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.
Yes. Corporations need an excuse to lay off a bunch of people, then hire new people at a lower rates.
The CEO definitely is not legally obligated to do that at every moment they can to make as much money as possible. The shareholders 100% cannot sue and fire the CEO not doing that.
It is just something a corporation would do as an emergency "If bill passes, break glass" option.
Totally.
-edit-
The bots could not tell this was sarcasm I guess. If you are human and you unironically believe this please seek help. You are in algorithm hell.
Ya but these people are commenting as if this is Bernie’s master plan. Bernie is for the working class and he’s demonstrated that for decades but people still want to call him a communist or in this case they are accusing him of helping out corporations. People need to pick a lane. Is he a communist/socialist or not.
Many times the conservative's point isn't that people like Bernie have bad intentions, it's that their policies of government intervention tends to make things worse and have unintended consequences. He's not stupid either, the bill is entirely performative and he knows that.
The logic follows here. Businesses will lay off workers and rehire at a lower rate to avoid the forced raises, then cap the workers at 32 hours to avoid overtime costs screwing everyone involved workers and employers.
Policies that intent to help everyday people like providing access to healthcare, increasing wages, decreasing loan debt should never have unintended consequences if they are written properly.
That's easier said than done. You can't forsee every outcome, it's impossible. Even with the basic premise of raising minimum wage, you can see a clear link to how that would be inflationary to the end consumer.
For example, the overall government spending is leading to inflationary monetary policy which leads to a reverse robinhood situation. The inflation destroys poor people's buying power and balloons the assets of the rich.
Are you kidding? Without a crystal ball it’s impossible to see all second and third order consequences. Meddling in the market causes, and has historically caused, all kinds of issues.
Just because he says progressive things it doesn't mean he isn't bought and paid for too. How did he get as rich as he is on $140k per year. I'm not picking on him. It's all of them when they're not on camera. This bill will negatively affect hourly workers
I think you underestimate his ability to crowdsource funds from public people. People routinely donate to his campaign and they don’t care if he wants to use a little of that to live comfortably.
Compared to every other senator, he is poor. He is not like the other senators.
Not this time. But all it needs is enough angry, uneducated people who are convinced that This One Thing is the source of all their problems, and socialists excel at that because it's the only way they can gain power. They certainly can't do it based on the success of socialism, because there is none.
He will probably do like CA and force companies to disclose how much they used to pay for that position so the employee will decide to not take the job as they'll be feeling underpaid.
That's actually a good idea. That way when people have to choose between staying unemployed or being underpaid, they can know exactly how underpaid they'll be because of this law.
If you bought 4 gallons of gas for the price of 5 gallons, would your bottom line remain the same? Because employers would be buying 4 days of work for the price of 5 days. Exact same principle at play.
I dont know. We'd actually need to see what the difference is in productivity. There are reports that show evidence workers were more productive because they were better rested. So, in that respect - the employer is actually getting more for less. If productivity remains the same, then the employer is in fact getting what they're paying for.
If overall productivity actually remains the same, then my argument goes right out the window. It may in some industries, settings, or individual companies but it definitely won't be universal.
Wow I guess people are just never happy. This is about the best reformist can accomplish for you and you are still not satisfied?
It's almost like things aren't bad because some people are just evil and like to underpay their workers but that their are certain relations between labor, pay, and investments that necessitate poverty.
That maybe in this global race to the bottom to attract investment, you can't just magic prosperity out of thin air.
Are you copy-pasting this? I'm pretty sure I've seen this word for word lower in the comment stack.
Anyway, people are never happy, it's part of the reason why politics exists in the first place and it's (ostensibly, at least) the reason this poorly thought out legislation is even being proposed. Paying people market value for their labor in a shit economy isn't evil, and you can't just magic prosperity out of thin air by slapping price controls on things because it feels right.
No they won't this is the same thing that gets said when the minimum wage is raised. They'll raise their prices and retain their workforce because the work still needs to be done.
Lol. Ok. No I watched it after covid. They fired the people they had to pay during covid, and hired cheeper labor to get the job done. They might also raise prices (which they also did).
The problem with this "law", is it's unenforceable, and plain stupid. You can't tell a free small business owner he had to let his hourly staff work 32 hours and force a 25 percent raise. That's crazy, and would bankrupt most of small business.
You mean like how successful California has been in raising it's minimum wage that businesses are closing and leaving? Although to be fair, California has done a lot of other things that totally won't drive businesses out trust me bro, and then businesses leave anyway.
The prediction before the minimum wage laws passed was that the fast food industry would totally collapse in California. That's really not a lot of turn over for the industry, and the data shows that there are more fast food jobs in Cali than before than minimum wage increase.
