7 ms·

Greece introduces the six day work week

88 points by matsemann 2y ago

aussieguy1234 2y ago
Right. So they can optionally work weekends and get compensated with penalty rates. Can't really see an issue here? We have the same system in Australia for lower paid workers.
giantg2 2y ago
6 days used to be normal generations ago, and still is in many parts of the world. Perhaps we're just in a golden age that's about to end.
- ossobuco 2y ago
  I wonder what was all the progress in automation about then, just making a few capitalists richer while we regress to "generations ago"? The luddites don't sound so crazy anymore these days.
  - i80and 2y ago
    Badging the Luddites as regressive dummies was never historically accurate, but has been a highly effective anti-labor framing. I've been glad to see more and more people rediscover lately their actual grievances.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- unfunco 2y ago
  …or maybe not? Britain's biggest union demands a four day week: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/06/21/ftse-100-retail-sales-latest-updates/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/06/21/ftse-100-ret...
  - giantg2 2y ago
    And how is the UK economy doing?
- gambiting 2y ago
  Funny how not that long ago everyone used to predict that with the increases of productivity worldwide we'll keep reducing our workload to a point where we'll work just few hours a week and remain just as productive. And it seems that this has happened for a select few but everyone else is working more and more just to afford rent and basic necessities.
  - squidbeak 2y ago
    And anxiety over affording those necessities leads to drops in productivity.
  - energy123 2y ago
    > And it seems that this has happened for a select few It's happened for anyone that owns housing without a mortgage in a wealthy country. Everyone else has to work full-time to pay their landlord or bank. Given the housing stock is kept artificially low, all remaining money in the average paycheck will necessarily be eaten up by housing. It doesn't really matter how productive the economy is. If shelter is kept scarce, the cost of housing will keep rising to eat up the rest of the average paycheck.
    - giantg2 2y ago
      "Given the housing stock is kept artificially low," I'm not sure I'd call it artificial. There are rational market forces at play. The real issue is that everyone wants to live in the same places, and the people there already want to preserve their lifestyle and investment.
      - CapstanRoller 2y ago
        >The real issue is that everyone wants to live in the same places They want to live where they can survive, and survival is dependent on money. Many people (myself included) would be perfectly happy living in a quiet remote area with basic amenities.
      - energy123 2y ago
- close04 2y ago
  Productivity has increased substantially over the past few generations. Longer working time just captures more of that productivity for the benefit of the employer. This is a continuation of another trend over the past generations, to have increased productivity over a much larger segment of the population (more women joined the workforce) and yet the benefits of this were mostly captured by the employers, at least in the countries where this was more thoroughly documented and didn’t suffer any upheaval or regime changes to influence the numbers (e.g. the US).
- litoE 2y ago
  In Chile in the 1950s they had a 48-hour work (and school) week: Monday through Saturday. However, it was common for people to just not show up for work on Mondays, jocularly referred to as "celebrating Saint Monday's Day", even though they forfeited one day's pay. In 1959 the government implemented a new program: if you worked the full 6 days you were paid for 7 days. If you worked less than 6 days, you were only paid for the days you actually worked; that meant that taking Monday off now cost you two days pay. The "Saint Monday's Day" practice quickly died away.
  - xtracto 2y ago
    Here in Mexico it's pretty normal for companies to require working mon to sat.
- pjscott 2y ago
  Maybe it's just a Greece thing. I notice that other EU countries are doing a lot better than them economically; not sure why Greece in particular seems to be struggling.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  Perhaps the majority should stop letting a bunch of elites tell it what to do? They only have the power we let them have.
krasin 2y ago
Two things happen at the same time: 1. people say that robots are taking all the jobs 2. countries raise retirement age & adopt 6 day work week, because there's too much work to be done I am not entirely sure, but maybe robots are not that bad, assuming appropriate taxation to fund pensions & 5-day work weeks?
- klysm 2y ago
  No amount of automation has ever seemed to result in a net reduction in work to do thus far
  - Imnimo 2y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
  - echoangle 2y ago
    Why would it? It’s not like the amount of work to do is fixed and once it’s done, everyone can relax for the rest of the year. There’s always work to do and progress just speeds up as work becomes more efficient.
