What are the downsides to a 35-hour work week?

[kentuck]

It seems to me that a 35-hour work week should be an option on the table if the economy does not rebound in the next year or so?

In effect, it would create one job for every seven that now exist if employers expected the same productivity. Anything above 35 hours per week would be overtime. Most employers would probably hire another person if that overtime became too costly?

What effect would it have on the long-term unemployment?

How could employers be persuaded to pay their workers for 40 hours if they only worked 35 hours? Could they be shamed into it? Could they be told by the government that was the expectation? Could the employees ask for a raise to equal their old paycheck of 40 hours? How could workers make up for that 5 hours lost??

IF jobs were created from the 35-hour week, it would probably be between 10-15 million new jobs. That would take care of the unemployment problem.

[Mimosa]

1. Self -employed have no choice

More people in the USA are now 'independent contractors' who work multiple jobs. :)

[kentuck]

3. What percentage do you think that would be? n/t

?

[Mimosa]

4. 20% these day.

*hug* to Kentuck.

[Thav]

32. Salaried people are in the same boat.

I'm in seat 4a.

[rucky]

2. For two working parents, a well-timed 5 hours per week off (each)

could pay for itself by avoiding the stopgap child care costs and all the related headaches.

[m00nbeam]

5. Not sure employers would go for it

Paying people the same for 20% fewer hours would be a rather large issue to overcome. Also, for years, employers have moved earth and sky to avoid having full time employees because benefits (health and dental insurance, life insurance, paid vacations) are costly, so to lower the bar for full time employment to 35 hours would require employers to pay for more employee benefits.

Personally, I would love to see a 32 hour work week, but that is even less likely than a 35 hour work week.

[givemebackmycountry]

6. MB

Welcome to DU.
Have fun and you'll have a home.
There are some great folks on here.

[m00nbeam]

7. Thank you for the warm welcome

[Yupster]

14. Awful lot of companies barely hanging on today

You're going to hit them with a huge new expense.

You'll end up with fewer, but bigger businesses.

[m00nbeam]

15. I totally agree

And the bigger the company is, the less likely they are going to care if they are screwing their employees.

[kentuck]

17. They could qualify for a 100% tax break in certain instances...

such as you mention. It might persuade small businesses to hire more if they thought they could improve productivity and business by hiring another employee, especially if they were paid back with a 100% guaranteed tax break.

[Warpy]

8. That's just it, employers don't hire more employees

They expect their 40 hour per week employees to work overtime at company convenience right now because hiring new employees means benefits for those employees. It's cheaper to work the ones you have until they get exhausted and quit, then hire new ones.

While cutting hours seems like a great idea, they need to cut them for the people working mandatory overtime now. Then they need to start raising wages so that those people don't need to work 50-80 hours a week just to make ends meet, afraid to take that measly 2 week vacation every year because they can't afford to lose 2 weeks of overtime.

National health insurance would have removed one of the biggest burdens on employers and one of the biggest disincentives to hiring people instead of working fewer of them as though we'd all gone back to an 1800s sweat shop system. Unfortunately, our chickenshit Congress cared more about the insurance corporations than about anything else.

[kentuck]

9. If Congress passed a law...

they could stipulate whatever in the law.

They could encourage workers to ask their employers for a raise. Or they could pass the card law that the unions want. They could negotiate either of those with the employer.

[phasma ex machina]

10. 30 million productive people working 5 days a week produce all of the goods that America needs.

Everybody else does "make work," furiously spinning mouse wheels, trying in vain to keep with America's inflating central bank.

Theoretically everybody could work a couple of days a week to produce necessary goods and spend the remainder of their time enriching the community with Arts, Sciences, ...

Infantile psychotic capitalism must evolve for this to happen. Control freaks must give up their inflating central bank. Everybody must to learn to love everybody else, even the people from other political parties.

[kentuck]

13. Interesting...

How are people going to adapt to such a new economy? It's a new reality.

Labor would be valued at a much higher price as people find other ways to support themselves other than capitalism, be it arts, crafts, furniture, or whatever they did to help the community. The "community" would be the defining word.

[phasma ex machina]

19. +1 "The 'community' would be the defining word."

Amen! In the end all we have is each other. All the rest of the crap is just distraction.

[Codeine]

11. I'd have trouble paying my rent, for one. nt

[phasma ex machina]

16. In a rational world, America's glut of new houses sitting empty would tend to reduce rents.

Unfortunately, the powers-that-be proclaim deflation an enemy of the people then use America's inflating central bank to run up prices. Most people like deflation. That's why they spend so much time shopping for bargains.

[kentuck]

18. Most of them are big enough to house 4-6 people...

In the spirit of community, if they were to split the rent 4-6 different ways, they could provide shelter that was not so expensive and, at the same time, pay off the mortgage on the house held by God knows whom?

[Freddie Stubbs]

30. The problem is that there are a lot more renters now

People who used to be paying a mortgage are now renting, so demand for rentals is up. It is a big pain in the ass to maintain a rental property, so many homes are sitting empty.

The positive is that home prices are low and so are interest rates.

[Radical Activist]

12. The basic societal changes would be even more significant.

What happens when you give people time to enjoy life and be involved in other things? Does a 40 hour work week make sense with so many single parents out there? This should be one of the top things the left pushes for.

[DesertFlower]

20. every job i had in new york was a 35 hour week.

overtime was paid at time and one half after that. my last job paid double time on sundays and triple time on holidays.

i worked the night shift for a few months. worked 30 hours, but was paid for 35.

[kentuck]

22. That sounds like that woud be a good model for America.

to start weaning our people off capitalism. We would enter a stage of advanced capitalism or some other means of economy and commerce.

[McCamy Taylor]

21. The 40 hour work week started in the Depression to make more jobs.

The downside will be less wages. The upside is more jobs so a healthier economy since more people will have money to buy the stuff that other people are making.

Companies will not like it because of benefits, but soon health insurance will not be their concern anyway.

[kentuck]

24. Would employees be more inclined to ask for higher wages?

from their employers?

[snot]

23. Back in the 70's, experts considered a shorter work week inevitable --

because of productivity gains, etc., we'd all be able to make as much money or more, and still work less.

And the experts would have been right, if U.S. workers had shared proportionately in the profits they created.

[kentuck]

25. Somewhere the agreement was broken?

[SoCalDem]

26. There are millions of part-timers who would LOVE a 35 hr week

Most of the time, they have to make do with 20-24 a week and then beg for hours..

[jtuck004]

27. But we have excess capacity now - plants idle, equipment not working

people not working. Millions of people (there is a category on the BLS jobs report each month) are already working less hours than they want to, can't pay their bills now. And millions of jobs that used to pay $50K to $70K a year are gone, replaced by those that pay $20K to $30K.

Jobs are created based on demand. As soon as there is demand, employers will create jobs, or they will watch the sales go to the company that does.

The only resource with enough money to make that happen is our government, multiple trillions of dollars. If we just try to duplicate what we have done in the past we will wind up in the same bad spot we are in today, so there are some major structural changes, probably very painful, that would have to come about. But until demand is fixed we will continue to spiral downward.

[Thav]

34. The supply side needs to be fixed as well

In our consumer society, the production was moved out of the country. Our economy now is based off goods that are imported, and intangible value in commercial paper. Bringing production back to the US would return us to a more producer-consumer society where companies are creating tangible goods, as opposed to numbers and commercial paper.

[jtuck004]

38. You are correct, but I wonder if people realize how much investment

bringing manufacturing back is truly going to take? If the companies could make more money here they would be doing it. Our glory days came when we manufactured the equipment to blow up Japan and Germany, then re-built them, and ourselves, back up (using Japan as a source of cheap manufacturing, for while, part of what started this whole mess). The needs (not only in this country but in all the countries we bombed into rubble) were high. It took hundreds of people to build a car, bridges and dams took thousands. Whole cities were being built, millions of workers, energy and transportation infrastructure required millions of workers. Everything took HUGE labor. Today a lot of that stuff sits empty and unused, no demand, too much debt.

Things are far different today. Today it is the U.S. starting with the factories in rubble. Our shuttered factories are obsolete. The majority of the new stuff is in Japan, Germany, and especially China. (It is being reported that we are closing the last factory that makes incandescent light bulbs this week. Those that make the new compact bulbs? Overseas). We would need TRILLIONS to build today's automated factories. (It just cost GM about $750 million just to refit 5 different lines to raise fuel efficiency - not to build new lines, but a revamp of existing lines for a PART of ONE engine. Multiply that by all the different industries...trillions. Without that we could never compete with the people outside of this country who can outbuild us with far better precission and quality than our factories were capable of. (We may get the opportunity when the oil supply goes down and the price goes up, but if history is any indication that will throw us into at least as big, if not bigger, financial crisis than we are in now).

