5 ms·

I work 70 hours a week. Surely you wouldn’t outlaw my ethic? And if a run a company, surely I could require my employees to work 5 days, 40 hours? The solutio

I work 70 hours a week. Surely you wouldn’t outlaw my ethic? And if a run a company, surely I could require my employees to work 5 days, 40 hours? The solution is to let business owners switch to 4 day weeks and then let the free market sort it out.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
The free market would grind every last human into powder if it could. Labor regulations exist because you can’t trust humans to be various degrees of moral, decent, and empathetic. If labor regulations ratchet the work week down, you’d be free to offer 32 hour work weeks to employees, and pay them for overtime beyond that. Productivity has exploded over the last four decades (across various economies, developed and developing), it just hasn’t been shared equitably with labor. This effort contributes towards correcting that. Unions in the US brought about the 8 hour day and weekend, for example. https://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html https://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html High level, humans exist to live, not to work. The work is a means to economically support one’s life.
- core-utility 4y ago
  Humans are free to enter contracts of their own choosing, not forced by arbitrary government regulations. As many other commenters here have pointed out, negotiating oneself to a 4 day workweek (or other offers) is possible. I for one, choose to not take the 20% pay cut and will happily work a 40 hour work week. That's my choice.
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    I strongly encourage you to find a jurisdiction that agrees with your belief systems, versus making everyone else suffer due to yours. I welcome government protecting my labor rights from businesses, and I will vote every election for people who will steward such policy. I will even show up to help organize others, even if it provides myself no benefit whatsoever. The world libertarians describe of “everyone is free to enter into contracts” is the modern day version of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” We’re currently trying it, and to be frank, it’s pretty fucking terrible for a majority of workers. Perhaps that’s why support of unions in the US is at record highs (since 1965); the beatings continued until we were all out of morale. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2014.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2014.html (Refer to Key findings) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-highest-point-1965.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-hi... (crafted as politely as possible and not intended as a personal attack; my belief system is a natural result of robust amounts of consumed data, actively collected ground truth, and an overwhelming amount of empathy)
    - tastyfreeze 4y ago
      The current labor laws force somebody else's view of what is "full-time" employment on everybody. The ideal of "everybody is free to enter into contracts" doesn't result in crushing employees to dust. It results in businesses that treat their employees poorly going out of business. Competition is required for a healthy economy. In many markets the US has legislated to protect the incumbent businesses at the request of lobbyists. Such legislation allows businesses to treat their employees like shit because starting a competitor is costly and cumbersome due to regulations. We can have a free and open market and legislation to protect individuals from abuse by employers. Setting a required number of hours to work to qualify as "full-time" and a minimum wage are dictating what an individual is allowed to negotiate for themselves. A high number of work hours or extremely low pay are not abusing individuals if they agreed to work for a company knowing full well what they got in return. Allow people to make their own choices, whether you agree with them or not, and you will be surprised by the result.
      - toomuchtodo 4y ago
        Businesses that treat workers poorly don’t go out of business. They thrive. Amazon Retail. Walmart. Etc.
        tastyfreeze 4y ago
        People agreed to work for those companies knowing what they were in for. We already have laws to punish bad companies. They will be held accountable if they are found guilty of alleged crimes. Apparently the employees accept the abuse for their compensation. If they found the treatment unacceptable they would leave. Those companies are lobbying for higher minimum wages which will make it impossible for any company to compete with them. If you think their treatment of employees is bad now just wait until their employees truly have no where else to work.
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    In theory maybe. I bet most people don't have the luxury to chose a 80% job that still lets them pay their bills. Probably has to do with wages not tracking inflation which was caused by the same free market principles.
    - mantas 4y ago
      ... and then we get to core issue. Some people don't want 80% worktime for 80% pay, but 80% worktime for 100% pay :) What if many people will keep working 100% time but now get 125% pay? Inflation happens and we're back at square 1.
  - iroh2727 4y ago