    - MiguelX413 2y ago
      Why not just stop once we've done the same work as in the past?
      - xboxnolifes 2y ago
        Because, thus far, people have always wanted more.
      - brewtide 2y ago
        Shiny new phones every year, bigger better faster shinier cars, Fancier meals, must have gadgets, keeping a keen eye on the Jones's, better fuller lawn without weeds, that paved driveway you've always wanted, a faster computer, better heating systems, brand name clothing... When needs and wants get all mixed up, there is always more to be done.
SeanAnderson 2y ago
"While the 40-hour work week is still officially in place, employers are permitted to require staff to work up to two unpaid hours per day for a limited period in return for more free time." This is kind of a wild quote from the article. WTF? two hours unpaid work per day? "A supplement of 40% of the daily wage will be paid for the sixth day of labor." It's unclear to me if this means they're receiving 100% + 40% for their sixth day, or if the sixth day is 4/10th the normal wage?
- nerdjon 2y ago
  I came back here wondering the same thing. The first paragraph ends with “in return for more free time” which makes zero sense if they are working 2 more hours for each day. I was expecting something later like it’s banked and you work a 4 day week or something. But nothing on that. And then yeah one place it says unpaid and another place (to me) said 140% pay rate for that time. Screams AI written or bad translation.
- stavros 2y ago
  What the article probably means is "they get those two hours back in lieu" and "140% pay on the sixth day". What already has been happening in reality is that workers work ten/twelve-hour days for no overtime, and the sixth day is unpaid. We've been working six-day workweeks ever since I can remember (so at least forty years), and probably much longer than that.
Zarathustra30 2y ago
Isn't Greece's unemployment rate the highest in the E.U.? Yes, they may be "low-quality" workers applying for jobs, but if a company can't find "high-quality," they must make do. How did we lose the art of training new hires?
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  Companies have no pension to tie people to those jobs, people make more money by job hopping, companies don’t give large enough raises to keep people, companies lay off people at the slight change in fortune. Correspondingly it doesn’t make sense to spend the time training someone if they leave as soon as they are productive.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Maybe they just don't pay enough to convince people to do the shitty work they want done?
- chmod775 2y ago
  > but if a company can't find "high-quality," they must make do. At some point it isn't economical to "make do", because paying for in-training employees eats into margins. Especially if "training" means you have to teach to read and write properly and teach how to do more arithmetic than counting on your fingers. No Greek business is going to squirm at investing a few months of training, but the reality is that many people are lacking years. Greece has been ranking near last in the EU on some important education metrics (specifically those that affect composition of their workforce, like early leavers and those who never went to school at all) until they recently got their stuff together and did a complete 180, but for now they're still stuck with a workforce whose education isn't a strong match for the kind of work that is available now. There's very little work for people with tertiary education in Greece, and at the same time there's a large number of people who simply hadn't had any formal education at all or dropped out early. The middle ground is extremely under served.
- lr4444lr 2y ago
  The problem with training new hires is that they can leave with the the skillset you invested in them. I realize of course that employer loyalty erosion may be in large part to blame for that being a big risk, but the issue should be acknowledged in an era of increased job switching.
rafamvc 2y ago
If Robots/Ai allow us to extract more value per hour worked, it will unlock more work that wasn't worth doing before. Paradoxically, efficiency generates more available work, not less. The amount of work to be done is not finite.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  "to be done" is doing a great deal of work in "The amount of work to be done..." There's no fixed definition of how much work needs to be done. Different people may have different interests and standards that lead them to prefer that more, less and/or different work is carried out. The amount of work to be done can certainly be bounded for some people in some situations.
- jackcosgrove 2y ago
