but it is definitely cheaper than labor, so we could at least say that the difference of these costs is the gained efficiency, and this could be translated back to lowering the average work load of workers. And if you still want an incentive that more machines are introduced, you would say that 80% of the gained efficiency is translated back to lowering the average human worker's load.
There is no reason why we should have unemployment if machines make work more efficient -- it just means that there is enough money to be earned to give back part of it so that we do not need all the manpower.
When it comes to jobs where the skill growth and knowledge domain is fairly static and is hard on the body or dangerous, like the trades, I think these demands are a good idea.
Not so much in IT. I've seen too many public sector tech employees atrophy and fall way behind in their skill set and productivity. Most would hardly make it past an initial tech screening at a startup or FAANG. I think it's great that those guys have a union to protect them, but we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.
The idea of tech workers simultaneously saying they don't get a living wage and demanding a 32 hr work week completely undermines any sort of position they hope to establish. Those who make far less than tech already work more hours, and the people who have more wealth (talking about the majority of predominately the boomers, not the uber wealthy) worked more hours too. I'm not sure who this would resonate with beyond an echo chamber for the small group who are (I fear) going to be dismissed as lazy & entitled. This is a real shame, because there's work to be done against inequality and opportunities for (specifically) the young & educated who are struggling to get experience. Meanwhile the (admittedly glib) criticism here is being down voted into oblivion but I believe it represents the majority response. Swing and and a miss.
Often used as a hateful word to justify some awful statement. It is mostly a synonym for retirees - something that hopefully we all have a chance to be. And for a fair comparison we need to compare our own future as retirees against the current cohort of retirees.
I get it: "Baby Boomers owned 52% of the country’s net wealth despite comprising only 20% of the population" sounds terrible as an aggregate statistic. But individuals are not the group. It is hard to find a good statistic that is representative of a normal individual e.g. a median figure can be useful; yet a lot of American data is reported as averages per household (highly misleading).
> people who have more wealth (talking about the majority of predominately the boomers, not the uber wealthy
But the uber wealthy are what cause the problem with using aggregate statistics...
The richest 1% of the global population owns approximately 82% of the world's wealth
That's the issue, not the boomers. Retirees get fingered because they are an easy target, not because of any statistical facts.
Don't you sometimes wonder if the things you say about boomers, will likely be said about you in a couple of decades by those younger than you? Perhaps consider those behind you, not just those in front.
Disclosure: I'm not a boomer (and the label is somewhat nonsense in New Zealand anyways). Aside: I know millennials struggling to get a house, and I also know millennials that have got onto the housing ladder. There's no simple answer...
Edit: "New figures show nearly 14% of all houses in Japan are empty" -- so maybe demographics will fix house prices in other countries (excepting high demand cities)?
w.r.t 'living wages', quote: "...The call for a minimum salary of $85,000 corresponds with what is considered Low Income in New York City ($87,100 for 2024). "
> Now, instead of meeting our demands for living wages, the CEO has announced a new round of jobs hirings internationally
I’m convinced that in ~10 years we’ll look back on the work-from-home movement as a major own-goal by American tech workers. I would expect a lot more of this.
I would like to understand the first half of the demands, fight for living wages. How much do the union members currently make? It is very easy to understand 32 hours workweek in 4 days, but there is nothing I can find in the article about what is their current wages. I did find the minimum they are looking for is $85,000.
On one of the pages the demand is written as "Codifying the 32-hour, 4-day work week that has been our reality for over three years". So they work 32-hour workweek just not codified in company policy? Are there US labour laws or health insurance agreements that doing 32 hours officially will create problems?
John Maynard Keynes wrote an interesting essay in 1930 called "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren." It is very optimistic that the gains of the present time (his own time, that is) would lead to a future where individuals could work much less. He looks around in his own time with a cynical but clear-eye, calling out the moral contradictions and outright evils of the industrial age he is living in. But it seems he believes that the current period of evil will be worth it for a better future, his grandchildren's future. In that essay, he supposes that if people share equitably in what labor remains, a 15-hour work week should suffice to adequately take care of society.
Like Keynes, I'm just as optimistic that such a future is possible, and that it could happen very soon if society willed it so. But just looking at the 95 years of history that have passed since Keynes wrote this essay, it is clear we are not natually, inevitably moving towards such a society. The technology is making such a future possible, but such as a society has to be demanded by the people, and it will not be gifted to us by benevolent rulers or captains of industry.
"We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.
But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight.
I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change
which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings
in the aggregate."
I'm a bit confused by this as a union demand because I've followed 4dayweek.io for some time now and Kickstarter shows up there as a 4x8 company as of 2022. (https://4dayweek.io/company/kickstarter/jobs). Anyone know if that's not still the case?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 50.9 ms ] threadWe won't win that fight 10 years from now, we might as well try winning the fight now.
