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That was the idea behind the 35 hour work week in France. Didn't work out as expected: unemployment didn't go down. More recently, they had removed some tax br
by vladvasiliu 5y ago
That was the idea behind the 35 hour work week in France. Didn't work out as expected: unemployment didn't go down.
More recently, they had removed some tax breaks on overtime, but it turned out that that only hurt the people needing to work overtime; still no effect on unemployment. At least some of the breaks are now back.
I think the broader issue is that most people having to work crazy hours with multiple jobs don't do it because they're workaholics, but because they have to, as in they can't get a single "normal" job that pays well enough for whatever reason. I'm not sure that putting random limits on the number of hours worked will increase the hourly wages.
- Clubber 5y agoI think the underlying issue even above that is we've automated away the need for workers, yet people still exist. So let's say our economy only really needs 100 million people to do stuff and there are 150 million people, that's an obvious disparity. What really sucks is automation is cranking up but the next generation will be even bigger than the Millennials, which were much larger than GenX. So in the next few decades we'll have 160 million people and only need 95 million people, etc. This will keep happening until something breaks. At some point crimes of desperation will become rampant.