  > The amount of work to be done is not finite. That's only true because expectations rise. It's the old economics problem definition of finite supply and infinite demand, which may be true for a lot of people but not all. It is easier to provide for "basic", however that is defined, needs such as food and clothing than ever before, and there are a lot of NEETs who live minimal lives without working because of this. There are two sectors which have an inelasticity problem, healthcare and housing. Healthcare demand is inelastic, and housing supply is inelastic. (Housing demand is inelastic to a point where everyone is housed, and healthcare supply is inelastic because of the lag of training newer professionals, but these have less of an effect than the converse.) These are two of the sectors seeing the most price increases even as consumer staples fall in price. Housing is already correcting itself through reduced birthrates. Healthcare is the tougher problem to solve. Theoretically the amount of work to be done is infinite, but practically people can trade work for free time, and accept the lower earnings, and still survive. Many people already do this to varying degrees.
kjksf 2y ago
I'm confused because economically it doesn't add up. Shortages of labor should lead to higher wages. Supply and demand. So it would make sense to relax laws prohibiting working more than 40hrs in order to unleash additional economic output i.e. increase the amount of money made. The article claims that for some reason that defies logic, it will just make employers demand more work for same amount of money. I see two possibilities for that. A country-wide collusion between employers to fix wages. That doesn't seem possible. If employer A has profit to spare and could make even more profit if he had more employees, what logic would lead him to NOT raise wages and steal workers from employer B? The wages should raise because workers would migrate to the highest paying jobs. Or there just isn't profit to pay more in which case there's noting the government can do either way.
- erikaww 2y ago
  You must have never worked a fast food job. Companies will do anything but raise wages, even if it allows them to have way more revenue and higher reliability.
- generic92034 2y ago
  > A country-wide collusion between employers to fix wages. That doesn't seem possible. Why? I would rather guess that this is very common. Obviously, they cannot fix wages directly, but they might outsource the job of estimating wages to some agencies providing the market wages for relevant positions. If every employer asks the same agencies, they all arrive at the same wages, with minor variations.
- saulpw 2y ago
  or maybe economics is the study of spherical cows trading fungible goods and services in an efficient market with perfect information, and the real world is none of those things.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  A lot of employers will never increase wages just out of spite. Clearly you haven't spoken with some of these awful human beings. Don't assume the market is rational. History shows otherwise.
EncomLab 2y ago
AGI and General Purpose robots are both so far off in the future they should be considered science fiction at this point. The "Woz Standard" - a robot is dropped in front of a random house and proceeds without any assistance to brew a cup of coffee - is hard to imagine being met before 2040, if not even later.
- squidbeak 2y ago
  AGI and Robotics are separate things, and Robotics still being far off doesn't mean AGI is also.
  - pdimitar 2y ago
    They are only separate in the strict dictionary sense. You can't have an efficient general robot if it is not handled by a general-ish AI.
    - squidbeak 2y ago
      But you can have AGI in advance of (or without) Robotics.
      - pdimitar 2y ago
        Yes, true, though I don't see the relation to the previous argument you were making.
      - MiguelX413 2y ago
        You can also have robotics without AGI, as we already do.
      - Jensson 2y ago
        We already have affordable advanced robotics, what we lack is AI to control the robot limbs accurately and carefully enough to match humans. This robot is $1600 today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ClYBtfhkaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ClYBtfhkaw I don't see a future where we have AGI but don't have affordable full fledged household robots costing like a car or less. Where are already at the point where you pay more for the programming than the robot itself.
timonoko 2y ago
Fascinating thing about america 50 years ago was it seemed to work 24/7. In Finlandia it was illegal to work after 16:00. Then we got a nazi government who decided that small shops and kiosks can extend their hours upto 18:00. Worst thing was that there was no bank services outside 8:00-16:00. This was a blessing sort of, because Finland was the only country you could get bank services with a modem in 1970's. In 1983 you could do exactly all banking with your own Teletype. This included realtime stock exchange and that modern scheiße. At least HN's downvoting team works 24/7. Excellent.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- eesmith 2y ago
