Tech workers' fight for living wages and a 32-hour workweek is a battle for all

I don't think the push-back here is against a 4 day work week, but the idea that wages increase or stay the same as you reduce down to 4 days. I known several people who work 4 days for 80% equivalent. They seem like you who seek a more balanced, family & personal focused lifestyle. This is awesome and I agree with you that flexibility can be a huge competitive differentiator for companies that doesn't need to cost them a lot more money. It's kinda crazy that more don't seek out creative approaches like this.

Same. I work 4 days a week, and most weeks I work 32 hours (some weeks I am excited about what I am doing and end up working later than I intended to once or twice). The flexibility is amazing. I have time for personal projects (some of them coding related, but also music or home improvement or really anything I want), I have time to lift every day, I read more than almost anyone I know.

Having that extra day off for Whatever I Want is invaluable, and there's nothing that anyone can offer me that would make me give this up.

The free market could do that without unions. Doing so increases the cost of labor in the product as % of the total price. You're super highly valued employee, your employer will be more than happy to buy your work in packages of 4 days instead of 5 if it suits him and you. Also if this is not suitable for one party of the deal (either employee or employer) both can go and freely trade/buy their labour.

However, generally advocates propose a blanket "mandatory 35 hours week", which have many negtive consequences:

- Why do you need to "enforce" that to other people who can't or wan't earn the same way and are more than happy to work overtime because they need to say earn more to pay medical bills or want to save to buy a house? Isn't that limiting the amount I as a person can sell my own work hours to the business?

- How can the business compete on the local market when other companies aren't forced to do work with the same cost base for the labour component in the final product?

- How can the business compete with the Mexican company across the border who can do it for even cheaper?

Free markets are very brutal and at the first glance are bad for humans, but their efficiency gives the tax base for redistribution. Also they're inherently moral, because if you can do something for your fellow citizens and swap your labor for their money and back, then you shouldn't expect to be entitled to their surplus earning redistributed via the welfare system.

In tribes in the olden days, when a person got sick/too old, many tribes just left him to die, because they couldn't afford to feed him. Societies are much wealthier now, but we shouldn't forget that starvation and poverty are the default state, not the other way around.

> 48 hours is not enough time to fully decompress and feel human again.

When I’m in that situation, I’m not thinking that my weekends are too short, but that my job is too stressful. I either need to change jobs or find peace in my current job.

One of Henry Ford biggest push was for a 5 day work week when no one else did it. Why? Because it meant workers had two days of week to spend money which increased consumer spending and look at the US today. Our consumer spending is about 2/3 of our GDP spending. I'm not saying you're wrong. But there's more to "drive your workers to the bone means we get better productivity and economic conditions". The biggest mistake the US is making is not capitalizing harder on onshoring + robotics.

I assume we agree that working less produces less (which reasonable people debate) since otherwise competition from abroad wouldn't be an issue.

If that is the case, then adding trade barriers also doesn't fix anything. Adding the trade barriers would ultimately just produce a lower standard of living. You'd essentially have an isolated system and the system is now producing less, so necessarily there will be less for everyone in the system.

Adding trade barriers also doesn't fix the threat of an adversarial country working 50% more than you for the next 50 years and as a result having the infrastructure to dominate you in numerous ways.

I wonder if there could ever be a tariff policy that is automatically proportional some measure of worker/environmental exploitation. I know tariffs are current very unpopular, but maybe they can be used for good?

I'm a senior South African software developer (let my add my perspective here).

In terms of hours worked per week, I have rarely worked more than 40 hours per week (and I mean by that that I'm contracted for 40 hours and rarely work overtime). I know people who work more than that, and sometimes much more than that, which is a function of their skills and what kind of job they can secure (as well as their appetite for overtime), but I'd say my situation is fairly normal for people with ze skills. I also worked at a company which did 32 hour work weeks (which they did as a perk to retain people, not because they were forced to).

Software dev skills are quite scarce here, and South African devs are already cheap enough that it is difficult to try and offshore that work (although I know a few SA companies which have contracted companies in India for work). I also know many SA devs who have emmigrated to other countries which themselves have scarce software developers, but where the salaries and "standard of living" is perhaps better.

Look at Germany, their highly profitable companies have moved so much outside of the country, because they can't produce a competitive product inside with the strong unions, well-meaning green taxes and giving too much to the unemployed imigrants coming as social security and benefits.

When you start overtaxing, you are just milking the cow and not feeding her enough. She'd last for some time but then't you won't have a cow and milk.

You're absolutely correct, but most people don't understand how even a simple "village-size" economy works. They think money is just "printed" and "government will enforce our standard of living".

If things were this simple compensation costs alone would have pushed all labour that could be moved (blue collar or not) outside of the US.

Countries can stay ahead by enticing better workers with better working conditions. I ain't doing 996.

Many countries have <40 hours/week and are still thriving.

There will always be someone willing to undercut. Should that be reason for us all to race each other to the bottom?

I personally don’t think the negative consequences of working a little less (on paper!) are proportional to the positives.

The economic engine demands 80 hour work weeks and constant crunch?

>> When it comes to jobs where the skill growth and knowledge domain is fairly static and is hard on the body or dangerous, like the trades, I think these demands are a good idea.

Likewise for raising the retirement age. I could carry on with my email job into my 80s (health permitting). Bricklayers not so much.

