Pfff that’s coward numbers. I’ll do you one better:
We should get a 3-day work week.
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
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%.
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.
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.
Inequity is a global issue.
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.
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.
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.
3-day by now. 4-day was due before AI, so why would this great boost not make the difference?
3-day week, baseline annual salary across the board of $100,000, free health care for all and capital asset tax of 95% over $50 million
Who’s with me?
The people.
I’m down for that. I could be satisfied with only $50 million.
Heck. This should have happened in the 80’s.
Instead we got trickled on.
Get ready for more. We have the golden dome coming.
The forecast is sunny with a 100% chance of golden showers
Fucking clown of an actor was the most destructive US president to the planet, we still suffer the impact all over the world. The horror we have today is the evolution of the foundation he built.
It did, for a select few. Less than four days, even. You just had to be one of the finance sector aristocrats who laid claim to enough passive rents.
1880s. Industrial revolution.
I assume /s but seriously the 40 hour work week was 1940 so the eighties was four decades later. It was more than enough time and plenty of technological efficiency had come to pass. We should be doing round 3 at this point at least. I mean we are not that far from it being a century since.
“Technology is gonna work to improve us, not just the people who own the technology and the CEOs of large corporations,” Sanders said. “You are a worker, your productivity is increasing because we give you AI, right? Instead of throwing you out on the street, I’m gonna reduce your work week to 32 hours.”
0% chance this wouldn’t also come with a 20% pay cut.
40% pay cut, those server farms are expensive
100% pay cut, and you better say thank you
120% paycut, would you not pay a few hours of work for a whole day off?
A voucher for the company produced bag of rice, a place to sleep in the barracks next to the workplace and the “promise” of some definition of healthcare.
Sure, but that’s not what’s being discussed. Sanders is saying people deserve a 4 day work week at full pay.
Anyone can negotiate a 4 day work week for a 20% paycut. That’s not worth public figures time to discuss.
Except even with a 20% pat cut it might still be hard to get because any amount of personal time threatens your dedication to their profits.
I’ve had a difficult time negotiating this as an American mechanical engineer. There’s this bizarre norm of working long weeks even though we get paid way more than most jobs.
I just want health care and they won’t offer it at 32 hours. If I’m missing some obvious trick here, please inform me!
Same here, I’m a computer engineer trying to do 20-30/week. So far the only places that will even talk to me are where I formerly worked full time.
I’ve had multiple people suggest that I simply agree to work full time and then just not, but I’m not sure if those folks realize how stressful that can be.
I wish you luck in your situation!
I just want health care […] If I’m missing some obvious trick here, please inform me!
Move out of the US?
it’s almost as if the US is a shitty place to live O:
If productivity increases by x% they are going to fire x% of the workforce and give the saved money to themselves.
Or more realistically, they fire x+5 percent, just to see if you work slaves can’t be worked a bit harder.
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.
but then shareholders?
Fuck shareholders.
Ew
What?
It’s just gross is all. Don’t really want any of that shareholder action
I agree gross. But we can still eat them right?
But then they couldn’t pay 1/2 as many people as they used to while still expecting the same amount of work to get done.
Oh you sweet summer child. 1/2 as many people for double the amount of work
Hear hear!
Nah, the top 0.1% will just pocket 90% of the fruits of that extra productivity and the top 10% the remaining 10%.
The rest will either be fired or asked to do the part of the work those who were fired did for the same pay.
