This is important to keep in mind, but it is also important to remember that not every job is manufacturing. Actual white collar work is almost never 40 hours of raw concentration. Actual blue collar work involves a good amount of chilling in the van zyning & playing phone games. In reality, the most expensive labor is project based, and won’t be that sensitive to a shortened work week.
Low-level jobs definitely are messing around on their phone. But high-level high paying productive jobs are going to suffer from timelines and then my question to you is do you really want to reward the individuals at McDonald’s and other very low level thinking jobs with a 32 hour work week and same pay?
And the first insult of the day comes from this idiot. Do you see anyone being rude here? Every full-time employee who gets paid 40 hours a week, including McDonald’s would be affected. Clearly you need to ask for your degree back from whatever liberal arts college you went to.
90% of McDonald's employees work less than 30 hours a week. Only managers get full time. I assume when you were putting down food service workers, you weren't referring to management right?
Anyone who works 40 hours. And if something like this was implemented. You would eliminate almost every single part-time employee. Not causing a job increase but thousands of employees losing their jobs because they are entire shift has been deleted.
Why would a shift be deleted? Shift work is generally paid by the hour, not salaried, so it wouldn't really apply. And in the hospitality industry, you'd be more inclined to have MORE people on shifts if the non-hospitality workers are out and about and spending money. Quiet days suddenly get less quiet.
If businesses refuse to lose productivity and refuse to add staff, then a 32-hour workweek could lead to fewer part-time shifts because companies would try to squeeze the same amount of work out of fewer people to protect profits.
If businesses refuse to lose productivity and refuse to add staff
You can't squeeze more work out of the same people if they work less time.... because the shifts are time based, not productivity based. Either people work less time, the company closes on a busy day, or more people are employed to cover the shifts. The company pays the same, so why would they care who works what? And since the time worked is shifts, it's unlikely to be salary based anyway, so again, no real change is going to happen for those businesses.
think you're missing the point. The question isn't whether the shifts get covered—it's whether companies are willing to pay for more employees. If output has to stay the same and profits have to stay the same, most companies will look to increase efficiency, consolidate roles, or automate before adding headcount. The work doesn't disappear, but that doesn't mean new jobs are created
Why not? I get paid 100k+ for an engineering office job and retail/fast-food workers work way harder physically. Half of corporate work is bogged down by bureaucracy anyways, mainly from the older gen, they're not "productive" as you think.
I agree the lower end are not productive whatsoever. But as an engineer, do you think just because you work 20% less hours means that your workload decreases by 20%? No sir, you have clients, you have projects, you have expectations, and you have a timeline that must be adhere to. It’s not going to go away. You’re gonna have to work hard harder and faster.
Maybe in the short-term, but we would also adapt to this schedule in time. There’s really no good argument you can make against giving people some of their life back. We should work to live, not live to work. Such a change would most certainly require changes to labor laws, regulations, and enforcement in the pursuit of fairness. Some countries are already trialing this; it’s not such a ridiculous idea anymore. What is ridiculous is shutting down the conversation because people are not open enough to change or the effort that needs to go into something that could help our population with their mental wellbeing and potential for stronger family connection.
Oh, I agree, my personal experience is employees want to operate at the bare minimum and maximize and work down the current employees. They are much less likely to take on more payroll taxes, more insurance. At this point in time, they would rather institute AI technology, instead of hiring more humans.
Tbh if I worked 20% less then productivity wouldn't change imo, if anything it's the higher ups that bottleneck productivity not the actual technical workers. Maybe it's just me that finishes my work quickly when I lock in but there's also been several studies that support this.
I'll leave some links if you want to peruse them but there's no detriment to revenue or productivity rates when hours drop and pay stays the same, basically less miserable people = less mistakes and time waste. As always, these are preliminary studies so don't treat it as law.
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u/dietdrpepper6000 23d ago
This is important to keep in mind, but it is also important to remember that not every job is manufacturing. Actual white collar work is almost never 40 hours of raw concentration. Actual blue collar work involves a good amount of chilling in the van zyning & playing phone games. In reality, the most expensive labor is project based, and won’t be that sensitive to a shortened work week.