[qwerty456127]

32-hour workweek still is too much. For six-hour workdays would be a reasonable change. Specifically for the United States - also a mandatory 20-workday vacation (I live in the EU, heard Americans only have 2 weeks an that sounds nightmarish).

People need to have lives, not just jobs+recovery. Working for 5 consecutive days feels like living in the office and only coming home to sleep and do home chores - this doesn't even justify commuting.

[deafpolygon]

Not just “2 weeks”, most offer 10 days - and that has to include sick time off.

I once had 4 days sick, and my manager had to call me into a meeting with HIS manager to impress upon me that there was 6 months left to the year and I could only take 2 more sick days before they would have to count it against me on my performance review.

[qwerty456127]

By the way, I meant "foUr six-hour workdays would", sorry for a typo.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

They won't reduce the workweek without reducing your pay. There might be some 3-card-monte-style shuffling so that it seems like they didn't (at first), but no rational person (or company) pays more for less product.

In the United States, employees have no leverage.

[qwerty456127]

> but no rational person (or company) pays more for less product.

Spending time at the office looking busy not a product.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

If someone will consistently pay you to do it and you consistently agree to sell that, then it is a product to be bought and sold. Pretending otherwise just leads to mental illness, like leftism.

[exe34]

> In the United States, employees have no leverage.

If only there was some kind of organisation that workers could form to improve their collective bargaining power...

[SirMaster]

People negotiate things like a higher salary or more PTO etc every day. How can you say employees have no leverage?

[dfxm12]

Please put the snark down for one second. Unions have been intentionally eviscerated by both the government and the media (eta: as evidenced by at least one sibling comment). It took a heroic effort to start one union in one Amazon factory, and that was under "the most pro-union administration in American history" (and it is sad to realize that it might be near the top of that list).

Setting that aside, employees still have no leverage as many benefits that people rely on are tied to employment requirements. People can't take off time to retrain for a better job, have to come in when they're sick, etc., because if they upset their employer, they may lose their job which means losing food assistance they need for their kids, and employers know this...

This is a systemic issue.

[qwerty456127]

> have to come in when they're sick

To infect more people. This should be outlawed as sabotage and bioterrorism. If an employee would come in sick to my office I would be really mad at them, fire them if they do so twice.

[exe34]

> This is a systemic issue.

And the only way you will fix it is by collective bargaining. Not by giving up.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

If there were some kind of organization like that, mobsters would take it over, and they'd collude with the business to squeeze the workers for all they're worth. Believe it or not, some of us have first and secondhand experience with unions, so we don't pay much attention to the communist propaganda bragging about them. Besides, in an economy where many are unemployed and desperately seeking jobs, they tend to want fewer barriers to getting hired, not more. Only the most mature companies can afford the extra overhead of a unionized workforce... how many of the people here reading your comment work for startups? Do you think that they read it and say to themselves "gee, I know that we can barely afford to keep the lights on and we're just six, but I wish there was a union here holding the CEO's head under water until he gives us more raises"?

[collingreen]

I get that you don't like unions but this is a weird argument. Unions being corruptible isn't a great reason to imply companies should be able to do anything they want to their workers and the workers should placidly accept it. Neither is your next implication that some companies wouldn't be viable if they had to pay more so therefore paying more is bad.

In a labor market, companies aren't entitled to labor and laborers aren't entitled to jobs. If a company isn't viable then it isn't viable. If a job doesn't pay what you want, you dont have to do it. Things get complicated (intentionally?) when companies control large swaths of jobs at once or have outsized impacts on their employees' lives and future careers. Employees don't have nearly as much impact in the other direction (individually) and this asymmetry is the cause of lots of abuse historically. Unions are one way to help steady and maintain the labor market in order to keep it fair and efficient and powerful.

In general, things are worth improving even if there aren't perfect answers.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>Unions being corruptible i

Never really heard of one that didn't end up corrupted. Usually from the get-go. To call my argument "weird" tells me how little personal experience you have with unions.