  "Seemed" meaning through the media you watched while living in Finland? And you think that gives a good representative view of what the US was like in the 1970s? The news and shows you watched from the US were mostly made in large cities in California and New York. Parts of the US in the 1970s certainly had blue laws similar to what you mention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_laws_in_the_United_States mentions that "Maine was the last New England state to repeal laws that prohibited department stores from opening on Sundays. The laws against the department stores opening on Sundays were ended by referendum in 1990." and that in North Dakota it wasn't until 1991 that most business were allowed to be open on Sunday, and 1988 for Virginia. For that matter, TV stations would stop broadcasting during the late night, with about 6 hours of dead air, not the 24/7 of modern stations. Fall asleep watching Carson and you might be woken up by the national anthem played just before shutdown. No doubt your exaggerations cause the downvotes. It was not illegal to work after 16:00, even in Finland. Who ran the restaurants? The buses? The power company? The phones? The hospitals? The hotels? This 1979 travel guide for US tourists, at https://archive.org/details/fieldingseurope10000fiel/page/288/mode/2up?q=Shopping https://archive.org/details/fieldingseurope10000fiel/page/28... , says shopping hours in Finland (or at least Helsinki) at that time were "Weekdays, 8:30 A.M. to 5 P.M., plus 8 P.M. on Monday and Friday; Saturday 8:30 A.M. to 4 P.M. in winter, with 3 P.M. closings in summer."
downWidOutaFite 2y ago
Greece should have left the EU when the price of membership was revealed to be a generation of ruthless recession and exploitation. Somehow the german bankers convinced them it was worth it even though grexit would've been much more expensive to them then loan forgiveness. I don't see what Greece got out of EU membership other than a brain drain as their ambitious youth is forced to leave their country.
- Boltgolt 2y ago
  How about others in the EU bailing them out when they found out you actually can't just increase spend forever? Grexit would have been certain bankruptcy
  - rightbyte 2y ago
    Giving the elite money to continue the charade might not be benefitial for the people.
whatever1 2y ago
Greece fell from being in the top 10 wealthiest countries in eu to literally second to last. Of course the worker rights bacame a joke in the process.
- dyauspitr 2y ago
  I’m blown away that Greece was anywhere near the top wealthiest. What exactly did they do? I’m guessing tourism and agricultural exports?
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    They faked their books, literally, and underrepresented their governmental debt and deficit[1] . I assume the parent post includes state borrowing and spending in assessing "wealthiest" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis
clarada 2y ago
Gotta love the EU and how well it sticks up for workers' rights and economic stability.
- glenndebacker 2y ago
  The situation in Europe is worsening rapidly, and it's not just in Greece—it's a trend across several countries. The rise of nationalist parties has increased the influence of corporate lobbies as well. Migrants frequently bear the brunt of blame in this environment. Additionally, there's a troubling misuse of subsidies and tax breaks, with funds often channelled to companies who exploit them solely to boost their profits, rather than fulfilling their intended benefits. Certainly, in Belgium, this issue is significant. We allocate billions in tax breaks for research and innovation, yet politicians sometimes appear at technology fairs showcasing outdated VR technology as if it were still groundbreaking in 2014. Now, they are using lag in the development of AI as a way to justify new tax breaks, all the while proposing cuts to social benefits.
kostakostas 2y ago
The government service that does work inspections was soft-abolished. There is tons of immigrants that work in slavery conditions. Undocumented workers are everywhere because the taxes are too high for both workers and businesses. There was write-off of old debts for millionairs. The link below shows how government documents get stored in my home town. There are also images of people from a tax office "moving documents for storage" by throwing them out of the window to the back of a truck. We are a third world country. https://www.lamiareport.gr/index.php/topika/item/282557-lamia-leilatimena-dimosia-eggrafa-kai-ygeionomiki-vomva-mesa-stin-poli https://www.lamiareport.gr/index.php/topika/item/282557-lami...
kkfx 2y ago
This is a classic sign of a ruling class derailed. They have pushed a series of education reform to create "better useful idiots" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... and then they collect as a result a large slice of people unable to do anything, rulers included, so as long as those who know retire there is no way to go ahead. I think it's too late to recover, there will be a social collapse, a war as usual to cover and control the people and a slow recover. I only hope that respect of the past this time those who have caused the collapse for their personal interest will not make it again.

