People could do that if they were all willing to live like people lived in 1935. It turns out that many (most?) people prefer to live a more expensive lifestyle which requires more hours of work.
One consequence of this is that, since the number of people who prefer this is large enough that they've established a norm in many industries which makes it harder to find an employer willing to hire a worker that's going to put in fewer hours.
If you do really want a 1935 quality of life, though, you can probably attain it working 20 or 30 hours per week at a restaurant or supermarket.
It's important to note that this life could be very different from what you have now. You would likely live in a household containing three generations of your family and seldom travel outside the town/county you live in, among other things.
I don't know that this is quite true. I have asked many employers for fewer hours and more vacation time in exchange for less money. I am always refused. I am frequently offered more money but never more vacation time.
I work as a contractor now, but even now my main client is begging me for more hours. The only people I've seen who successfully negotiate for fewer hours are those so vital to the business that they'd rather have that part time employee than no employee at all.
Mind you that's anecdotes and all that.
> One consequence of this is that, since the number of people who prefer this is large enough that they've established a norm in many industries which makes it harder to find an employer willing to hire a worker that's going to put in fewer hours.
I actually see it as the ones with the power get to write the rules, and make things seem normal. Even if I'd prefer to work fewer hours, I still need some money to survive, and can't quite go jobless.
I say this having attempted to run a "egalitarian" team for well over a decade now. I've learned some lessons along the way. Basically reality doesn't matter to most people - perception does. If it's perceived that one employee is getting "special treatment" the rest demand it, deservedly or not. It doesn't matter if that employee does 5 times the work.
I still operate on the "Get your work done, and I don't give a shit if you're on the beach while you're on Slack with me" premise, but I understand this is only for a very select subsection of employees. The rest simply cannot handle it, and most companies take the easy/lazy way out and simply try to treat everyone as an equal as it results in far less drama. I think this is completely unacceptable, and high performers deserve to be treated as such.
I've managed, once, to get the full vacation time for seniority (i.e. At N years you get +1 week) by threatening to quit after being offered a 5 figure raise.
So I'd agree with you. I've never known anyone to get away with pushing past the upper limit on their seniority track for vacation.
I guess other companies are probably frequently less accommodating.
The "luxuries" which have had the greatest inflation over the last 30 years:
* Rent/house prices
* Education
* Health care
But hey, at least we have iPhones, right? Totally makes up for the rest.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-fed-dudley-ipad-idUSTR...
[1] http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c413ca76-ce3c-11e4-86fc-00144feab7... [2] http://www.insee.fr/en/insee-statistique-publique/connaitre/...
EDIT: But I am surprised by the higher productivity per worker, compared to UK.
Because you are both comparing oranges to oranges.
France's problem (frankly) is their labor protections are too strong.
America's problem (frankly) is their labor protections are too weak.
The parallels to be drawn here are not what you or the OP would like them to be.
The standard of living since 1916 has improved substantially and maintaining a modern level of living is expensive.
If I want to live like a college student (2 to a room, no car, and only food I prepare myself) I could be retired in my late 30s. I don't live that way and that costs something.
http://www.pbs.org/livelyhood/workday/weekend/timeline.html
Similarly, the gains from 1916 -> now are mostly in things we take for granted. The 40 hour work week (it used to be 60 then it became 48 and then 40), the access to quality medical care wasn't common, people lived two to a room in smaller homes, people didn't have the mobility of a car but relied on their own muscles, etc.
A good 50% of the productivity gains over the last 100 years went to moving things from 60 hour work weeks to 40. Modern conveniences represent the other half.
The reality is we got screwed in the 1980s -> 2016 in the US but that is a separate problem and conflating the two doesn't help anyone. Labor needs to start acting like its the 1920s again and get organized and push back politically.
But it's not the 1920s again. Acting like it is isn't going to work in this climate.
You want to demand higher wages? Great. Yet more jobs go overseas, priced out of the US by the higher labor costs.
You want to protect against cheap imports (created by cheap workers) with tariffs? Well, you just made everything everyone buys from overseas more expensive, so the cost of living went up. You also just broke a bunch of trade agreements, and there will probably be retaliation from quite a few trade partners, resulting in fewer exports, which will cost jobs.
