If workers move from 40 hours a week to 60 hours a week, that's going to result in up to a 50% reduction in available jobs. Realistically the number will be lower, as not everyone is going to want to work that much. But that's still going to have a huge negative effect on unemployment.
With the slow but steady rise of automation, the solution is not more work per employee, but less. There's going to be an incredibly rough period as unrestrained capitalism struggles against ideas like basic income. But there will come a day when there isn't enough work to go around, and your idea will only make this situation worse.
We have the wealth to pay workers more, at least in the US. It's just that the top ~400 people have more of it than the bottom 160,000,000 people combined. This doesn't require absolute socialism where everyone is given exactly the same amount regardless of work ethic; any amount of reduction in income inequality would be beneficial. A return to where we were in the 1950s (ignoring other inequality issues of the time) would be a very positive step.
Further, exponential growth of revenue is impossible to sustain indefinitely. At some point, people are going to have to stop judging a company that breaks even or has stable profits as a failure. As long as a company isn't losing money, it's providing value to all the people it employs, and to the economy as a whole by allowing those workers to purchase goods and services from others.
That isn't necessarily true. I wouldn't expect a wholesale move to 60 hour work weeks if the overtime pay requirement were raised or eliminated. And there are many people who already want to work 60 or more hours a week who get a second job to do that, but it's a very annoying and inconvenient process, and it usually results in a decent amount of wasted energy on the part of the worker. Having two jobs is especially inconvient when it takes 40+ minutes to commute via public transportation.
Though I also agree that there should be more wealth redistribution. But without a very significant increase in that sort of thing, the existing laws are still going to be more in the way of workers than actually helping them in my opinion.
> I wouldn't expect a wholesale move to 60 hour work weeks if the overtime pay requirement were raised or eliminated.
Certainly not. But for every two people that do, that's one more 40-hour-a-week job eliminated from the market. Unemployment is already at, depending on who you ask, 5% to 10%. Do we want to make that worse?
Further, people's natural productivity drops off after a certain point due to exhaustion. Why would an employer even want to pay the same employee to work to the bone when they can pay two employees the same amount and have them at their best?
> And there are many people who already want to work 60 or more hours a week who get a second job to do that, but it's a very annoying and inconvenient process
This isn't meant as a negative response to you, I just thought I'd share my experiences with you, if you're interested.
When I first started out on my own at 18, I was in the position where I had to. To qualify for an apartment, you had to make 3x the income level of your rent. The cheapest apartment was this affair where you paid for a room and shared living space with three others (they handled the roommates for you, so you weren't screwed if one up and left), for $425 a month (this was in 2001.)
Net income from 40 hours a week at Wal-Mart was just shy of $800 a month. So that required me working an extra 25-30 hours a week at McDonalds. It wasn't too bad because I spoke with both managers and worked things out before accepting the second job. But I agree, this can usually be really hard in these kinds of jobs that want to change your schedule every week.
Now to say that people "want" to do this ... holy fuck no. I literally started getting gray streaks in my hair after a few weeks of doing that. At 18 years old. I had no energy or time to do anything else. I basically lived to work.
I get that people do this, and some even work -more- hours, and do even -harder- work (like farm labor.) But, you know, fuck that. With my body decayed as much as it has since then, it would be impossible for me to do that again. And honestly, no hyperbole at all, I'd rather be dead than live like that again.
I always find it so laughably obscene that just because I am good at computer programming, I now earn six times more per hour (even accounting for inflation), and work 40% less hours per week. I never feel right that I make so much more simply because I'm good at something that others aren't. The lazy ones who don't try, sure. But the ones who just don't have the intellect for higher skilled labor ... that's heartbreaking that they're stuck in these kinds of positions.
And since I've shared their experience, it's a lot harder for me to turn a blind eye and tell them to just work more.
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Now all that said, maybe you've worked longer and harder than I have, and find me to be a huge wuss. And there's probably some truth in that. I'm definitely only speaking for myself here.
People have been talking about automation for generations. Replace "robot" with "combine" or "steam engine" or "cotton gin" and you get the exact same talk.
In part the answer is that people actually do work less than they used to. Less child labor, longer retirement--even the idea of retirement is something new.
Seems like that paid family leave so many want would be a good way to lessen work.
Society has found ways to cope with efficiency before, and the result has always been that people wind up with a higher standard of living. There's no reason it will be different now.
> People have been talking about automation for generations.
Sure. But there's some truly devastating automations coming up unlike any before it.
Self-driving vehicles are going to kill four million decent paying jobs driving semis. Where are these jobs going to go? Manufacturing is all but gone here. Outsourcing is taking out another huge swath of skilled workers. We're not going to be able to run an entire economy on the service industry.
And even those jobs aren't safe. Grocery stores are steadily replacing cashiers with self-checkouts. Fast food is increasingly being automated -- Eatsa has one employee working per store. People are staying home and ordering online where warehouse jobs at eg Amazon are increasingly assisted by automation.
Yes, if we look at the past, there's a lot of unnecessary jobs we've eliminated. Pin setters for bowling alleys, street lamp lighters, phone switch operators, etc. Then we have the really good paying jobs we've cut through outsourcing manufacturing and programming jobs. And yes, every time we've had some new job for people to go to. And they've always been worse jobs with lower pay.
We've gone from a time where one person working could afford a house and two cars, and get a pension retirement at 65; to now where both spouses need to work, probably can't afford a house, and will need their kids to get by on student loans to go to college. 401Ks do not replace pensions, and they can disappear out from under you (eg MCI Worldcom.)
But this time is different: we're really on the bottom rung of jobs in the service industry. Replace these jobs, and there's nowhere else to go.
Society is going to be forced to deal with a post-work economy. I don't mean no one working, but I do mean "there aren't enough jobs for everyone to work 40, let alone 60, hours a week." Broken window fallacy and all.
I think the pace of automation is slow right now, as we still aren't very good with AI. But eventually there's going to be a breakthrough in AI, and I don't see our governments keeping up with how rapidly everything is going to change.
Maybe this future is 10 years away. Maybe it's 100 years away. But it is coming.
With the slow but steady rise of automation, the solution is not more work per employee, but less. There's going to be an incredibly rough period as unrestrained capitalism struggles against ideas like basic income. But there will come a day when there isn't enough work to go around, and your idea will only make this situation worse.
We have the wealth to pay workers more, at least in the US. It's just that the top ~400 people have more of it than the bottom 160,000,000 people combined. This doesn't require absolute socialism where everyone is given exactly the same amount regardless of work ethic; any amount of reduction in income inequality would be beneficial. A return to where we were in the 1950s (ignoring other inequality issues of the time) would be a very positive step.
Further, exponential growth of revenue is impossible to sustain indefinitely. At some point, people are going to have to stop judging a company that breaks even or has stable profits as a failure. As long as a company isn't losing money, it's providing value to all the people it employs, and to the economy as a whole by allowing those workers to purchase goods and services from others.