In my own life, I was one decision away from driving trucks in West Virginia. The decision at the time was not obvious and the path I took was much harder. It took 10 years to see light at the end of the tunnel. However, I have since had incredible opportunities that I could never have imagined at that time. It was a costly personal decision as I lost a lot of important human connections along the way.
It is my view that it is perfectly feasible to design economies (in a voluntary way) where people can work 20 hours a week and have two months off a year every year. Or closer to our current world, there is no question in my mind that we could keep things as good or better they are now materially, while making sure no person has to work more than 40 hours a week to survive.
I do love to talk about specific strategies [1] but that quickly activates our tribal instincts and can cause violent arguments even when our underlying goals are in near complete agreement. So it can be useful to just ponder on the above. How did things get the way they became? Is it due to iron wrought natural laws, or historical decisions we could freely agree to change?
the other option is actively coercing a daily/weekly work limit, and that not only severely infringes personal liberties, but eventually makes whole economies less competitive as the hardest working & most ambitious workers migrate away.
the better approach is to try to ensure everyone has dignity and fair pay for the amount of work that they do. that's a function of the distribution of pay and wealth, which is something we can legislate via sticks and carrots.
Furthermore you just said we have to choose between hard limits that will provably reduce exploitation and harm and handy wavy notions of dignity and equality with literally zero actual suggestions of any kind given.
The people that are vulnerable to exploitation and harm are virtually always the lower paid individuals without options or stability. If you want to allow a high powered lawyer or a highly paid software developer to work 80 hours this week while protecting lowly paid people who fab "chips" composed of delicious cheese instead of silicon its simple. Add exceptions for individuals making n dollars where n is a function of the median income in the state preferably multiple times n. For example the median income in WA state is about 41k. Make individuals making 164k+ exempt from overtime rules under the reasonable presumption that they can negotiate their own rules.
Otherwise
- Time past 8 hours in a day paid double, time past 12 hours paid triple.
- Days in a row past 6 paid double, days in a row past 8 paid triple.
- Hours in a week past 40 paid double, past 60 triple
- Require 2 consecutive days of rest after every 5 or more days on. Working on one of these days double the pay.
Forbid any employment that doesn't guarantee a minimum of 24 hours and tax the beejesus out of anyone who makes use of more than 30% part time labor defined as less than 36 hours. Ensure that running on >30% part time labor is substantially more expensive than not.
Forbid paying employees less than their scheduled hours for the week. Schedule someone for 24 hours and figure out you planned poorly. Yes you can send your people home but you can't opt out of paying them.
Make work schedules agreed with less than 2 weeks notice cost 1.5x rate to discourage forcing people to live on call for meager wage jobs.
Propose this and people will scream that you are destroying their business. Let people live this for a year and you will shockingly find them adapting to it by providing predictable scheduling to their 75%+ full time staff who work sane hours.
The trick here is to make sure those who don't push for the incentives are taken care of. You need to make sure everyone participating at the sane rates are taken care of in their needs and some wants. After that, you allow for those obsessed with incentives and wants to work as much as they want to get extravagant things. It's easier said than done but I believe its attainable. If you can create an economy where that sort of effort at work is used to buy luxuries and not necessities, then you have a good model that still has a balance of incentives without dragging the rest of society into a work obsessed life.
People who put for this amount of effort shouldn't be doing it because they have to, they should be doing it because they want to. Unfortunately many people are doing it because they really have to, that or their standard of living drops significantly, their overall longevity. Unfortunately that's the world we have. People are forced to work at these sorts of rates to survive and it's only getting worse. It's not that they're slaving away their lives because they want to get a new luxury car or exotic vacation, it's that the alternatives to not doing it means they may be homeless next month or looking for somewhere new to live.
Of the advanced economies, Western Europe seems to have the exact issue identified by GP: the hardest working/most ambitious workers move to the US. On the other hand, in Japan "death by overwork" seems to be close to or at the level of a genuine public health crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi
Among the reasons for emigration to the US, there's not a single living soul that says "oh, I'm not legally allowed to work enough in my area of employment to achieve my dreams". It's a laughable and ridiculous statement.
you see: some people push very hard because their life is their work. They don’t have time for something else because they work a lot, and they work a lot effectively consuming what should be their free time because they don’t have the mental energy to so something else.
