Work Reform

I want more people to think though

"If this tool makes me produce double, and I get paid the same, who's keeping all that new value?"

This reminds me of this old productivity / salary chart that shows how fucked we are.

What amazes me is how many people believe they will get universal basic income from the pedophile tech bro overlords who don’t pay taxes are actively gutting the meager safety net and worker protections we have. The cognitive dissonance is staggering

Every little luxury we have with working, from safety to days off, is paid for in blood.

30 hour workweek should have been 40 or 50 years ago. 30 would be late. We should be moving down to 20 about now.

Despite having full industrial machines, some workers here in a milk factory work for 24h in a row and rest for 48h, mathematically it's the same as working 8h a day but who tf does that to their workers? another tomato factory I worked at kicked most of their workers and increased work time to 12h a day, everyday, even weekends, no shitty breaks, only 30min for lunch; bosses really don't care, whether they have machines or not, they just don't care for us.

Worse, there's actual practical evidence that a 4-day workweek for the same pay as the 5-day one still makes the company more money and the workers happier and healthier, but adoption is still glacial.

It's not just that technology doesn't shorten labour time on it's own. It's that technology disrupts the status quo.

A union uses strikes, sabotage, work stoppages, and everything they can to get an agreement that only a master weaver is allowed to sell woven products, and that anybody who wants to become a master weaver must first serve a 7 year apprenticeship. Then weaving machines are invented. The disruption isn't merely that a master weaver can make a woven product in a much shorter time and the additional profit goes to the owner of the machine. It's that now the owner of the machine is hiring orphan children to run, clean and fix the machines and the master weavers are unemployed. And, the government, rather than enforcing the laws about 7 years apprenticeships pass new laws to make the destruction of machines punishable by the death penalty.

New technology doesn't just mean that workers have to fight to get better treatment than they currently have. It means an uphill fight just to get the same level of treatment they had before the introduction of that new technology. Just to give a simple example of something that happened within the last few decades: from 5pm to 9am people were off work, and weekends were free. Then phones, cell phones smart phones, etc. meant that it was much easier to get in touch with an employee during those hours. Now many people's time off isn't truly free time because they can be forced into working (even if it's just replying to a message) during their time off.

It's something of a joke that office workers do maybe 2-3 hours of work a day.

Or, at least, they did. And now offices are playing the "how many people can we lay off before the system collapses" game

There is no war but class war.

The bosses are much more likely to shorten the work week while shortening pay even more and then using the "not full time" to reduce any benefits. Be wary.

My union had been fighting for 32 hours for years. Right when I retired, the college agreed to 36.

If anything we're back sliding in the other direction and I think one of the most troubling things I've noticed is that workers don't see unions as workers fighting together but another organization they can complain to.

They didn't just hand us the forty hour workweek. You can thank the early unions for that. Organizations like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Brotherhood_of_Boilermakers%2C_Iron_Ship_Builders%2C_Blacksmiths%2C_Forgers_and_Helpers

US labor laws and income distribution are pathetic.

Or Henry Ford oddly enough

So I used to work in industrial automation, and I did see a factory owner buy a robot to automate a task because it was a brain meltingly simple task that was unpopular with his workers. The robot was slower, and more expensive than a human.

It was taking a small piece of metal from a stack and putting it in a machine and pushing a button (not sure if he had a two-hand-no-tie-down set up) then taking the now bent piece of metal out of the machine and putting it on a stack. I think they had about 8 hours production per week of demand for the part.

He didn't do it out of the kindness of his heart but because he got tired of paying recruiters to find people willing to do it.

*fucking

Thanks, Industrial Revolution...

Yup.

Workers have to fight hard for every little thing, which is why it's so sad to see us back pedal by electing born rich anti-worker dipshits into the highest offices in the land. We're losing things that will take years and a lot of struggle to get back.

Of course not. It needs to be legislated, just like the 40 hour workweek and worker safety laws. Is there anybody who really thinks companies will voluntarily disadvantage themselves against their competitors?

32!? I was thinking like...4?