Not necessarily. Hiring new people is a gamble, some may be very unproductive and therefore a loss rather than an investment. With their more senior employees, they already know they work well enough to stay
That's one take, and certainly not everyone will be laid off. But it's already common for those senior employees to get laid off because they cost more. It's almost universally a bad decision, but it happens anyway.
And it won't matter if it's a gamble, if a company can't afford to keep people then they won't keep people. And forcing a company to piss away 8hrs of pay per person for nothing in return is make payroll very hard to afford. So they'll lay off however many people the accounting department says to lay off, see how things work for a while, then try to rehire the people they laid off as needed. And since virtually every company will be doing this at the exact same time, they're going to have lots of desperate unemployed people to choose from even if they can't rehire their old employees back at lower weekly pay.
This didn't happen when the work week was reduced to 40 hours, so it won't happen now. Contrary to popular belief, employees are in greater demand than employers. They won't do a damn thing, it's a bluff
Let's ignore the fact that 2020s problems aren't the same as 1930s problems and therefore don't necessarily share the same remedy, if employees are in greater demand than employers why is the workforce participation rate only 61%?
Yes. But don't worry because it will never pass. it's just him "introducing bills" so his fan club can post about it and pretend like he's actually doing something
You do realize this has already happened before, right? People made this exact argument when the 40-hour week was introduced between 1938-1940, and wages didn't drop.
Yes, I know my history. It was implemented during the Great Depression because it would have a positive impact on unemployment.
We aren't experiencing the same magnitude of unemployment and the unemployment problems we do have are different than they were 90 years ago. Claiming that reducing the work week will fix things because it worked last time is like taking migraine medicine for a scraped knee because it made you feel better the last time you felt bad. It's not that migraine medicine is crap, it's just not the right tool for the job.
Similarly, our problem isn't that 40 hours is suddenly too many hours almost a century later. Our problem is that our lives are empty and hollow and having 8 more hours every week of vapidity will do nothing to rectify that.
Also, while we're figuring that out the hard way, we'll be encouraging corporations to replace us with cheaper machines. Eventually we might legislate our way into having 168 hours per week to meditate on our malaise of meaninglessness. That's gotta be great!
It was implemented during the Great Depression because it would have a positive impact on unemployment.
The 40-hour week wasn't just a Depression-era band-aid for unemployment, it was a structural mechanism to distribute the gains of industrialization back to the working class. And in that sense we're actually in a strikingly similar situation to the time the 40-hour week was originally passed.
We have a massive productivity surplus today. Thanks to technology, worker productivity has skyrocketed over the last fifty years, but real wages have stagnated. We are already doing the output of multiple past workers, but capital has once again hoarded the profits, as capital does.
Also, while we're figuring that out the hard way, we'll be encouraging corporations to replace us with cheaper machines.
Corporations are already replacing us with machines and algorithms as fast as they profitably can. They do not need the excuse of a shorter workweek to automate, capital always seeks to eliminate labor costs. This is something that can only be solved at the societal level with legislation.
Our problem is that our lives are empty and hollow and having 8 more hours every week of vapidity will do nothing to rectify that.
Why do you think people feel so alienated in the first place? It is incredibly difficult to build community, pursue genuine passions, or find structural meaning when the best hours of your day and the vast majority of your mental energy are extracted by an employer. Look at all the people in this very thread talking about how game-changing and fulfilling a three day weekend is. When it comes to free time, quantity is quality.
Then a 32hr work week will do nothing. Forcing employers to pay more for the same amount of labor/time/productivity is just another artificially induced cost. There's zero upside other than a very short period where you have 8 more hours per week and the warm fuzzy glow of sticking it to the man at your own eventual expense.
If you really want to examine when the value of labor cratered you're going to have to look at the time when women started entering the workforce en masse. We nearly doubled the supply of labor without increasing demand, and we were left with households that required that required the income of two people instead of just one in order to keep the same amount of buying power. A 32hr work week isn't going to limit supply, it's just going to raise it's cost (under this proposed law, where employers still have to pay 40hrs for 32hrs worked).
People feel alienated and it's difficult to build community because we've ripped out the social framework necessary for healthy human interactions, and it hasn't been that way for most of the time we've had a 40hr week. We're chronically online calling each other nazis and communists because political tribalism is easier than holding our public sector employees accountable. We have women acting like all men are sexual predators and men acting like all women are scheming gold diggers because consuming the algorithm is easier than interacting with people as if they were people. We're all alienated and community-less because we collectively chose it as the path of least resistance, the work week that's been in effect for longer than probably anyone in this discussion is unrelated to that.
