So, the 32 hour work week was discussed on a forum I'm on, and honestly, you guys know my stance on this. It's a no brainer. If we could reduce the work week and get the same productivity, as many studies and trials seem to indicate, I'm all for it as it seems like a very obvious free lunch.
But then came the naysayers. And we get the whole "well what about this" and "what about that" mindset of trying to nitpick it. The guy's specific complaints were what about critical industries like firefighters and doctors. If we have people working 40 hours a week and then they shift to 32, what about the hours that won't be covered?
Now, in some ways this seems like a legit complaint, especially if in the case of doctors where it might not be easy just to hire more as it can take years to train them. But to this I ask, do doctors typically only work a 40 hour week? Especially the ER style doctors the person bringing it up was talking about? No, actually. I mean, think about it, ERs need to be staffed 24/7, and doctors are typically subjected to working long hours to make it work.
And that's the thing about a lot of these more "emergency" based jobs. You work when you're expected to work, even if it's long hours, you're either dedicated to your job to the point you're willing to put up with it, or you're making a lot of money. In medicine, typically both simultaneously.
As a matter of fact, let's just be real about the 40 hour work week, it's largely statuatory. While those statutes are enough to keep most working around 40 hours a week, there are exceptions. Some industries have people on call or working mandatory overtime regularly to keep the business fully staffed 24/7. And then some industries, wanting to avoid giving their workers full time protections, are only willing to hire part time workers, with people often forced to work multiple jobs just to survive.
I mean, reducing the work week is one of those liberal "band aid" ideas I often propose, and while I do think there should be downward movement to the statuatory work work week and we should normalize working fewer hours, and this would help a lot of workers, let's be real, the idea has real limitations in practice. There are ways around it, both on the high end, which keep people working much longer, and on the low end, where people often work less...and then more in order to make up with less.
This is one of the reasons why I think labor regulations and trying to reform work and jobs is such a mediocre idea. Don't get me wrong, it's better than nothing, and it does help some people, but in some ways it also stops us from working less and being able to survive, and many people often end up having to work more.
This is why I think it's better to focus on freeing people from work where they can make choices more in line with how a theoretical "true free market" would operate and we didn't come to the bargaining table as de facto wage slaves begging prospective masters for the "opportunity" to serve them. I want every person to have dignity in and of themselves that allow them to work as little or as much as they want. And if they choose not to work at all, so be it. Different people have different drives, different ambitions, and different motivations. This is okay. And capitalism acts enough like a meritocracy where it would allow people to rise and fall by their merits at least somewhat. Someone who doesnt wanna work at all can skate by on the bare minimum, and someone who wants to spend their whole life working can do that. Statutes like work weeks, or reduced work weeks, are fine for regulating relationships in between that, but they should not be seen as the end all be all of everything, because without further changes to the economy we're just regulating how the slaves are to be treated, and while better treatment is positive, without fixing the root causes, things won't get any better.
But yes, regardless, if everyone has a UBI, and no one is truly poor, and people work as much or as little as they desire, maybe some will work a lot, and some will work little. Maybe we won't even need "full time" jobs any more. Maybe we should bifurcate "opportunities" into salaried careers with high pay but demanding work schedules and a bunch of hourly gig work that people can pick up and put down as they please. Our economy seems to be wanting to head that way in the first place, so why not just let it? I know a lot of your typical "pro job" leftists dont like that since they think 'well we fought for these protections" but again, I kind of think that whole mere reformist tradition toward work doesnt really do enough. And to some extent, discussions about reducing working hours shouldnt be the central discussion on this matter. Don't get me wrong, I support the concept, but theres a reason I emphasize UBI over that.
Either way, yes, we should still look into work week reductions. I think they're long overdue. As for how we'd accomplish it, I think that much like with FDR, we should pursue such stuff when we're facing a surplus of unemployment. it would be a way to "spread the work around" more easily and then we could more easily recover from recessions and get back to normal a lot more quickly, with an added bonus of a permanently reduced work week.
We could approach these changes incrementally. I have that article about reducing the work week every 10 years to account for added productivity over the past decade. We also typically have a recession once a decade. So why not do it when we enter recessions to make the jump as painless as possible?
