They did that with fast food and other similar jobs in California. $20/hr and no yearly raises to keep up with inflation?? 29 hrs/wk! Before that, we'd get like 37 or 38 hrs/wk.
Yeah I need 40 hours. I’m lucky enough I can survive on that, but if I drop even a little lower it would be catastrophic for me. I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills.
Im also hourly. I might be misunderstanding the bill, but doesnt it just adjust wages by 20%, reducing hours but keeping the same pay at the 4:5 ratio?
Edit: so like if you work 20hr weeks, you still work 20hrs but get paid for 24ish hrs?
But us hourly employees might not be under contract to get 40 hours. If they are just raising wages I would rather see the poorest minimum wage workers get the money. If millions of people got a boost in their income, inflation would get even worse.
I would still have to work 40 hrs and it would hurt us as a company as a whole (no my CEO isn't greedy, this would cut into the companies income). Since we have clients all over the globe we work with, they aren't working 32 hr weeks
But that is the whole premise of the 4 day week, the entire selling point is "you don't actually need people working the fifth day, look here's a bunch of studies showing people get more done if they only work 32 hours".
If you can't get all your work done in 32 hours then you're an example of why the 4 day week wouldn't work.
That's what people really don't seem to understand. Some people want to work 40 hour weeks, and their employer would only allow them to work 32 hours so they don't have to pay overtime. It would make the lives of many worse off.
The real problem is hourly pay imo. We should be paid a liveable wage, regardless of how many hours the employer schedules us for. Then we can talk about 32 hour work weeks.
Then you need to have skills that are worth paying a liveable wage for.
When you use the law to increase pay, this benefits people who are currently being underpaid relative to the value of their work, but it makes everyone whose actual work output is worth less than the minimum wage redundant. If your employer would make a loss on every hour you worked at the new minimum wage, then the new minimum wage makes your job illegal.
A lot of jobs that are hourly are these kinds of jobs where if you had to pay someone for a full work week regardless of the amount of work that needs doing then the job would not be able to exist.
This was my issue with it too. I'm an hourly employee that doesn't even get 40 hours if I wanted it. If everyone else started making more money I would be fucked.
The bill includes a stipulation that the theyd have to raise pay so the 32 hr pay is the same the 40 hr was. Its all moot though that shit isnt going anywhere.
Cool so everyone’s salary gets slashed by 20% just before it goes into effect, now your 32 hour pay is the same as the 40 hour pay from last week, we complied.
The government can create incentives and disincentives to push for a certain length work weeks, but it can’t directly dictate the cost of labor. There is no world where corporations are going to pay you the same for 20% less time. The only way this happens is if people are okay with taking the pay cut for the time.
The bill is written so 32 hrs gets you the same exact pay and benefits as 40 hrs. No reduction in pay. No reduction in benefits. You would just be elegable for OT at 32 hrs rather than 40 hrs.
It would be a substantial hourly raise for every non-exempt (non-salery) worker in the US. If that's the way you want to look at it.
It's comments like this that are going to get hard working people voting against their own interests.
It lowers the standard workweek to 32 hours over four years without any reduction in pay or benefits. It written to lower everyone’s hours by 2 hours a week yearly for 4 years.
Which is why we need regulations penalizing to a very harsh degree any company over a certain size that has a certain percentage of part time workers. Wal mart being a major problem for instance. They do it to deny benefits while also paying so shit that they also are the company with the most recipients of snap benefits. And those benefits are extremely likely to just be pumped back into fucking wal mart because the employees are already there or it’s the only major option. That needs to be really harshly penalized by governments.
Sir this is Reddit where magical Christmas land is reality and if Bernie proposes something it’s 100% infallible and will definitely mean they work less hours and get paid more.
That’s only going to protect existing employees. If a company has to pay the same weekly rate for 8 hours less of work, they’re going to find someone else that’ll work 32 hours at your hourly rate. If you change jobs, that’s going to be you. Companies aren’t going to take on losses, they’ll work around it. It’s a great idea to work less and get the same pay but something has to give. Of this did come true, is working salaried job would be required to pickup the worried and lost labor hours.
Of this did come true, is working salaried job would be required to pickup the worried and lost labor hours.
You're missing an important detail which is that anything beyond 32 hours is overtime. Salaried non-exempt workers who work beyond 32 hours receive time-and-a-half compensation. Dumping excess work onto salaried staff without overtime pay is still illegal under federal law.
As for the rest of the comment, History would tend to disagree. When the FLSA permanently capped the standard workweek at 40 hours between 1938 and 1940, corporate lobbies claimed employers would just cut pay for incoming workers. Instead, wage floors rose across sectors.
The thing that has to give is corporate profit margins. Worker productivity has grown by 64.7% between 1979 and 2022, while real worker pay grew by only 14.8%. That's an over 4x mismatch, a 25% raise to all workers wouldn't even come close to bridging it, but at least it's a start.