Once you create a bit of space and disentangle yourself from your work not a lot of people want to work extra time. ideally life should be split between work and creative pursuits and the percentage of work should decrease until it eventually hits 0. People will still do stuff, but your livelihood should not be tied to your job. You should pursue your “hobbies” because they are fun and/or fulfilling.
Automation is good enough today that we should not have to work more than 15-20 hours per week. Knowledge workers already do this but “butt in seat” mentality still says 40 hours per week. It’s a tragedy really. We took all the productivity gains our technological advances brought and use them to create more bs work instead of reducing the amount of work we have to do.
That said, 100%, straight coding for 40 hours / week is probably unrealistic, but that's not really the full job description of a software developer.
To be clear, I am talking about a voluntary system. No one would be prevented from working more, it just wouldn't be necessary to survive. I love to work pretty much all the time, though only some of that is hours I am billing to my employer.
EDIT: I quickly rewrote my original comment after posting, but I do see one quoted reply got in before the change. Just wanted to add this note about the change.
What GP is arguing is that is achieved by fixing the pay distribution, not by limiting hours. If you only limit hours but don't fix the pay problem you create perverse incentives where people have to work undocumented "overtime" or face the threat that they will be replaced by someone who will or where people who want to work overtime face punitive punishments if they do so.
One thing I can be extremely clear on is that I do NOT think the US government legally limiting work hours is any kind of solution. I am all about looking at society as a whole and reasoning on society-wide changes we can make voluntarily to achieve a better world.
Unfortunately any kind of solution that tries to address the market side effects of labor will die in the US by the socialism boogeyman
Reminds me of Scott Alexander's Meditations on Moloch, which also ponders this question. I can't do it justice with just one excerpt, but here's one passage that always stays with me:
The reason our current system isn’t a utopia is that it wasn’t designed by humans. Just as you can look at an arid terrain and determine what shape a river will one day take by assuming water will obey gravity, so you can look at a civilization and determine what shape its institutions will one day take by assuming people will obey incentives.
... Just as the course of a river is latent in a terrain even before the first rain falls on it – so the existence of Caesar’s Palace was latent in neurobiology, economics, and regulatory regimes even before it existed. The entrepreneur who built it was just filling in the ghostly lines with real concrete.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
I don't think the point is that the exact detailed form of Las Vegas was inevitable, but rather that it exemplifies the collective madness that these forces can produce.
Although perhaps more relevant to this thread would be how a society might, under pressure, lose its traditional siesta and never get it back. He mentions examples like this too.
The essay does continue its fair share of glib side-stepping of areas of social organization that are less deterministic than Alexander likes to suggest, but it also contains some good points and some interesting examples (even if I don't agree with his explanations/projections of all of them).
And fun fact: retraining absolutely does not work. Less than 10% can be retrained and usually they are the segment that could have retrained themselves without specific retraining.
The bigger question is usually why don’t people move from a rural location? And the answer is usually “it’s complicated “. Old parents to take care of. It’s familiar. Friends. Maybe own your simple home. Maybe your church is there. Maybe quiet life is your thing.
Remote workers also don’t fully contribute to the economy of the rural area because their place of employment is not in that area. If the company the remote worker works for does well and grows, that won’t grow the rural community.
when you stop competing for the same strip of land, 10 miles from the pacific ocean, it turns out there's a sort of stupendous amount of land.
while, yes, there will technically be some competition, in the areas under discussion i don't think it will meaningfully effect housing prices.
(i could divide the amount of land in rural america by the number of possible work-from-home employees and we could figure out what it'll do to the average population density. but, hell, i've lived in these areas, i don't need to.)
I’ve been following news of this sort closely during COVID as a personal curiosity. Most of the affected towns are either (1) within 1-2 hour drive of a major metro center (e.g. northwestern CT) (2) already a major vacation destination prior to COVID (Jackson Hole, WY and friends) (3) a top-3 metro area in the state. If you check more than one box, the situation is more dramatic.
Many of these places were already changing prior to COVID, but, as in other domains, COVID has accelerated an already latent process.
Basically, Missoula’s example does not contradict their claim.
But yes, remote workers are more likely to move to a place like Missoula than a place like Philipsburg, MT.
are you at all familiar with missoula? i am. my wife is from there. i visit regularly.
it is packed into one end of a mountain valley, surrounded by mountains on three sides. the land there was already extremely limited.