    Some individuals, in some particular professions, may have this choice. But there are structural forces preventing this on a population level. Most people in the US live paycheck to paycheck as is, and it's not that they're spending frivolously. Our standards of living are based on what's needed for subsistence, yes, but also cultural and historical. Based on how we grew up and how our parents grew up, and how culture (e.g. hollywood) tells us we should be living. So most people are trying to live according to established standards. It's already much harder for the present generation to live at the standard of the previous generation or two (e.g. buying a home is less of a possibility). Choosing, then, according to our "freedom", 20% less pay would require also choosing poverty according to established standards of living (i.e. it would look like poverty). The narrative of "the individual" is a nice narrative from the perspective of the elites of our society to distract from the fact that, as always, there is class conflict and systematic forces in place. Of course, don't get me wrong: it is nice that there is some legitimate freedom on an individual level in the US. But for one, that legitimacy is overblown via mass media marketing (e.g. of course Jeff Bezos is going to tell his rags-to-riches story for everyone to hear). And more importantly, there is also the question of the overall structural forces that establish the population level structure.
    - ceeplusplus 4y ago
      Compare the Chinese household savings rate to the American one, and I think you'll find people in the US do indeed spend frivolously. Note that living in HCOL locations beyond your means is still spending frivolously. You don't have a right to live in NYC or SF. If more people realized that, then supply of low wage workers would drop in these places and wages would go up.
      - toomuchtodo 4y ago
        The Chinese public have invested in quicksand represented as a low quality housing stock pyramid scheme the CCP is barely holding together with control economy duct tape. Perhaps domestic consumption is lower than the US is due to this higher savings rate, but lets not pretend that savings is going into productive enterprises. With China aging very rapidly and a total fertility rate that will decline below 1 in the next 2-5 years, doesn’t make much sense to save for a future with limited returns (time value of life vs money and so forth). https://archive.ph/2022.05.23-232226/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-23/china-s-16-3-trillion-cash-hoard-shows-deepening-household-gloom https://archive.ph/2022.05.23-232226/https://www.bloomberg.c... > Home prices in China have been falling since September, Chinese stocks and mutual funds aren’t great bets these days either, there’s little access to international markets and cryptocurrencies are officially illegal. Instead, people are increasingly shelving their money in savings accounts, despite benchmark deposit rates staying at record low levels. > “No matter if you’re high net-worth or not that rich, the golden time of parking your money and letting your wealth grow, it’s gone,” said Wei He, an economist at Gavekal Research Ltd. in Beijing. > “There’s no other investment options,” said Clawde Yin, a 45-year-old Shanghai resident. “I’ve got no choice but to wait and see.”
  - bowsamic 4y ago
    You are looking at a Platonic ideal of an individual and disregarding their actual choice when you take into account their social environment. "Work a very exploitative job or die" is not freedom.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    > Humans are free to enter contracts of their own choosing, not forced by arbitrary government regulations. Difficulty: their counter-parties are often creations of "arbitrary government regulations" (corporations).
- wyager 4y ago
  > The free market would grind every last human into powder if it could. That's interesting, because it's not free market capitalists advocating for importing billions of people and cramming everyone into urban centers in the name of efficiency.
  - adrienthebo 4y ago
    That's the thing with free market capitalism - nobody needs to advocate for policies like moving people to urban areas in the name of efficiency. Instead people living in rural areas are forced to migrate to cities to make a living wage, thereby causing the negative scenario you're describing. Free market capitalism allows those with capital to dominate social decisions.
- mantas 4y ago
  Easy to game - declare lower lower base rate for 32 hours that will get to the same number with overtime surcharge? Different people have different relations to work in different stages of life. E.g. it makes sense to work your ass off while saving for downpayment for a home. Or saving for XYZ. Same people may scale down when kids come up.
mlaterman 4y ago
if the free market was capable of sorting anything out, unions would never have existed
- core-utility 4y ago
  Unions are inherently free market. If government controlled all labor, Unions would not exist.
  - ifsothen 4y ago
    That's not true. Unions are only practically possible because labor laws make it illegal to fire someone for advocating for unionizing, to fire someone for joining a union, and to fire someone for striking (kind of). The law also makes it legally mandatory to negotiate in good faith with a union. Without any of these government interventions, unions could never work.
- ilc 4y ago
  Not true at all. As a group workers have far more power than alone. So the "free market" for workers says they should unionize as soon as they have the power to, because they can drive the price of their services up. Monopolies happen even in free markets.
systemvoltage 4y ago
I prefer working all the time. It is way more fun to build stuff, especially if that's your own company.
- x86x87 4y ago
  Nope. Your system is flawed because you cannot extended it to all of our society. It's great it works for you but that's about it.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
happyopossum 4y ago
> The solution is to let business owners switch to 4 day weeks and then let the free market sort it out. We do "let" business owners switch to 4 day weeks, most don't. The free market has sorted it out.

