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This is such a weird disconnect between middle class white collar workers and the rest of the country. I know a bunch of people working 60-80 hours a week, usua

This is such a weird disconnect between middle class white collar workers and the rest of the country. I know a bunch of people working 60-80 hours a week, usually doing multiple jobs, just to make ends meet. It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts. It would be interesting to see what this does to social cohesion.

rightbyte 3y ago
Are rents too high? I mean unless living in rent controlled apartments I don't understand how people can afford working at normal jobs in most metropolitan areas.
euroderf 3y ago
> I know a bunch of people working 60-80 hours a week, usually doing multiple jobs, just to make ends meet. Is their hourly rate anywhere close to 15$/hour ?
mlyle 3y ago
If we adopt a 4 day / 36 hour workweek as normal, we can expect substantial social benefits: - Reduced commuting, etc. - Improved health / quality of life. - Reduced supply of labor (due to overtime kicking in) should push up equilibrium price. > It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts This is the nature of any job where there's substantial leverage effects: if your work can make a hundred people fractionally more productive, you're going to reap outsized rewards. LLMs are just going to amplify this, by devaluing a lot of work but allowing other people to be fantastically more productive thanks to their leverage.
- ttoinou 3y ago
  Lets make it 1 day workweeks then. The benefits will be even greater
  - mlyle 3y ago
    Alternatively, let's go back to sweatshop, all-day-long backbreaking labor. (It turns out this style of argument is not very useful). We have a high enough standard of living to shoulder the downsides of 10% fewer working hours (which should lower productivity by less than 10%; perhaps much less) in exchange for the upsides. Automation poses substantial risk of high unemployment; shortening the work week a little is a good hedge (and offers other benefits).
    - gottorf 3y ago
      No need to make any policy changes; existing policy appears enough to make people work less. The labor force participation rate has been steadily decreasing from the 1990-2000 peak[0]. As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less, I don't see the problem with it. But the current system of the welfare state that depends on redistributive taxation has a strong incentive against that change; if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available to be transferred to those who aren't. [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
      - mlyle 3y ago
        > No need to make any policy changes; existing policy appears enough to make people work less I interpret this in the opposite way you do. Labor force participation includes effects where people think it's not economically worth their time to work. Reducing supply of labor could be expected to increase labor force participation. Not to mention this version of the statistic is a completely worthless one: it's not corrected for demographic (aging) effects. > As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less This is unlikely: when you reduce the supply of something, the price tends to go up. > if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available The marginal benefit of the factor (e.g. per-hour productivity) tends to go up, too. (Declining marginal factor product, blah blah blah). Indeed, this is why the price of the factor increases.
        3y ago
jedberg 3y ago
The good news is that if this law passes, those people will all make a lot more money. OT would kick in at 32 hours instead of 40 and double-time would apply on Fri/Sat/Sun instead of just Sat/Sun (assuming you have a union that has negotiated a weekend double-time).
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  Which would be about 6% of the private us Workforce
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    yeah whitecollar IT gigs are generally OT exempt
astura 3y ago
Agreed, a huge chunk of my friends have picked up second jobs or are working overtime, it's kinda crazy.
hgs3 3y ago
> This is such a weird disconnect between middle class white collar workers and the rest of the country. Want to hear a bigger disconnect? Most jobs we need to maintain our standard of living are blue collar jobs. Think waste disposal, plumbing, carpentry, textile, farming, transportation, etc... By contrast most white collar jobs are unnecessary fluff mostly dedicated to producing luxury goods, bean counting, or high-tech entertainment. About the only white collar jobs we need to live well are medical personnel. > It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts. You are paid based on how difficult it is to hire your replacement. Blue collar workers are paid less because the availability of able-bodied people is high. It's supply and demand.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > By contrast most white collar jobs are unnecessary fluff mostly dedicated to producing luxury goods, bean counting, or entertainment. About the only white collar jobs we need to live well are medical personnel. “Bean counting” (which I take as not just accounting, but management, analytics, auditing, investigation, and legal and dispute resolution) is what makes sure the combination of resources are where they need to be for other (including blue collar and medical, and everything in the supply chain of either) jobs to be able to happen at all, and which deals with the fact that the humans doing them aren’t robots and have coordination needs. If you want an economy much beyond individual subsistence farming, you need “bean counting”, and you need more of it the farther from that you want to be. Coordination costs are real.