Rural America is huge. If every single person in New York city got themselves a suburban house, they'd take up 0.1% of the United States (about the area of two counties).
Housing is expensive in cities because 10 million people want to live in the same square mile. The US, however, has 4 million of those square miles. (Everyone in New York City could move to California and have 10 acres of their own. I did the calculation with the intent of showing that everyone in the country could have their own square mile, but that's not true -- I didn't realize how big a square mile actually is.)
Remote workers probably aren't going to raise the cost of living that much. It is certainly possible that they could all move to the same place (i.e. turn Aspen, Colorado into New York City), and that would be a problem. But if people randomly move into rural areas, there just aren't enough people buying 1 million dollar apartments in the same place to "gentrify out" farmers.
I'll also point out, that remote work doesn't necessarily imply that it's possible to move to the middle of nowhere. You still need a good Internet connection, and many people want to live closer than an hour's drive away from a grocery store or hospital. I work remotely but I'm happy to live 3 minutes away from Manhattan. There are factors other than commuting to work that account for where people live.
Not sure what you're trying to say with this, but putting 10 million people anywhere and packing them into any density would require enormous infrastructure that needs to be built and paid for.
Of course, this does happen at much smaller scales and in many places. The pattern is repeated all over the USA: developers buy up land from farmers who want to retire, then quickly erect sprawling tracts of cookie-cutter mcmansions, selling a pipe dream of rural living in plywood and tyvek box with a 2 car garage. This always has the effect of straining the local infrastructure, making traffic into a nightmare, boosting the cost of housing to the point where it's out of reach for locals, and sucking the taxbase out of the nearby urban area.
Because you can't get anyone in rural Montana who is capable of getting a job paying Bay Area or NYC salaroies to accept that offer. Adjustment will result in meeting somewhere in the middle but whether that's 25% or 95% of Bay Area salaries is an open question.
That and the logistics of moving. Not to mention, having a job beats not having a job. And moving often means not having a job to start. Especially when your only work experience is retail, factory floor, and farmhand.
You can't really afford to take a week off of getting paid.
And if you're constantly working to make ends meet, you don't really have time or energy to work on developing marketable skills.
As someone who had to do similar work for years the answer is that there were no alternatives.
No one takes a shitty job on purpose.
More employees means more HR work, more administrative work, more legal work, more work in general, and unless the benefits of hiring more people are great, they will just abuse the employees at hand.
First you need work two 10 hour shifts a day, 7 days a week to survive. Then you can't even study, because you can't afford it.
This is why proper unemployment and free schools (evil SOCIALISM) comes in to play. People don't need to work themselves to death just to survive, there are safety nets you can fall back on. (Yes there are holes in said nets, but it's better than the gaping black hole the US has).
Turns out there are people who take shitty jobs on purpose, out of a sense of... I don't know, fear, embarrassment, impostor syndrome, or a combination of them.
*This is not in the US.
All of them in this case did, with no families or major expenses to support, and not a weird scam or pyramid scheme, just standard contract development work where in two or three contractually secured months they'd make what they currently do in over a year. The reason is basically geographical, working for clients abroad is just ridiculously more profitable (think Venezuela).
The risk in this case is extremely low, I wasn't looking for referrals either (I'd offered to give it to them if there were any), just genuinely wanted my friends to earn more and work less.
So, at 84 hours a week (46 normal pay, 38 overtime at 1.5x), thats $1700/week on the low end, or $88k/year.
I dont think that excuses the forced overtime and I would absolutely expect severe health and/or mental health issues to result from the overwork. But, these people can quit (and according to the article many do) - I expect the only reason folks do stay is because they cant make the same money anywhere else.
Edit: sorry I’m wrong. I read “kills you over time” as “kills your overtime”
The pay is exactly high enough to maintain minimal staffing. That's normal, but in working conditions like this sometime it ends up a tiny bit higher than the local rate for similar jobs if there's competition for employees. Not everyone can maintain the working conditions. They leave, get kicked out, or they're useful (or connected) enough to keep around working humane hours.
The rest have bills, or legal requirements to maintain employment, or burned a bridge at the other factory in town, or they're inexperienced enough to not know better. They establish a reputation as an employee who can be pushed into working inhumane hours. Managers are often rewarded for keeping up with production with a small team.
