As part of his Labor Day message to workers in the United States, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday re-upped his call for the establishment of a 20% cut to the workweek with no loss in pay—an idea he said is “not radical” given the enormous productivity gains over recent decades that have resulted in massive profits for corporations but scraps for employees and the working class.
“It’s time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay,” Sanders wrote in a Guardian op-ed as he cited a 480% increase in worker productivity since the 40-hour workweek was first established in 1940.
“It’s time,” he continued, “that working families were able to take advantage of the increased productivity that new technologies provide so that they can enjoy more leisure time, family time, educational and cultural opportunities—and less stress.”
Why does it feel like it’s only ever Bernie Sanders that is pushing for life improvements.
TL;DR: Corruption and capitalism
Any kind of socialism (even relatively-speaking weak social democrats like Bernie) is severely underrepresented in US politics due to the influence of private money/capital in the government and in elections. The two party system/first past the post voting doesn’t help matters either.
The people with money actively want to supress socialism by any means necessary. Look at Joe McCarthy and the Red Scare if you want an example in US history that still affects us today.
Also Reagan with deregulation and Bill Clinton with “triangulation” (effectively becoming more economically right wing by finding the middle ground between right and left, while the right is constantly pushing right. See: the Ratchet Effect)
Bernie is one of the extremely few principled politicians who doesn’t take corporate money, but he also lacks power as he is one person.
Because he doesn’t have to accomplish anything. Does he have a plan for this? Has he done any due diligence on transition? Has he studied the impact on small business vs large business? It’s easy to tell people what they want to hear. It’s harder to implement. Studies have shown it working in other countries, but that’s nowhere near enough to just make it happen in the US.
Cause he’s one of the few that actually give a shit. Its why the DNC did everything in their power to scuttle his primary run. Can’t have a president that actually wants to help the common American cause then the corporate overlords might lose their stranglehold on them.
Because 95% of them are on the corporate dime.
This goes against what Republicans want. They’re literally removing child labor laws so kids can get into the work force while they’re in middle school. Start a kid working at 12 years old and they can get about 50 years of labor out of them. Chances are that kid will be working 60-70 years and won’t be able to retire.
That’s simply not possible, I need my employees to be working more hours, not less. Last year I could barely afford my sailing trip to Aruba. If such a law passes I’m going to have to fire some people for sure or raise rents on my tenants.
I know this is sarcastic but I can’t help read it in my literal bosses voice, who didn’t give us Christmas bonuses but did fix the sail on his yacht immediately after a storm for like £20k or some bs
Or, y’know, you could just skip the sailing trip to Aruba.
Its funny how schizophrenic your posts are from thread to thread.
I can only see this happening hand in hand with Medicare For All and the decoupling of healthcare from full time employment.
Service jobs, which are currently 80 percent of US employment, require the same amount of hours with actual people present, e.g. you can’t wait more tables, or answer more customer service calls, in 20% less time.
Removing the cost of healthcare from employers will allow them to allocate some of the savings towards employee salaries instead of healthcare insurance.
Nobody is saying you should have to do 40 hours work in 32 hours - rather the company hires more people to cover those hours.
This only works out in 9 to 5 jobs. There are ao many people out there that work very different hours. Many career fields that work a lot longer shifts wouod not be able to simply work less. It just doesn’t work that way.
Firefighters work 48 or 72 hours a week depending on the week. We can’t just say, ok cool. You work 32 hours a week now.
Removing the cost of healthcare from employers will allow them to allocate some of the savings towards employee salaries instead of healthcare insurance. Or just, y’know, keep the savings. On the bright side, it would mean you no longer depend on your job for healthcare, so people would have more freedom to quit.
Even 32 hours a week with a proportional decrease in pay would be a huge improvement.
You shouldn’t have to take a cut in pay for this. Productivity has increased and the benefits of the productivity increase has only gone to the ultra wealthy.
A lot of people are struggling with inflation already. A 20% pay cut is not an improvement.
Yeah not for everyone. I’m thinking higher paying areas like technology and programming where pay is high but people are getting really burned out.
