[shagie]

Calfironia is mandating that everyone currently employed when this goes through get a pay raise that can't be cut back.

This, however, wouldn't be able to practically impact future hires or readjustments of pay bands. So, all future employees would likely see a pay cut.

Bob was working at $20/h prior to the 32. When the change happens, Bob is now working at $25/h.

When Charlie joins working at 32h/w, Charlie will be hired at $20/h.

[dragonwriter]

> California is mandating

“The current text of the bill would mandate” is more accurate, it hasn't passed out of the policy committee in the first house yet, much less become law.

[daniel-cussen]

No, it's two different things, the hours and the wage. It's not just hourly wage. I can tell you companies are super square, making no deals where an employee can work a bit fewer hours a week, for a bit less money. If you want to work even 10% less hours, they cut your salary in half. And usually they start there and work on ways to cut you down again and again.

And modern jobs aren't productive for 40 hours per week of ass-in-seats. I can tell you my case is more extreme, the best work of my career as an algorithmist (like an inventor) amounts to like an hour over the course of over a decade. So Chilean ingenegreros comerciales (pathologically avaricious businessmen) see that and say, OK for that decade with one productive hour, we'll pay you one hour of wages. If you want a decade of wages, perform what you performed in that miraculous hour 30,000 times.

And in fact, now that the company gets 32 hours out of people, people can spend more time working the job market, and might need more Bobs and Charlies altogether to have the amount of authority their egos crave, so the job market tightens up, raising wages. I think this happened with previous hour decreases in like the twenties and thirties, it's been shown that is great for workers. That just came to a complete stop in the forties, no progress since then, despite Keynes for example predicting by now we'd be working twelve hour weeks. And getting more time outside the office, in particular by commuting one less day, that's huge. Employers lose 8 hours of the in fact negative returns on time spent in the office, so really they're losing nothing but power (which to be fair is what being a boss is truly all about), but they gain money from more creative workers, and then the worker doesn't gain 8 hours, he gains 11 hours, of the worst hours he spends in the office, when he's most tired. Then he goes home and does things that make him more creative when he goes back to the office, like a hobby or woodworking or homeschooling and charges his boss nothing for it, the boss ought to be grateful, do you know any who are?

So France imposed fewer hours specifically to get companies to hire more workers. California is not doing it with that in mind, but it will be a side-effect. French companies hated that, in fact making sacrifices to make the statistical results of that move look bad, diametrically contrary to the enormous benefits shown in the early twentieth century. You think companies can't collude on statistics?

So Purdue Pharma may call itself a pharmaceutical company but it's not, it's a mathematical research institute that uses brilliant new theorems involving the equals sign to make billions of dollars. So for OxyContin, they demonstrated to FDA that 7==12 and that theorem made them tens of billions, then they tried 60==100 and eureka! They made great money too with methylphenidate hydrochloride with that innovative theorem, how do they keep coming up with this stuff?

So then, theorem in hand, they first lobbied and who knows what else to reduce methylphenidate chlorhidrate dosage limits from 100 to 60, then they introduced methylphenidate hydrochloride as the only methylphenidate available above 60 milligrams, up to 100 mg, and made it extremely painful just motherfucking brutal for doctors to complete the form for patients who were prescribed more than the new limit that were grandfathered in. Like it's the most horrible thing you can ask a psychiatrist to do, nothing compares with that form literally bureaucratic sadism, Kafka for doctors. Their shit costs $500 a month, whereas methylphenidate chlorhydrate is under $20, generic. Basically patented methylphenidate chlorhydrate again seventy years after it was patented by Novartis.

[shagie]

This is all phrased in the context of a creative professional in an office environment.

What about teachers? office administrative staff? tech support? data center operations? building facilities and maintenance? bus drivers? health care professionals?

There are many situations where this represents an increase in labor costs or a reduction of services for that role. Tech support working only 32h/week means that the company needs an additional 20% staff to maintain the same coverage (or do you not offer external tech support on Fridays?).

Similarly, bus drivers working an 8h day means that either you need 20% more bus drivers or you are paying the existing ones an additional 12h of work (1.5x overtime for 8h) to maintain the same level of service.