A few years go by before you know it, and working hours like this is expensive. You don't have time to maintain your stuff and house, you pay someone else to. Kids need to be watched. Spouses leave. Drugs or alcohol offer to fill the holes in Maslow's Hierarchy you've sacrificed. Savings don't pile up like one might assume.
Interviewing is treacherous. If you're lucky you work a night shift so you can do an interview instead of sleeping. They'll ask you how much you make per hour and offer you a lower "starting rate" hourly wage with fewer hours, which would cut your income drastically, and suggest there might be a review/small raise in 6 months. They'll call your employer before offering you a job at that rate, putting you at risk of retaliation whether you take the offer or not.
> After 37 years, I still get forced to work 12 hours a day, seven days a week... I make $20.50 [an hour] after 37 years here.
Assuming they obey overtime laws, he's' making $112,996 a year ((40 * 20.5) + (44 * 1.5 * 20.5) * 52).
I think that has something to do with it. There likely aren't any alternatives where someone with that skill set can make nearly double the median income for Topeka, Kansas. But there are probably alternatives where they can make maybe a half that at more reasonable hours.
Thing is, this sort of schedule turns into a weird form of neo-slavery. You don't have enough time to yourself to job hunt, even if something is even available, and you can't schedule an interview around your work. Saving money can be nigh impossible even when making that much because you no don't really have the time to try doing anything the cheap way (making your own food, fixing things yourself, etc.). It turns into this vicious, endless cycle of nothing but work and sleep. If you try take a day off, you run the risk of getting fired.
Federal overtime starts at 40 hours per week. Your link specifically says:
Whichever law (state or federal) is more favorable to the worker will apply. In most instances, federal law will cover issues involving overtime pay and minimum wage.
Yeah, the 46 hour rule probably doesn't apply in this case, though who knows what sorts of shenanigans Lays is trying.
I worked in a factory for years when I was younger, not too different than what he is describing.
There are some jobs, like the one I have now writing code where you think about them even when you aren't doing them, they invade your dreams. I feel like I am writing code all the time, even when I'm not logged in to the work laptop actually doing it.
There are other jobs where you don't think about them when you aren't doing them, you go home after work and then you stop thinking about work.
The factory job I had was not like either of those, I did not think about work even while I was doing it. My mind was free while my body was getting paid to do work. I could be thinking about anything else other than the physical work I was doing.
I'm getting old, won't be able to write code much longer. The factory job that I used to do doesn't exist now, it's been automated. Save your money, kids.
> I stay here because in two years, I'll be 62 and I have a union pension acquired over 37 years. I've spent so much time here that I might as well take that pension and social security and call it quits.
New hires keep quitting once they experience the work and schedule, which is why those who are trapped are forced to do overtime.
A lot of people who work paycheck-to-paycheck in "flyover state" parts of the USA do not have sufficient savings to relocate to a place where they could work a normal 40-hour week schedule and support themselves on a reasonable income. That, combined with family ties and obligations force them to remain in their local community.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/americans-struggle-to-save...
No you can't realistically move - every other location is far more expensive and would require significant relocation expense, and you'd have to leave your community, likely where you were born and raise(d) your family.
Personally Ive done the 12+ hr/7 day in the film industry, a notoriously abusive industry (tv shows shoot 14-18hr days) but the money is great. We call it blood money, and do it until we need a vacation. We also get health benefits
> Frito-Lay has been told they need to fix this but unfortunately, when they bring in new people, they force the same schedule on them and they quit. Frito-Lay has waited so long to replace workers, and now Frito Lay has a horrible reputation in town so a lot of people won't work here.
It seems like the existing workers mostly put up with it for a while, and then it eventually fell apart like you'd expect.
I assume, because you did it, that you're one of those mutants who doesn't use it nor like it much. Good for you and all, but caffeine made the modern world, the majority of the population uses it every day, and industrial society wouldn't function without it.
It's also super-cheap even on a modest salary, and most workplaces give it away for free because of how necessary it is to production.
I quit caffeine a few years ago. I'm not an unusual mutant. I have the genes on markers rs4410790 and rs2470893 that indicate a typical reaction to caffeine. (https://enki.org/2017/08/13/quitting-caffeine/)
Most people experience a temporary increase in productivity until they build up a tolerance for caffeine. Thereafter, they are just paying and consuming to avoid headaches and reach the baseline.