This will be a repeat of manufacturing going outside of US due to reduced standards (labor and pollution) and therefore cheaper manufacturing in China. And due to that blue collar work got destroyed in the long term.
Logically, unless there are high trade barriers for software/services/goods from countries that don't have similar standards, long-term, these jobs will just shift there.
When you start overtaxing, you are just milking the cow and not feeding her enough. She'd last for some time but then't you won't have a cow and milk.
You're absolutely correct, but most people don't understand how even a simple "village-size" economy works. They think money is just "printed" and "government will enforce our standard of living".
Should we go ahead and bring back slavery for "competition"? I mean, you can't compete with free labor, right?
We have to draw the line somewhere, and that somewhere is arbitrary. We're not changing any decisions here - 32 hours/week is equally as arbitrary as 40.
I am never going back to 5 days a week, if I can help it.
Still, these numbers all seem arbitrary. More flexible opt-in work arrangements would be nice. My wife is a nurse and she can work "per diem" which is just amazing. She opts-in and chooses her schedule. I think society as a whole would be a bit healthier if that flexibility was extended to more of the population.
I can walk downstairs to work out during the middle of the day, swim almost all year (Florida), go for a jog of whatever.
On a higher level, working remotely means we can do things like spending a full year flying around the country like we did until September 2023 or going forward spending a couple of months in Costa Rica, Panama during the winter while working.
4-5 days a week doesn’t impinge on my freedom like working in an office would. I “retired my wife” in 2020 when she was 46 8 years into our marriage so she could enjoy her hobbies and passion projects.
I “decompress” between the minute I close my computer and not think about work until the next day and walk to the living room.
This math isn't just arbitrary - it's embedded deeply in how organizations function, how people work, get promoted, deliver, all that. in a vacuum, a 32 hour workweek might push meeting times lower and leave the same or more engineering productivity time. It might also stress the system so hard that non-meeting work grinds to a halt, unfortunately just at a time when there's less time to notice it.
There is no reason why we should have unemployment if machines make work more efficient -- it just means that there is enough money to be earned to give back part of it so that we do not need all the manpower.
What's wrong with this perspective?
Not so much in IT. I've seen too many public sector tech employees atrophy and fall way behind in their skill set and productivity. Most would hardly make it past an initial tech screening at a startup or FAANG. I think it's great that those guys have a union to protect them, but we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.
Often used as a hateful word to justify some awful statement. It is mostly a synonym for retirees - something that hopefully we all have a chance to be. And for a fair comparison we need to compare our own future as retirees against the current cohort of retirees.
I get it: "Baby Boomers owned 52% of the country’s net wealth despite comprising only 20% of the population" sounds terrible as an aggregate statistic. But individuals are not the group. It is hard to find a good statistic that is representative of a normal individual e.g. a median figure can be useful; yet a lot of American data is reported as averages per household (highly misleading).
> people who have more wealth (talking about the majority of predominately the boomers, not the uber wealthy
But the uber wealthy are what cause the problem with using aggregate statistics...
That's the issue, not the boomers. Retirees get fingered because they are an easy target, not because of any statistical facts.Don't you sometimes wonder if the things you say about boomers, will likely be said about you in a couple of decades by those younger than you? Perhaps consider those behind you, not just those in front.
Disclosure: I'm not a boomer (and the label is somewhat nonsense in New Zealand anyways). Aside: I know millennials struggling to get a house, and I also know millennials that have got onto the housing ladder. There's no simple answer...
Edit: "New figures show nearly 14% of all houses in Japan are empty" -- so maybe demographics will fix house prices in other countries (excepting high demand cities)?
w.r.t 'living wages', quote: "...The call for a minimum salary of $85,000 corresponds with what is considered Low Income in New York City ($87,100 for 2024). "
I’m convinced that in ~10 years we’ll look back on the work-from-home movement as a major own-goal by American tech workers. I would expect a lot more of this.
On one of the pages the demand is written as "Codifying the 32-hour, 4-day work week that has been our reality for over three years". So they work 32-hour workweek just not codified in company policy? Are there US labour laws or health insurance agreements that doing 32 hours officially will create problems?
Peak I don’t even know what. Have these people worked a day in their life?
Like Keynes, I'm just as optimistic that such a future is possible, and that it could happen very soon if society willed it so. But just looking at the 95 years of history that have passed since Keynes wrote this essay, it is clear we are not natually, inevitably moving towards such a society. The technology is making such a future possible, but such as a society has to be demanded by the people, and it will not be gifted to us by benevolent rulers or captains of industry.
"We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight. I look forward, therefore, in days not so very remote, to the greatest change which has ever occurred in the material environment of life for human beings in the aggregate."
http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf