Obviously this will depend on the industry and work environment, but I feel like the "4.5 day workweek" is already a thing for many office workers. What I'm talking about is the culture around slacking on a Friday.
At least at my company, it's an unwritten rule that you never schedule a meeting after 12PM on a Friday. You can see from slack statuses that folks most all leave early and take longer lunch breaks. And any calls usually end with "lets finish hashing this out monday".
Again just my personal experience, but where I've worked I've noticed that's consistently been the culture.
I would say that .5 is more like .75 - still gotta go through traffic to get to work, and people are still in a place they (apparently) rather not be. Eliminating the day entirely is still quite valuable compared to leaving it as-is.
more like 'california considers codifying that which is already known'
many of the largest employers like amazon, walmart, and fast food already restrict their employees to <40hrs to conspicuously avoid paying any benefits to employees. salaried employees wouldnt be affected by definition.
what good does this serve? i guess it squeezes reprehensible companies by forcing them to pay healthcare/benefits, but the reality is likely that companies will just further divide and conquer the employees workday.
> many of the largest employers like amazon, walmart, and fast food already restrict their employees to <40hrs to conspicuously avoid paying any benefits to employees
40 hours or 8 hours per day is the current general overtime threshold; 30 hours is the current general full-time threshold for benefit mandates.
I am curious how this "no meeting after 12pm on Friday" would apply to companies with offices on the East Coast in addition to California. On the East Coast 12pm Pacific Time would mean 3pm. Would it put East Coast employees at disadvantage?
At my work, they standardized it once a month. The first Friday of every month is "Fresh Air Friday" where employees are strongly encouraged to log off at 1 PM their time. Meetings after 1 PM on a FAF are forbidden.
there is a MASSIVE psychological/cultural difference between "well everyone pretty much silently agrees x" and "x is the stated rule." Why not let Thursdays become the new day that people slack off and leave early? Not trying to attack you or anything but why would you undermine an initiative to enforce a better work-life balance? Your response seems pretty complacent/apathetic, which seems irresponsible to me when so many stand to benefit from this change.
Unless I'm missing something, this would have no impact on engineers and other professional employees who are "exempt" from overtime. My nominal 40-hour work week meant nothing if there was a crisis or schedule slip that required putting in many extra hours.
The claim that this law would force companies to be more efficient by having fewer meetings assumes management are rational.
Also, it's weird that it only applied to companies with >=500 employees; wouldn't this be a strong incentive for smaller companies to resist hiring the 500th employee?
Many years ago. Knew a tech worker that had worked years of unpaid overtime for IBM.
She said it was fine, because she was exempt. So I looked up the definition of exempt. She didn't meet the legal definition. Argued with her for hours over it. She refused to believe that she was being taken advantage of. In her mind all a company had to do was say you were exempt, and that was enough. Eventually I gave up.
Following year, IBM lost a big lawsuit. She got a very big check.
Employee misclassification is very common, even and especially with higher-paid salaried positions. Whether you are exempt depends on the actual work you do in the day, and in what proportions. It does not depend on your job title, official job description, salary/hourly status, or pay level.
Example: You work 60 hours a week for BigCo. You have a fancy Director of BlahBlah title. You receive a salary of $500k. You spend 49 percent of your time performing truly managerial tasks. The other 51 percent of your time, you’re pitching in to help with your subordinates’ production-level work. Guess what? You’re non-exempt 100% of the time, and your employer owes you 20 hours of overtime each week, at an approximate rate of $240 per hour. This isn’t a kooky law school hypothetical, by the way: actual employees have sued and won on similar facts.
Edit: the downvotes would seem to mean my "often accurate" generalization here is not accurate often enough to be worth saying, which I'm willing to believe. No level of detail in a HN comment can substitute for hours of research and talking with a lawyer, of course!
A good indicator is "do you have to fill out a timesheet". If you do, that means you're probably paid an hourly wage, and you should be paid overtime; if you don't, you're probably salaried and overtime-exempt. As usual, it's more complicated than that if you get into the weeds (e.g. in the news article linked in the comment you're replying to), and having a lawyer interpret your employment contract is probably the most authoritative way to figure that out if you feel your situation is unusual.
You can be hourly and exempt. You can be paid a fixed salary and be non-exempt. There are also many salaried people who fill out timecards.
Edit to your edit:
> my "often accurate" generalization here is not accurate often enough to be worth saying, which I'm willing to believe. No level of detail in a HN comment can substitute for hours of research and talking with a lawyer
Just to be clear -- frequently incorrect even among HN readers? I would think one or more of these exemptions apply to just about everyone likely to read these comments who has a job, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding them.
