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.
In the market, second place is "first loser"
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.
I assume we agree that working less produces less (which reasonable people debate) since otherwise competition from abroad wouldn't be an issue.
If that is the case, then adding trade barriers also doesn't fix anything. Adding the trade barriers would ultimately just produce a lower standard of living. You'd essentially have an isolated system and the system is now producing less, so necessarily there will be less for everyone in the system.
Adding trade barriers also doesn't fix the threat of an adversarial country working 50% more than you for the next 50 years and as a result having the infrastructure to dominate you in numerous ways.
Doesn't that ignore the possibility of profit motives driving innovation when they're not being undercut by lower standards re externalities?
One of Henry Ford biggest push was for a 5 day work week when no one else did it. Why? Because it meant workers had two days of week to spend money which increased consumer spending and look at the US today. Our consumer spending is about 2/3 of our GDP spending. I'm not saying you're wrong. But there's more to "drive your workers to the bone means we get better productivity and economic conditions". The biggest mistake the US is making is not capitalizing harder on onshoring + robotics.
Countries can stay ahead by enticing better workers with better working conditions. I ain't doing 996.
Many countries have <40 hours/week and are still thriving.
There will always be someone willing to undercut. Should that be reason for us all to race each other to the bottom?
I personally don’t think the negative consequences of working a little less (on paper!) are proportional to the positives.
Which countries have <40 hours/week and thrive?
France is thriving! …if you omit that Fitch and S&P degraded the debt notation from AAA to A+ in just 6 years.
And that there’s no B.
The Netherlands is basically a narcostate at this point...
Care to elaborate on that statement?
Do you think meaningfully more work will get done in those countries with those extra 8 hours?
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.
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.
What's wrong with this perspective?
>> What's wrong with this perspective?
The worker is not putting out the capital that (hopefully) pays off in increased productivity; why do they benefit from this investment - especially when it's diameterically opposite the cost/value proposition they represent? If we value an employee's contribution and pay accordingly why would I pay more per unit if they work less?
I don't necessarily (fully) agree with this counter, but you better believe that's how investors view it. Productivity is really hard to measure in IT, but I tend to think of "attention". I want to pay a salary for all of your attention, and when you start talking about reducing your... work-focused hours (?) I'm getting less for the same money.
We've been doing that for a long time. Average worker in
1900 worked 3000 hours
1950 worked 2000 hours
2023 worked 1790 hours
There's been a decline as living standards (and expectations) have dramatically increased. In the 1990s people still mended clothes.
Maybe you are expecting even fewer hours still, which you are welcome to do. I know lots of people that work 800 hours a year. All their basic needs are easily met. I do not want to live like them, though.
data from: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
It's the same as saying "people need food to live; why not raise the price of food indefinitely to have better wages for people who produce food?"
The answer (thank goodness) is: competition.
You are a consumer more than you are a worker. Every industry that brings in automation and reduced costs can offer you goods for less, or pay their workers the same for more. Competition means they tend to choose the former (or, given there's also competition for workers, actually wages go up a bit and prices come down a bit, but there are slightly fewer jobs).
> So less work is needed for the worker, and this could be averaged to pay out as a bonus for all workers.
The whole point of their investment into the machines is to no longer have to pay workers.
> What's wrong with this perspective?
Morally? Nothing.
It requires somebody who is in a powerful enough position to enforce the rule and also who doesn't become corrupted by their access to that kind of power.
Or it lacks a mechanism by which we can enforce the rule collectively.
By all means let's make it happen, it's a great idea, but how?
Capitalism. Squeezing out that productivity for the company instead of the worker ensures your company has an advantage over competitors, either via reduced cost or higher margins.
Pretty much all anti-worker outcomes are just corporate competition playing out.
The owners of said company do not make processes more efficient in order to share the additional profits with others.
In order to affect the change you are suggesting that change must be legislated. Those who make laws are funded by these same companies extracting wealth from labor.
How would one implement such a plan without it falling apart immediately in The House or Congress?
Are you asking me to give some of my profits to the workers? Are you a communist? /s
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.
I was in software in from mid-2000s onwards and never experienced anything like 35 hours of meetings a week.
> I don't know the numbers today but in the 2000s, on average, corporate engineers had 35 hours a week of meetings
Do you have the dataset for that? I'd be surprised by that number, unless it was all "engineers" irrespective of software taken into account.
> The current 3-year agreement covering 59 community support specialists, trust and safety analysts, marketing professionals, software engineers, and other tech workers...
Yeah they're going to just offshore to the UK and Singapore or offer remote first jobs domestically. Most Kickstarter jobs are now one of those 3 instead of in NYC.
In fact, why are all the other non-SWE and Strategy roles in NYC at all?
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.
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
Call me a slacker but 40 days a week really feels like too much.
It is when you factor in commute as well.
I'd personally be supportive of the 4-day 40-hour work week because I converted to that about six months ago, myself, and I'm not looking back.
I'd be all about 32-hour work week, but provided either employers were required to pay us all more, or the price of _literally everything_ in the US consumer economy came down. Cutting my paycheck by 25% would be devastating to the arguably modest lifestyle I have built for myself, so I can't see that ever being offset by just being generally happier because I'm not wasting the single life I have making someone else rich.
> Now we need to build a similar fighting movement for a 32-hour week and living wages for all workers.
It has to start somewhere. I can hardly criticize them for trying.
It feels like they should start with a field that has harder work or below average wages. Tech has it pretty easy already, I never found 40 hours/wk oppressive.
Manufacturing (my field) would be a good place to start. Most of the guys I work with work overtime not because we have a bunch of work to do, but to inflate their weekly paychecks that much more. I've stopped reminding them that nobody ever got rich by working overtime, and it's a tool designed to keep them toiling away. Odds are if something like a 32 hour week passed, it would take a ridiculous amount of convincing for them to adopt it since overtime is so deeply entrenched in the culture.
Tech is good precisely for that reason. Tech workers have a lot more leverage than many other workers who work in more oppressive fields.
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.
Most tech workers I know would be happy with a 40 hour work week.
The time to do this was 10 years ago. Now there are a dozen people in line to take that 996 job off your hands for you.
I think this was true 10 years ago too if you consider the global talent pool.
Why not a six hour work week. Anything less is capitalist cronyism.
Why shouldn't the greatly increased productivity over the past century translate into less of a need to work?
There is literally an infinite amount of work to be done. being 1,000% more efficient doesn't change that.
32 hour work weeks are difficult to apply in many industries. Health care is already insanely expensive.
Decreasing number of workers means buildings are built slower and more expensively (resulting higher housing costs).
Along with productivity gains, we also have quality gains. Previously all houses did not need air conditioning, but because things are more efficient, more people can afford one.
no thanks.
Previously people could also afford housing :D
I get to sit in a chair at my house instead of shoveling coal out of a mountain a thousand feet below ground while suffocating.
I think it will help your case if you can acknowledge how far we've come already.
We should get the BEST cakes, and several hours a day to EAT them!
You can work less, if you want to.
It does! So long as you are willing to accept a commensurate relative reduction in salary.
This is what economists in the very early 1900s thought that increasing industrial efficiency would eventually lead to. Ie. that we'd all work maybe a day or two per week or less.
But that's not what happened, for various reasons relating to the nature of how capital grows and how that impacts increasing production volumes.
Why not 16h a week though? We can surely do better than these oppressive 32h a week, right?
32 hour work week? Meaning you don’t do anything work related outside the 32 hours? That seems very short.