88 points by matsemann 2y ago

Right. So they can optionally work weekends and get compensated with penalty rates. Can't really see an issue here? We have the same system in Australia for lower paid workers.

giantg2 2y ago

6 days used to be normal generations ago, and still is in many parts of the world. Perhaps we're just in a golden age that's about to end.

ossobuco 2y ago
I wonder what was all the progress in automation about then, just making a few capitalists richer while we regress to "generations ago"? The luddites don't sound so crazy anymore these days.
- i80and 2y ago
  Badging the Luddites as regressive dummies was never historically accurate, but has been a highly effective anti-labor framing. I've been glad to see more and more people rediscover lately their actual grievances.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
unfunco 2y ago
…or maybe not? Britain's biggest union demands a four day week: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/06/21/ftse-100-retail-sales-latest-updates/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/06/21/ftse-100-ret...
- giantg2 2y ago
  And how is the UK economy doing?
gambiting 2y ago
Funny how not that long ago everyone used to predict that with the increases of productivity worldwide we'll keep reducing our workload to a point where we'll work just few hours a week and remain just as productive. And it seems that this has happened for a select few but everyone else is working more and more just to afford rent and basic necessities.
- squidbeak 2y ago
  And anxiety over affording those necessities leads to drops in productivity.
- energy123 2y ago
  > And it seems that this has happened for a select few It's happened for anyone that owns housing without a mortgage in a wealthy country. Everyone else has to work full-time to pay their landlord or bank. Given the housing stock is kept artificially low, all remaining money in the average paycheck will necessarily be eaten up by housing. It doesn't really matter how productive the economy is. If shelter is kept scarce, the cost of housing will keep rising to eat up the rest of the average paycheck.
  - giantg2 2y ago
    "Given the housing stock is kept artificially low," I'm not sure I'd call it artificial. There are rational market forces at play. The real issue is that everyone wants to live in the same places, and the people there already want to preserve their lifestyle and investment.
    - CapstanRoller 2y ago
      >The real issue is that everyone wants to live in the same places They want to live where they can survive, and survival is dependent on money. Many people (myself included) would be perfectly happy living in a quiet remote area with basic amenities.
    - energy123 2y ago
close04 2y ago
Productivity has increased substantially over the past few generations. Longer working time just captures more of that productivity for the benefit of the employer. This is a continuation of another trend over the past generations, to have increased productivity over a much larger segment of the population (more women joined the workforce) and yet the benefits of this were mostly captured by the employers, at least in the countries where this was more thoroughly documented and didn’t suffer any upheaval or regime changes to influence the numbers (e.g. the US).
litoE 2y ago
In Chile in the 1950s they had a 48-hour work (and school) week: Monday through Saturday. However, it was common for people to just not show up for work on Mondays, jocularly referred to as "celebrating Saint Monday's Day", even though they forfeited one day's pay. In 1959 the government implemented a new program: if you worked the full 6 days you were paid for 7 days. If you worked less than 6 days, you were only paid for the days you actually worked; that meant that taking Monday off now cost you two days pay. The "Saint Monday's Day" practice quickly died away.
- xtracto 2y ago
  Here in Mexico it's pretty normal for companies to require working mon to sat.
pjscott 2y ago
Maybe it's just a Greece thing. I notice that other EU countries are doing a lot better than them economically; not sure why Greece in particular seems to be struggling.
EasyMark 2y ago
Perhaps the majority should stop letting a bunch of elites tell it what to do? They only have the power we let them have.

krasin 2y ago

Two things happen at the same time: 1. people say that robots are taking all the jobs 2. countries raise retirement age & adopt 6 day work week, because there's too much work to be done I am not entirely sure, but maybe robots are not that bad, assuming appropriate taxation to fund pensions & 5-day work weeks?

klysm 2y ago
No amount of automation has ever seemed to result in a net reduction in work to do thus far
- Imnimo 2y ago
  https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever
- echoangle 2y ago
  Why would it? It’s not like the amount of work to do is fixed and once it’s done, everyone can relax for the rest of the year. There’s always work to do and progress just speeds up as work becomes more efficient.
  - MiguelX413 2y ago
    Why not just stop once we've done the same work as in the past?
    - xboxnolifes 2y ago
      Because, thus far, people have always wanted more.
    - brewtide 2y ago
      Shiny new phones every year, bigger better faster shinier cars, Fancier meals, must have gadgets, keeping a keen eye on the Jones's, better fuller lawn without weeds, that paved driveway you've always wanted, a faster computer, better heating systems, brand name clothing... When needs and wants get all mixed up, there is always more to be done.