Ah, I think I get what you were saying, company A is billing company B hourly so employee of company A needs to track their time even if overtime-exempt. Yeah, not necessarily "rare" in tech, mea culpa.
> Overtime for a salary non-exempt worker is poorly defined.
No it's 1.5x (minimum), just like hourly.
To find the hourly wage that the 1.5x applies to, you divide their salary for the pay period by the number of non-overtime paid hours in the pay period.
> An hourly computer professional making over $27.63/hour is likely exempt.
Under federal law, but maybe not under state law (CA, for instance, has a much higher threshold for computer software workers.)
Exempt (and non-exempt) are orthogonal to salaried vs hourly.
An exempt hourly worker still gets paid for over time, just at 1.0x rather than the mandated 1.5x.
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The "improve productivity through fewer meetings" assumes that the loss in productivity is through meetings. Things like tech support, facilities, and office administrative work generally don't encounter wasteful meetings to the degree that the professional staff does.
> The claim that this law would force companies to be more efficient by having fewer meetings assumes management are rational.
It also assumes that non-exempt employees are spending 8 hours a week in unnecessary meetings. Aren't most meeting-heavy jobs by definition exempt, since they'll tend to be either professional or administrative?
Researcher/Engineer in government here. The project I've been on for the last year has me averaging over a full day a week in meetings.
The PM (who has been in charge of the project for five years now and at the research center 25+) is "non technical", so she likes to have multiple tech roles in each meeting for "backup".
It's exactly the hell you'd expect.
On the plus side (/s), when COVID forced us telework, they put in a policy requiring an email at the end of every of what we did, so I have documented exactly why everything is behind.
> they put in a policy requiring an email at the end of every of what we did
Every day? Every week? You left out a word.
Every day would be awful. Every week isn't bad. At my work, we recently implemented a Slack bot that would ask you on Friday what you got done, what you wanted to get done but didn't, if you have any blockers, and what you hope to accomplish next week. Honestly, when it was first deployed, I hated the idea of it, but after a couple weeks, I had noticed that there were times when Friday came and I was thinking "I got fucking nothing done this week", but being prompted by the bot to answer the weekly questions made me stop and think harder on it, then I realized I actually was pretty productive.
I had a guy in a previous position that had a manager that started asking for those kinds of updated every Mon/Wed/Fri. After it became clear that he wasn't even reading the messages (The manager would ask about things he had just included in his report an hour prior), he started including gibberish in them.
It was a month before the gibberish was noticed. The boss was noticeably upset when he discovered the last month had been gibberish, but conceded that obviously the reports are a waste of time and stopped asking for them.
> However, Section 13(a)(1) and Section 13(a)(17) of the FLSA provide an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly skilled workers in the computer field who meet certain tests regarding their job duties and who are paid at least $684* per week on a salary basis or paid on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour.
If you're a computer programmer making less than $27.63/hour (and I have been that situation living in low cost of living area), you are a non-exempt professional worker. I got 1.5x overtime, and since the company had it as policy, working evenings or weekends got a shift differential too.
> an exemption from both minimum wage and overtime pay for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, software engineers, and other similarly skilled workers in the computer field who meet certain tests regarding their job duties and who are paid at least $684* per week on a salary basis or paid on an hourly basis, at a rate not less than $27.63 an hour.
NB: California has a much higher exemption threshold for the industry: $47.48/hour or $8,242.32/mo on a salary basis.
This bill seems perfectly tailored to really screw medium businesses that aren't big enough to treat everyone like interchangeable cogs and are in blue collar industries where most employees are hourly.
Companies hiring low cost labor already play stupid games to keep people well under 40hr because benefits. They'll just plug a different number into their excel formula and send everyone their new schedules.
Salaried professionals are the ones who's time gets wasted in meetings (because there is no obvious marginal cost to doing so) but they're mostly exempt.
Had a few jobs that were mostly just meetings. Mostly because there was so much red tape, that no real work could actually get done. Think, 200 hours of various employees time to approve a 5 hour project.
> Aren't most meeting-heavy jobs by definition exempt, since they'll tend to be either professional or administrative?
No.
Very many do not meet the salary threshold to be exempt, and others don't meet the detailed nature-of-the-job requirements (though, as with contractor status, there is a fair amount of miscategorization on the latter point that employers get away with unless it is challenged.)
That really depends on the industry and company, if you work for facebook,amazon for example, the hours mean nothing but meanwhile, those who work in these companies usually got 3x, 4x pay over the similar positions in other companies.