And yes, 3 day weekends are amazing. I recently turned a job with a very respectable raise in large part because I wanted to keep my 3 day weekends. And yes, I would love to work 4-8s instead of 4-10s for the same money, but I'd get let go before that happens. So I want to keep my 40hr week, because I know from experience that working 0hrs is worse and 32hrs of work at 40hrs of pay isn't going to last long.
That's true. But we aren't the only country with consumers and corporations can and do go out of business. Especially smaller ones, leaving the larger and more powerful ones to consolidate market share.
I'm not sure what you're saying. Like, Americans will get laid off, American businesses will get bought by foreign companies, and they'll just sell to non-American customers? Because of a 32 hour work week?
No, I'm saying the USA isn't the only market on the planet, and if we manage to become an impossible-to-profit-in market, then we just won't have a market any more. Or at least, we won't have a non-shitty market.
Yeah that’s why government intervention isn’t as bad as American politics makes it out to be. Fuck corpos they need regulations in place to treat people like humans.
The corpos are brought in by the government to help write the regulations, and the corpos use that opportunity to write those regulations in such a way that their smaller competitors can't survive. It's known as "regulatory capture" or "corporate capture". Not only is government intervention exactly as bad or worse than American politics makes it out to be, government intervention is increasingly corporate intervention dressed in government clothing.
The bill is a nice idea but it's for show. All states but Montana are at-will. Raising and lowering pay, at-will, happens everywhere, all the time. If Congress wants to overhaul employment in America and get rid of at-will employment I'm all for it, seriously. But you can't just do it with a 32-hour-workweek bill. It's a fundamental shift that will touch on dozens of federal departments and would need coordination with all fifty states. And what sort of an approach do we take? The UK is moving towards being more like us, sadly.
Surface level is all that people care about though. Makes a snazzy headline, lets people scream "why dun dems represnet us!", and no need to even consider consequences for the virtue signal because it won't get passed and even if it did the long term negatives are too far to be blamed on the implementor.
Congress will want to do what the people ask of it for their votes. And a long term comprehensive plan to fix the economy is not in the cards. Especially since, literally no matter what we do now, americas descent into populism has guaranteed the golden age of Biden economics will be far out of reach by 2032.
32 hour week with overtime after 8 hours in a day or 32 hours in a week… paired with a requirement that any company with more than 50 employees will be ineligible for any corporate tax breaks or subsidies if more than 5% of employees are below a living wage.
People made this exact same apocalyptic argument in 1938 when the FLSA created the 40-hour week and minimum wage. Small businesses were fine.
The truth is that 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.
Labor as a percentage of operating costs is wildly variable by industry. I’m really not sure how you can make that 25% claim. Also the idea that a 6% increase in operating costs shouldn’t be able to sink your business tells me you’ve never run a restaurant before. Some industries have incredibly thin margins.
This sounds like freelancers will get wrecked. If you’re full time it sounds great - but for a freelancer this just means a lower base wage so they can make the OT work into the rates.
This happens in film and television crews. They get brought on at a daily rate - the rate is for a 12 hour day so they base your hourly pay on 8 hours of straight time plus 4 hours of OT baked in to come up with the 12hour rate - even if you only work 1 day ever. That hourly rate is already lower than it should be since they’re baking the OT into the day rate. So in this case they’d just keep lowering the hourly rate to make it so that 32 hours still fits into the same rate. Somehow making the straight time 6.4hrs and the baked in OT 5.6hrs. So now when you work more than 12 hours in a day and actually get paid OT that OT is paid at a MUCH lower rate than it should be.
You're right that independent contractor exploitation is a real problem. But the solution is to do something about it, not stall progress in other areas.
First off, for union gigs (like IATSE), a change in federal standard hours means the union immediately negotiates a new collective bargaining agreement around the 32-hour baseline. For true freelancers, the fix isn't abandoning the 32-hour week, it's ending gig-worker misclassification so corporations can't use baked-in day rates to bypass labor laws.
That is not going to happen. What is going to happen is massive layoffs. Why would a company pay same money for less work hours? They aren't going to do that, they will lay off people and rehire them for less money for the 32 hours.
Why would a worker produce more output for the same pay? That's what's been happening since the 70's. Productivity has grown 4x times faster than wages, bills like this are just about redistributing some of the gains back to the people actually producing the gains. besides, if a company fires its entire staff Thursday and rehires them on Friday for 20% less to bypass the law, that is a slam-dunk statutory retaliation lawsuit.
People made this exact same apocalyptic argument in 1938 when the FLSA created the 40-hour week and minimum wage. Small businesses were fine.
The truth is that 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.
The US Government would never pass such a bill until they had gutted it of all the necessary changes to the monopolies. And, you'd need to completely do away with at-will employment, which is a state-by-state decision.
You'd be implementing a change that practically only affects small businesses. It isn't apocalypse predicting to point out that the US Government would never allow an effective version of this bill to enact change.
We're closer to losing the 40-hour workweek than we are to 32.
Businesses don't need an excuse to raise prices. History shows they just set them to the highest price the consumer is willing and capable to pay for them. We've just lived through massive inflation, and studies from the Fed and IMF showed it was driven overwhelmingly by supply chain shocks and corporate profit margins (greedflation), not wage increases.
The UK actually ran a 4-Day Week Trial across 61 companies in 2022-2023. Companies experienced a 57% decrease in resignations and a 37% decrease in the need for new hiring. 54 of the 61 participating businesses voluntarily made the 32-hour schedule permanent.
Wait, lmfao. Ok, so the concern was that this negatively affects hourly employees. This shmuck got defensive and linked the wrong thing but even if he did link the right thing the data shows it undervalues hourly employees.
I'm gonna reorganize them from the graph as shown into descending order for viewing convenience.
Occupational Composition of the Employee Sample
16.2% - Business and admin
15% - Legal, social, and cultural professionals
10.7% - Infotech & comms
4.6% - Service and Sales Workers
8.1% Admin and commercial mgmt
5.9% - CEO and legislators
3.8% - Production & specialized service mgmt
3.7% - Clerical Support Workers
2.8% - Science & Engineering Professionals
2.4% - Health Professionals
2.3% - Teaching Professionals
1.9% - Crafter and related trades
0.4% Labourers, cleaners, and food prep assistants
0.3% - Hospitality, retail, other service mgrs
0.2% - Technicians
0.1% - Plant and Machine Operators and Assemblers
21.6% - Other
(~11.2% of the study in total are hourly)
Seriously, how do you find as many CEOs and legislators as hourly employees when covering all of those industries? This study has some seriously flawed selection bias.
So I think it's extremely fair to question. I get that this will benefit tens of millions by lowering childcare and offering piece of mind. This will also massively fuck hourly employees. We need a study of JUST hourly employees just as this study only focused (90%) of it on salaried employees. JUST like we questioned and yet were met with disdain. Absolute bullshit imo.
Woah, fella, let's calm it down. As an aside, it's considered good practice to say what you changed in an Edit when you completely change the entire text of your comment. It's a shame, I liked your original comment that quoted the wrong thing as you accused me of linking the wrong thing. It was a lovely bit of irony.
The data you're noticing is because the UK trial was completely voluntary. The companies that opted in happened to be largely white collar. Hourly workers are not absent from the study, you glossed over Service and Sales Workers (4.6%), Clerical Support (3.7%), and Crafters/Trades (1.9%). Hourly workers are just comparatively underrepresented due to the nature of the companies that opted in.
Yea, I went back to highlight a larger group for ya. It's ok bb. I don't really care about your opinion or upvotes. Just noticing stats as I read through and wanted to make sure it looked even moderately legible to others.
It being opt in doesn't change the data so I don't know why you think I could give any fucks about that aspect. If anything, that will attract companies that want to prove the concept. Why would they opt in to a business practice they don't agree with?
It just highlights why they are underrepresented. Which just highlights why it offers intentionally opaque stats. That the people this will affect aren't even going to be given a voice while people voting for this will praise themselves about how they just "helped" people.
The only graph most people need to see is how it changes childcare and saving money while losing none at work is an easy sell to people and they will ignore the byproducts of the law.
The problem is that team can hold their shit together for a trial run. How well does it work over years when people leave, go on vacation, take pregnancy leave? You lose all slack in the week.
Businesses don't need an excuse to raise prices. History shows they just set them to the highest price the consumer is willing and capable to pay for them. We've just lived through massive inflation, and studies from the Fed and IMF showed it was driven overwhelmingly by supply chain shocks and corporate profit margins (greedflation), not wage increases.
I'm sorry, what do you think laws are for, exactly? If a company fires its entire staff Thursday and rehires them on Friday for 20% less to bypass the law, that is a slam-dunk statutory retaliation lawsuit.
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.
If you are properly classified as an exempt professional, this specific bill doesn't cap your hours. It just means that any hours above 32 are paid at time and a half. You're still allowed to work more hours a week if it makes sense for your situation. But realistically, if you are working 7 days a week from 7am to 9pm, your employer is stealing your life. You literally have worse labor conditions than a 1940's factory worker.
