Technology has changed the concept of work.

[kentuck]

and we need to adapt to the new reality.

We are programmed to work 40 hours per week or more. Companies expect 40 hours of productivity from each worker. That is an obsolete idea in this new reality.

Here is a graph that I post from time to time:


As we can see, wages have been stagnant for over 30 years. Even as productivity skyrocketed, all the money was kept by those at the top. This is much of the problem with today's economy. In a consumer-based economy such as ours, there must be money in the pockets of consumers in order for our economy to keep running.

We need to return to the same formula for wages vs productivity that we had previous to 1980. Even at that, workers have lost 30 years of wages. How do you make up for that deficiency?

On top of the low wage problem, we now no longer need 40 hours of work from each employee. If we went to a 35-hour work week, that would open up about 15 million new jobs and would mostly resolve the unemployment problem. However, how would we make up for the loss of wages with the decrease in hours worked? There would have to be legislation of some sort to incentivize hiring more workers. Either pay your workers more or pay more in taxes. That is the choice that businesses would have to make. Also, we would promote and encourage more union activity. Business profits would decline but workers wages would increase. That would be the trade-off we would have to make.

[FredStembottom]

1. I'm happy to have been steadily employed almost 29 years....

...( which was done by sticking to an un-outsourcable job at all personal costs) - but my wage has only gone up about 1 dollar in 26 years!

This is becoming a problem of it's own as inflation didn't bother to stop in 1986 - like my wages did.

[ixion]

2. As a software engineer, I could charge more in 2001 than I can now

thanks to off-shoring and H1-B visas.

[FarCenter]

3. Average weekly hours worked in the private sector is 34.2

It varies from 44.0 hrs/week in logging and mining to 25.9 in leisure and hospitality.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm

[kentuck]

4. Employers have become very ingenious with these lesser hours...

They offer comp time off and employees can use their PTO (vacation) time and still get paid for their time off. Unfortunately, they have no vacation time when they need a vacation and employers get to maximize their need and their overtime pay. Some have figured it out to the minute how much labor they might need on a given day and offer time off to volunteers that sign a list to go home early, for example.

Perhaps a good start would be to make the new work week 35 hours and overtime for anything over? Workers simply are not needed in the same way as they used to be. We need to adapt.

[Terry in Austin]

5. Industrialism has, anyway

We think we're so advanced, but we put up with this overwork.

Medieval peasants worked an average of 15 hours a week. Bushmen in the Kalahari desert don't even average 30 hours, fer crying out loud.

Let the "yes buts" commence!

B-)

[MedicalAdmin]

6. How about a yes, and?

I would love some links on these poInts.

I would love tomback these up when I use them.

[Terry in Austin]

16. Work week links

The material on medieval peasants and !Kung bushmen is mentioned in a recent piece in Truth-out.org: "The Jobs Mirage: How Much More Work Do Humans Really Need?"

Some of the original work on the bushmen was by Marshall Sahlins and Richard Borshay Lee.

Juliet Schor has investigated the matter in her classic The Overworked American, finding that if increases in productivity over the course of a baby boomer's career were applied...to shrinking the workweek, it'd now be 6.5 hours. The Truth-out article also says

It has been drastically shorter in the past. In his "Stone Age Economics" (1974), Marshall Sahlins calculated some aborigines worked 15 hours per week. In his "Six Centuries of Work and Wages" (1884), James E. Thorold Rogers, member of Parliament, calculated that after a plague, peasants worked 14 hours per week.

Hope this helps!

[kelly1mm]

7. Technology has made many workers no longer necessary. In 2000, I had two

employees, a receptionist/office manager and a paralegal. Now I have no employees. Voice mail, internet research, speech recognition software, portable computing, case management software, - all made them redundant. Now I do everything myself, work less hours, make less gross, but more net.

Some call it progress but I don't know. Both my employees left to have children and seem to be doing OK. I read the "we are the 99%" website and see the people hurt by technology (tech exacerbates outsourcing).

I don't know what the answers are.

[FreakinDJ]

8. Quit talking like a Union member before we have to .......

Oh well - you know what happened to the last guy

[DonCoquixote]

9. French duers

Isn't this what they tried in France? How did it work?

[kentuck]

10. Different time...

Different technology.

[DonCoquixote]

13. not at all

They tried this a few years ago, and indeed it was an election issue with Nicolas Sarkozy, so how can it be a different time and technology when it was past 2005?

[kentuck]

14. First of all...

I don't think they tried it to solve an unemployment problem? Also, they already had benefits that the average American does not enjoy, like 6 weeks vacation or socialized medicine. Mostly, they wanted the 35-hour work week for entirely different reasons.

[lunatica]

11. I get paid by the hours I work in a week (not paid hourly)

In my job people work 100% time if they work 40 hours. We get paid a salary set at that percent. So if we work 60% we get paid at 60% of that salary.

I would gladly work less and have more people hired, but I can't afford to live on my 100% salary, much less a percentage of that.

mortgages, food, gas and living expenses are too high for a solution where people work less for less. It simply doesn't work.

[ThomWV]

12. Hey, look at that! It started the same time Reagan came to Office. Strange coincidence, or what?

[JCMach1]

15. This is why we need a paradigm shift... both capitalism AND socialism are based

on the concept of unit labor.