So it's really the hour rate that matters at the end of day. If you can pull a million a year guess you would be too much adamant about hours. The question is what your objective is, money, or freetime, or whatever your priority.
I see various websites show Canada as having an average of 32.5 hours per week for working hours. I don't think that is accurate. Most business here use a 40 hour week and most government departments have a 37.5 work week.
Most European countries I see are well under 30 hours most mid to low 20s. I wonder if that is accurate as well.
I do see videos of people from the US living in various European countries who say people are less stressed from work. They say most people want to go out after work compared to the US where everyone is so stressed they just crash at home after work.
"low 20s" is such an outlier you need to provide sources that "most European countries" are in that range or people should take this comment as an outright lie meant to deliberately deceive.
One of the questions that I thought across would be "how would this impact schools?"
Would schools be going to a 4 day week?
Or would California be paying all its teachers an extra 8h of overtime each week? How would that impact school budgets financed by property taxes... oh... wait... California.
Or would instruction hours be reduced to 6h/day? But the total required days and instructional minutes remains the same ( https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/pa/instructionaltimetable.asp ) which means that the school year would be longer no matter which way its done to avoid having teachers need to get more (not saying they shouldn't, but the way this is proposal is phrased, it appears that they would need to be).
How would this impact private schools?
As many families effectively use school as child supervision for the work week, how would any changes to the duration a child is supervised at school impact a family that doesn't have adults working on the same schedule as the school (e.g. school went to a 4 day week with Fridays off and parents work a 4 day week with Mondays off)?
> One of the questions that I thought across would be "how would this impact schools?"
Schools have mostly unionized faculty and staff, and this doesn't affect union contracts, so, aside from potentially increasing pressure on wages and working conditions from competitive options outside of schools, it wouldn't directly effect most of them.
This will just result in lowered salaries across the boards no?
The article mentions that there won't be any pay cuts, and that might be true for the current employees but for new employees the companies will just adjust (read: cut) pay to 32hr weeks.
I am also struggling to see how they plan on keeping track of this "no pay cut".
> I am also struggling to see how they plan on keeping track of this "no pay cut".
As with other wage and hour rules, if an employee thinks it has been violated they file a complaint with evidence, and the agency investigates. Since it's typical for pay stubs to report all the relevant information, proving that the pay per 32 hours after the law was not at least the pay for 40 hours before is...not that hard.
This assumes that a company can find workers without raising wages.
The labor market is a market, companies and workers need to come to an agreement on wages. And, right now, it seems that workers have the upper hand in negotiations.
First get rid of exempt status for most non-equity dependent positions- unless you're receiving a significant share of the profits there is no justification for an engineer, much less a teacher, to be forced to work unpaid overtime.
So basically everyone affected will have their hours cut without a change in hourly wage. All these people are then going to have to find a second job to avoid losing 20% of their income. How is that not going to happen?
“The current text of the bill would mandate” is more accurate, it hasn't passed out of the policy committee in the first house yet, much less become law.
No, it's two different things, the hours and the wage. It's not just hourly wage. I can tell you companies are super square, making no deals where an employee can work a bit fewer hours a week, for a bit less money. If you want to work even 10% less hours, they cut your salary in half. And usually they start there and work on ways to cut you down again and again.
And modern jobs aren't productive for 40 hours per week of ass-in-seats. I can tell you my case is more extreme, the best work of my career as an algorithmist (like an inventor) amounts to like an hour over the course of over a decade. So Chilean ingenegreros comerciales (pathologically avaricious businessmen) see that and say, OK for that decade with one productive hour, we'll pay you one hour of wages. If you want a decade of wages, perform what you performed in that miraculous hour 30,000 times.
And in fact, now that the company gets 32 hours out of people, people can spend more time working the job market, and might need more Bobs and Charlies altogether to have the amount of authority their egos crave, so the job market tightens up, raising wages. I think this happened with previous hour decreases in like the twenties and thirties, it's been shown that is great for workers. That just came to a complete stop in the forties, no progress since then, despite Keynes for example predicting by now we'd be working twelve hour weeks. And getting more time outside the office, in particular by commuting one less day, that's huge. Employers lose 8 hours of the in fact negative returns on time spent in the office, so really they're losing nothing but power (which to be fair is what being a boss is truly all about), but they gain money from more creative workers, and then the worker doesn't gain 8 hours, he gains 11 hours, of the worst hours he spends in the office, when he's most tired. Then he goes home and does things that make him more creative when he goes back to the office, like a hobby or woodworking or homeschooling and charges his boss nothing for it, the boss ought to be grateful, do you know any who are?