  - mlyle 3y ago
    > and you need more of it the farther from that you want to be. Obviously there's some optimum amount of coordination and allocation of resources. There's an upper bound on how much is useful, though. I worry that we're creating more and more empty administrative and make-work middle management work, especially in many sectors. Look at higher education, and what it costs these days (as a society and individually). But there's fewer senior actual "production" faculty and researcher jobs around per capita, and the compensation for them has significantly fallen in real value. An administrative and management class has captured a huge portion of the value to questionable benefit. It's most clear there, but I worry that we're dedicating too many resources to middle management and excessively clever intermediaries.
hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
Nobody should have to work 60-80 hours a week in a high productivity modern economy, independent of the job.
DanielHB 3y ago
Sweden pays (salary and benefits) blue collar workers relatively well, an average white collar worker very rarely makes more than double what a blue collar does (especially after taxes). On top of the social security net and taxes it creates a very egalitarian society. It DOES cause another problem though: unemployment. Since blue collar workers are so expensive there is a lot of incentive to reduce it as much as possible in all areas of society. A few examples: It is almost comical how many swedes do manual labor themselves instead of hiring help (especially home renovations). A software engineer coworker renovated all of his apartment (except bathrooms) himself, including changing floors. Construction materials and housing styles are optimised to reduce manual labor. Almost all public parks have grass-cutting roombas, street cleaning is mostly done with machines, etc IKEA is so popular because furniture is almost disposable, it is never worth repairing it (unless you do it yourself). So this still creates another underclass of unemployed people which is also pretty bad for society and individuals. A lot of the gang violence you see about Sweden is a direct result of this. The social safety net helps (especially in ensuring that the children from this class has a chance to excel) but it is not enough and there are no clear answers.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  > A software engineer coworker renovated all of his apartment (except bathrooms) himself, including changing floors. I mean that’s trivial. Get a decent paint gun, laminate or vinyl flooring and just install them? It’s neither hard nor time consuming and it helps clear them mind.
  - DanielHB 3y ago
    It took him months to be able to finish it even with taking a vacation. If it weren't so expensive to hire someone to do it he definitely would have
    - gumballindie 3y ago
      Well i converted my garage into an office, sound and thermal proofed it, layed out drywood walls and the structure needed, painted, did the flooring and underlaying too. Took me a week and a half. A fun project. But i do admit i forced my self to step out of the tech bubble and learn other skills a few years ago, just for myself. It was a really cool project. It can take longer when you have zero experience but once you build it up just a little bit it can go fast. As an added bonus, i made sure my network cables running through the walls are 10 Gbe. Just in case :-) I absolutely recommend to anyone working in tech that they try it.
stonecharioteer 3y ago
This. I am in India and my cousins already make so much lesser than I do it's not even fair. They work harder physically, and their work life balance is shit. At some point they realized software pays a lot more and some of them tried to switch, but they didn't get the time in their jobs to study, and while I switched from a blue collar factory worker role to a content writer role and to a software developer, the times (2014) were largely different. Nowadays it's like the gate into this field is shut in everybody's face and it's sad seeing them regret not switch sooner. Not everyone enjoys the same advantages we get, and sometimes it's as simple as a reduced work week that let's you study, improve, or just pick up a new hobby to make life fulfilling.
gumballindie 3y ago
Interesting. So instead we should make things worse for everyone else? Just like rto advocates want to make it worse just so a minority of folks can fill in voids in their private lives with coworkers. I think we should strive and improve things for those who works 60-80 hours instead if “feeling strange” when some get a good deal.

