We should get a 4 day work week anyway even with reduced hours. It is fucking ridiculous people think that it is possible to do anything but the simplest tasks actively for 8 hours without breaks and be productive. People who think that are either stupid or have never spent a single second analyzing what they do in their day. Practically all companies already operate with their employees getting all work done within a few hours and lounging away with tiny bits of looking busy throughout the day. Might as well let them go home and rest so they can have higher motivation, clearer minds and more productivity. It’s a win win.
Studies show productivity has a sharp drop off after 6 hours iirc
Mine starts badly, tails off a little in the middle, and the least said about the end the better, but other than that I always give 100%.
Let’s make anything over 32 hours double pay.
4 days is kinda outdated, like how the $15 minimum is so long overdue it’s moot. 24 hours. 3 days working vs 4 days living. We deserve to live more than we work.
Absolutely agree. They wanna complain about entitlement. They think they’re entitled to 3/4 of all of our lives.
Suppose that at a given moment a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
—Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness, 1935
If AI is so productive, we should have Unuversal Basic Income, and free college/vocational education for anyone who wants it.
America? Educating their population? For free??
We could have done this 150 years ago when oil gave us 100 times more energy back than it took to extract it.
Humans are a defective species, we must see others suffer.
Nah it’s just that the socio-economic system we’re stuck with that literally incentivizes ghoulish behavior that causes suffering. Change the system, change humanity.
I think you may have cause and effect inverted.
Well yes, ghouls were the ones who invented capitalism, but before that we had feudalism, which was even more ghoulish - but guess what, we don’t go around drawing and quartering criminals anymore, so it looks like I’m right. Change the system, change humanity.
Nah, we just change the methods, the underlying mechanism is the same. For example, you need to win so you wrote “looks like I’m right”, instead of clobbering me. But that innate human need to triumph over the other is still there.
To be fair, we kinda did. Don’t get me wrong, workers are still heavily exploited now, but we’ve come a long way since then. At least we have minimum wage and some degree of workers rights now, even if we still have a way to go.
Hopefully this current productivity boom can continue to push us along that path without driving us further into techno dystopia.
No, no, no. They’ll just make it so that each of us is expected to do more since AI is “helping” us. Success under capitalism just leads to more work. The number has to keep going up. If they get their arms twisted they may give us a day off, but they will absolutely decrease the pay. My fear is that they would also go, “Oh, well, since you’re not working 40 hours a week, even though it’s the same work, so no benefits for you 🤷🏿♀️.”
Hear hear!
It’s already cooked Bernie. It’s a charred dead carcass.
Fair, but the guys a politician - beating dead horses is too often just part of the job.
That’s cool and all but what about maximum salary hours?
Not enough people talk about this.
When I found out how that worked I was like
“Lemme get this straight…they get whatever they want out of you, as long as they want, exempt from overtime, for a flat yearly fee? But of course you get benefits and vacation time you are socially stigmatized from using…Yeah that’s a scam.”
What’s with the obsession with renting/owning people?!?
Meanwhile, in Germany: There are a lot of unemployed people, and there are a lot of people who want a four-day week, so what we desperately need is working longer hours.
?
Oh. I missed the sarcasm. But yes, that is how conclusions work in my country, as well.
Yeah, they just like squeezing out some more. Why should the efficiency gains of the last decades help the people, after all? No, what we really need is richer billionaires.
Pfff that’s coward numbers. I’ll do you one better:
We should get a 3-day work week.
Manager: You’re right! AI Makes me as productive as half my team, so I’m firing half of them AND working a 4 day work week!
Manager in two weeks:
Please come back, I can’t do all this myself!
fuck yeah
We should already be on a fucking 3 day with increased pay with how much productivity has gone up, instead we’re just getting ass raped harder and harder while rich assholes keep getting richer and richer with no end in sight.
with how much productivity has gone up
How has productivity gone up?
We should already be on a fucking 3 day
Are you aware how the 5-day work week happened? It wasn’t something that workers just got when it started to make sense. There were literal street battles between striking unionized workers and cops. People were hanged by the government. It took decades.
If you want that change to happen, you need to form or join a union. Right now in the US only 12.2% of workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. That’s the 4th lowest in the OECD, with only Mexico, Costa Rica and Turkey lower. Canada is at 31%. Switzerland, one of the most right-wing countries in Europe is at 45%. Spain is at 80%, France is at 98% and Italy is at 100%.
Once people are covered by CBAs, the unions need to flex their power and go on strike.
Complaining on the Internet is not going to cause the situation to change.
No, you don’t undestand 😡
One day I’ll be a billionaire too and I can be the one that ass rapes others 😎
Tap for spoiler
/s
I read the following sentence a day ago and it’s stuck with me:
We europeans shouldn’t laugh at the suffering of the American people, just because we get fucked in the ass with slightly more lube.
Well yeah absolutely, answering as an European.
The issue is that it’s so comfy for most they don’t see any issue. Like at all.
12.2% of US workers are covered by a collective bargaining agreement. In Europe the lowest rate is Greece at 14.2%, but most other countries are much, much higher. Right-wing Hungary is at 21.8%. Bend-over-backwards-for-US-tech-companies Ireland is at 34%. The home of the bankers, Switzerland, is at 45%. No other European country is below 50%, and the biggest economies France is at 98%, Germany is at 80% and Italy is at 100%.
Europeans may not be fully satisfied with the balance of power between corporations and workers. But, it is doing so much better than the US.
Inequity is a global issue.