So France imposed fewer hours specifically to get companies to hire more workers. California is not doing it with that in mind, but it will be a side-effect. French companies hated that, in fact making sacrifices to make the statistical results of that move look bad, diametrically contrary to the enormous benefits shown in the early twentieth century. You think companies can't collude on statistics?
So Purdue Pharma may call itself a pharmaceutical company but it's not, it's a mathematical research institute that uses brilliant new theorems involving the equals sign to make billions of dollars. So for OxyContin, they demonstrated to FDA that 7==12 and that theorem made them tens of billions, then they tried 60==100 and eureka! They made great money too with methylphenidate hydrochloride with that innovative theorem, how do they keep coming up with this stuff?
So then, theorem in hand, they first lobbied and who knows what else to reduce methylphenidate chlorhidrate dosage limits from 100 to 60, then they introduced methylphenidate hydrochloride as the only methylphenidate available above 60 milligrams, up to 100 mg, and made it extremely painful just motherfucking brutal for doctors to complete the form for patients who were prescribed more than the new limit that were grandfathered in. Like it's the most horrible thing you can ask a psychiatrist to do, nothing compares with that form literally bureaucratic sadism, Kafka for doctors. Their shit costs $500 a month, whereas methylphenidate chlorhydrate is under $20, generic. Basically patented methylphenidate chlorhydrate again seventy years after it was patented by Novartis.
This is all phrased in the context of a creative professional in an office environment.
What about teachers? office administrative staff? tech support? data center operations? building facilities and maintenance? bus drivers? health care professionals?
There are many situations where this represents an increase in labor costs or a reduction of services for that role. Tech support working only 32h/week means that the company needs an additional 20% staff to maintain the same coverage (or do you not offer external tech support on Fridays?).
Similarly, bus drivers working an 8h day means that either you need 20% more bus drivers or you are paying the existing ones an additional 12h of work (1.5x overtime for 8h) to maintain the same level of service.
Creative office workers will likely not see too much of a hit - especially if it means removing less productive meetings. However, the rest of the world that isn't working in an office would be severely impacted by this - especially people who depend upon parts of the industry such as public transportation or health care professionals where this represents an increase in costs.
You gave me two beautiful examples, the best examples, thank you very much.
Medicine (healthcare's real name) and driving.
Right so, that ties in to what I was saying, you do need more people for the menial jobs, 20% more bus drivers hired. It doesn't increase COSTS, it increases WAGES, not the same thing! Throwing away half the good food just for the sake of wasting it increases costs, hiring 20% more bus drivers increases wages, the money goes to a person, not to the garbage. And then, too, you have fewer people out of work as a percentage of society, so in fact they're much more productive because instead of resorting to theft and drug deals and borrowing money from good people to pay it back to usurers, and all the costs in uncertainty of being unemployed long term, the bus drivers share a job and are never unemployed.
And they're never depleting their body while unemployed, have you ever thought of the costs of poverty if they were actually charged? An employee can have his back broken in three minutes to make the employer thirty cents in additional profit and complain nothing for fear of being fired (happened to me in Mare Island at a brewery, I had to do all these defensive maneuvers to avoid work that would have caused spinal injury in hours). Like yeah there's the lawsuit, supposedly, tons of lawyers handy to give the employee the run-around, so fine there's a settlement, but does the boss ever completely repair the harm to the worker whose body he considered his like he rented it, good-as-new? He could right! So that's more than what the boss pays, a back injury Amazon-Warehouse style, I figure the suit goes for $300,000. But that's not what it costs to get it good-as-new, that would cost like $15,000,000 for a spine, if that, I think they can never fix a spine for real. Medicine cannot fix that. By having two drivers share the wage, none is ever unemployed and therefore desperate, so they never sacrifice their backs to the boss for a millionth of what it costs to repair them, what's the ROI on that, -99.9999%. So splitting a $70,000 job in half saves millions of dollars, I think that might just cover the "costs" you're talking about.
So that takes us to healthcare in America. As a matter of fact, doctors pretend they work crazy hours, and that's what you see in the felatory TV series like Dr. House and ER, Gray's Anatomy, but many just don't. Surgeons--it depends. I think old doctors in their extreme hazing of young doctors make them work fucked up hours but after the hazing they don't do shit. Don't work shit. Like don't work Fridays a lot of them, and even when you go see them, they are always fucking late. So that's time too, they're not working during those thirteen minutes they keep you waiting, then they take breaks between patients, their hours are mostly empty. They generally cut you short on minutes, like if you want to ask them three things they get pissy, they get pissy for all kinds of stuff, they're actually a boss, doctors are bosses, they boss around the nurse and the pseudo-nurse staff. They even boss around the patient, give you "doctor's orders" as they put it which are not orders in a legal sense. They nag you. They extort you. They judge you. Ask you super personal irrelevant questions. Few put themselves at the patient's service.