SeanAnderson 2y ago

"While the 40-hour work week is still officially in place, employers are permitted to require staff to work up to two unpaid hours per day for a limited period in return for more free time." This is kind of a wild quote from the article. WTF? two hours unpaid work per day? "A supplement of 40% of the daily wage will be paid for the sixth day of labor." It's unclear to me if this means they're receiving 100% + 40% for their sixth day, or if the sixth day is 4/10th the normal wage?

nerdjon 2y ago
I came back here wondering the same thing. The first paragraph ends with “in return for more free time” which makes zero sense if they are working 2 more hours for each day. I was expecting something later like it’s banked and you work a 4 day week or something. But nothing on that. And then yeah one place it says unpaid and another place (to me) said 140% pay rate for that time. Screams AI written or bad translation.
stavros 2y ago
What the article probably means is "they get those two hours back in lieu" and "140% pay on the sixth day". What already has been happening in reality is that workers work ten/twelve-hour days for no overtime, and the sixth day is unpaid. We've been working six-day workweeks ever since I can remember (so at least forty years), and probably much longer than that.

Zarathustra30 2y ago

Isn't Greece's unemployment rate the highest in the E.U.? Yes, they may be "low-quality" workers applying for jobs, but if a company can't find "high-quality," they must make do. How did we lose the art of training new hires?

dyauspitr 2y ago
Companies have no pension to tie people to those jobs, people make more money by job hopping, companies don’t give large enough raises to keep people, companies lay off people at the slight change in fortune. Correspondingly it doesn’t make sense to spend the time training someone if they leave as soon as they are productive.
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Maybe they just don't pay enough to convince people to do the shitty work they want done?
chmod775 2y ago
> but if a company can't find "high-quality," they must make do. At some point it isn't economical to "make do", because paying for in-training employees eats into margins. Especially if "training" means you have to teach to read and write properly and teach how to do more arithmetic than counting on your fingers. No Greek business is going to squirm at investing a few months of training, but the reality is that many people are lacking years. Greece has been ranking near last in the EU on some important education metrics (specifically those that affect composition of their workforce, like early leavers and those who never went to school at all) until they recently got their stuff together and did a complete 180, but for now they're still stuck with a workforce whose education isn't a strong match for the kind of work that is available now. There's very little work for people with tertiary education in Greece, and at the same time there's a large number of people who simply hadn't had any formal education at all or dropped out early. The middle ground is extremely under served.
lr4444lr 2y ago
The problem with training new hires is that they can leave with the the skillset you invested in them. I realize of course that employer loyalty erosion may be in large part to blame for that being a big risk, but the issue should be acknowledged in an era of increased job switching.

rafamvc 2y ago

If Robots/Ai allow us to extract more value per hour worked, it will unlock more work that wasn't worth doing before. Paradoxically, efficiency generates more available work, not less. The amount of work to be done is not finite.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
"to be done" is doing a great deal of work in "The amount of work to be done..." There's no fixed definition of how much work needs to be done. Different people may have different interests and standards that lead them to prefer that more, less and/or different work is carried out. The amount of work to be done can certainly be bounded for some people in some situations.
jackcosgrove 2y ago
> The amount of work to be done is not finite. That's only true because expectations rise. It's the old economics problem definition of finite supply and infinite demand, which may be true for a lot of people but not all. It is easier to provide for "basic", however that is defined, needs such as food and clothing than ever before, and there are a lot of NEETs who live minimal lives without working because of this. There are two sectors which have an inelasticity problem, healthcare and housing. Healthcare demand is inelastic, and housing supply is inelastic. (Housing demand is inelastic to a point where everyone is housed, and healthcare supply is inelastic because of the lag of training newer professionals, but these have less of an effect than the converse.) These are two of the sectors seeing the most price increases even as consumer staples fall in price. Housing is already correcting itself through reduced birthrates. Healthcare is the tougher problem to solve. Theoretically the amount of work to be done is infinite, but practically people can trade work for free time, and accept the lower earnings, and still survive. Many people already do this to varying degrees.

