I’d love to have a 32 hour week.
It’s been a struggle lately to get even 16 hours of work a week lately.
Turns out, problems are more complex than just what goes on in the US
you can have a 32 hour work week but you get paid for working 32 hours
So I used to work in industrial automation, and I did see a factory owner buy a robot to automate a task because it was a brain meltingly simple task that was unpopular with his workers. The robot was slower, and more expensive than a human.
It was taking a small piece of metal from a stack and putting it in a machine and pushing a button (not sure if he had a two-hand-no-tie-down set up) then taking the now bent piece of metal out of the machine and putting it on a stack. I think they had about 8 hours production per week of demand for the part.
He didn’t do it out of the kindness of his heart but because he got tired of paying recruiters to find people willing to do it.
I’m so fucking done, it will take 4 years for us to get a 40 hour workweek and yeah that’s great but it’s a fucking joke
Gracias Sheimbaum
Here in Colombia it were like that and did it work. I think it’s because not terrorize the right hand
yeah they gave us the same reasons here and I get it to certain extend. the same companies that have exploited us for decades were scared of this reduction and asked for this compromise.
I’m still mad that the so called “left leaning” president bent to their claims but was not able to secure TWO free days a week
leave your ai to cover for 8 hours. they’ll love it
They didn’t just hand us the forty hour workweek. You can thank the early unions for that. Organizations like this.
Yup.
Workers have to fight hard for every little thing, which is why it’s so sad to see us back pedal by electing born rich anti-worker dipshits into the highest offices in the land. We’re losing things that will take years and a lot of struggle to get back.
Exactly. Productivity gains don’t magically turn into free time for workers unless people organize and demand it.
Right and why would it? If you let people take advantage, they will. Doesnt matter what’s right. Doing what’s right gets you fucked in this world. Literally people distrust you if you try to do what’s right. It’s a lonely existence and that’s fucking sad.
Worse, there’s actual practical evidence that a 4-day workweek for the same pay as the 5-day one still makes the company more money and the workers happier and healthier, but adoption is still glacial.
The grabbing hands grab all they can
All for themselves - after allIt’s a competitive world…
not really because it is a race to no where. Everybody is working but nothings getting done. It is the inverse a period of die back. It seems like they got something going but in reality the are trying to make us to pay for capitals mistakes. We ain’t building no infrastucture just boxes with gpus powering boring chat bots and spying on those with no skrilla. This is the end. The economy is shrinking. A pyramid with a brittle tip. No weight behind it to push it through. This is death not progress. K Shaped economy more like cancer shaped economy
This, I feel, is the real message behind Animal Farm
*fucking

This reminds me of this old productivity / salary chart that shows how fucked we are.“Class now observe this is called a K shaped economy.” The students now start to grind their teeth.
Weird that the divergence is also the same point in time where (a) modern conservatism is born, (b) Fox News is conceived, and © the middle class died.
Total coincidence, I’m sure.
Literally been flat lined for 50 years
great but there are more studies about it just look up salary vs productivity

Now that is limp.
Let’s knock this one out of the way now: despite what people at the mises institute would have you think, not a lot of couples divorce because of bitter arguments on the convertibility of the dollar to gold.
The divorce rate increase since 1960 is related to the no-fault divorce laws passing in the US Before that, if a couple went to a court and said “we hate each other, grant us a divorce, please” the judge could legally say “fuck you, you’re still married, work it out”.
Ah a breath of fresh air about this bs website. The gold standard won’t fix your economic woes, much less your marital ones
“That’s a bad source. So anyways, here’s a Reddit link.”
Would you like me to buy a domain for $10/yr and copy and paste it onto there for you, would that make it seem more legitimate somehow?
You could link the blog the Reddit post links to.
Fair point, will keep that in mind. For anyone else allergic to clicking Reddit links, here’s the blog the author also posted the content to:
https://singlelunch.com/the-bad-economics-of-wtfhappenedin1971
Reddit is an unreliable source but not to be dismissed just because it is reddit. There is a higher chance of having a good source from reddit than from randomwebsiteabouttopic.com.
There is no war but class war.
I suggest an alternative. All war is class war. Start fighting like it.
also the increase 30-40+hrs is design to exhaust people so they are to tired to protest for reforms socially, financially and to keep people disengaged from politics/ and information.
I want more people to think though
“If this tool makes me produce double, and I get paid the same, who’s keeping all that new value?”
If your productivity doubles, they will lay off half the people, and all gains disappear upwards. It’s already happening.
in the civilised world we just vote for people that support 4 day work weeks
do catch up neo-commies
Didn’t France throw an absolute shit fit over raising their retirement age. In then end, guess what, the retirement age was raised.
Do catch up neo-liberals.
Does your region have laws that mandate no more than four days? If it was in my industry it’d just end up being four fifteen hour days. I worked 18 this last Sunday.
Maintenance workers, the engineers who designed the machine, everyone above who keeps it running.
Plants get shut down yearly for maintenance, stuff need to be lubed, replaced, upgraded etc.
Those contractors are gonna be making 3x what you do. Sure they’re keeping some extra profit, but their expenses also go up proportionally too. Millwrites here make over $50 an hour, the company charges out at $100+ per man hour. Maintenance is friggen expensive on machines.
All you need is 2-4 weeks off a year, and they save money while you’re off. Machines always cost money.
If that was true, if it was a wash to get the new tool for the owner, they wouldn’t do it. That’d be silly.
Upgrading someone from pen and paper to a laptop with LibreOffice is probably going to dramatically (let’s say 4x) increase their productivity, without a corresponding 4x increase in maintenance cost.
You know companies have whole branches deticated to computer support and cyper security, right?
Or do you think that before laptops businesses had their own divisions of Quill-Certified Problem Solvers and Paper-Based Troubleshooting Engineers?
And you think that costs more than the productivity gains from having the computer?
No. I think the computer industry is more expensive and creates more jobs than all the paper and pen industries have trough the history.
What does that have to do with the ownership class extracting value from labor?
Hmm. What could industry producing millions of jobs world wide offer for working class. What a tough nut. You got me stumped. Maybe we should have just stayed using pen and paper.
Jokes on you, I get paid for my five weeks of holidays.
Which is likely less than your full time rate, or it’s accounted for in total yearly “salary”. You’re paying for it somehow, even if it’s making a dollar less instead.
And think more the lowly workers, the ones that only get 2 weeks, and that’s because they’re forced to by laws.
Lowly workers? I had five weeks paid as a dishwasher. Make unions strong and reap the benefits.
They have their own issues, as described in my story in another comment.
They made a company waste millions of dollars replacing a job, than forced them to remove the machine and reinstate the worker.
They create problems where they are none, than celebrate when they win.
You are also fooling yourself if you don’t think you’re not paying for that time off another way. Most people would rather have the higher hourly rate.
Most people are morons who trade their entire lives for a slightly nicer bed to die in
I like the time off. I like having the ability to plan a trip every year (near or far), and not having to worry about how my bills are going to get paid.
Much better for my mental health than to work those weeks and not have anything to look forward to.
the contractor getting over double is a bad deal for the worker unless they are providing significant infrastructure like complex expensive tools and vehicles and such.