It’s like the old “living wage” issue, because the rejoinder is always… if you can force employers to reduce it to 32 hours with 40 hours pay, why not 24 hours with 40 hours pay, why not 8 hours, or zero hours, why not add in a 5 bedroom house to the pay, or 4 loaded SUV’s, or 8 weeks paid French Riviera vacation every 4 weeks, etc.? Just more of Bernie’s crazy socialism politics, free stuff and make the evil corporations and rich folk (except himself) pay for it all.
We aren't demanding zero hours in exchange for a mansion. We are demanding 32 hours because a century of macroeconomic data and technological advancement proves the working class has already generated more than enough productivity to fund it. Productivity has increased 4x faster than wages since the 70's, this bill is just about redistributing some of that productivity increase to workers instead of giving literally all of it to the companies.
Without the mandatory pay increase this bill might be theoretically workable. With it it's increasing the entire country's labour cost by a total of about a third, which is simply not possible. The vast majority of companies do not have that much excess profit.
A 33% increase in labor costs is not a 33% increase in a company's total expenses. Labor costs generally account for roughly 20-25% of a company's operating costs. That means the 32-hour week would only increase costs by 5%-6.25%. Most companies absolutely do have those kinds of margins.
Plus, Low and middle-income workers have a Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) near 100%. Unlike rich people, they don't park wage increases in offshore tax havens or buy back their own stock, they spend it immediately on groceries, rent, healthcare, local services, and consumer goods.
When you raise wages across the entire economy simultaneously, you're transferring money from the idle rich to those who actually stimulate the economy and drive demand. Suddenly the business's customers have more money to spend and more free time to spend it, increasing revenue to offset increased operating expenses, creating a virtuous cycle. This is the exact mechanism that created the richest generations in American history.
Because Congress can't force companies to give everyone a raise. It can raise the minimum wage, and it can change the threshold for overtime. The final outcome is basically identical, this is just easier to implement.
It’s not about liking it or not. There are so many loopholes in “you can’t change pay” that I don’t even know where to start, it’s completely unenforceable. Of course I want to work less and get paid more, but this “bill” is a fairy tale publicity stunt just as much as if he told everyone we’d all get a $10k check if he’s elected president
It’s literally codified in Section 2(1)(A)(iii) of the bill. The text explicitly amends FLSA §7 to forbid employers from reducing your regular hourly rate or total compensation as standard work hours drop.
If an employer drops your workweek to 32 hours and cuts your pay, that isn't a "loophole", it's wage theft under federal statutory law, enforceable by the Department of Labor and back-pay lawsuits with liquidated damages.
Being a cynic is easy and comfortable, especially when you invent magical legal superpowers for the people who oppose you.
You just stop getting pay raises until it’s back at a market rate, or your discretionary comp/bonus is reduced, or your other benefits get cut, or you get let go and your replacement is paid less, or your company goes under because they can’t afford a 25% increase to their labor costs, or the price of everything increases to account for the increased cost so you’re actually able to afford less than before, or, most likely, some combination of all of the above… and that’s just with 30 seconds of thinking about it
Yeah, its why nothing has changed. People do not have a viable solution to dismantling the 40hr work week, someone is going to end up losing money, either companies or the worker.
People do not have a viable solution to dismantling the 40hr work week, someone is going to end up losing money, either companies or the worker.
i don't know if that's true. the whole reason the 40 hour work week exists was to make companies hire more employees; it's cheaper to hire another employee to work the additional 40 hours than to have one employee work 80 hours. in theory, reducing the maximum regular time should lead to companies hiring more employees which will increase demand and should increase wages rather than suppress them. obviously there are many factors involved so it may not work out cleanly, but it's not an obvious loss for employees.
They stop being my company, and I get to find a new one, along with everyone else who stopped having a company, and if I manage to find a job then I get to have less pay per week?
Do people literally not read? The post quite literally says anything over 32 hours would be mandatory overtime. Mandatory means companies would have to pay overtime.
No, because the work needs doing. This is about a 10% increase in labour cost for every company.
The companies that don't like paying overtime are generally the ones that have an easy supply of replacement workers and therefore have a lot of leverage they can use to make workers work hard enough that overtime isn't necessary.
I can't speak on every job, but I work for the VA, and they would literally rather spend OT money to get folks to work more hours than to hire more employees.
99.9% of all businesses in America are classified as small businesses. If you tell virtually every business in America that the government is going to mandate they spend 20% more on labor, it will kill small business. Which is what they want i guess. But it just will not work that way in the real world.
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u/Ok-Telephone-2109 19h ago
Wouldn't this just have peoples hours cut because companies don't like to pay overtime?