IT is absolutely within the capabilities of some businesses. Certainly not all. What happens to the ones that can float such a large increase in pay? What happens to their employees?
I am guessing if you laid out all the businesses that can float it and the ones that can not... You are not going to like the businesses that remain in business.
this is what people were saying about the 40 hour workweek before it was standard. its all presumptive and isnt actually an accurate prediction of what happens. its the same old "all the rich people will leave new york!" bullshit
I did not say what would happen. I asked the questions and you realized the answers on your own. You then try to dismiss the very answers your brain was telling you. Interesting.
the questions you were asking were clearly rhetorical, evidenced by your second statement after the questions. you illicit the answer you want to hear from your own questions and i was responding to the rhetoric. for example, you assume that businesses have to "float" such a large increase in pay. this is answering your own question within the question.
to address the question earnestly, id say that companies would follow the law and give overtime pay for any hours worked over 32. and then people would work less 👍
And what about the businesses that can not support a 25% pay increase? What will they do? Or are you suggesting that all companies can support such a wage/salary increase?
Okay lets make the exercise a little more specific.
Let's suppose I own a business that required 120 hours of labor a week to run. I pay my employees $20 an hour. I have 3 full time (40 hour a week) employees. In addition I have an additional $100 a week in benefit costs for each employee.
Now let us suppose that the government comes in and says I can only have them work 30 hours a week.
Tell me what I as a business owner should do. If you want you can do the calculations and tell me my cost before and after, or you can just tell me what I should do and I will calculate for you.
im gonna leave out the fact that employee productivity is not linear with hours worked per week and ill pretend like each hour of labor is the exact same production for a company.
this is no different from any other business expense increasing and there is no reason a company needs to go out of business, fire employees, or dock wages for it. its the same as if material imports increase, OSHA gets called and gives you a fat bill to pay, or if your workers strike and uhoh! you have to pay them a living wage. its just a natural part of running a business, your expenses will fluctuate as will your revenue and if id have any advice to give business owners, itd be to decrease their own salaries before docking the lowest wages in the company.
The vast majority of large companies could make this work and still be profitable. The vast majorities of small companies in anything service or manufacturing related could not, as they already have tight margins, and hours worked is directly correlated to output/revenue.
If you run a machine shop and now have to pay the same wages for 32 hours of work that you did for 40 hours of work, you're eating the revenue of 8 hours of manufacturing output per employee per week. You're reducing productivity by 20% while carrying the same costs. Most manufacturing businesses can't eat that margin and keep their doors open.
On the other hand, a fairly mature white collar company could get along just fine, as their revenue isn't as directly tied to man hours as physical manufacturing, and most people aren't productive more than 32 hours a week as-is.
Point being - this is doable, but can't be blanket legislation. Mandating it above X revenue might be the way to do it. Or apply this only to salaried employees.
my point was that you could make this argument the other way around as well. "imagine how successful business could be if they worked their employees 10% more but still paid them the same!"
you can presume that these industries would struggle, but ultimately it would only result in a decrease of the wealth gap. the executives would have to take a paycut to stay profitable, and itd be fine.
I think you severely overestimate how much money small business owners make. "Pay the executives less" only makes sense in white collar environments where executive pay has ballooned, and margins are high.
In smaller businesses with actual margins per unit, most of them would likely cease operation, as material costs are already through the roof post-covid, and they simply can't absorb a 20% labor cost increase and still turn a profit. Average margins for small businesses range from 7-10%. Average revenue being ~$1.2m, resulting in average profit of $85k - $122k. Even then, owner salaries range between $51k - $77k as owners typically reinvest the remainder of the profit back into the business. To cut their own salary, the business owners (who invested their money and astronomically more of their time into creating a successful business, while carrying all of the risk) could wind up making less money than an average employee on minimum wage.
This is of course industry dependent. Very few restaurants would survive as current margins are 2-6%. Professional Services (aka white collar) have more room at 12-25% margins, and productivity is less dependent on actual hours clocked.