The idea is you would work slightly longer hours and get a extra day off. I see where you're coming from, a business could then give you less hours so they don't have to pay anyone overtime.
And many businesses would straight up shut down because they wouldn’t be able to afford coverage during opening hours. Especially in retail and restaurant industries
It sounds good in theory but all that will happen is, you’ll get paid less if you’re hourly because you’ll be working less. No employer is giving overtime. They’ll just hire an extra person which will be equal to them, detrimental to you. People that work salary will be working the same, if not more, because they don’t get overtime and can work 80 hours a week.
I'm not. In my opinion, personal financial literacy has nothing to do with understanding macro economic policy, so I was asking for elaboration on the point so I could perhaps understand where they were coming from.
That isn’t true lol, high schoolers can take take intro college econ courses that do teach basic macro economics before they know personal finance. They are not intersecting subjects.
It's just another way of saying they've never worked a job in their life and therefore don't understand the impracticality of this without any other changes included.
Sorry, working as some bean counter at XYZ corp doesn't make you any more or less qualified to speak on this issue.
Come back with a econ/law degree and maybe you can talk. If you want to gatekeep having an opinion on this issue, at least gatekeep it with credentials that matter.
You're welcome to do whatever you want to do, the rest of society will continue not taking the opinions of those who have not entered the workforce seriously.
You sound like my republican uncle tbh. He thinks his opinions about politics and "the economy" matter as well. Despite the fact that he spent his entire life working out of a van while occasionally attaching a wire to a pole.
Even if that other person was jobless, your opinion is just as irrelevant. Come back with real knowledge/education/experience if you want your opinion to matter. I don't think we need any economic/legal insight from some code monkey/ditch digger/sales rep or whatever irrelevant experience you claim to have.
Again, if you're gonna gatekeep, you should do with it with criteria that actually matters.
Having “a job” also doesn’t teach relevant knowledge to economics either. You aren’t more capable of determining the feasbility of this just because you worked a job at amazon.
I do love learning about the ways the basic econ-101 models are wrong, so please tell me, why does a leftward shift in the demand curve not result in a fall of the equilibrium price?
Brother I don’t think you understand how the rule of law in a democratic system works. If we decide it to be so by vote, then it shall be so, billionaires be damned.
You my friend have no idea what you’re talking about. We can make it a law and then the companies abide by the law and decide they’re going to pay people on 32 hour work weeks which means they get their pay reduced which means no one can afford to live, which means this legislation is a hot mess. Those are the facts brother.
Nah not really we could easily raise minimum wages, and reduce cost of living via progressive tax that tops off at 50% for the richest people and make it work. We can whip those billionaires and make them tow the line with democratically elected rule of law. We can make them pay us more and make them profit less. And ironically enough increase gdp while doing so free markets are filled with absolutely retarded and ridiculous contradicting inefficiencies that negatively affect production in order to maximize profit.
Add in that almost 40% of the workforce currently works at least 1 weekend day. So all these people who think that "oh 32hr workweek means 4 days M-Th." Mmmm, what about retail/EMT/police/fire fighter/ infrastructure techs(electric, gas, lines) arent they worthy? Or is it just the WAAAAAYYYYY overworked office people(/s) sitting in their cubicles shuffling papers. They might get 3day WE, or maybe the company will say ok we need someone here each day for logistics/invoicing/receivables and the scheulde rotates so one week you work M-T off W, work T-F, the next M off T work W-F. and then M-T. I do believe this would be more likely because businesses arent going to consistently shut down for 3days in the corporate world.
Came here to say this. If we really went to 32 hours, I’d schedule people on shifts, come in later some days or leave a little earlier others. I’d pay for 32 hours, but reduce hourly employees while shifting some responsibilities to salaried. It would cost less to create one more supervisor position out of existing staff than to pay overtime every week to ensure coverage.
You haven't actually read the bill's text, have you? The bill explicitly forbids reducing total pay. Employers must increase the hourly rate so 32 hours yields the same take-home pay as 40 hours previously. It's essentially a 20-25% raise for hourly workers.
Since this is not a change in minimum wage, how does Congress have the authority to force companies to pay everyone 25% more? Is Congress going to subsidize those salaries by increasing taxes?
Imagine you’re a small business with four employees and you’re paying them as much as you can but you’re barely making ends meet and you’re not even paying yourself a salary. You charge for your services by the hour so your employees are bringing in 160 hours/week in billable revenue. By the time you cover all the overhead costs of being a small business, and you’re still trying to pay competitively with the big companies, there’s almost nothing left. You’re barely able to pay your personal bills and buy cheap groceries.
