Okay all you over worked, under paid wage earners out there, this one's for you, courtesy of vice dot com.

http://www.vice.com/read/who-stole-t...-0000406-v21n8

Maybe it's time to reinstate the Black-Connery bill or amend the Fair Labor Standards Act?

I once bought The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure and it sat by my bed for nearly 6 months before I found the time to read it. #Irony

Good book on this topic but needs an update (originally published in 1993).

Looks interesting. Thanks for the heads up. And it seems more timely now than twenty plus years ago, unfortunately. Maybe it could be revised and reissued as "The Overworked and Underpaid..."

People are fighting for higher wages. Only a few are arguing for reduced hours more leisure time. But that might change someday, hopefully, if and when we really start demanding it.

"The economy wouldn’t be able to produce quite as much"


And this is why the 4 hr workday is a bad idea.

The author states this as a plus because there would be less pollution. But to develop a viable solution to pollution, people are going to have to work on the problem more than 20 hrs a week.

Lol no one works the entire 8 hours of their day anyway. Half of it is spent trying to look busy.

8 hours a day 3 days a week >>>>>>>>>> 4 hours a day 5 days a week.

Who works the least hours while still making enough to pay all your bills and have some extra by the end of the month?

I'll start. I probably work an average of 20 hours, maybe 22 or 24 when I account for the commute. 4 or 5 of these hours I work from my sofa.

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/20...L-d9g.facebook


Here's a great example of how employers induce employees to work longer hours without actually making it mandatory. The L.A. Times is getting rid of formal vacation time for many employees and replacing it with a system of "unlimited discretionary time off." Basically, you can ask for as much time off as you want, and take as much as your supervisor approves, but the supervisor is not required to give it to you, and the employees are reminded that performance and commitment to the job will be considered in future wage and promotional decisions.

So, who wants to help me build a PowerPoint deck to help me convince my boss that my trip to Vegas next month is essential to my continued excellent performance at the firm??? Anyone stoked about having a heart to heart with your boss about why you and your significant other REALLY need that vacation?

The studies I've seen indicate that discretionary time off policies actually encourage employees to use more vacation, not less. Companies like it because their employees get more recharge time AND they have less banked vacation time sitting on the books (it's an accounting liability).

shocking that the slow death of unions the last 40 years has coincided with the steady decline in workers' benefits and perks. ...

yay, Reagan!

No one stole it. There's no reason why you can't take a part-time job. You'll be able to buy less stuff but I presume you have bigger plans for your leisure time than shopping.

Hmmm... It's obviously good for the companies from an accounting perspective. I haven't read any of the studies you site, but I wonder if they were looking at specific industries or classes of workers? Intuitively it seems like the system would be good for employees who had very high demand skills and thus a significant amount of leverage (also, maybe for workers whose jobs can be done at least somewhat remotely, because they might be able to negotiate more out of office time in exchange for checking in with the office periodically while on vacation), but bad for more commoditized workers who don't have as much bargaining power.

I guess that I'm just a little skeptical of removing guaranteed benefits and replacing them with discretionary benefits because it seems like part of an overall trend towards greater worker insecurity that I find a bit problematic.

My vacation time doesn't roll over to the new year so I use up every day.

lol @ people only working 40 hours a week. lucky bastards.

I'd like to point out that the tech industry is almost entirely non unionized and enjoys amazing benefits and perks. In fact, the only unionized tech company I know pays their employees horribly compared to the rest of the industry.

It's almost like there are lots of other factors in play.

Obviously

because obv., one healthy sector explains the trend as a whole...

Hah, typical Jigggs. Claim a generic pattern and then hand wave away the evidence and arguments that maybe its a little more complicated than he thinks.

Unlike you, who instead hand waves both the evidence of a generic pattern and the complexity of the issue by pointing to an outlier.

I stand by what I said. I guess I didn't realize that some here would attempt to trollspin that well established axiom as well.

The study, “Unions, Norms and the Rise in U.S. Wage Inequality,” (by Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, and Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at the University of Washington) found that the decline in union power and density since 1973 explained a third of the increase in wage inequality among men since then, and a fifth of the increased inequality among women.

They noted that as unions have grown weaker, there has been less pressure on lawmakers to enact labor-friendly or worker-friendly measures. “As organized labor’s political power dissipates,” the authors wrote, “economic interests in the labor market are dispersed and policy makers have fewer incentives to strengthen unions or otherwise equalize economic rewards.”

The IWW was struggling for a 4-hour workday, 4 days a week. Yet you assumed 20 hrs a week.

For what it's worth, it depends on the job. For myself I would like anything from a 30 hour work week/6 hour work day to every Friday being a half-day (a 4-hour day if you will.) I'm open to different possibilities.

For those professions where the 4-hour work day is impractical, I think they should get additional days off per year. Say every other Friday off. Or a month off at full pay per year. Whatever is feasible. These are just examples mind you.

If we had more time to choose our activities, we might get more involved in politics or other activities to make the world a better and more just place.

Agree. There is a reason that the auto and airlines industries are the top 2 strongest sectors for the past 20 years. Unions, baby!

Wage inequality has never and will never be a problem.

Having lawmakers making less laws is often a good thing (see the negative effects minimum wage has on the everyone who isn't getting the raise).

BTW- The only reason we work more than 4 hours a week is because we want to. We want to because we are greedy and don't want to live like they did back in the day when they worked 4 hours a day.

Bahbah, is that some sort of parody post designed to give credibility to the four hour work day or something?

Like when "back in the day" do you think people worked four hours a day?

there has never been a time in modern history where people at large only worked 4 hours a day. that's a ****ing dumb statement.