rightbyte 3y ago

Are rents too high? I mean unless living in rent controlled apartments I don't understand how people can afford working at normal jobs in most metropolitan areas.

euroderf 3y ago

> I know a bunch of people working 60-80 hours a week, usually doing multiple jobs, just to make ends meet. Is their hourly rate anywhere close to 15$/hour ?

mlyle 3y ago

If we adopt a 4 day / 36 hour workweek as normal, we can expect substantial social benefits: - Reduced commuting, etc. - Improved health / quality of life. - Reduced supply of labor (due to overtime kicking in) should push up equilibrium price. > It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts This is the nature of any job where there's substantial leverage effects: if your work can make a hundred people fractionally more productive, you're going to reap outsized rewards. LLMs are just going to amplify this, by devaluing a lot of work but allowing other people to be fantastically more productive thanks to their leverage.

ttoinou 3y ago
Lets make it 1 day workweeks then. The benefits will be even greater
- mlyle 3y ago
  Alternatively, let's go back to sweatshop, all-day-long backbreaking labor. (It turns out this style of argument is not very useful). We have a high enough standard of living to shoulder the downsides of 10% fewer working hours (which should lower productivity by less than 10%; perhaps much less) in exchange for the upsides. Automation poses substantial risk of high unemployment; shortening the work week a little is a good hedge (and offers other benefits).
  - gottorf 3y ago
    No need to make any policy changes; existing policy appears enough to make people work less. The labor force participation rate has been steadily decreasing from the 1990-2000 peak[0]. As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less, I don't see the problem with it. But the current system of the welfare state that depends on redistributive taxation has a strong incentive against that change; if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available to be transferred to those who aren't. [0]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
    - mlyle 3y ago
      > No need to make any policy changes; existing policy appears enough to make people work less I interpret this in the opposite way you do. Labor force participation includes effects where people think it's not economically worth their time to work. Reducing supply of labor could be expected to increase labor force participation. Not to mention this version of the statistic is a completely worthless one: it's not corrected for demographic (aging) effects. > As long as the ones who are working 10% fewer hours are also taking home 10% less This is unlikely: when you reduce the supply of something, the price tends to go up. > if everyone working works 10% less, that's 10% less available The marginal benefit of the factor (e.g. per-hour productivity) tends to go up, too. (Declining marginal factor product, blah blah blah). Indeed, this is why the price of the factor increases.
      - 3y ago

jedberg 3y ago

The good news is that if this law passes, those people will all make a lot more money. OT would kick in at 32 hours instead of 40 and double-time would apply on Fri/Sat/Sun instead of just Sat/Sun (assuming you have a union that has negotiated a weekend double-time).

s1artibartfast 3y ago
Which would be about 6% of the private us Workforce
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  yeah whitecollar IT gigs are generally OT exempt

astura 3y ago

Agreed, a huge chunk of my friends have picked up second jobs or are working overtime, it's kinda crazy.

hgs3 3y ago

> This is such a weird disconnect between middle class white collar workers and the rest of the country. Want to hear a bigger disconnect? Most jobs we need to maintain our standard of living are blue collar jobs. Think waste disposal, plumbing, carpentry, textile, farming, transportation, etc... By contrast most white collar jobs are unnecessary fluff mostly dedicated to producing luxury goods, bean counting, or high-tech entertainment. About the only white collar jobs we need to live well are medical personnel. > It feels strange to be offered the chance to work less than half as much as another human and receive substantially greater rewards for my efforts. You are paid based on how difficult it is to hire your replacement. Blue collar workers are paid less because the availability of able-bodied people is high. It's supply and demand.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> By contrast most white collar jobs are unnecessary fluff mostly dedicated to producing luxury goods, bean counting, or entertainment. About the only white collar jobs we need to live well are medical personnel. “Bean counting” (which I take as not just accounting, but management, analytics, auditing, investigation, and legal and dispute resolution) is what makes sure the combination of resources are where they need to be for other (including blue collar and medical, and everything in the supply chain of either) jobs to be able to happen at all, and which deals with the fact that the humans doing them aren’t robots and have coordination needs. If you want an economy much beyond individual subsistence farming, you need “bean counting”, and you need more of it the farther from that you want to be. Coordination costs are real.
- mlyle 3y ago
  > and you need more of it the farther from that you want to be. Obviously there's some optimum amount of coordination and allocation of resources. There's an upper bound on how much is useful, though. I worry that we're creating more and more empty administrative and make-work middle management work, especially in many sectors. Look at higher education, and what it costs these days (as a society and individually). But there's fewer senior actual "production" faculty and researcher jobs around per capita, and the compensation for them has significantly fallen in real value. An administrative and management class has captured a huge portion of the value to questionable benefit. It's most clear there, but I worry that we're dedicating too many resources to middle management and excessively clever intermediaries.