Sure some doctors are fine, but if half the waiters put flies in your soup deliberately you're not going to praise the other half for not putting flies in your soup, that's just what a waiter is supposed to do, does he want a 50% tip and praise for not putting a fly in my soup? No, instead it is legitimate to focus on the half that do put flies in your soup, don't correct me for not being fair and balanced. Like why do the other half of waiters tolerate the fly inserters?[1]
In fact 32 hour work-weeks, making doctors actually FUCKING WORK 32 FULL HOURS, and do their job for real, and answer questions for real, not play dumb so they don't do icky work they don't like, not try to shunt you into shitty treatments, not lie about side effects, not misdiagnose, no sadism like that's asking so much, basically not commit what is morally (and much more often than they realize, legally and provably) malpractice and negligence day in and day out would improve healthcare enormously. But it would reduce costs, unfortunately, and they want the opposite. Doctors are a union, they are always on strike, they've been on strike for a century. They make United Auto Workers look like sweatshop workers, Milton Friedman said so.
So thanks so much for those two examples, healthcare and transportation, in both of those the ROI for 32 hour work weeks is gigantic. I would have never realized how strong my arguments secretly were without your comment.
[1] In fact, the fly-inserting waiters are in charge and tolerate the normal waiters to deflect accusations, make those felatory TV series easier to be deceived by, do marketing calling themselves heroes, and release the pressure from the public hating them. They don't want that hatred. And to pin the blame on them when there's a scandal. And the fly-inserters hate them for doing their job properly.
Reducing the hours to 32h/w doesn't increase the amount of employment when there are currently openings and the current staff is working overtime to meet the commitments.
Going to 32h/week and then overtime increases the amount of overtime that the currently employed get and makes the existing budget for public transportation worse (currently running a deficit - https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/SFMTA-s-budget-defici... ).
Reducing the hours that nurses and lab techs work before getting overtime, again, doesn't increase the availability of the existing staff but rather increases the labor costs or wages depending on the term you want to use.
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The 32h/week proposal increases the amount spent without addressing the issues in a number of sectors - especially where there is an existing shortage. In areas that are publicly funded, this is going to increase the amount the government is spending or raise the corresponding costs to service those sectors (e.g. bus ticket prices go up 20%) or a corresponding reduction of services to meet the budgetary constraints.
Going to 32h would be good for society as a whole, but the flip a switch approach when there are existing labor shortages in key sectors is going to make those problems much worse until the underlying problems are resolved. Giving bus drivers and nurses an additional 12h of overtime pay a week isn't going to resolve that.
> There is currently a shortage of bus drivers in San Francisco.
Translation: there's a surplus of employers who don't want to bid up. Anything other than bidding up, no bidding up, no just no bidding up, never clear the market. No, drag the bosses kicking and screaming, not even, kicking screaming shitting their pants and swearing treacherous vengeance upon the auctioneer. The auctioneer, the worker who'll do the work, their enemy, for asking them for a raise instead of every single other thing they can do instead, which is everything, put a man on Mars before raising wages, invent a time machine before raising wages, elect a gestating fetus as Governor of California before raising wages, sell their sole to the shittiest loser among the demons of hell before raising wages, anything just don't ask for what makes perfect obvious sense.
Bid up or shut up, nobody can say there's a shortage, shortages don't exist. If you paid $10000000 a year for bus drivers would people go to California to drive? Yeah then there's no shortage.
Shortage. No, conspiracy to suppress wages. And if you can't pay what it costs to find someone, tell the truth that you're a shitty poor employer, don't say there's a shortage. There is just as much a shortage of bus drivers in California as there are Apple shares that cost one dollar. It's a surplus of poor and entitled...well not buyers, they don't buy anything, not even prospective buyers like I guess...bidders. Poor and entitled bidders, "pobres diablos de mala muerte."
Doctors there is a shortage because they restrict supply, that's a fair description. So in fact there's a commensurate surplus of medical-school applicants and foreigners who want to become American doctors, but they get turned away, that's a shortage. So in fact no amount of money can actually get America the supply of medicine it needs to have dignity, no amount of money can "incentivize" these overeducated losers to make America healthy. That's a shortage. Going back to the bus driver, would people move into California to drive for ten million dollars a year? Yes, and there would be more drivers, no shortage. "Oh but that's not a reasonable salary" It is if you say there's a shortage! Whereas with doctors, would there be more doctors if you paid ten million a year in salary? No, there would not. A billion a year? No, there would not. So in fact it would backfire, the more America spends on healthcare the less of it it gets, shortage.
