Want happier employees?
No. American corporations absolutely do not care about how happy their employees are. They only care about maximizing profits, and the best way to do that is to squeeze as much productivity out of their workers while also paying those workers as little as possible.
They know the workers aren’t there to find fucking happiness. Few are so privileged. Most people go to work not because it makes them happy, but because they need the god damn money, to keep a roof over their head and to put food on the dinner table, and as everything gets more expensive, the workers need more and more money, to stave off homelessness and destitution. Happiness, Jesus Christ. What a luxury!
The purpose of capitalism isn’t to make people happy. It’s to make profit for owners. That’s it.
It’s not even about max productivity, as it’s well established over long run you get better productivity in many jobs working 4 days and better vacation etc, the suffering is literally the point for many of these fucks. Whether they admit this outright or not
It’s hard to explain, but I have a hard time believing it’s just sadism. Maybe it has to do with the productivity gains from a four day work week taking time to realize. Like you said, over the long run you get better productivity, but maybe the corporations are just more interested in short term profits.
Lol. This country just voted to move in the opposite direction of this. We voted for less worker rights. Less power for the average person.
At this point, we’ll need to start utilizing our 2nd amendment right if we want to get anything better than what we have. People died to give us the 40 hour work week. Looks like that’s going to have to happen again for any further improvements.
Smarter countries did it without the bloodshed. America isn’t that smart.
My dipshit coworkers think trump will actually be good for unions. Mfers.
I’d like to add that 32 hour weeks is pretty much purely something that works for white collar work. It’s considerably harder to implement in blue collar settings.
Not true. The electricians in my area work 7 hour days and the sheet metal workers get every other Friday off.
Is the reason it wont work in blue collar settings that it’ll inflate prices of stuff too high? Possible making the country fall back in a global stance on pricing on exports, etc (not competitive)?
Only other reason I can see is if they need people at the workplace 24/7, but they usually hire more people to make that schedule work (which in return ig increases prices of whatever they are producing).
Not “won’t work”. Considerably harder. Big difference. There’s companies who have successfully implemented it in blue collar jobs.
But more put simple, it’s that unlike white collar, output has a direct relationship with how many hours are worked, up to probably nearly 50, more or less depending on the job.
So, in practice it turned out that slower service was one of the largest problems with it.
Half of the benefit issue costs would go away with universal healthcare anyways.
Sure you can get more employees, but people who work don’t magically appear
The mental gymnastics required to believe that hurt my brain.
Want happier employees?
No, not really.
- The owner classthat’s a bit unrealistic. The expected answer is “will this make line go up?”
No. Happier employees almost always do make the line go up in the long term, but most employers don’t understand that, can’t look further ahead than the next quarter, and think of an employee is happy it’s a sign they must be slacking off.
Nah. It’s “will this make line go up by next quarter?”
Short term profits are the only profits that matter to high frequency stock traders.
I would literally take a life for that work balance.
40-50hrs a week isn’t a life worth living
Ikr. I can’t even find time to go to gym cuz of commute. That alone just drains whatever energy I had left from the day and so I just scrap by with the few things I can do later in the evening. Sucks man.
The next ad you see: “The only device that lets you work-out, on your way-out, to work!”
A sad world indeed.
No matter how valid the premise is, that headline kills this article. It should say, “Want More Productivity? Start with yada yada…”
Okay i agree now what
32 hour workweeks AND lower the overtime threshold to match. And that’s just using my office job as a basis.
The threshold from part-time to full-time will also need to be lowered accordingly for grocery store/fast food type jobs.
Don’t forget keeping yearly salary the same.
four weeks? hell no, i’d walk from any interview that attempted to strip two weeks of vacation from me.
Exactly. The “wild fantasies” of Americans seem to be “below average” European.
Your premise is flawed in the first sentence - “Want happier employees?” No American employer cares about that in the least. Being happy at being allowed to keep their job and keep showing up to collect your meager pay is about all you can expect.
came in to comment effectively this., but you phrased it better than I would have.
“But happy employees naturally work harder” yeah, but so do desperate employees, and that also satisfies corpo desire for abusable slaves.
Also worth mentioning from the article,
I work fully in the office. But I think remote work is better for work-life balance. I don’t have the option to work remote
Well, why not? Covid showed how great this can work … but so many companies went back to 20th century norms as soon as the pandemic ended*
- AS per https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/who-pandemic-not-emergency-1.6833321 the global emergency ended on May 2023 - almost two years ago to the day, but covid itself still circulates.
My experience is that in person and remote favors different sorts of tasks. For me I have both so I think hybrid is the most ‘productive’, though I’m much happier with the ‘remote’.
So on pure productivity, I could see some roles favor in-person.
But if you want to more cheaply recruit and retain, favoring remote is certainly going to help.
I really want a new normal of shorter hours, though that might be a trickier discussion so long as we have very highly utilized labor pool.
Productivity has been universally higher on every job that moved to remote, tracks those metrics and makes them public.
Start paying people enough that they can actually live instead of struggling just to keep their heads above water.
Want happier employees?
“No.”
Only 4 weeks? In much of Europe, 5-6 weeks is the norm.
4 weeks is still not on par with other civilised countries. Living here in the UK now, 5 weeks is standard. When I was in the Netherlands I was getting six.
Know what really hurts?
Running into foreigners in your own city who tell you about how they’re on a multi-week vacation to America and they’ll probably do it again to another country again next year. I’ve had that happen multiple times while out at bars in my city.
Meanwhile, I’ve barely crossed state lines in my entire adulthood because it’s hard to even get a 3-4 day extended weekend.
America sucks y’all.
Join a union. I work part time in America. After just one year of working I had 3 weeks of vacation. After 3 I now have 4 weeks and am taking my 2nd international trip of the year and 3rd vacation trip of the year.
Or better yet, unionize your own workplace with vacations as the primary demand
Lmao they don’t want happier employees they want more money