We could also implement changes slowly over a number of years. Much like I would recommend adopting a basic income program over, say, a 5 year period, we could do the same with work week changes. Perhaps we could phase in a 32 hour week over four years. Year 1: 38 hours, Year 2: 36 hours, Year 3: 34 hours, Year 4: 32 hours, Year 5: 30 hours or something (and yes, I think 30 would be a nice round number allowing for either 5 days at 6 hours, or 4 days at 7.5 hours, or 3 days at 10 hours). And then we let that sit for a bit before we revisit it.
I think in part of my own understanding of human centered capitalism, which is a little different from Yang's, maybe the goal should be, instead of increased productivity, lower work hours and less emphasis on employment.
As for how individual jobs would adjust to these changes. Well, the high end jobs will probably just make people work salary or mandatory overtime all the time to avoid hiring more people. The low end jobs will probably cut working hours a bit more to stay under the idea of "full time" (although given 25 is currently the max a lot of these jobs go for a 30-32 hour work week wouldnt change things much). And the middle jobs where people do work full time, yes, 30-32 hours of work for 40 hours of day.
As for staffing issues. Well, again, truly necessary and essential labor like emergency services properly already operates under the idea of mandatory overtime or salary already. As for how other businesses react, well, they can either hire more people, which is why i recommend doing this in the middle of recessions, or much like with our current "worker shortage", they could just operate under more limited hours. We already saw this. A lot of 24/7 business establishments no longer operate as such post COVID. Walmarts now close at night. I've seen pizza places open at 4 PM and close at 10 PM. All in all these changes might cause some getting used to, but i have no doubt that businesses will adapt.
And that's the thing. We WILL adapt. Any time anyone proposes any good idea ever, you always get nay sayers who act like things are as good as they'll ever get, and we cant change anything because it would lead to negative consequences. I had this view as a conservative, which is why i spent so much time as a liberal/leftie going over the specifics of HOW we can do these things.
But that's the thing. We CAN do a lot of these changes. Sure, sometimes the left pushes the outside of the envelope and asks for things that are currently impossible. Sometimes they go too far, get unrealistic, and then act all pissy when you try to talk sense into them. But at the same time, I feel like that mindset is a direct response to the fact that we have this larger sense of learned helplessness and weaponized incompetence where any time any idea is proposed, no matter how small, someone is always going to be there shooting it down or saying it's impossible because blah blah blah. And often times it comes in the form of hand wringing over small businesses or some nonsense where it's like "but but these businesses wont survive if we have nice things".
And this is where I take the FDR approach of saying "sink or swim". People did this when FDR passed the framework we currently have in the 1930s. And you know what he said? Well, if you cant adapt to these changes, then your business doesnt deserve to exist. And that's where I tend to have the same mindset. Maybe on a micro level some businesses won't survive a change like this. Well, tough crap, I say. Adapt. The economy exists for people, not people for the economy, and we should continually and progressively trying to improve the conditions of the modern person to be better and better as our technology allows for such changes. GDP growth and technology is the means by which we can accomplish these things. We can use those changes that we keep accumulating year after year and decade after decade to choose to work less. And in the long term, granted we make the changes incrementally enough, we can adapt our society to anything. If we've been adapting our society all along, I'd argue a 32 work week is child's play. I've run models at different levels of growth and GDP tradeoff where we can work 25 hours, 15 hours, even 8 hours a week. It just depends what living standard we're willing to tolerate.
And I'm not saying any increment along that way is the objective right answer either. GDP growth and the amount of stuff we have is one metric by which we measure the success of the economy. But it's not the end all be all of everything, and leisure is also important. It's a balancing act. And I'm just encouraging a good balance. I think a 32 hour work week is a reasonable balance to strive for, it should be something that given the great means we have in this country, should be easily accomplishable. If anything it's long overdue. I recently went over my GDP vs working hours projections again using a slightly different set of numbers for a different project, and while the gist was largely the same, we could've theoretically been working Keynes' 15 hour week in the 1990s if we wanted to live by 1950s living standards. The numbers on this blog came to the conclusion we could've reached that by 2010. So the numbers do work differently. But regardless, we could reach 32 easily if we wanted to. Most studies show no reduction in productivity, although with some hourly intensive labor, maybe we would have staffing issues. Still, again, some jobs already solve this with mandatory overtime and being salaried, while other jobs already keep so many people hired virtually none of them work full time. So I'm not seeing the problem.
But yeah. I think that these issues are overblown and that they can be easily solved if we wanted to.
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