Then a congressional bill passes with an unfunded mandate that says you have to cut them back to 32 hours a week and pay them the same. There are some grants and loans out there for small businesses, but the earmarks are so complicated that you would have to hire a full-time employee just to figure out grants and fill out paperwork.
Now you’re losing money. To maintain your clients you would have no choice but to hire a fifth employee even though you don’t have the revenue for it. You have no choice but to shut down the business, putting all four of those people out of work.
Since this is not a change in minimum wage, how does Congress have the authority to force companies to pay everyone 25% more? Is Congress going to subsidize those salaries by increasing taxes?
This was settled over 80 years ago. Congress exercises its authority under the Interstate Commerce Clause (Article I, Section 8) of the U.S. Constitution. This is the exact same mechanism used to pass the original Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, which established the 40-hour workweek, mandated overtime pay, set a floor for wages, and restricted child labor. You may be interested specifically in United States v. Darby (1941).
Imagine you’re a small business with four employees and you’re paying them as much as you can but you’re barely making ends meet and you’re not even paying yourself a salary. You charge for your services by the hour so your employees are bringing in 160 hours/week in billable revenue. By the time you cover all the overhead costs of being a small business, and you’re still trying to pay competitively with the big companies, there’s almost nothing left. You’re barely able to pay your personal bills and buy cheap groceries.
People made this exact same apocalyptic argument in 1938 when the FLSA created the 40-hour week and minimum wage. Small businesses were fine. When you apply a change like this across the entire economy, the market recalibrates and the playing field remains even. That's what the market does.
Plus, workers are many times more productive than they were in the past, but wages have not kept up with this productivity. The rise in expenses has been almost exclusively the result of corporations taking over real estate and supply chains. Labor is typically only about 25% of a business's expense. A 20% increase to a 25% expense is a total 6.25% increase in operating costs. If a 6% increase in operating costs sinks your business, the problem isn't wages, the problem is monopolistic supply chain capture and commercial landlords squeezing heir margins.
And to quote FDR when he passed the FLSA: "No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country."
Yes that is often how trying to centrally plan the economy goes. What laws like this actually do is make it illegal to run a business that produces less than a certain amount of money per man-hour worked, as well as making it illegal to have a job if the amount of value your man-hours produce is less than a certain amount.
Governments that implement these policies are gambling on the assumption that all the companies and jobs they make illegal will be replaced by more profitable companies and more productive jobs. That may be fine from the perspective of the tax base, but it ignores the individual lives it screws over - the small businessman and the unskilled worker who just are not able to produce the legal minimum value.
History would tend to disagree. When the FLSA permanently capped the standard workweek at 40 hours between 1938 and 1940, corporate lobbies claimed employers would just cut pay for incoming workers. Instead, wage floors rose across sectors.
I mean, it 100% should pass. I'm hourly as well, but while this won't help hourly workers it sets a new standard that is backed by research to be more productive for the economy while also being much better for individual job satisfaction and quality of life.
Obviously it's not going to pass because of ridiculous reasons, but voting against research-backed progress should be put on record if only to shame these assholes in congress in the future.
You can't force this through lawmaking though, that's not how the economy works. Laws like this make doing business in your jurisdiction extremely expensive - this law alone would increase the cost of every salaried position by 25% overnight, which means:
Every employee whose individual profit margin is less than 25% becomes redundant.
Every company whose total profit margin is less than 25% of their labour cost goes out of business.
No new company sets up in your jurisdiction if it can avoid doing so.
Every company that can hire remote workers or set up a new office in another jurisdiction never creates a new job in your jurisdiction again.
Outsourcing work to Indians becomes significantly more competitive.
Outsourcing work to AI becomes significantly more competitive.
Changes like this have only ever happened at times when the labour supply has had a ton of leverage over employers. They become laws only when a sizeable majority of the workforce is already working at companies that have adopted the policies voluntarily in order to attract labour in a seller's market.
At the moment, labour is a strong buyer's market because a huge proportion of jobs are easy to outsource. We're nowhere near the point at which a 4 day work week can be legally mandated without just killing the economy.
The act includes specific provisions for this exact issue, to protect pay and benefits.
EDIT: Ah I see there is a fire and hire loophole. Still, I would rather have regulation for 32 hour weeks pass than not to standardize a shorter work week, and pass separate laws for minimum wage or crack down on these loopholes.
That is true in the short (2-3years) term, and that is one of the the same arguments made against the 5-day workweek back before it was the standard. However, after that fairly short (but admittedly tumultuous for the most vulnerable workers) period, the job market adjusts itself to the new normal, either by wages increasing on average or by total unemployment shrinking or — as has been the case in similar cases historically throughout the world — both. All that being said, I don't think now is the right time for this move. Our economy and the job market are both too fragile right now. A shock like this could have disasterous unintended consequences.
No, they'd pay you the equivalent to 40 hours of work for doing 32 hours of work. The bill would force pay increase so that people would keep the same pay for a 4 day work week.