Creative office workers will likely not see too much of a hit - especially if it means removing less productive meetings. However, the rest of the world that isn't working in an office would be severely impacted by this - especially people who depend upon parts of the industry such as public transportation or health care professionals where this represents an increase in costs.

[daniel-cussen]

You gave me two beautiful examples, the best examples, thank you very much.

Medicine (healthcare's real name) and driving.

Right so, that ties in to what I was saying, you do need more people for the menial jobs, 20% more bus drivers hired. It doesn't increase COSTS, it increases WAGES, not the same thing! Throwing away half the good food just for the sake of wasting it increases costs, hiring 20% more bus drivers increases wages, the money goes to a person, not to the garbage. And then, too, you have fewer people out of work as a percentage of society, so in fact they're much more productive because instead of resorting to theft and drug deals and borrowing money from good people to pay it back to usurers, and all the costs in uncertainty of being unemployed long term, the bus drivers share a job and are never unemployed.

And they're never depleting their body while unemployed, have you ever thought of the costs of poverty if they were actually charged? An employee can have his back broken in three minutes to make the employer thirty cents in additional profit and complain nothing for fear of being fired (happened to me in Mare Island at a brewery, I had to do all these defensive maneuvers to avoid work that would have caused spinal injury in hours). Like yeah there's the lawsuit, supposedly, tons of lawyers handy to give the employee the run-around, so fine there's a settlement, but does the boss ever completely repair the harm to the worker whose body he considered his like he rented it, good-as-new? He could right! So that's more than what the boss pays, a back injury Amazon-Warehouse style, I figure the suit goes for $300,000. But that's not what it costs to get it good-as-new, that would cost like $15,000,000 for a spine, if that, I think they can never fix a spine for real. Medicine cannot fix that. By having two drivers share the wage, none is ever unemployed and therefore desperate, so they never sacrifice their backs to the boss for a millionth of what it costs to repair them, what's the ROI on that, -99.9999%. So splitting a $70,000 job in half saves millions of dollars, I think that might just cover the "costs" you're talking about.

So that takes us to healthcare in America. As a matter of fact, doctors pretend they work crazy hours, and that's what you see in the felatory TV series like Dr. House and ER, Gray's Anatomy, but many just don't. Surgeons--it depends. I think old doctors in their extreme hazing of young doctors make them work fucked up hours but after the hazing they don't do shit. Don't work shit. Like don't work Fridays a lot of them, and even when you go see them, they are always fucking late. So that's time too, they're not working during those thirteen minutes they keep you waiting, then they take breaks between patients, their hours are mostly empty. They generally cut you short on minutes, like if you want to ask them three things they get pissy, they get pissy for all kinds of stuff, they're actually a boss, doctors are bosses, they boss around the nurse and the pseudo-nurse staff. They even boss around the patient, give you "doctor's orders" as they put it which are not orders in a legal sense. They nag you. They extort you. They judge you. Ask you super personal irrelevant questions. Few put themselves at the patient's service.

Sure some doctors are fine, but if half the waiters put flies in your soup deliberately you're not going to praise the other half for not putting flies in your soup, that's just what a waiter is supposed to do, does he want a 50% tip and praise for not putting a fly in my soup? No, instead it is legitimate to focus on the half that do put flies in your soup, don't correct me for not being fair and balanced. Like why do the other half of waiters tolerate the fly inserters?[1]

In fact 32 hour work-weeks, making doctors actually FUCKING WORK 32 FULL HOURS, and do their job for real, and answer questions for real, not play dumb so they don't do icky work they don't like, not try to shunt you into shitty treatments, not lie about side effects, not misdiagnose, no sadism like that's asking so much, basically not commit what is morally (and much more often than they realize, legally and provably) malpractice and negligence day in and day out would improve healthcare enormously. But it would reduce costs, unfortunately, and they want the opposite. Doctors are a union, they are always on strike, they've been on strike for a century. They make United Auto Workers look like sweatshop workers, Milton Friedman said so.

So thanks so much for those two examples, healthcare and transportation, in both of those the ROI for 32 hour work weeks is gigantic. I would have never realized how strong my arguments secretly were without your comment.

