I deeply wish this would happen, but know it would never happen in my lifetime in my country.
I’ve been working full time, sometimes overtime, for almost five years out of college. I want to practice piano more. I’d love to volunteer. I want to go outside more. I’ve always wanted to spend a month backpacking in the Pacific Northwest. It’s been my lifelong dream to write a book.
I’m so exhausted after work every single day that I can only get myself to play piano for a half an hour, and then play video games or read until I pass out before my bedtime.
Okay i agree now what
Lol. This country just voted to move in the opposite direction of this. We voted for less worker rights. Less power for the average person.
At this point, we’ll need to start utilizing our 2nd amendment right if we want to get anything better than what we have. People died to give us the 40 hour work week. Looks like that’s going to have to happen again for any further improvements.
Smarter countries did it without the bloodshed. America isn’t that smart.
My dipshit coworkers think trump will actually be good for unions. Mfers.
I’d like to add that 32 hour weeks is pretty much purely something that works for white collar work. It’s considerably harder to implement in blue collar settings.
My dipshit coworkers think trump will actually be good for unions. Mfers.
Are y’all in a union? If so, you should see if you and your friends could maybe schedule an appointment with an organizer at your Local, who might be able to walk these chuds through it.
We are already unionized, which tbh makes it worse.
It’s part of my position as union stewards duty to walk these chuds through it
Not true. The electricians in my area work 7 hour days and the sheet metal workers get every other Friday off.
The mental gymnastics required to believe that hurt my brain.
Is the reason it wont work in blue collar settings that it’ll inflate prices of stuff too high? Possible making the country fall back in a global stance on pricing on exports, etc (not competitive)?
Only other reason I can see is if they need people at the workplace 24/7, but they usually hire more people to make that schedule work (which in return ig increases prices of whatever they are producing).
Not “won’t work”. Considerably harder. Big difference. There’s companies who have successfully implemented it in blue collar jobs.
But more put simple, it’s that unlike white collar, output has a direct relationship with how many hours are worked, up to probably nearly 50, more or less depending on the job.
So, in practice it turned out that slower service was one of the largest problems with it.
Half of the benefit issue costs would go away with universal healthcare anyways.
Sure you can get more employees, but people who work don’t magically appear
'preciate the edumacation. Definitely sounds like a harder problem to solve, good point on the universal healthcare, I’m sure that could save some money for companies, it’ll make employees happie regardless to not have to worry about paying doctor bills.
I would literally take a life for that work balance.
40-50hrs a week isn’t a life worth living
Ikr. I can’t even find time to go to gym cuz of commute. That alone just drains whatever energy I had left from the day and so I just scrap by with the few things I can do later in the evening. Sucks man.
The next ad you see: “The only device that lets you work-out, on your way-out, to work!”
A sad world indeed.
Start paying people enough that they can actually live instead of struggling just to keep their heads above water.
No matter how valid the premise is, that headline kills this article. It should say, “Want More Productivity? Start with yada yada…”
Your premise is flawed in the first sentence - “Want happier employees?” No American employer cares about that in the least. Being happy at being allowed to keep their job and keep showing up to collect your meager pay is about all you can expect.
came in to comment effectively this., but you phrased it better than I would have.
“But happy employees naturally work harder” yeah, but so do desperate employees, and that also satisfies corpo desire for abusable slaves.
32 hour workweeks AND lower the overtime threshold to match. And that’s just using my office job as a basis.
The threshold from part-time to full-time will also need to be lowered accordingly for grocery store/fast food type jobs.
Don’t forget keeping yearly salary the same.
4 weeks is still not on par with other civilised countries. Living here in the UK now, 5 weeks is standard. When I was in the Netherlands I was getting six.
Know what really hurts?
Running into foreigners in your own city who tell you about how they’re on a multi-week vacation to America and they’ll probably do it again to another country again next year. I’ve had that happen multiple times while out at bars in my city.
Meanwhile, I’ve barely crossed state lines in my entire adulthood because it’s hard to even get a 3-4 day extended weekend.
America sucks y’all.
Join a union. I work part time in America. After just one year of working I had 3 weeks of vacation. After 3 I now have 4 weeks and am taking my 2nd international trip of the year and 3rd vacation trip of the year.
Or better yet, unionize your own workplace with vacations as the primary demand
Lmao they don’t want happier employees they want more money
Don’t forget the healthy dose of salary and humane treatment.
Wait,you guys don’t get that? Shit I’m.here in Northern Ireland and that would be less than standard. That’s what we give teenagers,hell,most teens would not take that deal. When did America start treating the worker so bad? Like 1865?
America was built on treating the worker badly. Most of the first people that came here were either slaves or indentured servants. Chinese people got exploited to build the railroads, and then banned from being citizens in the country. Now we have prison slavery and wage servitude. There are a million and one examples, but exploiting the worker is as American as apple pie.