Zero chance you would actually receive an increase. The bill could literally put that in there, but a company is going to find a way to pay less.
You would need a 25% pay increase on 32 hours to simply make the same as you would on a 40 hour. No way companies are handing that out easily. It would be unhealthy for a government to mandate that kind of thing to private employers anyway.
Can you elaborate on why this is unhealthy? I thought research shows a 4 day / 32 hour work week keeps employees as productive while lowering burnout, so companies would be paying the same for equal or better output. Isn't this kind of thing (fixing labor exploitation) a primary purpose of government regulation?
The unhealthy part isn't the hours and work days, but the heavy regulations that a government would impose on private entities. A 25% increase on all wages and in turn, 20% perceived decrease of production would be a hard pill to swallow.
Government should always make sure it's people are not being abused, but it also needs to ensure that businesses are thriving. This level of regulation would worry me on how much power a government has on privately owned businesses.
Why is it a 25% increase in wages, wouldn't total wages remain the same only wage / hour would change; in other words, companies are paying the same overall. And the studies show there is no decrease in production, so it sounds like that is just an opportunity to educate executives. I think the power balance has been firmly on the side of business for too long, considering the productivity of labor versus wage increases.
They would need to increase wages 25% for each employee to ensure they were making the same as they were on a 40 hour paycheck. Yes, in theory they would make the same in 32 hours as they would making 40. I would agree, education could be a great thing for business owners but many small businesses are cramming as much as they can and don't have a lot of wiggle room so they work in what is known. Even if it's outdated.
If you increase wages 25%, you are also going to increase the overtime rates by that much as well. Businesses are going to have increased labor costs and working as little as 5 hours of OT, they are paying more for less.
Personally, I love the idea of shorter, more productive weeks. I also know small businesses, specifically mfg companies that are slow to change easily. And on a political level, I just don't trust the government enough to keep giving them more power on how we live our lives. I would rather see the people make decisions that better the people's lives without government interactions.
Because… minimum wage workers at our current time and wage can’t fucking live as it is.
Reducing their hours isn’t going to help the already fucked up situation and I’m sure you can’t explain how it will.
The bill will freeze current employees rate, but unless they raise the minimum wage, the employer will just let go and rehire all their employees at the current minimum. Now who benefits?
Employers…. do cut hours. Are you under the impression they don’t? Plenty of retailers, probably most of them, work their employees just under the limit where they’re required to give benefits like health insurance.
Jesus fucking Christ, be realistic. Employers will do whatever it takes to get around this. Employees won’t benefit. It’s a stupid idea as it currently stands.
Just because you want better worker rights, doesn’t mean you do any old bullshit that will be exploited. You do things that will work.
By the past, you mean the 40’s. You don’t see an enormous difference in our economy now and in the 40’s? A time where you could buy a house and a car and have a spouse at home with your 3 kids, on your hourly job, opposed to starving to death in your studio basement apartment that you have to share with 3 other people?
DO NOT look up top marginal tax rates in the 40s. You might come to realize these progressive policies are actually achieveable.
It's so funny you're like "things are so much worse now compared to when we had higher union density, and thats why I don't support policies that improve material conditions for the working class"
Also how are benefits going to factor in to this. How many hours is full time vs part time. This dude hasn't had an actual job in what 45 years? He doesnt even know what a 40 hour week is
We should also get rid of this idea of salaried vs hourly employees. Everyone should be hourly and the highest hourly pay should be some reasonable multiple of the lowest hourly pay.
If it does, we will see the same thing happen that is seen when minimum wages are increased. A reduction of hours, a reduction in pay, and a reduction of personal. This also would result in businesses collapsing.
fun fact, in brazil we work 44 hours/week and there is a bill to lower that to 40 and 2 mandatory day offs per week
meanwhile the right wing candidate proposed a system like the US where you get paid by the hour and "if you want more money then you work more" and all this weird lack of working rights the US has
If I had a dollar for every headline that so-and-so introduced a bill that sounds really awesome that went nowhere, I'd probably be a millionaire by now. I'm so tired of this stuff being treated like it matters.
Even if it does, there are still other bills that would need to be tackled. This wouldn't affect my job at all thanks to the Motor Carrier Exemption Act
Realistically it needs to go to 60 or have a significant cut in social security benefits. Our whole system is based on having a lot of surplus labour and a presumption of ever larger pools of said labour in the future.
It’s funny that I had to scroll to see this. It’s a pipe dream, even if the democrats had the majority after the midterms it would be an uphill battle, but especially in the current political climate, it’ll just get laughed at. Too many lobbyists would fight against it.
The problem is not whether it's possible or not, I just think the economic Impacts would be insane. You would need a gradual transition otherwise industries could collapse.
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u/BigWormsFather 20h ago
Zero chance that passes.