That's a crock

Post #319,714 by jake123 1/7/10 4:12:27 PM Reply	That's a crock the real problem is that people are so desperate for work that adults now do most of the jobs that used to be reserved for the young, like fast food, newspaper delivery, etc.
Post #319,716 by Andrew Grygus 1/7/10 4:46:07 PM Reply	Yup, you raise the minimum wage . . . . . you just get to select from a better grade of employees willing to work for that. Why hire an 18 year old with no experience when you can get a 22 year old with some experience for the same price? Net job loss - next to 0.
Post #319,717 by jake123 1/7/10 4:49:49 PM Reply	The thing is, around here real minimum wage has fallen quite a bit from twenty years ago, and yet now adults are doing that work. It's not because of the minimum wage, it's because the "real work" has largely disappeared.
Post #319,718 by Another Scott 1/7/10 4:56:52 PM Reply	Yup. Like you, I remember classmates who had a paper route. I vaguely remember helping one for a few days - I got paid something like $0.10 a paper. Around here these days, newspapers are delivered by people ("independent contractors") in their 30s-50s who drive, often large vans, and do it on an industrial scale. The same with phone-book deliveries. I don't think the minimum wage had anything to do with it (since it's piece-work). There's been a fundamental change in the labor market in the US in the last 50 years, and we need to do something to get it back on track. Whether it's a 30 hour work week (as the OP suggested), I dunno. But there is an imbalance between what an employee can demand in wages and what an employer can do to get a worker that needs to be addressed in a serious way. My $0.02. Cheers, Scott.
Post #319,720 by drook 1/7/10 5:14:25 PM Reply	Shorter workweek is absolutely needed We have too many people competing for too few jobs. We can't invent jobs, as long as "job" is defined as "something I do for 40 hours a week." And I don't believe in make-work like Ghandi advocated. -- Drew
Post #319,725 by boxley 1/7/10 5:26:22 PM Reply	Re: Shorter workweek is absolutely needed and management would love to both give and pay you that 30 hrs per week. No net loss to them. YOU might have a bitch about it ask any people you know that have been furloughed. ATL cops were told to work and get paid a 4 day week. They now have to go to court on their days off without pay for testimony. More people get to work, sure and live lower on the hog.
Post #319,762 by jay 1/8/10 11:22:22 AM Reply	Companies hate it Companies hate the idea of a shorter work week for a bunch of reasons, both rational and irrational. There are rational cost reasons. The paperwork, training and other overhead costs are mostly fixed per employee. Communication costs trying to coordinate between employees can go up geometrically for complex projects. There are also a lot of irrational reasons having to do with making everybody work harder and the desire to make it look like everybody is overworked. Getting back to the original discussion of employment and wages. The idea I have always liked is essentially a universal work program. The government would guarantee employment at some mediocre wage for everybody. It would have it's own set of issue to work out, but it would have advantages in terms of flexibility and reliability. The reliability is the key one, a lot of the reason that employers can abuse employees is that quitting is a huge risk. If there was a fallback job that people knew they could live off, even if poorly, it would be much harder for managers to abuse employees. ATL cops were told to work and get paid a 4 day week. They now have to go to court on their days off without pay for testimony. That is actually a different problem and relates to the weakness of the laws that enforce pay and hours worked. A lot of employees are pressed into working overtime, often without pay. The average American now works well over 40 hours a week. Jay
Post #319,766 by Another Scott 1/8/10 11:49:53 AM Reply	Good points and a good idea. The "8 hour day" was passed in the US in 1916, but apparently didn't become a nation-wide rule until 1938. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adamson_Act http://en.wikipedia....bor_Standards_Act The economy has changed an awful lot since those days... In a way it's unfortunate that 8 divides into 24 evenly. There are several ways to reduce hours and thereby enable more positions, but all of the choices seem to be less natural: 6 or 7 hours x 5 days? 5 hours x 6 days? 10 hours x 3 days? Since manufacturing isn't as big a part of the economy as it was, the concern about having 3 shifts a day shouldn't be as large. The last two choices makes some sense - Have the business day be 10 hours but the work week be 6 days: and run 2x5 hour shifts for 6 days, or 1x10 hour shift with 2 3 day per week teams. The 5 hour day might also support the ideas that some have of keeping kids in school 6 days a week. Since some hospitals run 12 hour shifts, there are obviously ways that the system could be tweaked for certain circumstances. Presumably someone has already looked into this... Some say that since the work-week is already effectively 33 hours, we might as well make it official: http://open.salon.co...k_the_time_is_now Cheers, Scott.
Post #319,771 by folkert 1/8/10 2:37:06 PM Reply	Don't qualify for benefits if you don't work 32 hours.
Post #319,772 by drook 1/8/10 2:44:32 PM Reply	Obviously that's the big change the Govt. would have to make They'd have to redefine "full-time employee" to mean something less than 40 hours. -- Drew
Post #319,775 by beepster 1/8/10 6:55:44 PM Reply	And this would change things how? as you say...mfg isn't important anymore and there are a boatload of salary folks that would kill to only work 40 hours. I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose freewill.
