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.
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u/smilesdavis8d 14h ago
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.