kjksf 2y ago

I'm confused because economically it doesn't add up. Shortages of labor should lead to higher wages. Supply and demand. So it would make sense to relax laws prohibiting working more than 40hrs in order to unleash additional economic output i.e. increase the amount of money made. The article claims that for some reason that defies logic, it will just make employers demand more work for same amount of money. I see two possibilities for that. A country-wide collusion between employers to fix wages. That doesn't seem possible. If employer A has profit to spare and could make even more profit if he had more employees, what logic would lead him to NOT raise wages and steal workers from employer B? The wages should raise because workers would migrate to the highest paying jobs. Or there just isn't profit to pay more in which case there's noting the government can do either way.

erikaww 2y ago
You must have never worked a fast food job. Companies will do anything but raise wages, even if it allows them to have way more revenue and higher reliability.
generic92034 2y ago
> A country-wide collusion between employers to fix wages. That doesn't seem possible. Why? I would rather guess that this is very common. Obviously, they cannot fix wages directly, but they might outsource the job of estimating wages to some agencies providing the market wages for relevant positions. If every employer asks the same agencies, they all arrive at the same wages, with minor variations.
saulpw 2y ago
or maybe economics is the study of spherical cows trading fungible goods and services in an efficient market with perfect information, and the real world is none of those things.
pdimitar 2y ago
A lot of employers will never increase wages just out of spite. Clearly you haven't spoken with some of these awful human beings. Don't assume the market is rational. History shows otherwise.

EncomLab 2y ago

AGI and General Purpose robots are both so far off in the future they should be considered science fiction at this point. The "Woz Standard" - a robot is dropped in front of a random house and proceeds without any assistance to brew a cup of coffee - is hard to imagine being met before 2040, if not even later.

squidbeak 2y ago
AGI and Robotics are separate things, and Robotics still being far off doesn't mean AGI is also.
- pdimitar 2y ago
  They are only separate in the strict dictionary sense. You can't have an efficient general robot if it is not handled by a general-ish AI.
  - squidbeak 2y ago
    But you can have AGI in advance of (or without) Robotics.
    - pdimitar 2y ago
      Yes, true, though I don't see the relation to the previous argument you were making.
    - MiguelX413 2y ago
      You can also have robotics without AGI, as we already do.
    - Jensson 2y ago
      We already have affordable advanced robotics, what we lack is AI to control the robot limbs accurately and carefully enough to match humans. This robot is $1600 today: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ClYBtfhkaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ClYBtfhkaw I don't see a future where we have AGI but don't have affordable full fledged household robots costing like a car or less. Where are already at the point where you pay more for the programming than the robot itself.

timonoko 2y ago

Fascinating thing about america 50 years ago was it seemed to work 24/7. In Finlandia it was illegal to work after 16:00. Then we got a nazi government who decided that small shops and kiosks can extend their hours upto 18:00. Worst thing was that there was no bank services outside 8:00-16:00. This was a blessing sort of, because Finland was the only country you could get bank services with a modem in 1970's. In 1983 you could do exactly all banking with your own Teletype. This included realtime stock exchange and that modern scheiße. At least HN's downvoting team works 24/7. Excellent.