In the market, second place is "first loser"

> we cannot run the entire industry this way and expect to keep the economic engine of these companies going.

I mean why would they care? If you can't get a FAANG salary due to the lack of the skills, but can laze around 32 hours a week for $85k, it sounds too good to refuse to destroy the industry.

If you look at the revenue, number of employees and cost of living in the area it isn't so hard to calculate a sensible salary.

The weird thing in the west are these MBA types who feel they must force down labor cost even if it makes no difference for the company. I've seen lots of truly absurd examples of it. My favorite are the giant factories full of state of the art machinery and near perfect automation. 90+% of the employees are gone but the business logic still instructs to squeeze them. Like trying to squeeze wine from rocks.

If LLM's live up to optimistic speculation you can "soon" have a single employee run a large complicated software project with a low bus factor. Someone somewhere will think it is their job to make sure the dev costs the absolute minimum and works day and night. To spend $100 to squeeze $1 extra out of them is a job well done.

really? are their skills atrophying because they don't spend enough time at work?

I was in software in from mid-2000s onwards and never experienced anything like 35 hours of meetings a week.

even as a full-time manager I have never had anything like 35 hours of meetings a week. No developer has that either. IME a developer who says "I have a lot of meetings!" is at < 10 hr/ week. Something like standup (1hr) planning (1hr) refinment/definition (2hr) 1:1 (1hr) staff/all-hands (1hr) practice groups (2hr) adhoc (3hr) is what I might see on their calendar and that's a heavy - not regular - week.

> I don't know the numbers today but in the 2000s, on average, corporate engineers had 35 hours a week of meetings

Do you have the dataset for that? I'd be surprised by that number, unless it was all "engineers" irrespective of software taken into account.

Call me a slacker but 40 days a week really feels like too much.

I'd personally be more supportive of the 4-day 40-hour work week because I converted to that about six months ago, myself, and I'm not looking back. I find it works very well, for me.

I'd be all about 32-hour work week, but provided either employers were required to pay us all more, or the price of _literally everything_ in the US consumer economy came down. Cutting my paycheck by 25% would be devastating to the arguably modest lifestyle I have built for myself, so I can't see that ever being offset by just being generally happier because I'm not wasting the single life I have making someone else rich.

It has to start somewhere. I can hardly criticize them for trying.

> Now we need to build a similar fighting movement for a 32-hour week and living wages for all workers.

The title says exactly that, does it not?

We've been doing that for a long time. Average worker in

    1900 worked 3000 hours
    1950 worked 2000 hours
    2023 worked 1790 hours

Maybe you are expecting even fewer hours still, which you are welcome to do. I know lots of people that work 800 hours a year. All their basic needs are easily met. I do not want to live like them, though.

data from: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...

It's the same as saying "people need food to live; why not raise the price of food indefinitely to have better wages for people who produce food?"

The answer (thank goodness) is: competition.

You are a consumer more than you are a worker. Every industry that brings in automation and reduced costs can offer you goods for less, or pay their workers the same for more. Competition means they tend to choose the former (or, given there's also competition for workers, actually wages go up a bit and prices come down a bit, but there are slightly fewer jobs).

You sound like an out-of-touch elitist. Do you really not understand all this? Just out of curiosity, what do you and your parents do for a living?

> why not lower the average work week hours accordingly?

Because workers can get more money this way.

> this could be translated back to lowering the average work load of workers.

Yeah, but workers want more money, not a lower load.

> it just means that there is enough money to be earned

More money means more agents trying to earn them, which means more competition, which mean less profit.

>> What's wrong with this perspective?

The worker is not putting out the capital that (hopefully) pays off in increased productivity; why do they benefit from this investment - especially when it's diameterically opposite the cost/value proposition they represent? If we value an employee's contribution and pay accordingly why would I pay more per unit if they work less?

I don't necessarily (fully) agree with this counter, but you better believe that's how investors view it. Productivity is really hard to measure in IT, but I tend to think of "attention". I want to pay a salary for all of your attention, and when you start talking about reducing your... work-focused hours (?) I'm getting less for the same money.

Companies are constantly striving to compete. Being able to do more with the same amount of staff and therefore salary is a big part of that. The moment you let your workforce reduce their hours just because they are more productive is the moment a competitor gains extra productivity compared to you by simply not following suit.

If you want to work less, you need unions, government intervention, or some other form of organization (e.g. a change in the status quo).

It requires somebody who is in a powerful enough position to enforce the rule and also who doesn't become corrupted by their access to that kind of power.

Or it lacks a mechanism by which we can enforce the rule collectively.

By all means let's make it happen, it's a great idea, but how?

> So less work is needed for the worker, and this could be averaged to pay out as a bonus for all workers.

The whole point of their investment into the machines is to no longer have to pay workers.

> What's wrong with this perspective?

Morally? Nothing.

Do you think we live in a planned economy or something?

> The current 3-year agreement covering 59 community support specialists, trust and safety analysts, marketing professionals, software engineers, and other tech workers...

Yeah they're going to just offshore to the UK and Singapore or offer remote first jobs domestically. Most Kickstarter jobs are now one of those 3 instead of in NYC.

In fact, why are all the other non-SWE and Strategy roles in NYC at all?

I was crying hoarse about this on HN during that time and was constantly downvoted and flamed.

100% in-person is dumb, but a 2-3 day hybrid approach was good enough to both justify retaining a domestic presence as well as train new grads.