toomuchtodo 4y ago

The free market would grind every last human into powder if it could. Labor regulations exist because you can’t trust humans to be various degrees of moral, decent, and empathetic. If labor regulations ratchet the work week down, you’d be free to offer 32 hour work weeks to employees, and pay them for overtime beyond that. Productivity has exploded over the last four decades (across various economies, developed and developing), it just hasn’t been shared equitably with labor. This effort contributes towards correcting that. Unions in the US brought about the 8 hour day and weekend, for example. https://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html https://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/8hourday.html High level, humans exist to live, not to work. The work is a means to economically support one’s life.

core-utility 4y ago
Humans are free to enter contracts of their own choosing, not forced by arbitrary government regulations. As many other commenters here have pointed out, negotiating oneself to a 4 day workweek (or other offers) is possible. I for one, choose to not take the 20% pay cut and will happily work a 40 hour work week. That's my choice.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  I strongly encourage you to find a jurisdiction that agrees with your belief systems, versus making everyone else suffer due to yours. I welcome government protecting my labor rights from businesses, and I will vote every election for people who will steward such policy. I will even show up to help organize others, even if it provides myself no benefit whatsoever. The world libertarians describe of “everyone is free to enter into contracts” is the modern day version of Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle.” We’re currently trying it, and to be frank, it’s pretty fucking terrible for a majority of workers. Perhaps that’s why support of unions in the US is at record highs (since 1965); the beatings continued until we were all out of morale. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2014.html https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2014.html (Refer to Key findings) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-highest-point-1965.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/398303/approval-labor-unions-hi... (crafted as politely as possible and not intended as a personal attack; my belief system is a natural result of robust amounts of consumed data, actively collected ground truth, and an overwhelming amount of empathy)
  - tastyfreeze 4y ago
    The current labor laws force somebody else's view of what is "full-time" employment on everybody. The ideal of "everybody is free to enter into contracts" doesn't result in crushing employees to dust. It results in businesses that treat their employees poorly going out of business. Competition is required for a healthy economy. In many markets the US has legislated to protect the incumbent businesses at the request of lobbyists. Such legislation allows businesses to treat their employees like shit because starting a competitor is costly and cumbersome due to regulations. We can have a free and open market and legislation to protect individuals from abuse by employers. Setting a required number of hours to work to qualify as "full-time" and a minimum wage are dictating what an individual is allowed to negotiate for themselves. A high number of work hours or extremely low pay are not abusing individuals if they agreed to work for a company knowing full well what they got in return. Allow people to make their own choices, whether you agree with them or not, and you will be surprised by the result.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      Businesses that treat workers poorly don’t go out of business. They thrive. Amazon Retail. Walmart. Etc.
      - tastyfreeze 4y ago
        People agreed to work for those companies knowing what they were in for. We already have laws to punish bad companies. They will be held accountable if they are found guilty of alleged crimes. Apparently the employees accept the abuse for their compensation. If they found the treatment unacceptable they would leave. Those companies are lobbying for higher minimum wages which will make it impossible for any company to compete with them. If you think their treatment of employees is bad now just wait until their employees truly have no where else to work.
- barbazoo 4y ago
  In theory maybe. I bet most people don't have the luxury to chose a 80% job that still lets them pay their bills. Probably has to do with wages not tracking inflation which was caused by the same free market principles.
  - mantas 4y ago
    ... and then we get to core issue. Some people don't want 80% worktime for 80% pay, but 80% worktime for 100% pay :) What if many people will keep working 100% time but now get 125% pay? Inflation happens and we're back at square 1.
- iroh2727 4y ago