deleted 2y ago
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eesmith 2y ago
"Seemed" meaning through the media you watched while living in Finland? And you think that gives a good representative view of what the US was like in the 1970s? The news and shows you watched from the US were mostly made in large cities in California and New York. Parts of the US in the 1970s certainly had blue laws similar to what you mention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_laws_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_laws_in_the_United_States mentions that "Maine was the last New England state to repeal laws that prohibited department stores from opening on Sundays. The laws against the department stores opening on Sundays were ended by referendum in 1990." and that in North Dakota it wasn't until 1991 that most business were allowed to be open on Sunday, and 1988 for Virginia. For that matter, TV stations would stop broadcasting during the late night, with about 6 hours of dead air, not the 24/7 of modern stations. Fall asleep watching Carson and you might be woken up by the national anthem played just before shutdown. No doubt your exaggerations cause the downvotes. It was not illegal to work after 16:00, even in Finland. Who ran the restaurants? The buses? The power company? The phones? The hospitals? The hotels? This 1979 travel guide for US tourists, at https://archive.org/details/fieldingseurope10000fiel/page/288/mode/2up?q=Shopping https://archive.org/details/fieldingseurope10000fiel/page/28... , says shopping hours in Finland (or at least Helsinki) at that time were "Weekdays, 8:30 A.M. to 5 P.M., plus 8 P.M. on Monday and Friday; Saturday 8:30 A.M. to 4 P.M. in winter, with 3 P.M. closings in summer."

downWidOutaFite 2y ago

Greece should have left the EU when the price of membership was revealed to be a generation of ruthless recession and exploitation. Somehow the german bankers convinced them it was worth it even though grexit would've been much more expensive to them then loan forgiveness. I don't see what Greece got out of EU membership other than a brain drain as their ambitious youth is forced to leave their country.

Boltgolt 2y ago
How about others in the EU bailing them out when they found out you actually can't just increase spend forever? Grexit would have been certain bankruptcy
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Giving the elite money to continue the charade might not be benefitial for the people.

whatever1 2y ago

Greece fell from being in the top 10 wealthiest countries in eu to literally second to last. Of course the worker rights bacame a joke in the process.

dyauspitr 2y ago
I’m blown away that Greece was anywhere near the top wealthiest. What exactly did they do? I’m guessing tourism and agricultural exports?
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  They faked their books, literally, and underrepresented their governmental debt and deficit[1] . I assume the parent post includes state borrowing and spending in assessing "wealthiest" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_government-debt_crisis

clarada 2y ago

Gotta love the EU and how well it sticks up for workers' rights and economic stability.

glenndebacker 2y ago
The situation in Europe is worsening rapidly, and it's not just in Greece—it's a trend across several countries. The rise of nationalist parties has increased the influence of corporate lobbies as well. Migrants frequently bear the brunt of blame in this environment. Additionally, there's a troubling misuse of subsidies and tax breaks, with funds often channelled to companies who exploit them solely to boost their profits, rather than fulfilling their intended benefits. Certainly, in Belgium, this issue is significant. We allocate billions in tax breaks for research and innovation, yet politicians sometimes appear at technology fairs showcasing outdated VR technology as if it were still groundbreaking in 2014. Now, they are using lag in the development of AI as a way to justify new tax breaks, all the while proposing cuts to social benefits.

kostakostas 2y ago

The government service that does work inspections was soft-abolished. There is tons of immigrants that work in slavery conditions. Undocumented workers are everywhere because the taxes are too high for both workers and businesses. There was write-off of old debts for millionairs. The link below shows how government documents get stored in my home town. There are also images of people from a tax office "moving documents for storage" by throwing them out of the window to the back of a truck. We are a third world country. https://www.lamiareport.gr/index.php/topika/item/282557-lamia-leilatimena-dimosia-eggrafa-kai-ygeionomiki-vomva-mesa-stin-poli https://www.lamiareport.gr/index.php/topika/item/282557-lami...

kkfx 2y ago

This is a classic sign of a ruling class derailed. They have pushed a series of education reform to create "better useful idiots" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... and then they collect as a result a large slice of people unable to do anything, rulers included, so as long as those who know retire there is no way to go ahead. I think it's too late to recover, there will be a social collapse, a war as usual to cover and control the people and a slow recover. I only hope that respect of the past this time those who have caused the collapse for their personal interest will not make it again.