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212

Bernie Sanders Proposes Reducing Americans’ Workweek to 32 Hours (www.nytimes.com)

submitted 8 months ago by UrLogicFails@beehaw.org to c/politics@beehaw.org

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Archive link: https://archive.ph/sVDYB

Some key excerpts:

Senator Bernie Sanders this week unveiled legislation to reduce the standard workweek in the United States from 40 hours to 32, without a reduction in pay

The law, if passed, would pare down the workweek over a four-year period, lowering the threshold at which workers would be eligible to receive overtime pay.

Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, said at the hearing such a reduction would hurt employers, ship jobs overseas and cause dramatic spikes in consumer prices.

Mr. Sanders is far from the first to propose the idea, which has been floated by Richard Nixon, pitched by autoworkers and experimented with by companies ranging from Shake Shack to Kickstarter and Unilever’s New Zealand unit.

Representative Mark Takano, Democrat of California, introduced the 32-Hour Workweek Act in the House in 2021, and has reintroduced it as a companion bill to the one sponsored by Mr. Sanders in the Senate.

In proposing the legislation, Mr. Sanders cited a trial conducted by 61 companies in Britain in 2022, in which most of the companies that went down to a four-day workweek saw that revenues and productivity remained steady, while attrition dropped significantly. The study was conducted by a nonprofit, 4 Day Week Global, with researchers at Cambridge University, Boston College and a think tank, Autonomy.

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[–] bobs_monkey@lemm.ee 9 points 8 months ago (5 children)

Here is the actual bill. As far as I can tell, all it really does is make some wording substitutions and redefinitions to the original 1940 bill.

What I find interesting is that it addresses weekly pay, assuming salaries workers. What happens to hourly employees? Will the employer be required to up their hourly rate to compensate for the 8 hour loss? People are already stretched thin enough, an 8 hour loss for hourly workers would be devastating in many cases.

There would also need to be payroll tax adjustments on the employer side regarding hourly workers. Payroll taxes generally end up being about 90% of an employee's wage added on to their gross wage (at least here in California), so while employees see a great benefit of increased pay and/or reduced hours, this would absolutely screw small/medium businesses that already operate on tight margins. I operate in the construction industry, and dropping down to 4 days would delay projects even more, and having to pay overtime on a fifth day at increased hourly wages would be prohibitively expensive that most wouldn't do it.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely think this is a step in the right direction, but I think there needs to be a good balance for both employees and employers. I know online communities like to paint all companies as evil, but I do my damnedest to take care of my guys and provide good jobs with great pay and benefits while also giving my customers reasonable prices in a state that's already stupid amounts of expensive to do business in, and I'm not penny pinching or being anal about my bottom line. Stuff like this without consideration of the impacts of small businesses is how you end up with mega corps that are the only ones that can afford to stay in business.

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