And how many people will be employed? The new factories use FAR fewer people, and at a much lower cost. Where wages used to be $30 to $40/hr, plus good benefits, the most prevalent wages will be $11 to $17/hr, with much lower benefits. Retirement pensions will be less than half of the traditional amounts, and will Social Security even be there? How will they learn the jobs? The engineers are going to graduate with $80,000 or more in debt for a job that pays $45K. The techs will graduate from a two year school with $30K (or more) in debt for a job at $11/hr running a board or a computer controlled machine in an automated plant. And that's assuming there is a school to go to. The junior colleges are already turning people away, and those that are there are going to graduate to no jobs with a large debt load (according to the financial aid officers I have spoken to). The 4 year colleges are full, and states budgets are forcing layoffs - and those jobs are gone for at least 2 decades. The numbers just don't work anymore - the government will have to step in with some funding, at least hundreds of billions, probably trillions. Barring some incredible miracle of technology or a much bigger program than anyone has even talked about, there will quite likely be 50 million unemployed or underemployed people by about about 2012, or the alternative of tens of millions of people working jobs equivalent to customer service for $8/hr, who used to pay taxes on $40K a year or more. Makes one wonder who is going to pay for increasingly expensive health care.

And we haven't even talked about demand, the thing that gives a factory a reason for living. Who we gonna sell our stuff to? Brazil (they are making deals with China), China (how will we compete against the yuan when they hold it low against the dollar? They might raise it, or perhaps we lower the dollar? Get ready to lose another 30-40% off real estate, and as our abiltiy to import falls so does our ability to feed everyone. (There is no longer enough arable land to feed everyone here). Japan (check out their financial condition lately?) India (they are buying from China, less interest in American stuff all the time), Mexico? (Got any livestock or milk cows? Mexico just slapped a 5% tariff on pork products, a tariff on cheese, and some other things, because we haven't agreed to let their trucks across - they aren't too worried about us, eh?).

And how do we teach people that it is in their best interest to pay 2-3 times as much for an American-made product? Nice to talk about, but I will believe we can do it when I see it happen on a large scale.

So we get to fill our Walmarts with higher-priced goods and try to sell enough to Americans to support the governments (teachers, fire, police, univerisites, a raft of federal through city employees for other jobs, etc). How would one sell a $35 American shirt against an Asian $12 shirt when the customer barely has $8?

Who is gonna pay for all the above? Many businesses are already international in scope - if one tries to "make" them move their jobs back to a U.S. that is currently not as profitable as their foreign locations they may just close here. Then we get to increase the deficit to build a competitor from scratch. Think they won't? Goldman Sachs was at a banking conference this past month talking about how the renminbi is going to strengthen against the dollar, about their strategy to invest in that direction. Part of that is the crushing debt we have in homes, credit cards, the nation's current account, because we have not "made" anything in years, and have ignored what is happening around us. Check the markets - most of the profits are being made by companies with international exposure to the BRIC countries mentioned above.

While it is self-evident to the most untrained monkey that we can't just print money to get out of this, (always love people who jump up to point out the obvious, as if that adds anything to the discussion) that we have to do something different from what we have done before to get different results. But if the gov doesn't step in and start re-booting this country, there is nothing to stop us from a lazy swan dive into oblivion. Kids might be well advised to learn more about China or South America, since they may very likely be working for them in their lifetime. I am all for bringing manufacturing back, but without a strategic plan to address the issues above it's a great idea supported by a lot of hot air.

So what's the plan, Stan? ;)

And thanks for the reply...

[no_hypocrisy]

28. You get less done and you earn less money.

[SmileyRose]

29. you'd end up with fewer hourly workers and more salaried

[w4rma]

31. I see no downsides, as long as it is enforced as the 40 hour workweek is enforced. (nt)

[melm00se]

33. not a linear relationship

from a raw number of hours worked, you are correct however, when you factor in the "invisible" expenses, the numbers are going to be significantly different:

invisible costs:

- training
- HR administration (payroll costs, tax compliance etc)
- benefits (these are pretty much fixed costs regardless of the number of hours worked)
- physical space (in an office environment things like: cube space)
- any necessary equipment to do the job (pc's, phones, machinery etc)
- plus others

All of these costs would actually skew the numbers off the 1:7 ratio, in reality it might be more like 1:14 (or more).