Post #319,777 by Another Scott 1/8/10 7:24:52 PM Reply	RCP? I freely admit that I sometimes miss the nuance in your all-too-brief posts, but I really tried to be clear here. Since manufacturing isn't as big a part of the economy as it was, [...] =/= as you say...mfg isn't important anymore [...] As to how it would help: There are close to 20M people in the US who aren't working, or aren't working as much as they want/need. I think you'll find that there are many more, larger, boatloads of people like that than white-collar people who have to work 80 hours a week. Shifting to a 30 hour week would enable more people to be employed (to get the same [or increasing] amounts of work done). But I guess since history tells us that the 40 hour week destroyed the US economy, well then ... :-/ Cheers, Scott.
Post #319,780 by beepster 1/8/10 7:52:13 PM Reply	and it worked so well in France http://www.dissentma...icle/?article=936 that they abandoned it. I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose freewill.
Post #319,783 by Another Scott 1/8/10 8:44:09 PM Reply	Hmmm. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7522659.stm (~9 months after the Dissent article): France's parliament has passed a law which effectively ends the country's compulsory 35-hour working week. The new law will allow companies to strike individual deals with unions on working hours and overtime. [...] Unions say the new measures will mainly affect smaller and medium-sized firms. "In the big companies, no-one wants to renegotiate the 35 hours and reopen Pandora's Box," said Philippe Jaeger, of managers' union CFE-CGC. It still seems to be sticking around, or at least unions have to agree to new arrangements. Maybe its an argument for increased unionization in the US? The French labor market is quite different from the US - as you well know. ;-) I'm not sure what conclusions can be drawn from their experience. One could easily argue that a 5 hour reduction in the work week wasn't enough to substantially reduce unemployment there... My $0.02, FWIW. Cheers, Scott.
Post #319,802 by jay 1/9/10 12:54:54 PM Reply	Re: Good points and a good idea. For a lot of jobs, I would like to get away from the idea of fixed hours of work anyway. Put in a base line, say 1 - 4 Monday thru Thursday, so that you know when you can schedule meetings and see other people, and then let people put in the rest of the hours whenever they want. For jobs that do require a fixed schedule, 6 hour shifts for 5 days a week would be the way to go for most. But I would leave it open for companies that wanted to do other organizations, up to 10 hours a day. Anything over 10 hours a day should require over time pay. I would probably ban hospitals from running their stupid long shifts. Tired doctors and nurses are one of the more common sources of errors. Jay
Post #319,748 by boxley 1/7/10 11:16:45 PM Reply	maybe a better idea 2 years mandatory national service. Pick armed forces or civvy. Take a chunk out of the work force, give them food shelter clothing and beer money and get some infrastructure work done. Helps integration, team building and training them to do something useful when they are done. Worked quite well while we had the draft
Post #319,733 by beepster 1/7/10 7:10:49 PM Reply	Re: Yup. "There's been a fundamental change in the labor market in the US in the last 50 years," Yeah, we decided we didn't actually need to make anything...and pile on laws, fees, taxes etc to make us factories non competitive. We need to build things...somehow I think we've convinced ourselves it will be enough to finance everything and sell software/Int Prop. I will choose a path that's clear. I will choose freewill.
Post #319,734 by Another Scott 1/7/10 8:22:14 PM Reply	I remember it differently. Post-war US had a period of 20-25 years where it was a colossus. As the rest of the world recovered, it was natural that US exports as a percentage of the world total would decline. And since the US has a relatively free market for imports, US manufacturers should have expected more competition. (Recall that the US still is the largest manufacturer in the world.) Women entering the workforce in ever larger numbers also played a role in driving down labor's relative strength, of course. But women were often entering the workforce out of necessity, so they were as much an effect as a cause of the relative drop in power of labor relative to management. (Not to mention the fact that everyone should have the opportunity to do what they want with their lives and not be force to assume a "traditional" role...) While you could (I suppose) argue that regulations on (say) autos caused problems for GM, I think the case is very weak. Air bags and other safety requirements, pollution controls, and mileage requirements didn't keep GM's production from increasing along with their profits. In fact, I think that the case can be made that the regulations kept GM in business since they forced the company to improve their cars and allowed them to increase their prices in the process. GM's, and too many other large corporation's, management was too conservative and too unwilling to take risks to change the company to meet new realities. They didn't like change, so were unprepared as the world changed around them. I think the case is even weaker in many other industries: railroads, heavy equipment, industrial tools, and even in basic materials like steel. Too many of these industries were resting on their early-20th-century laurels and not investing in their plants and people. Unions may have played a role in some specific instances but aren't the general cause. I don't think you can honestly look at the declining percentage of union membership over time and say that they somehow destroyed US competitiveness. If that were the primary cause, then Japanese and German auto industries would have been in the toilet as well rather than eating GM's lunch. http://www.cepr.net/...acturing-in-2006/ Their management did them in, with the help of their "investment advisers" whose idea of improved processes was to buy up a competitor, combine management, fire productive employees, and muddle along for a few years until the IAs decide that the company should be broken up to components to make it more "nimble" - while the IAs collect fees all along the way... See, e.g., ITT, GM, AT&T, etc., etc. But, I guess it's easier to blame the Gubmint... :-/ Cheers, Scott. (Who recognizes that if this topic were easy to argue then it wouldn't be controversial...)

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