I realized this is literal. America put a man on the moon to win the space race, meaning fight communism, meaning not raise worldwide wages. Also to prove they could do it and be historic beyond any appeal, but that's not why NASA got the budget they got.
The state of California cannot mandate “no cut in pay” by employers (although I'm sure they would like to, because a 20% cut to income tax would devastate the state's budget - which is why this idea is dead on arrival). Your pay will be reduced appropriately either based on an hourly rate or a cut to your salary.
> The state of California cannot mandate “no cut in pay” by employers
It can specify no cut in full-time pay for an employer for substantially similar work, on both an individual and overall basis (the current text only does this on an individual level, but that's not all the State could do. E.g., “The minimum hourly wage shall be the greater of $X/hr or the 5/4 the actual wage paid by the employer to the employee on date Y or the 5/4 the average wage paid by the employer to employees doing substantially similar work on date Y.”)
This formulation presents a host of federal (and state) constitutional problems (i.e., contracts clause, takings, equal protection, etc.). You're certainly right that California "can" specify this. California would not be able to successfully defend this type of law in court. Pedantically, I guess you're right in the same way that you can "sue" anyone for anything, provided "sue" doesn't mean "win the lawsuit."
> So basically everyone affected will have their hours cut without a change in hourly wage
From the bill text: “The compensation rate of pay at 32 hours shall reflect the previous compensation rate of pay at 40 hours, and an employer shall not reduce an employee’s regular rate of pay as a result of this reduced hourly workweek requirement.”
Australia has a 35-hour work week... but so many breaks too. Morning coffee. Lunch. Afternoon tea. Like it really paced out the day nicely. Not sure if the breaks were mandated or just cultural.
Thing is, it never felt like we lost that much productivity. Spent a lot more at the local coffee shop though, that's for sure. But also, such better coffee than we have in the US.
I think 32 hours is weird. Like 32 / 5... 6 hours 24 minutes a day. Just strange way to slice it.
> Australia has a 35-hour work week... but so many breaks too. Morning coffee. Lunch. Afternoon tea. Like it really paced out the day nicely.
I can understand that some people (particularly extroverts who want some time to socialize and mingle) might like this lifestyle a lot, and once in a while yeah you can use a break of course, but personally speaking I'd rather work hard straight through the day and have a larger uninterrupted block of time available in the evening for my own activities outside of the work environment.
Eh, you do you. But I'm guessing this is perceived as anti-social behavior and will hurt your career a bit. It's always good to build relationships. Results matter, but promotions always tend to go to friends. And the connections you make at one job will continue to pay off long after you cash the final paycheck from that company. Hard to think of any job where being social with your coworkers isn't the right play. Think of it like contributing to your 401k, or going to the gym. Putting in time to build out your network will make life easier down the road.
I agree. If I don't get that uninterrupted time after work where I can really switch gears or do some longer activity, it starts to feel like work is eating up my whole life.
Considering the companies they are talking about here, wouldn't it just be better to work towards a more goal driven work agreement? Show up, do what is required and then the time is yours?
If you're being paid regardless then what does it matter if you're "on the bench" for a few hours or you leave early for the day? A lot, if we're talking about employee morale. Not much if someone is sitting at their desk trying to find stuff to do.
So long as there is effective communication (which I know can be a challenge) then it really doesn't (or shouldn't) matter when a person is working if the gets done. No?
40h (or 32h) work weeks make even less sense when you work remotely.
Your logic is not wrong, but I think the part you are omitting is that most managers really do not know how to manage. In most companies nobody REALLY has a good feel for how much work someone should get done in a given amount of time, or what fair compensation would actually be. This puts us into the mode of "pay the minimum amount we can, and then try to extract maximum work product".
If an employee is measurably unproductive for a few hours regularly, then the assumption is that their manager has failed somehow. I agree that this is most likely not an accurate conclusion, but it is a prevalent one.
Well, we already got examples with companies implementing the "take as much PTO as you like" benefit, the counterintuitive result is that employees tend to take as much or less days off than what they had before in fixed amount, without QoL improvements.
The thing is, the fact that something is possible doesn't mean that people will feel comfortable doing it. Cultural norms, management style or habits aren't easy to change.
I live and work in France, where you legally have 5 weeks of PTO. The 5th week has been introduced 40 years ago. And yet, it's still hard for a lot of HR departments to make sure that employees properly take all of their PTO each year.