The world is a much more complicated place than it was in the 1920s. Simple responses aren't likely to fix things. We need to fix things - I'm with you there, there's a lot that's broken from the point of view of the working person - but an antagonistic power struggle is unlikely to produce an improvement.
Eh, you clearly don't understand what being organized and pushing back politically means.
> You want to protect against cheap imports (created by cheap workers) with tariffs? Well, you just made everything everyone buys from overseas more expensive, so the cost of living went up. You also just broke a bunch of trade agreements, and there will probably be retaliation from quite a few trade partners, resulting in fewer exports, which will cost jobs.
Your point of view is exactly why Trump exists, populist outrage. That populist outrage is available for anyone to tap precisely because:
A) Labor is getting screwed.
B) There are a bunch of people whose strong views were in the closet and willing to take any panderer that offers a possibility their views will be heard.
These things don't exist in a vacuum. You need outlets and balanced scales, politically, or you'll end up with populist panderers.
> The world is a much more complicated place than it was in the 1920s. Simple responses aren't likely to fix things. We need to fix things - I'm with you there, there's a lot that's broken from the point of view of the working person - but an antagonistic power struggle is unlikely to produce an improvement.
There is an antagonist power struggle. The fact you believe there isn't or there shouldn't be has been the game they've played for 40+ years. (i.e. Collective, organized labor as a political force is bad)
If this power struggle, which you are convinced doesn't exist, truly did not exist...why is there such a disproportionate shift in income growth? Such a powerful and effective push for lower tax rates for the rich than everyone else?
The AMT was originally intended to minimize the disparity for people making substantial money btw. It was created to deal with corporations/people with extremely low tax burdens (i.e. 0%) and so forth.
The problem here isn't the gross income, the problem is how the income is distributed by the tax system. The concept the burden "increased" is an illusion since its largely caused by increased income concentration (by percentage) rather than fundamental tax code changes that shift things. (i.e. Tax the wealthier more, tax the poor less)
The jobs that can go overseas are pushed overseas regardless.
The jobs that can't be pushed overseas? Turns out fighting for higher wages works well, as the fight for 15 can testify to.
>You want to protect against cheap imports (created by cheap workers) with tariffs? Well, you just made everything everyone buys from overseas more expensive
When that's offset by rising wages, which, in the absence of underpriced competition it will - the people at the bottom end aren't bothered. They're happy, in fact.
Besides, what eats up most people's paychecks these days? Not plastic crap from China - student loan repayments and rent/mortgage payment to keep a roof over your head.
>The world is a much more complicated place than it was in the 1920s.
Yet some things never change.
> The jobs that can go overseas are pushed overseas regardless.
No. For every increase in the minimum wage, some incremental amount of jobs get pushed overseas.
What is true, though, is that those jobs were pretty crummy jobs. You can make a case that we didn't want them anyway. And if we had better jobs to replace them with, I think I'd agree. We don't, though, at least not at the moment.
> >You want to protect against cheap imports (created by cheap workers) with tariffs? Well, you just made everything everyone buys from overseas more expensive
> When that's offset by rising wages, the people at the bottom end aren't bothered. They're happy, in fact.
That's probably true. It probably hurts the middle class, though. Hurting the middle class to help the bottom isn't really the trade-off we want. We want the pain to go more to the upper- or upper-middle class.
^^^ What gets threatened by lobbyists fighting minimum wage increases.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b9602ba0-3c91-11e6-8716-a4a71e8140... (Push for higher wages squeezes US corporate profits)
^^^ What actually happens in reality
>That's probably true. It probably hurts the middle class, though. Hurting the middle class to help the bottom isn't really the trade-off we want
^^^ What politicians say when Bernie Sanders proposes raising taxes on people earning over 200k / year.
There isn't much of a middle class left in America these days. The people who would be helped are in the majority.
If the car is 1/4 the price[0], that's a wash on the income of the worker. A huge benefit to society, but a wash for that guy.
[0] in real terms, i.e. normalized to cost of living
This memo neatly glosses over where the productivity gains in the last 100 years have gone, and makes it seem as if it's fair for wages of the American worker to stagnate while the megawealthy get all the profit. If a worker in 2016 can build a car in a-fourth the time it took a worker in 1935 to build a car, why is it implausible for them to work 35 hours a week with better benefits and more vacation time?