this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Not being able to entertain ideas. "What would the world be like with 100% renewable energy?" "Would basic healthcare for every person help our country?"
I tried to explain the 4 day work week to someone that gets paid by the hour. You make the same money but work 4 days a week instead of 5. Insisted he got paid less. Had to explain like a Bingo card with a Free Space, 1 day he is paid even if he stays home.
I don't know if that's necessarily wrong of them. There isn't any precedent for hourly workers to be paid when they're not working. The "four day workweek" as described simply means that any time over 32 hours a week is overtime. Hourly workers in general don't really have a "workweek" anyway because they will often have multiple jobs or will work whatever shift they can pick up that works with their schedule.
They understood how the 4-day workweek works based on how the 5-day workweek works. I think maybe you need to listen more to them and try to understand your own proposition better.
When companies voluntarily implement 4-day workweeks, they are literally either cutting 8 hours or doing 10-hour shifts. They do not pay for hours not worked.
If you can't understand that 40 hours a week can be accomplished in 4 days instead of 5 days, than you are an idiot. It has nothing to do with your life experience. Its simple math.
So here's what I'm talking about, we have a legally mandated 8-hour workday. It's not implied that you're changing that to a 10-hour workday.
Also, if you've never worked a 10-hour day, maybe you don't quite understand how much harder than 8 hours it is for most people- because fatigue compounds faster than a linear rate.
So someone who is paid hourly and assumes you're retaining the 8-hour workday isn't likely to understand how they're getting paid for 40 hours while working 32.
And literally everything has to do with lived experience. Listen to people and try to understand their position. Being educated isn't the same thing as being intelligent and knowing how to understand different perspectives.
One of the main ideas behind the 4 day work week is that workers have become much more efficient, but with no compensation for that increase in efficiency. A worker in 2023 is going to get a lot more work done in the sane 8 hours than someone in the 70s/80s due to increases in technology, automation, software, etc.
Pair that with the fact that the lions share of profits head upwards in business (ie, CEO/management compensation has increase way more than hourly workers), then it stands to reason that we can afford to pay those workers that extra day if we equalize the pay increases across the board instead of concentrating it in the ownership.
That doesn't explain at all how a waiter who is being told to work 32 hours instead of 40, or 10 hour shifts instead of 8, is making more money or is otherwise better off.
If there's another policy like raising the minimum wage or UBI that's required to make this work, it should be stated.
I think it's good to note that while some of this is a failure to develop critical thinking, failure to entertain hypotheticals is OFTEN a trait for people with differing cognition. So don't assume they're poorly educated just from this, take it as a sign that the person thinks differently.
I've met and am friends with people who struggle with hypotheticals and education isn't the problem, just how their brain works.
Also, some hypotheticals don't consider the inherent problem of a situation or ignores context, and therefor aren't worth entertaining. Not all, just some. When that happens it's best to explain why the hypothetical doesn't work, which I suppose is entertaining it.
Because he's an hourly worker he's in the hourly mindset. You'd have to say your hourly rate would go up but only if you worked 32 hr/wk.
I like the idea of the 4 day workweek and would absolutely advocate for it, but I'm not sure how I personally would be affected by it. I do rotating 12 hour shift work to operate a power plant. I flip between 36 and 48 scheduled hours, 5 to 5 flipping between days and nights with a few days off between to flip my sleep schedule.
Would my OT start after 32 hours instead of 40? Would my company hire more people to schedule me between 24 and 36 hour weeks as a result? Because I'm not sure they'd be down with paying 4 hours OT on the cheapest weeks of my labor, and 16 hours OT every other week. So they probably have me work less, but does this result in a one time 25% raise and then fall off over time as no further raises come?
Idk, I would be fine either way because of how I budget, but I think these are valid questions that most hourly workers should be concerned about. I don't think it's such a simple concept, and companies will almost certainly find loopholes to exploit to fuck us like they did for the ACA.