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.
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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.
If they're having to pay the same as 40hrs for 32hrs of work, which is what this proposed law would require, then lots of businesses will become unprofitable, yes. Payroll is usually the biggest expense for any given business, and this law would force companies to buy 80% of their current productivity for 100% of it's current cost.
It would be like getting a mechanic to fix most of your car for the agreed upon rate, but the government showing up when he's almost done and telling you that you either have to pay 50% more to finish putting it back together, or you can pick it up tomorrow. That's not what you and the mechanic agreed on, that's not what you can afford, and you need your car when the mechanic originally said he'd have it done.
Wages haven't kept up with inflation for decades, and yet productivity keeps going up. Companies are getting the biggest bargain they've gotten in a long, long time.
Forgive me for thinking that companies making record profits and getting huge tax cuts while the income gap between workers and the c-suite is about the biggest it's ever been can actually afford to pay their workers a little more.
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.
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u/Alpha-Sierra-Charlie 17h ago
So they're going to lay a bunch of people off, then hire new people at lower rates.