So I am seeing more and more of ideas like this; but I feel the need to challenge them a bit.
Not the ideal; work less, have more fulfilling lives - I am all in.
But all of these initiatives are focused on the wealthier office workers and sometimes factory/shift workers who are non-customer facing. But it totally ignores the service industry which is a huge part of our society (and arguably even more so if we end up working less!).
You will still want an Uber after 5pm, or a shop or restaurant to be open on a public holiday. 4 Day work weeks, shorter hours - all great ideas but all ideas that either negatively impact the poorest portion of our society. Even universal basic income, which ostensibly would have a positive impact there would still not allow those individuals to work less.
Which is why my challenge is always; first we need to automate out the poorest roles in society (and then give them UBI obviously) before we solve our own lengthy work weeks.
> You will still want an Uber after 5pm, or a shop or restaurant to be open on a public holiday.
No one says this change doesn't apply to people in those industries or in shift work. You have to remember that the idea is more to reduce work from 40 hours per week to something like 32 hours per week (30 in OP's case).
In this case, you can still have restaurants open late, it would just mean the schedule would be shorter for all staff.
> But all of these initiatives are focused on the wealthier office workers and sometimes factory/shift workers who are non-customer facing. But it totally ignores the service industry which is a huge part of our society (and arguably even more so if we end up working less!).
The service industry could make up for the lack of coverage by hiring another person. Giving jobs to more people.
I do believe that the question of having a livable wage (supplemented or not by UBI) is a separate issue that should not impede giving people their time back.
I still don't buy that. In an office job you can find cost neutral ways to cut hours: a lot of people in this thread have said they would work harder in less time to achieve the same outcome, as a really simple example.
That's patently not an option in the service industry. You help people cut hours but now a restraunt, say, needs a percentage more staff (each of whom comes with a salary overhead) at a higher hourly wage.
This is before you consider the scale of it. About 85% of UK jobs are in the service sector. There is a massive labour shortage in key service areas anyway. At the same time, highly leveraged office workers cut their hours and have more leisure time, so service industry demands go up.
It's just not an easy pitch to make in my book. If I wanted to cut my hours I absolutely could come up with some automation and investment to help me do that, and my employer might agree to invest in that because I have high value and strong individual leverage.
That is just untrue for the vast majority of the service industry.
> ideas that either negatively impact the poorest portion of our society
I don't see the connection here, why would it affect the poorest?
I don't think people mean that all shops close earlier, just that they'd need to hire more people to cover a reduced shift.
> we need to automate out the poorest roles in society
I think we've done that many times in history but it has never led to a reduced workload, usually the company will take the increased profits and the ones that lost their job need to find something else
I fundamentally disagree; the smartest and wealthiest of our society should also be working hard to make the lives of the poorest better.
You are sort of making my point; proposals like this assume that those who contribute "less" are less valuable - but of course that is only true on one scale.
As a though exercise; if someone is physically disabled to the extent they cannot work and need regular care should they a) live hand to mouth and unable to afford non-essentials? Or b) should they be comfortable and capable of indulging in luxuries.
Currently our society says they have zero value so (a). I argue that it should be (b)
> there won't be an incentive to reward people which provide zero value.
I am assuming you mean "who don't work" when you say provide zero value. The poor encompass more than just people living in a cardboard box in some alley. There are poor people living paycheck to paycheck who are barely able to afford food AND a roof over their head. A poor person can be a single parent with two kids who works two minimum wage jobs just to be able to provide for their family.
Really telling when a person equates low wage with providing no value in society. So much for "essential workers" being forced to work in-person during the pandemic
Thanks for this. There is a bit of tone deafness in this thread with everyone calling for fewer days of work so they can relax and then go to the cafe or linger over dinner while also wanting all those businesses to be open for them at all times. If we want to change the societal norms around working hours it has to include everyone, not just software developers or else it isn't going to stick.
Though honestly this thread is making me think that we need to basically reinvent the Sabbath. I'm old enough (mid 30s) to remember when most everything was closed on Sundays and now it's just another day for errands and brunch. Even holidays that were considered sacrosanct like Christmas and Thanksgiving you can now go to the store or they have absurd opening hours the day after (black friday) so that retail workers can't even enjoy the Holiday because they have a 4am shift the next day.
We're seriously out of whack here in the US.
Service folks almost always work in shifts already, many are part time. One of the benefits of moving up the ladder is to get holidays off. I think this is the only way it could possibly work.
Agree that most people should have say, Sunday off, but there are many import things that must have 24/7 or close to it coverage. Groceries (every day), medical personnel, firefighters, etc. Lot's of nurses work 3*12hr shifts per week for example.
Yes and it is interesting that the response to my comment is "oh we meant them too". Which I know is said in good faith but it fundamentally shows a disconnect from how a huge portion of our society lives.