I’m a programmer, and it’s very different from hourly work. Realistically, any programmer is coding for like 1-2 hours a day. There are meetings so we understand the problem we have to solve, and a lot of time thinking through the problems and architecture solutions. We’re not sitting there typing for 8 hours a day, or at least those are the ones getting burned out. Realistically I’m working like 30 hours a week already, with only 10 hours being real coding, the rest being talking, researching, learning, and pondering. Maybe I’m lucky I work somewhere that that stuff isn’t seen as slacking.
Ugh. I once did some independent programming and the guy insisted I do it in front of him because it involved his proprietary data. So much griping about the time I spent looking at documentation or referring to coding assistance sites like Stack Overflow. I quit on day two.
For the sake of comparison…
1940 median US male salary was $956. Women earned about 62¢ on the dollar to men.
Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $21,800.
Median US income (overall) in 2023 is $42,800.
You mean to tell me productivity has gone up 4.8x, and I don’t even see 2x the increase in salary.
Put otherwise, if my hours are worth nearly 5x to you, why aren’t they even worth 2x to me?
I tell people time and time again that work starts at 9 and end at 3pm, everything after is shuffling paper and killing time.
I started working a 6:30am-2:30pm job and it’s life changing. The first hour is just getting settled, I spend lunchtime organizing my calendar and Emails, and I still have time for a full day of activities after work.
I am super jealous. Imagine finishing work and have time to hang out with your friends and family. Living the dream.
i wish i could do that, but my body is not programmed for such early rising. i tried and it is a wonder i didnt crash my car on the way to work
It’s definitely not for everyone! I’m one of those weirdos who wakes up super early every day naturally. My partner, on the other hand, naturally sleeps til 10 or 11.
Well, jobs are different. It’s just that sometimes you get too tired to do anything effectively an hour or two before your work technically ends.
But what about the poor billionaires?
“I’ve got one hobby space program yes, but what about second hobby space program?”
32hr week is fine, but what does he mean by no loss in pay?
The mandated work week is something a central regulator controls, and the pay is not.
The drop in productivity because of working 32hrs instead of 40hrs will be much less than 20%, that’s for sure. Maybe there’ll be no drop at all. That doesn’t always translate to no drop in pay.
If by 32hrs we mean 4 days, then it frees that day for other workers (if we imagine any job with a physical workplace). The pay is a result of the balance of interests. It will become less.
And personally I’d say 35hr week is a better idea - as in 5 days of 7hrs .
We make gains by organization not legislation.
Read the excerpts of the speech quoted in the article. All is plainly said.
That’s not really true though. The majority of workers in the US are non-exempt full-time employees, which means employers are required to pay overtime for anything over 40 hours. Lowering that threshold will mean those 8 extra hours are more valuable and will hold wages steady.
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They do that anyway, but the whole wage market shifts upward because of the non-exempt regulations. The whole reason we even had a middle class to loose was the labor laws established from union strikes and labor reform in the early 20th century. The only reason you have a weekend is because of those laws. Regulation like this is the first step toward improving labor down the board.
ofc we should also raise min wage and/or establish universal benefits to head off automation and other productivity improvements, but those are bigger reforms.
And personally I’d say 35hr week is a better idea - as in 5 days of 7hrs .
No thanks! I’ll stick with The Bern on this one.
Depends on the purpose. If you want for the shorter week to be normalized - then surely yes.
And if you want that “no loss in pay” - then my idea is better to that end.
Bernie is advocating for a 4 day work week with no loss in pay, and you’re arguing against your own best interest before anyone has even objected. Why? I’m not interested in a 7 hour day. 7 hours, 8 hours, it makes very little difference. But 4 days vs 5 days is a major quality of life improvement.
Bernie is advocating for a 4 day work week with no loss in pay
Yeah, sure, and I’m advocating for long power lines with no loss in power. Bernie doesn’t explain how’s he (even algorithmically) going to evaluate which pay is “no loss in pay” and how is he going to enforce it.
I mean, cool, but nothing will happen because one old guy says this.
No.
You have to join a union or form a union.
If your workplace is already organized, then build further strength through solidarity, help other workers around you, and at every turn find ways to erode the power of the bosses.
I would absolutely love to only work 32 hours a week instead of 40, 45 or 50.
