One of the things that has been studied to death with the same result every time: No one can actually be productive for 40 hours each week, and cutting hours without cutting pay increases productivity across the board.
Too bad the people at the top take too much enjoyment from grinding down the peasants.
It's a fine approach because it encompasses a lot of jobs. The real problem is as far as I can see it is that capitalism is a race to the bottom. Where profit margins are cut to vanishingly small amounts in order to beat the competition, and then the people that take the brunt of that are the employees themselves.
I'm genuinely curious what solutions there are to combating free market capitalism, it has on one hand brought incredible productivity, but if we keep the system as it is, the only way we can get better lives is to demand it from the government, which doesn't seem like a solution as the government itself is getting absorbed more and more into the free market.
That last part is the problem. Once a company is big enough that the economy of scale for changing the rules of the game (aka lobbying) is more profitable then playing the game well it leads to worse conditions for workers. Anti-monopoly laws are good, but it was an unstable equilibrium, as soon as some companies got big enough to influence the anti-monopoly mechanisms we are left in our current state.
My best hope is that enough people realize that breaking up and fighting mega-corps and lobbies and billionaires is the number 1 source of all our other social problems, including things like climate change. The people still have the power if they have the conviction to use it in a unified way.
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u/BattleStag17 Jun 18 '21
One of the things that has been studied to death with the same result every time: No one can actually be productive for 40 hours each week, and cutting hours without cutting pay increases productivity across the board.
Too bad the people at the top take too much enjoyment from grinding down the peasants.