The only thing that has ever really improved in American labor is actual safety standards for work environments, equipment, etc. We do a great job of prioritizing that. But actual workers are viewed as expendable, and many of the largest employers are just meat grinders even if they offer half-decent benefits. Walmart is a good example of that
It’s such a bummer when I hear about the burial lack of workers rights over there. How is there not mass migration to Europe?
Because, for many people, it’s not all that easy to get the requisite visas to go to Europe legally. As it stands now, I’m pretty sure I’m the only person in my household of 3 who has a few options to get skilled work visas based on my work experience. In another few years, when we’ve all finished our degrees, we’re looking at making the leap.
For other people, they might already have put down roots that hold them back before considering what a raw deal they’re getting. Even if someone can qualify to emigrate, significant others, kids or property can make it more difficult for them to decide to go for it.
And, of course, you have plenty of folks who drink too deeply of the Kool-Aid, and believe Fox News when they say Europe is overrun by communist governments that implement Sharia law in their gulags, and force you to be gay to hit the national quotas.
“But worker rights that is socialism! Socialism is evil because the soviets say they are that!”
Yea everyone knows how that great socialist state of ireland
Legally, I get 1 hour of sick leave for every 40 hours worked. And this is a pro-worker state, most states don’t mandate any sick leave at all.
1 hour of sick a week ? That doesn’t make sense, you can’t plan being sick. How does that work? What if your sick fir one hour and ten minutes
The way paid time off works in WA is that it goes into a fund that you get paid out of for missing work. So, a minimum of one hour of wages gets added to the pot for every full week of work.
I go to therapy weekly, so I can choose to either take my PTO to cover the hour I miss each week, or I can choose to save it for when I actually get sick. Hypothetically, I could also save it for a vacation, but I’m not bougie enough to take a vacation.
Everyone deserves a holiday
we never stopped. One week vacation per year is considered a perk at most jobs that offer it.
One week? Do you get like 46 days of bank holiday?
I don’t know how many banking holidays there are but they typically are only observed by people working at banks… Personally speaking, I’ve never had a job that gave any holidays off, but I also never had a job that gave vacation time, even though some of them said they did on paper.
No, it’s usually somewhere between 5 and 12 and none of them are mandatory.
Edit: if I’m translating that right, anyway.
32h work week?
You have 32h/week as a standard?
Yeah its slowly becoming the standard
That’s awesome! I was actually looking into moving to Ireland (not the TERF-island part tho). Sadly their trans healthcare is also sub par.
Your sexuality is not a personality
Cool. Didn’t talk about my sexuality. Weird that you would bring that up, are you well?
Well full time is 36plus i think
4 weeks vacation is too small.
Make it 8. Rest is fine.
Also worth mentioning from the article,
I work fully in the office. But I think remote work is better for work-life balance. I don’t have the option to work remote
Well, why not? Covid showed how great this can work … but so many companies went back to 20th century norms as soon as the pandemic ended*
- AS per https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/who-pandemic-not-emergency-1.6833321 the global emergency ended on May 2023 - almost two years ago to the day, but covid itself still circulates.
My experience is that in person and remote favors different sorts of tasks. For me I have both so I think hybrid is the most ‘productive’, though I’m much happier with the ‘remote’.
So on pure productivity, I could see some roles favor in-person.
But if you want to more cheaply recruit and retain, favoring remote is certainly going to help.
I really want a new normal of shorter hours, though that might be a trickier discussion so long as we have very highly utilized labor pool.
Productivity has been universally higher on every job that moved to remote, tracks those metrics and makes them public.
A dock worker wouldn’t be more productive remote. There’s obviously some responsibilities that cannot be done in person, and a lot of jobs require both.
But let’s say we discard all obviously in-person sorts of work from the “jobs that can move to remote”, the so called “knowledge work”, and we are deep in an area where objective measure of “productivity” has proven elusive. For example, one such study I looked at used “how productive do you feel?” as the basis. Another facet is individual productivity versus group productivity, particularly over time. A pretty middling junior employee spends a lot of time flailing hopelessly because no one knows to get with him and help him become better, both in terms of his job and in terms of communication and confidence (e.g. not trying to hide having difficulty to avoid people thinking he is less competent than he should be, when everyone has those sorts of struggles).
The commute, morale, ability to avoid low value coworker distractions (no, I don’t need the daily reminder that my coworker in fact has a boat…) , and ability to manage the work related distractions better certainly help remote work. However home life distractions and the ability to tune out work related distractions a little too well at the expenese of peer productivity can impact work at home. Different people and situations manipulate this balance and for the best employees, that morale can go a long way to having a good outcome, but I think we have to confess that in-person has some value.
In person work only has value to micromanagers and commercial real estate investors.
Maybe he is a hardware toucher
Unfortunately the leading point of view from employers
Is that if an employee is happy with their job… THEY ARE NOT WORKING HARD ENOUGH.
They feel that ONLY those who hate their jobs … are efficient
