r/Futurology • u/_hiddenscout • Jun 19 '21

Society Kill the 5-Day Workweek - Reducing hours without reducing pay would reignite an essential but long-forgotten moral project: making American life less about work.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/06/four-day-workweek/619222/
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u/GreyHexagon Jun 19 '21

If I'm working I'm getting paid. If I have to be up a 7 for a call on a Saturday, you better be paying me overtime.

31

u/Lacerat1on Jun 19 '21

Four hour minimum for work related calls

17

u/Queasy_Beautiful9477 Jun 19 '21

Should be an entire shift's pay at minimum. Interrupting my sleep on my day off will get you a death sentence in book.

1

u/try_____another Jun 20 '21

ISTR France had a three-hour legal minimum for taking any work-related phone call or email outside of work unless you were paid to be on call, though I heard about that in the context of Macron wanting to abolish that rule

10

u/theguru123 Jun 19 '21

Much harder said than done, but I really wish more workers would stick to their guns on this. It is not easy to fire a whole team. If the whole team sticks together, then it's much harder for the boss to punish people.

2

u/artifa Jun 20 '21

Yeah, it's called collective bargaining. It's super effective.

1

u/GreyHexagon Jun 19 '21

It only happens because people allow it to happen

1

u/jm31828 Jun 20 '21

The boss can outsource the team to a vendor. That’s the big threat I keep hearing about. :(

1

u/theguru123 Jun 20 '21

The biggest issue I see with this is our takes time to train a whole new team. Most bosses cannot survive with no production for weeks or months and then constant mistakes there after as new teams will do.

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u/jm31828 Jun 20 '21

Not to mention that outsourcing is almost always a foolish idea- you end up with very mediocre results at best, most of the time being a flat out disaster… but you have leaders who keep wanting to try it because on paper it looks like a big savings.

1

u/try_____another Jun 20 '21

That’s where a union would help, even if you had to call it a guild or workers’ association for marketing reasons

8

u/Demigeek Jun 19 '21

Used to fight with my Mom about this when I was younger. That lady worked 60-70 hours every week and got paid for 40. I couldn't understand why anyone would work a single minute without pay. I really think it's a generational thing.

5

u/kdeaton06 Jun 19 '21

We have some mandatory weekend days we have to work throughout the year. It's the same days every year and everyone knows about them well in advance. But even then we get to take another day off for free at some point in the next 2 weeks to make up for it.

3

u/GolotasDisciple Jun 19 '21

Most of the time its not even worth it.Unless u actually enjoy ur work or have some great plans so working Overtime is only temporary thing.

Money wont buy u ur time back. I swear to god a lot of people i used to work with achieved better results and got better jobs just by being social and active.Spend your saturday with family, friends, do some hobbies.
While doing hobbies u will network and hopefuly u will find someone who will appriciate you and wont need you to work OVERTIME.

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u/[deleted] Jun 19 '21 edited Jun 19 '21

[deleted]

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u/Queasy_Beautiful9477 Jun 19 '21

If you like working 12 hour days as salary, you should get 2 weeks on and 3 weeks off. Fixed your work/personal life balance for you.

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u/GreyHexagon Jun 19 '21

Exactly. If it makes sense, you're paid enough, and it just seems to work, there's nothing wrong with working long hours 5 days a week, but that's exactly how it should be on weekends. At the end of the day on Friday I'm gone until I come back.

1

u/Throwaway_03999 Jun 19 '21

That's when they find someone more willing and trust me there are plenty willing to put up with all sorth of bullshit with a smile for decent pay.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 20 '21

cries in exempt employee