So, a lot of anti work people like to emphasize the size of the work week as the path forward to solving technological unemployment while making us all work less. Honestly, the idea is interesting, but I'm not convinced it's THE solution. It would help, don't get me wrong, but let me explain the difficulties that reducing the work week would have relative to UBI.
The big thing about reducing the work week is that it's a regulatory change, and regulatory changes are only as good as the laws themselves are. If you make the minimum wage $7.25, people will pay $7.25 without market forces forcing wages upward. If you make people work, say, 30 hours a week, they'll still find ways to make people miserable the whole time, or find loopholes in the law to make it where this statute doesn't matter.
After all, the 40 hour work week exists, but many people work more than 40 hours. You got salaried workers who work insane hours and are paid the same regardless of hours worked. People who work overtime when working hourly. And because of the common problem with employers not wanting to give people healthcare, you often got people working multiple 25-30 hour a week jobs, meaning they work 2 jobs at 50-60 hours total. Simply reducing a statute does not solve these issues.
Speaking of that last bit, many employers want to hire people for only 25-30 hours a week? The problem is people can't live on that. And while we could raise the minimum wage to solve that, it would involve raising it not only to the point where we achieve a living wage at 40 hours a week, but raising it even higher, making labor even more costly because we now expect a 30 hour a week job to pay what a 40 hour a week job should. So say the minimum wage should be $15 at 40 hours a week, if we wanted a 30 hour work week, it should be $20 an hour so they can make the same amount of money.
This might work. Or it could theoretically cause inflation if it's too high. I'm not sure on that. Or employers could find more ways to automate and streamline work, which isn't a good thing if you're looking to expand employment. The point is, if this is your way of trying to achieve "full employment", basically redistribute work that exists so people work fewer hours, but we still expect everyone to work, I mean, it might work, but it might have side effects and not really fix the issue beyond reducing the work week slightly. Employers will still overwork poor salaried people, still force overtime at times, maybe underwork people to social obligations like health insurance, and nothing really changes.
It also ignores that there are vastly different needs for work across the entire economy. A lot of the people who this would work best for are office workers. As we know from David Graeber's "Bull**** Jobs", a lot of work is drawn out to encompass 40 hours simply because social convention demands it. A lot of these jobs could be done in, say, 15 hours on average, but people have to pretend to work and be busy to avoid either being laid off, or given a paycut. Some have automated their entire job, without telling their boss, for fear of being let go and their script taken by the boss and used for his benefit. Reducing the work week would work great for these people. It would allow them to not keep up as much of a charade of pretending to be soooo busssyyyy all the time, and allow them to work as they want.
But, different parts of the economy have different needs. Service sector work is hour intensive. If you're running a restaurant, you need people there working constantly, around the clock. Same with retail. While automation might eventually eliminate these jobs entirely, they rarely reduce hours in a partial fashion. They just eliminate whole roles. So people are let go, rather than cross trained and expected to work less. Same with factory work. You either automate the job, or you need someone there around the clock doing something. While we could distribute the jobs better, shifting to a shorter work week means more turnover, more people going in and out, more disruptions, more problems with people not doing their shifts, as more shifts will exist. Employers seem to prefer working fewer people harder as it leads to no downtime. Not that I sympathize with employers, but it's a fact. It's also not necessarily good for the worker. Say we reduce working hours. Okay, now we have more people working crappy jobs for fewer hours. If we have 30 hour work weeks instead of 40, we have 4 people working instead of 3. It redistributes labor, but it just continues the process of having the service sector absorb other job losses.
Some employers dislike the idea of hiring more people to work less so much that they just work some people on salary 60+ hours a week. We could turn a lot of managerial jobs into two jobs, but that would mean needing more coordination between the two people doing the effective job, once again, leading to disruption. Ultimately the call to hire comes from the employer, not the employee. And without increased bargaining power from the market being influenced in other ways, all shorter weeks does is just cause employers to adapt to a new system and find ways around these regulations.
Ultimately, it would be better I think to allow people more freedom in their choice of work. While a 30 hour work week or something should likely happen, I'm not saying it shouldn't, it could come with a basic income and the right to say no. Unless employees can walk altogether, they're still subject to a boss's whims and is not truly negotiating in a market place, but is begging for a position in a master-slave relationship. We can regulate the obligations for masters to treat their slaves decently all we want, but unless we change the core relationship, all this amounts to is a slight incremental improvement.
If people can say no, unmotivated people won't work and motivated people will. This increases the quality of employees. but it also means employees will command better pay and working conditions. Conditions would improve beyond mere pay, people could dictate the hours they work, because the'yre no longer subject to the whims of their employer in order to meet their immediate material needs. We might see a cultural revolution in work in which people don't want to work like before, and instead seek more work life balance, and employers will have to meet that or they won't be able to hire people at all.
Heck, if anything, I kind of would like to see the abolition of the work week and the traditional job. We're trending toward gig work anyway, so why not embrace it? UBI meets basic needs, and then people work in a gig economy that actually works for workers due to the basics of supply and demand and the fact that workers are liberated from being forced to work long hours at a job. And people can do what they want. Some people aren't very motivated. They might work odds jobs for a little extra spending money. Some people are extremely motivated and might work long hours on passion projects or to climb the ladder. I believe people should be free to determine their own life, without being told how many hours they should or should not work. As long as the decisions to do so are truly voluntary, and not done under the threat of poverty, I really don't care what arrangements people come to. The work week debate is one that still moralized and valorizes the idea of work as a social obligations that everyone should participate in, but also still thinks people should be given a decent living standard for it. I have no problem with the latter, mind you, but that's why I want to give people a minimum standard outside of work, so we dont treat work as a social obligation everyone has to suffer through to earn their bread, but that it's what people want to do, either for more money, or a sense of fulfillment, or prestige, or what have you.I want people to choose how much they want to work, and be able to live a dignified life regardless of the decision, because if you can't guarantee that, then you're not really free.
Reducing the work week is a good idea. Don't get me wrong. I could see a 30-32 hour week working fine (5 6 hour days or 4 8 hour days), with little productivity loss, and most of the changes absorbed easily by the economy. But at the same time, we could also implement a UBI and have similar effects and absorb those instead. But in the process, we give people more freedom. The issue with relying on a shorter work week to save us is that it's just another regulatory band aid. it does not change the core issues with the economy. It just implements a law saying people should work less unless they meet certain exceptions or are paid differently or blah blah blah. It doesn't change the core relationship between employer and employee. And given the needs of the economy are different among different jobs, a shorter work week might help some, but do little to help others. And it certainly wouldn't change the fact that people are still motivated by the threat of poverty to work at all.
I'd happily take a work week reduction, but I'd encourage people to rethink the institution of work in far broader ways.
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