I would also love four weeks vacation a year, full healthcare coverage and a unicorn in my backyard please.
Apart from the mystical horse, those aren’t fantastical things. France has a 35 hour work week, many countries have 4 weeks vacation as the norm, and most rich countries have full healthcare coverage. These are policy choices, not impossible dream worlds.
It’s sad that over here in America people are conditioned to think they are fantastical things.
Oh please. Would that ever work, besides the dozens of countries and corporations that have managed without issues?
The unicorn comment makes me think you’re being a sarcastic ass.
The rest of your comment is 100% doable. At least, lots of other countries are doing it.
I was just kidding about the unicorn, as living in the US it seems just about as likely to get a unicorn as getting universal healthcare or vacation.
😅🦄
Anyway, my son loves unicorns and I grew up watching my little pony so whatever
Fair enough.
The vacation period is a minimum standard in the EU.
Beyond the daily and weekly rest periods, your staff has the right to at least 4 weeks of paid holidays per year. You cannot replace these holidays with a payment unless the employment contract has ended before the staff member has used up all their annual leave.
In the UK minimum holiday entitlement is 28 days. I am always appalled at how badly the US allows it workers to be treated. I really wish the US would start thinking more about working to live and not living to work.
If people who are negatively affected by it would stop voting for people who make it a campaign promise to never offer these things, we can’t get anywhere
It’s depressing that you’ve been convinced that full healthcare coverage is as unrealistic as a unicorn in your backyard.
In France I work 32 hours, have 7 weeks holiday and awesome healthcare.
I have cows in place of a unicorn though.
I mean they have to raise the retirement age and had (are having?) Protests about it the whole year didn’t they
“Have to”? That’s obviously more than up for debate, especially considering how many people protested.
God forbid they consider increasing taxes for the rich instead.
He still supports Biden…The same Biden who forced railroad workers to stop being on strike. Biden who wrote the crime bill that exploded our prison population. Biden who supports every war we’re involved in, all of which are illegal. Biden who was in favor of segration back in the day
Bernie had two primaries rigged against him in a row and didn’t say anything about it. Speaking as a disabled person, I appreciate what he has to say about a lot of things, but what good is he if he’s just going to cave in and do the same shit as the rest of them? He keeps saying that Biden is his friend. Well Bernie has some shitty friends.
Are you rejecting a call to build organized labor across the country because you have a grudge against one man for endorsing another man?
He’s never actually going to fight for anything. keep a close eye on the issue. As soon as the democrats encounter on obstacle they’ll declare that they “don’t have the votes” and then say “vote blue no matter who!” and then continue to do nothing even if they win.
The call is to build organized labor across the country, giving workers the power to shape society toward our interests, not to expect the ruling class to offer voluntary concessions that have no benefit to them.
I’ve heard all this before. It never works.
what I mean by that is that all these politicians talk about doing good things, but they never actually do anything. They just keep saying “we don’t have the votes yet” and then they give up, because they never actually wanted to fix anything.
Again, I think you are misunderstanding the message.
The speech is not giving a promise that Bernie Sanders will make gains on behalf of workers.
Rather, it is giving encouragement to workers to make gains for ourselves, by building our own power against the oligarchs.
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He can’t, but workers can.
Our fate rises or falls by our capacity to join in solidarity.
So he calls essentially for a 25% raise across the board for everybody. In some fields this doesn’t matter much. Office workers will probably achieve just as much or in some cases perhaps more in 32 hours than in 40 hours. Some other fields, perhaps less so.
If this would happen, it would directly lead to increased unemployment in some fields, and probably and increased inflation that might eat the benefit anyway in the end.
Still, even if I’m a bit skeptical, I’m all for lessening the hours we work, and all for spreading the productivity to more people and not just the top. I just think that the workers will need to take at least part of the hit to make this a realistic goal. Or perhaps robots and AI just need to take over all those jobs where number of hours correlate strongly to the amount of output.
You’re getting down voted for expressing legitimate concerns, and nobody is giving reasons why they disagree with you. I thought we left this kind of interaction behind with reddit.
Anyways, any major shift will have downsides, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t viable in the long term.