[1] In fact, the fly-inserting waiters are in charge and tolerate the normal waiters to deflect accusations, make those felatory TV series easier to be deceived by, do marketing calling themselves heroes, and release the pressure from the public hating them. They don't want that hatred. And to pin the blame on them when there's a scandal. And the fly-inserters hate them for doing their job properly.

[shagie]

There is currently a shortage of bus drivers in San Francisco. https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/12/29/bay-area-transit-look...

Reducing the hours to 32h/w doesn't increase the amount of employment when there are currently openings and the current staff is working overtime to meet the commitments.

Going to 32h/week and then overtime increases the amount of overtime that the currently employed get and makes the existing budget for public transportation worse (currently running a deficit - https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/SFMTA-s-budget-defici... ).

If you know anyone who is interested in becoming a muni driver, they're hiring immediately. https://www.sfmta.com/about-us/sfmta-career-center/become-tr...

Going to 32h/week doesn't solve either of these issues but rather exacerbates both.

---

While you're focusing on doctors, I'd like to draw attention to the nurses, lab techs, and similar. There's again, a shortage. https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2021/09/421366/california-faces-sh... https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2022/02/03/california-loom...

Reducing the hours that nurses and lab techs work before getting overtime, again, doesn't increase the availability of the existing staff but rather increases the labor costs or wages depending on the term you want to use.

---

The 32h/week proposal increases the amount spent without addressing the issues in a number of sectors - especially where there is an existing shortage. In areas that are publicly funded, this is going to increase the amount the government is spending or raise the corresponding costs to service those sectors (e.g. bus ticket prices go up 20%) or a corresponding reduction of services to meet the budgetary constraints.

Going to 32h would be good for society as a whole, but the flip a switch approach when there are existing labor shortages in key sectors is going to make those problems much worse until the underlying problems are resolved. Giving bus drivers and nurses an additional 12h of overtime pay a week isn't going to resolve that.

[daniel-cussen]

> There is currently a shortage of bus drivers in San Francisco.

Translation: there's a surplus of employers who don't want to bid up. Anything other than bidding up, no bidding up, no just no bidding up, never clear the market. No, drag the bosses kicking and screaming, not even, kicking screaming shitting their pants and swearing treacherous vengeance upon the auctioneer. The auctioneer, the worker who'll do the work, their enemy, for asking them for a raise instead of every single other thing they can do instead, which is everything, put a man on Mars before raising wages, invent a time machine before raising wages, elect a gestating fetus as Governor of California before raising wages, sell their sole to the shittiest loser among the demons of hell before raising wages, anything just don't ask for what makes perfect obvious sense.

Bid up or shut up, nobody can say there's a shortage, shortages don't exist. If you paid $10000000 a year for bus drivers would people go to California to drive? Yeah then there's no shortage.

Shortage. No, conspiracy to suppress wages. And if you can't pay what it costs to find someone, tell the truth that you're a shitty poor employer, don't say there's a shortage. There is just as much a shortage of bus drivers in California as there are Apple shares that cost one dollar. It's a surplus of poor and entitled...well not buyers, they don't buy anything, not even prospective buyers like I guess...bidders. Poor and entitled bidders, "pobres diablos de mala muerte."

Doctors there is a shortage because they restrict supply, that's a fair description. So in fact there's a commensurate surplus of medical-school applicants and foreigners who want to become American doctors, but they get turned away, that's a shortage. So in fact no amount of money can actually get America the supply of medicine it needs to have dignity, no amount of money can "incentivize" these overeducated losers to make America healthy. That's a shortage. Going back to the bus driver, would people move into California to drive for ten million dollars a year? Yes, and there would be more drivers, no shortage. "Oh but that's not a reasonable salary" It is if you say there's a shortage! Whereas with doctors, would there be more doctors if you paid ten million a year in salary? No, there would not. A billion a year? No, there would not. So in fact it would backfire, the more America spends on healthcare the less of it it gets, shortage.

[daniel-cussen]

> put a man on Mars before raising wages

I realized this is literal. America put a man on the moon to win the space race, meaning fight communism, meaning not raise worldwide wages. Also to prove they could do it and be historic beyond any appeal, but that's not why NASA got the budget they got.