Contrary to what seems to be popular belief, left unsupervised with goals to reach, it seems that most people tend to overwork themselves rather than laze off.
I suppose the main issue here from a legal perspective is the definition of a goal that can even be verified externally in case of disagreement, for instance by a judge. Hours of presence, on the other side, are quite objectively measurable (although becoming harder in a remote-work setting).
I would like to add more subjectively: as a company, I would also be afraid that contracts defining payment based on piece work result in an army of quasi-consultants. This might push the company towards: optimize your efforts against some agreed-upon metrics (see the previous point about goals), and go home. I suppose there is some benefit for a (software) company if its employees spend time at work "slacking" such that they might actually find useful things to do that none of their managers might ever notice.
> Considering the companies they are talking about here, wouldn't it just be better to work towards a more goal driven work agreement? Show up, do what is required and then the time is yours?
People with the liberty to have goal driven work are generally exempt (there is also a pay threshold, but the freedom of goal-driven work usually only comes with sufficient pay to meet it), and not the workers impacted by this bill. Giving people the freedom of goal driven work and the minimum salary for exempt status is a way for employers to not have to worry about this requirement, which does push people to that by making it more expensive not to do it.
What business is this of the California government?
I am 71 and a large fraction of my work life has been 32 hour work weeks, negotiated with my employers (I usually got 80% salary and 100% vacation and benefits).
It boggles my mind that this would be made a law though. Individuals and their employers should work out any deal that makes sense for both parties.
There are currently laws built around a 40-hour work week, so it seems to make sense that if this were to change, it would _have_ to change at the state/federal level.
It's not so much a question of whose business it is. It is more a case of policy being a very strong force in creating (sometimes positive) change.
If societies had relied on individuals to negotiate these types of deals themselves, we'd still be working 60-hour 6 day work weeks with 2 weeks of annual vacation days (which is very little in places like Europe).
> What business is this of the California government?
This is an odd question. unless California's constitution prohibits work time regulation explicitly, it's all California's government's business to legislate on these questions. Read California's constitution.
It's the business of the government because for most people otherwise it's a race to the bottom. If you are in a position where you could negotiate a 32h work week for most of your life you're in a privileged position. From your bio you hold 55 patents and have written 20 books, do you think that's the position most workers are in? Most people in the US have practically no vacation compared to the rest of the developed world because there's no mandatory baseline.
Thanks for your reply and other people’s replies. I have rethought my position, and have changed my mind. Having a mandated 32 or 36 hour a week work-week has some advantages, including something not mentioned here in the replies: it is healthy having work to do and with more AI and automation, it makes sense to share available work. Most of my family and friends think that I am very wrong about this: I expect a good future for most people. I think technology will fix climate change, and I believe that AI and automation will give most people the opportunity to do human stuff: cooking, sports, fellowship, etc. In my little world view, politics and greed-driven inequality are the big problems to solve.
Unless you are starving, it is a matter of tradeoffs. At least half of people could take some sort of pay cut, as demonstrated by the fact that 50% of people do in fact make less.
"Marketing manager" go for around $140k / year. That's a job that requires some skill but definitely not in the realm of "uniquely valuable".
80% of that is $112k / year or 1.6 times the US median salary. Enough to comfortably live with, especially since the job is not physically demanding, allows remote working etc.
What does marketing manager have anything to do with anything? The GP's profile shows they certainly aren't a marketing manager and probably make quite a bit more than $140k/yr.
To make a wide reaching and vague law that doesn't fit every industry is crazy. Are Amazon warehouse workers or delivery drivers really as productive in 32 hours as they are in 40 hours? No...there is no way that is possible. This might work for some big cubicle farms...but not for manufacturing type industries.
> Are Amazon warehouse workers or delivery drivers really as productive...
Is this the only thing anyone is ever concerned about? How about employee general well-being? The fact that average worker wages have been absolutely stagnant while average worker productivity has soared since the 70's? Maybe it's time workers won something instead of just getting squeezed for more productivity.
Are they productive because THEY are more productive or because tools and systems have allowed for increased productivity? Should Ford assembly line workers have been paid more because his assembly line system was easier and more productive? He ended up paying them more voluntarily, but would you really want to mandate that?
Maybe. On the other side, if California puts a 32 hour work week in place, and pays obvious costs from industry reacting to it and being able to easily move operations to other states... it may sour the country on a shorter workweek when we could have all moved together to 36 hours without much issue.
It’s not like anyone actually does anything on Friday anyways. Fridays for me are mostly catching up on work I put off during the week and lurking reddit until it’s time to log off.