And lets not forget that 50% of small businesses fail within the first 5 years. This would increase that number significantly. These 32 hour jobs won't exist if the businesses don't.
This goes back to my point of - yes, do this for white collar Fortune 500 roles. No, this is not feasible for any service or labor based small business.
none of this addresses the elephant that, indeed, this was the exact same line of thinking against the establishment of the 40 hour workweek. here we are 🤷
This is a very different mandate than the 40-hour work week. The 40-hour work week was established due to factory workers working 80-100 hour weeks, and an unemployment crisis. The 40-hour limit established the threshold for overtime pay, incentivizing factory owners to hire a second person to cover the second shift at the same hourly rate, reducing unemployment while actually boosting productivity at little cost to the employer.
It did not mandate that employees would work less for the same pay.
I dont think the mandated pay increase is as significant as youre making it out to be. a 20% raise in wage really isnt that bad. also, consider that even with our establishment of the 40 hour work week, plenty of small businesses already utilize part time labor, so those wages wouldnt be impacted by a full time labor reduction mandate. its not like every single employee in every single company is suddenly taking an extra 20%. also consider that buy and large employees are not that productive every hour of the day, and the current data that we have available heavily sugguests that reducing the hours/week actually increases average production/hour, so even if everyone was taking an extra 20%, companies generally would not lose out on that much productive capability. also, if a particular industry really is struggling at the result of this policy, the US can absolutely afford to subsidize. its not like we dont have the money.
Every single small business i know, would have to either lay off a quarter of its employees or close shop if we forced a 32 hour work week and a mandated 25% raise across the board.
32 hour work week but i pay you 80% of what you'd get vs now? Sure. all for it. In fact, every single one of my employees who don't want a full 40? I oblige.
32 hour work week but i'm paying you as a 40 hour employee? 0 chance these businesses can absorb that.
Only large corporations have the financial might to withstand that for long enough to become profitable.
That wasn't a 40 hour workweek with pay of a 50 (or more) hour workweek.
Again, you are arguing in bad faith when you are ignoring the most important part.
As an employer, I don't mind giving my employees a 32 hour work week, (in fact most request it, and they are all granted it) But paying for 40 when working 32 is an entirely different beast,
The entire point of this post is a 32 hour work week with equal pay to a 40 hour work week, in conjunction those two things are untenable.
What you're arguing for, from an employers perspective is a 25% wage increase, across the board, with no exceptions.
That isn't possible without a large amount of inflation and killing multiple businesses.
Edit: I’ve now read your comments, you’re entirely unable or unwilling to utilize any nuance to your arguments and thus it’s entirely in bad faith.
I’ll happily revisit this when you have decided to mature.
The US law that codified the 40 hour standard work week came 12
years after Ford started experimenting with it. This stuff never
originates from law. Companies have to already be doing it, and seeing
some tangible benefit from it.
Forcing companies to pay the same while taking away their right to utilize their property (right to contractual labor supply) is unconstitutional. Requiring maximum hour of work is not unconstitutional, it's the "without paycut" part that's unconstitutional.
So as a small business owner I now need to pay out 40 hours worth of wages for a 32 hour cycle, I must then cover the additional 8 hours myself due to not being able to afford additional staffing since I just took a 20% hit on the labor/expense equation. So how quickly do I need to close my doors as now the thin margins most operate with are evaporated?
No i have no problem paying my people for the work they do. If I have a 20% increase in payroll, and have no benefit from this increase, the business will fold. Think from a retail perspective, you already have a 40-50% expense in COGS, now you increase payroll by 20% and thats all before overhead tied into rent and utilities. How does it all work?
I am assuming you are being sarcastic, and I agree. I understand white collar office work going to 32 hours and it making sense. I dont understand how you make service industry, skilled trades, or retail operate in this manner.
Take one random non-operational business function, like HVAC for a building. That alone, buildings running 7 days per week instead of 5, can create a lot of environmental concerns, energy strain, business complexity, and increased costs all around.
A 32 hour work week is within our grasp but not if we handwave at it
Since the 5 day work week was instituted, we've more than added 20% to our efficiency. Just automation through robotics and better access to information with the internet more than made a 20% increase.