[reggie the dog]

35. no downsides

the work week is already 35 hours here in France

I want 32 like in denmark

[Blue_Tires]

36. i'd personally love 4 days on and 3 days off if i could do it...

[hunter]

37. Add a mandatory six week vacation, substantially raise the minimum wage...

... subsidize higher education using money now going to the military, raise taxes on the very wealthy, make it easy to jettison existing student loans by a wide variety of volunteer public service, establish a single payer health care system, and be generous with welfare and unemployment benefits.

The standard of the U.S. economy would be happiness as per the Declaration of Independence and our lives would be rich and productive.

Instead we measure "productivity" by how much profit the very wealthy can squeeze out of working people before they expire.

[immoderate]

44. Well said!

With the effects of automation, the wage/productivity ratio more favors a 20 hour week. :hide: That's hard for most to assimilate.

Another approach might be negative income tax, a subsidy for those whose labor is superfluous. Not to denigrate them, machines do it better and cheaper. (An idea proposed by the Nixon administration.(!))

We will have to find a better way of living than producing and consuming crap that winds up as land fill. Actually, we are doomed unless we follow these two simple rules:

1. Reduce the world population to a sustainable number.
2. Stop fucking around.

If they can do that, the problem is licked.

--imm

[WI_DEM]

39. for me personally losing 10-hours per pay period would be the loss of about $200 from my paycheck

so it would affect me. But I understand your point.

[russki]

40. What is capitalism?

Capitalism is private ownership of means of production.
Goal of capitalist economy is to eliminate all jobs and working class.
Capitalism is not about higher wages and higher standards of living for workers.
Capitalist economy doesn't need working class for consumer demand. Capitalists can spend as much as workers.
Wages must be as low as possible to ensure investment spending. Humans can't evolve as fast as machinery.
Capitalist society can be DEMOCRATIC if majority of population owns means of production while employing foreign workers(or no workers when means of production will become fully automated)
Worker can become capitalist if he saves money to create his own business. If capitalist society exists long enough then majority of people won't have to work hard to become capitalists, they will inherit means of production from their parents.
Capitalist deserves his wealth since he is a risk-taker and can lose all the money he invested.
Capitalism ensures fastest economic growth.
Socialism is evil. It destroyed my country.

[kentuck]

41. You speak very good English, russki...

What part of Russia are you from??

[russki]

42. Thanks

Vologda, small town in the north of Moscow

[kentuck]

46. At the present time, we have more than 15 million unemployed...

the "capitalist" system is not providing jobs. This was only an idea that would force the hand of some companies to either pay their present employees more money, time and a half for overtime, or force them to hire more people if they wanted the same production. They are presently squeezing the last ounce of production from the people they have.

What do we do with the 15 million unemployed?

[Radical Activist]

51. Your posts are much better when you honestly argue

Green/Socialist viewpoints instead of pushing flimsy anti-Democratic narratives.

[Strelnikov_]

47. Actually devotion to a centrally planned economy and excessive military spending

destroyed your country.

A timely transition to a market economy under a command economy at the macro level (aka the 'China Way' as Jintao calls it) would probably have had better results.

Make no mistake, Capitalism (actually crony Capitalism) as practiced in this country is just as 'evil' as the economic system you experienced under the Soviets.

On edit: And my bet is that when it unravels, the post-Soviet experience will pale in comparison.

[immoderate]

48. Well, if the workers own the means of production,

and pay themselves, as workers, a fair share of the income, isn't that socialism?

Russia? Empire building, militarism, Stalinism, WWII, corruption, and some poor planning decisions, might have contributed to Russia's decline.

Does the loser, also a risk taker, "deserve" what he gets? And what is the real meaning of "economic growth?"

Consider that capitalism can destroy a country too.

Welcome to DU. Your language is very clear. Better than many Americans. :)

--imm

[county worker]

43. If business are not hiring because of lack of cash what makes you think they would hire more people

and pay them all the same wages for less hours worked?

[kentuck]

45. That wouldn't be easy. would it?

Impossible? I don't know.

[Juche]

49. I think it failed to work in France to lower unemployment

My understanding is when they tried it in France to combat unemployment all that happened was employers increased productivity to get 40 hours of productivity in 35 hours. Hiring did not really change.

[kentuck]

50. I don't think that is the reason they lowered the hours in France??

I think they lost productivity because there were not new workers coming into the workforce?