I'm in it operations so Fridays are just like Mondays except I get to see my weekend melt away because the infra and the operating environment is 24/7. Bah.
I like the idea of a 32 hour work week (as a worker).
But really, I find it hard to believe the 8 hour loss just magically disappears. I'd have to think that less 'stuff' will be produced.
Less stuff produced means higher prices for the stuff that is produced. (Because of scarcity.) There's also less stuff to spread around, so society as a whole will be less prosperous.
In the big picture, I imagine it'll be counter-productive.
If this is done by the CA legislature, it likely will be written as to not apply to most of us - will probably affect only hourly workers, and be written in a way that actually screws them over (eg, the company must give $X overtime pay and $X benefits at 32 hours, meaning even McJob will be limited to 31 hours from now on).
So yeah, I'd imagine pessimism is the reason HN seems to not care about this bill.
When ACA was passed (Obamacare), it expanded healthcare benefits to millions of part-time workers based on a new definition of "full time" that meant >=30 hours.
The result was simply that many employees had their weekly hours cut to less than 30 hours.
The argument on who pays for health care is the wrong question.
When paying cash for an MRI is $500, and via Health Insurance it is $5,000. There are bigger issues.
I used to get a weekly shot. Paid my $60 dollar co-pay. They billed insurance another $120 or so.
Eventually I asked what the cash price is. $17 dollars. Was a real WTF?! moment.
Companies started offering insurance because tax rates above a certain amount where in the 90+ percent range.
To pay people more, companies had to get highly creative.
Lots of "perks". Company cars, hotels, etc. Insurance was one such method.
Our entire Health Insurance Industry came from companies and people avoiding absurd taxes.
Now things are absurd in other ways.
What are the numbers on that? Could one equally say that “the result was simply that many employees received healthcare benefits that they previously did not”?
I don't know of any job where people didn't routinely get healthcare where they do now.
What I do know is that these days you'd be very hard pressed to find a job that pays less than "what a skilled tradesman makes at their first job that's better than entry level" that doesn't also cap you at 30hr whereas that wasn't the case before. So now everyone who had a poorly paid job before now has two of them.
Accountants, administrative assistants, maintenance people, custodians, delivery drivers, CNAs, etc, etc, have had their hours cut to avoid paying benefits.
I too would be interested in numbers. If there is any improvement it seems to be confined to some industry I am completely unaware of.
> sounds like this would only apply to hourly employees, considering the mention of 1.5x pay in excess of 32h.
As with the existing 40-hour overtime rule, it would apply to non-exempt non-union-contract workers regardless of hourly or salary pay basis; unlike the 40-hour rule it would apply only to large employers.
my initial reaction is this is gov't overreach however considering the current state of healthcare-attached-to-employment, this policy will probably be zero sum in the long run.
this allows more employees to hit "full time" status and thus be eligible for benefits. of course mega corps are simply going to re-organize their benefits package to cut out the marginal increase in healthcare and labor costs somehow. those who were scheduled 35h to stay below the cutoff will now only have work for 30h.
the "more true" solution, IMO, is decoupling healthcare and other benefits from employment rather than trying to band-aid the symptoms of this poor system with Sisyphean policy like this.
> this allows more employees to hit "full time" status and thus be eligible for benefits
Not directly, it doesn't. The full time for mandatory benefits (30 hours) is not changed by the threshold for mandatory overtime dropping from 40 hours to 32 hours.
(Of course, if an employer wants to avoid overtime and has the same number of hours of work, but otherwise minimizes headcount, it will need 25% more 32-hour workers qualifying for benefits than it had 40-hour workers qualified for benefits, so it will mean more total workers getting benefits.)
Most employees, and I'm willing to bet about 98% of those reading HN who aren't contractors, are exempt and salaried. So "work week" in the legal sense has only a vague correlation to the work actually get done. If you're assigned the same amount of work, you don't really have much of a choice.
Do we need laws to encourage union membership? I'm not sure that 'be stuck at minimum wage and 32 hours a week' or 'join the union' are the only two choices some folks should have.
I think a good addition to this would be requiring a percentage of salary to be for commute for companies that mandate going to a physical office for jobs that can be done from home and an additional tax for the strain it causes on transportation infrastructure.
At least at my company, it's an unwritten rule that you never schedule a meeting after 12PM on a Friday. You can see from slack statuses that folks most all leave early and take longer lunch breaks. And any calls usually end with "lets finish hashing this out monday".
Again just my personal experience, but where I've worked I've noticed that's consistently been the culture.