hcarvalhoalves 3y ago

Nobody should have to work 60-80 hours a week in a high productivity modern economy, independent of the job.

DanielHB 3y ago

Sweden pays (salary and benefits) blue collar workers relatively well, an average white collar worker very rarely makes more than double what a blue collar does (especially after taxes). On top of the social security net and taxes it creates a very egalitarian society. It DOES cause another problem though: unemployment. Since blue collar workers are so expensive there is a lot of incentive to reduce it as much as possible in all areas of society. A few examples: It is almost comical how many swedes do manual labor themselves instead of hiring help (especially home renovations). A software engineer coworker renovated all of his apartment (except bathrooms) himself, including changing floors. Construction materials and housing styles are optimised to reduce manual labor. Almost all public parks have grass-cutting roombas, street cleaning is mostly done with machines, etc IKEA is so popular because furniture is almost disposable, it is never worth repairing it (unless you do it yourself). So this still creates another underclass of unemployed people which is also pretty bad for society and individuals. A lot of the gang violence you see about Sweden is a direct result of this. The social safety net helps (especially in ensuring that the children from this class has a chance to excel) but it is not enough and there are no clear answers.

gumballindie 3y ago
> A software engineer coworker renovated all of his apartment (except bathrooms) himself, including changing floors. I mean that’s trivial. Get a decent paint gun, laminate or vinyl flooring and just install them? It’s neither hard nor time consuming and it helps clear them mind.
- DanielHB 3y ago
  It took him months to be able to finish it even with taking a vacation. If it weren't so expensive to hire someone to do it he definitely would have
  - gumballindie 3y ago
    Well i converted my garage into an office, sound and thermal proofed it, layed out drywood walls and the structure needed, painted, did the flooring and underlaying too. Took me a week and a half. A fun project. But i do admit i forced my self to step out of the tech bubble and learn other skills a few years ago, just for myself. It was a really cool project. It can take longer when you have zero experience but once you build it up just a little bit it can go fast. As an added bonus, i made sure my network cables running through the walls are 10 Gbe. Just in case :-) I absolutely recommend to anyone working in tech that they try it.

stonecharioteer 3y ago

This. I am in India and my cousins already make so much lesser than I do it's not even fair. They work harder physically, and their work life balance is shit. At some point they realized software pays a lot more and some of them tried to switch, but they didn't get the time in their jobs to study, and while I switched from a blue collar factory worker role to a content writer role and to a software developer, the times (2014) were largely different. Nowadays it's like the gate into this field is shut in everybody's face and it's sad seeing them regret not switch sooner. Not everyone enjoys the same advantages we get, and sometimes it's as simple as a reduced work week that let's you study, improve, or just pick up a new hobby to make life fulfilling.

gumballindie 3y ago

Interesting. So instead we should make things worse for everyone else? Just like rto advocates want to make it worse just so a minority of folks can fill in voids in their private lives with coworkers. I think we should strive and improve things for those who works 60-80 hours instead if “feeling strange” when some get a good deal.