  Some individuals, in some particular professions, may have this choice. But there are structural forces preventing this on a population level. Most people in the US live paycheck to paycheck as is, and it's not that they're spending frivolously. Our standards of living are based on what's needed for subsistence, yes, but also cultural and historical. Based on how we grew up and how our parents grew up, and how culture (e.g. hollywood) tells us we should be living. So most people are trying to live according to established standards. It's already much harder for the present generation to live at the standard of the previous generation or two (e.g. buying a home is less of a possibility). Choosing, then, according to our "freedom", 20% less pay would require also choosing poverty according to established standards of living (i.e. it would look like poverty). The narrative of "the individual" is a nice narrative from the perspective of the elites of our society to distract from the fact that, as always, there is class conflict and systematic forces in place. Of course, don't get me wrong: it is nice that there is some legitimate freedom on an individual level in the US. But for one, that legitimacy is overblown via mass media marketing (e.g. of course Jeff Bezos is going to tell his rags-to-riches story for everyone to hear). And more importantly, there is also the question of the overall structural forces that establish the population level structure.
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    Compare the Chinese household savings rate to the American one, and I think you'll find people in the US do indeed spend frivolously. Note that living in HCOL locations beyond your means is still spending frivolously. You don't have a right to live in NYC or SF. If more people realized that, then supply of low wage workers would drop in these places and wages would go up.
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      The Chinese public have invested in quicksand represented as a low quality housing stock pyramid scheme the CCP is barely holding together with control economy duct tape. Perhaps domestic consumption is lower than the US is due to this higher savings rate, but lets not pretend that savings is going into productive enterprises. With China aging very rapidly and a total fertility rate that will decline below 1 in the next 2-5 years, doesn’t make much sense to save for a future with limited returns (time value of life vs money and so forth). https://archive.ph/2022.05.23-232226/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-23/china-s-16-3-trillion-cash-hoard-shows-deepening-household-gloom https://archive.ph/2022.05.23-232226/https://www.bloomberg.c... > Home prices in China have been falling since September, Chinese stocks and mutual funds aren’t great bets these days either, there’s little access to international markets and cryptocurrencies are officially illegal. Instead, people are increasingly shelving their money in savings accounts, despite benchmark deposit rates staying at record low levels. > “No matter if you’re high net-worth or not that rich, the golden time of parking your money and letting your wealth grow, it’s gone,” said Wei He, an economist at Gavekal Research Ltd. in Beijing. > “There’s no other investment options,” said Clawde Yin, a 45-year-old Shanghai resident. “I’ve got no choice but to wait and see.”
- bowsamic 4y ago
  You are looking at a Platonic ideal of an individual and disregarding their actual choice when you take into account their social environment. "Work a very exploitative job or die" is not freedom.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > Humans are free to enter contracts of their own choosing, not forced by arbitrary government regulations. Difficulty: their counter-parties are often creations of "arbitrary government regulations" (corporations).
wyager 4y ago
> The free market would grind every last human into powder if it could. That's interesting, because it's not free market capitalists advocating for importing billions of people and cramming everyone into urban centers in the name of efficiency.
- adrienthebo 4y ago
  That's the thing with free market capitalism - nobody needs to advocate for policies like moving people to urban areas in the name of efficiency. Instead people living in rural areas are forced to migrate to cities to make a living wage, thereby causing the negative scenario you're describing. Free market capitalism allows those with capital to dominate social decisions.
mantas 4y ago
Easy to game - declare lower lower base rate for 32 hours that will get to the same number with overtime surcharge? Different people have different relations to work in different stages of life. E.g. it makes sense to work your ass off while saving for downpayment for a home. Or saving for XYZ. Same people may scale down when kids come up.

mlaterman 4y ago

if the free market was capable of sorting anything out, unions would never have existed

core-utility 4y ago
Unions are inherently free market. If government controlled all labor, Unions would not exist.
- ifsothen 4y ago
  That's not true. Unions are only practically possible because labor laws make it illegal to fire someone for advocating for unionizing, to fire someone for joining a union, and to fire someone for striking (kind of). The law also makes it legally mandatory to negotiate in good faith with a union. Without any of these government interventions, unions could never work.
ilc 4y ago
Not true at all. As a group workers have far more power than alone. So the "free market" for workers says they should unionize as soon as they have the power to, because they can drive the price of their services up. Monopolies happen even in free markets.

systemvoltage 4y ago

I prefer working all the time. It is way more fun to build stuff, especially if that's your own company.

x86x87 4y ago
Nope. Your system is flawed because you cannot extended it to all of our society. It's great it works for you but that's about it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

happyopossum 4y ago

> The solution is to let business owners switch to 4 day weeks and then let the free market sort it out. We do "let" business owners switch to 4 day weeks, most don't. The free market has sorted it out.