How many of us would forgo a Starbucks on Friday in order to have that 4 day week?
I want a way to get where I want to go after 5pm, sure, but reduced working hours means, necessarily, that for a greater portion of the population than is currently the case, that will not be an individual, human-driven conveyance per party seeking transportation, and that's fine.
> 4 Day work weeks, shorter hours - all great ideas but all ideas that either negatively impact the poorest portion of our society.
No, they don't. Your argument that they do is based on the assumption that they are not applied to that group, which is odd because they are exactly the group (unlike elite workers who are generally exempt) to whom wage and hour laws apply.
> or a shop or restaurant to be open on a public holiday.
Actually, I want far fewer shops and restaurants open on public holidays, of which I would like to see more than currently exist.
> Even universal basic income, which ostensibly would have a positive impact there would still not allow those individuals to work less.
Yes, it will. It would drive up the costs for the wealthier people that would like the things provided by them working as much as they currently do, which would lead to a mix of reductions I working hours and downward movement of wealth, both of which benefit the poorer workers.
> Which is why my challenge is always; first we need to automate out the poorest roles in society (and then give them UBI obviously) before we solve our own lengthy work weeks.
That's backwards. We change the general workweek standards (which aren't, after all, hard limits but when, for non-exempt workers, extra costs for the employer and extra pay for the worker in the form of mandatory overtime compensation kick in), and establish UBI funded by taxes on capital income, and then the resulting pressure on labor costs drives automation, with the increasing pre-tax aggregate returns to capital as labor is minimized in production increasing the UBI funding bucket.
> Your argument that they do is based on the assumption that they are not applied to that group
I'd qualify it more as; I don't believe these ideas are easy to implement for that group vs. non-service roles.
Now, I am based in the UK so things may vary around the world but I disagree with your assertion about the wage & hours laws.
For example; here we have a maximum working week of 48 hours. This was supposed to help people in the service industry but actually it mostly helps office workers. We have leverage to kill off the crazy hours expected in creative roles. However, service workers have wage pressure to sign waivers to let them work more than the 48 hours (because minimum wage is not a living wage).
These things have to work in tandem to drive up lower-income wealth but they just don't - so I object to other initiatives which don't directly address the problem.
Anything that says "just hire more people" is an unsustainable plan which ignores the economics (most people work in service industry, and mostly in part time roles). The outcome of increasing demand on that industry OR forcing the full time workers to work less is that the part-time workers would need to work more.
> No, I don't.
Great! We all need this attitude.
But I assert the vast majority will still want their 10pm Starbucks, Friday restaurants and Sunday shopping trips (also, it's not a high-wage sacrifice - the majority are also service workers and they also want these things, it's a circular economy!).
Oddly we are probably largely in agreement; I just think we need to be more radical in how we fix this otherwise we will just have another cycle that depresses the lower-income workers opportunities.
> However, service workers have wage pressure to sign waivers to let them work more than the 48 hours
US wage and hour laws are not generally individually waivable, as the entire point of wage and hour laws is to address power imbalance between workers and their employers. When talking about the length of the legal workweek in the US, the discussion is of laws as to when overtime compensation for non-exempt employees is required, the added cost creates pressure on employers to limit excess working hours of non-exempt employees.
If UK wage and hour laws are waivable the way you suggest, that suggests a fundamental problem with the structure of the law which renders any discussion of fine tuning their coverage irrelevant.
Interesting point; but I think the US laws have similar effect in different ways.
For example; the overtime laws just create incentive to work more than 40 hours a week. On average US workers work much more than other OECD countries.
This has to happen first. Automation will put them out of work way faster than the UBI system will come online - and that is assuming the UBI system is not completely stonewalled to begin with.
As soon as we know the work is definitely automatable, we should start pushing for UBI. Once people who do not want to work leave the workforce, everything will get better.
I think people get so wrapped up in the concept of "free loaders" that they overlook how sandbagged our economy is by forcing those same people to engage with it.
We dont cull the weak anymore, which is fantastic, but they are still weak. We need to care for them and get them out of the way of people trying to accomplish things.
Not the ideal; work less, have more fulfilling lives - I am all in.
But all of these initiatives are focused on the wealthier office workers and sometimes factory/shift workers who are non-customer facing. But it totally ignores the service industry which is a huge part of our society (and arguably even more so if we end up working less!).
You will still want an Uber after 5pm, or a shop or restaurant to be open on a public holiday. 4 Day work weeks, shorter hours - all great ideas but all ideas that either negatively impact the poorest portion of our society. Even universal basic income, which ostensibly would have a positive impact there would still not allow those individuals to work less.
Which is why my challenge is always; first we need to automate out the poorest roles in society (and then give them UBI obviously) before we solve our own lengthy work weeks.