No, it is also for a great deal of enjoyment.
I used to drink at least 2 cups of coffee a day, and at least 3-4 of black tea.
over a year I slowly backed down to just a single coffee coffee in the morning.. then eventually switched to decafe coffee for that one. I had headaches for about a week, and I think I was irritable.
Recently I stopped even the decafe coffee, and now drink 1 or 2 decafe tea a day when it's cold.
I feel great, save money and don't miss the ups and downs of real coffee - I used to get the sweats, shakes, funny shallow breathing, etc. etc.
I also had no idea I was living life through a "fog", that I didn't even know about until a few months after I stopped. Life is much better now.
Then it‘s magically gone.
Not even close to a full week.
Just do it.
I also recommend /r/decaf where you can get support from others who have been and are going through decaffeinating.
Fast food and sugar are cheap for what you get. Pot isn't addictive.
The myth that pot is not addictive is contradicted by the physical withdrawal symptoms experienced and described by many.
These are tools to keep siphoning labor from the working class. The system is working as designed.
When I worked in the mall in college, our prep guy was an immigrant from Ireland who worked about 15-16 hours a day. He prepped vegetables and fruit at our place, did painting, did maintenance work and closed the day doing janitorial stuff.
You do it to support your family and because you’re too busy to find a better option.
We have had negative cash flow for the last decade, should our employees have made under minimum wage due to capital calls that were made by the business?
How does a bank do proper due diligence on a loan for a business with 47,000 owners, but isn’t publicly traded? What about the administrative overhead around decision making needing a timely signature from every owner?
It’s really simple to say employees should have equity, but get into the details and the idea falls apart.
I have met a number of parents who give up their personal lives and well being workingto provide their children the best lives possible, so that their children never have to work night shift or over time in a factory to provide a decent life for their families. It is a sacrifice.
So, imagine you’re making minimum wage and you have no benefits from your job and you have to remain in a certain income band in order to qualify for government aid. It’s very hard to take a vacation let alone to just take a Sabbatical and backpack around the world to “find themselves” because they can barely afford to survive. It’a a very hard life.
About 50% of people have very little choice in the types of jobs and conditions they work in.
Weak labour laws and enforcement of same, weak unions.
This and worse used to be completely standard in all industrialised countries.
> Everyone, through culture, decided not to overwork
I mean… Madeira’s subject to the EU working time directive. It’s not just culture; it’s law.
I don't think anyone works 12/7 in a dingy factory doing repetitive work for fun. So the answer must be yes, there is no alternative for them.
There, for some reason, culturally, they decided to work really hard all year.
I was talking to a hard working cab driver and told him about seasonal tourism in Croatia (tourist season lasts about 5 months) and he couldn't believe me that for the rest of the year a bunch of people do not work at all.
Siesta is mostly a cultural thing and Portugal doesn't have it.
I think a lot of it is inertia and fear of the unknown.
Then of course, the propaganda that you're poor because you don't work hard. Which again forces people to work hard. Then you put in incentives such as tying employment to healthcare - hence no choice to be unemployed. n now you've the perfect recipe oh sorry I meant endless supply of labor / soldiers you can abuse at your whim.!!
Kind of makes you wonder which side is being exploited.
They're also paid more per expected hour.
I bet I haven’t worked less than a 55 hour week in the last 20 years except for weeks where I was on vacation. Those lovely weeks of vacation—-probably 20 on average.
As a result, people in less than abundant job markets are forced into taking up jobs to merely survive.
If someone is trying to imagine an alternative world, they should visit non-tier 1 cities of SE Asia or India or China. People routinely survive with less than full time income. Sure, it's a life with less material pleasure but it is a surprisingly adequate survival life.
The only way to remedy this is to go to college or trade school and hope your degree makes you valuable enough that you can bargain for a realistic work/life balance.
Whenever I see people working really hard in other parts of the world, especially when the country is filled with other opportunities, I always wonder is it just everyone else that is raising the bar and now the standard is very time consuming work.
For example, there's year long tourism on Madeira. Everyone there is working hard all year long, charging for tourist services very cheaply. Yet there are many examples of places with year long tourism, but you can still find mass closures during siesta.
Everyone, through culture, decided not to overwork and there's no one "hard-working" enough to have their business open during siesta. No employee will agree to work during siesta, similarly employers do not expect their business to be open.