>Neither is your next implication that some companies wouldn't be viable if they had to pay more so therefore paying more is bad.

Not some. Practically all companies. In tech, maybe only the FAANG set would be able to shoulder that burden.

>If a company isn't viable then it isn't viable.

Some companies are viable in one environment, but not in another. If you're changing the environment to make fewer companies viable, then you're putting more people out of work. This should be obvious. It isn't, I think, because some second grade teachers pass children who should have flunked out.

>In general, things are worth improving even if there aren't perfect answers.

Dimwitted people will try to "improve" things right until the world burns down around them. Any attempt to point out to them that this is occurring will be met with even more ambitious-but-ill-conceived attempts at improving things.

[exe34]

> Never really heard of one that didn't end up corrupted.

We have them across the pond and they work for us - they are us. We can run for election in them. We can run them.

> To call my argument "weird" tells me how little personal experience you have with unions.

Sounds like you are the one with a limited experience of the world. The world is much bigger than America. The idea that "unions can't work" is fed to you and you gobble it up.

> Not some. Practically all companies. In tech, maybe only the FAANG set would be able to shoulder that burden.

In Europe, companies have to pay a living wage and they still function. They just don't always turn into giant funnels to siphon wealth into the hands of the ultra wealthy. If that's failure, then let them fail!

> Some companies are viable in one environment, but not in another. If you're changing the environment to make fewer companies viable, then you're putting more people out of work. This should be obvious. It isn't, I think, because some second grade teachers pass children who should have flunked out.

We have unions in the UK/EU and companies are still viable. Only people who failed geography and don't realise there are other countries out there would think that.

> Dimwitted people will try to "improve" things right until the world burns down around them. Any attempt to point out to them that this is occurring will be met with even more ambitious-but-ill-conceived attempts at improving things.

Whereas the really clever people want to keep things the same, because they are terrified of change.

[qwerty456127]

> seeking jobs, they tend to want fewer barriers to getting hired, not more

Like it or not, this is worth highlighting indeed. As I heard unions are an extra barrier for job seekers: in some occupations a union also has to approve an employee, not just the employer and this can make getting in the occupation prohibitively hard. Whoever knows better pleas comment, especially if and why this is not a problem.

[exe34]

Of course it would be a problem. We don't have that on this side of the pond. Unions are meant to be democratic institutions - members can table motions and other members can vote. If members of a union vote to keep such a barrier for new employees, it's not the concept of unions that's broken. It's the members. Unions aren't some kind of demon you summon from the dark side.

[amanaplanacanal]

Depending on what you consider a startup, they employee less than 10% of full time workers in the US. The great majority of folks are not working for startups.

Possibly higher than that on HN though.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>The great majority of folks are not working for startups.

I was speaking to a particular audience, here, which isn't a randomized sample of the American workforce. And the sort of people who do the sort of jobs that we all do here, we're the ones that it's being talked about "shortening" the workweek... because for the other crowd, shortening the workweek happens when you piss off the assistant manager, and they only schedule you for 3 hours next week.

Additionally, you might consider that instead of focusing on the less than 10% that are startups, you should talk about the more than 95% that aren't gigantic fortune 100 companies with employee head counts numbering in the tens and hundreds of thousands.

[exe34]

> Believe it or not, some of us have first and secondhand experience with unions, so we don't pay much attention to the communist propaganda bragging about them.

So the UK and Europe are communist now?

[qwerty456127]

In the EU I've never heard of a single union other than itself. Every time I see the word "union" it's about the US. This doesn't mean they don't exists in the EU, in fact it some googling uncovers they pretty much do, yet somehow they appear invisible unless you look for them actively. Meanwhile it seems they are always hot in the USA as they get mentioned so often.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

>So the UK and Europe are communist now?

It this rhetorical?

[exe34]

No. I'm just baffled, it's like I'm talking to an LLM that was trained on capitalist propaganda.