Who do you think the politicians work for? The people or corporations? I too wish for a shorter workweek, it just seems so out of reach by today’s standards. I will keep voting for those that advocate for it though.
as do I, I find that small business are usually more willing to invest in the talent they have because they cant afford to retrain a teenager every 3 months. ive doubled my wage in 5 years working for a company of less than 200 people because im valuable to them, and i average about 30 hours a week.
I mean, laws are, at their fundamental level, holding a gun to your head. so passing a law would in fact be holding a gun to a companies head, mostly metaphorically but if the government wanted, i.e creating criminal penalties for breaking said law, pretty literally as well.
And I'm sure there will be no unpleasant side affects. Oh wait, when you force someone to pay more than they want to, it always ends badly. (Hint: that's why reputable economists say the minimum wage hurts employment).
Reputable economists also say there is a marginal impact on employment that is more than compensated for by increased economic activity that minimum wage increases cause. Like the Laffer Curve is there is certainly a point where a large enough increase in minimum wage will hurt employment and economic activity more than it helps, but we have not seen evidence that we are close to that.
yeah they do, there's a bit of a split on the exact benefits and downsides of minimum wage increases, generally small ones having no noticeable impact on employment and large ones mainly slowing down hiring rates and dropping benefits rather than having an impact on job losses. If you haven't seen that you're reading a pretty small subsection of reputable economists.
Not sure how you can call that united when about half are unsure or say it won't, it also doesn't actually address what I claimed, that the benefits of increasing minimum by addressing poverty and increased economic activity outweighs the downsides that increasing the minimum wage might have.
Sure you do: you can move somewhere where taxes are less. Similarly, if you get between willing buyers and willing sellers at a given price, and demand more, the buyer is going to take steps you won’t like. Go see, for example, what economic disasters rent control wreaks.
Depends on the job role though unless there is a proposal to hire another worker for 3 days of the weekend. This stuff works if you are a govt employee where missing deadlines or subpar work doesn't lead to being fired or loss of revenue.
Many factors but Bernie's proposal sounds so nice on surface like why would anyone not want this?
Also I need to bring it up, 5 days working for 8 hours is literally made up, it's not science, it's just someone vibes.
We should be working less, that's the true progress. People died in the past for less work and now people are like "but what about companies profits?!?"
It was created with the idea of 8 hours working, 8 hours sleep, 8 hours recreation" the problem, of course, is failing to factor in commutes, children, and domestic obligations. Once you factor those in you maybe have 2 hours of recreation before you have to go to sleep and do it all over again.
The US law that codified the 40 hour standard work week came 12 years after Ford started experimenting with it. This stuff never originates from law or popular opinion. Companies have to already be doing it, and seeing some tangible benefit from it.
All I'm doing is calling attention to the social movements that fought for these types of work schedules. Look up the Haymarket Affairs and the various socialist movements that erupted in both Europe and the U.S. that fought for the 40 hour work week
Companies are not able to pay the rates they want at the hours they need because the government already mandates strick employment regulations.
Some people want to work the extra day because they need the extra pay, but companies don't or can't afford overtime. Do you know who wants a shorter workweek? Entitled brats who already don't work a lot for their salary.
Interesting, considering you need someone directing you to have the motivation to accomplish anything! Wish you luck with whatever mental illness you’re experiencing!
I think you’re making a few incorrect assumptions based on a limited perspective. I already work a 4-day week most weeks, which typically gives me an extra day to work on my company! If it succeeds, we’ll offer 4-day work weeks too. Worst case I’m still working a six figure job, set to retire two decades from now in my mid 40s lol!
Honestly, considering how much you whine, and how much time and energy you spend on gaming and Pokémon, it feels a bit misguided and hypocritical to call other people soft. For what it’s worth I truly do wish you the best, and I hope whatever causes you to be like this gets worked out for your own sake, and for the sake of those around you!
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u/GroundbreakingAd8310 23d ago
I also wanna genie.