employees in some sectors could easily make do with a 3 day work week, 4 hours per day, no payment reduction. all the rest is just surplus value being generated. however we know that the capitalists will never allow that, and that's the reason we need to, while pushing for work week reductions, agitate the working class today in order to build the revolution of tomorrow.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2025
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Meanwhile my job as a phone jockey went from 500 employees to no hiring for 4 years to now 212 employees and calls are back to back with no hope of new job openings... also makes seniority rough as everyone is a veteran at this point.
Shit drives me nuts. I work for a service delivery organization and the last few years have seen us adopting a new platform that likes to talk up automation and efficiencies. Making things work is my job, but I don't hesitate to tell folks that while we can help improve and change the jobs they do, they still have to have call center and field resources.
In fact, forget the AI
Yea more like if CEOs want their company to be more successful pay people overtime to work five days a week.
We are already more productive than any other time in history and we don't have a 4 day work week.
If we did get a 4 day work week, the owners would not scale our pay to accommodate for less hours on the job. 15/hr over 50 hours would turn into 15/hr over 40 hours, not 18.75/hr over 40 hours.
Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything more insane be imagined?
--Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness
i feel like capital vol 1 should be read by everyone.
A 4 day work week wouldn’t change anything for people working an hourly wage.
This is talking about redefining ‘full-time’ at a legislative level from being 36 hours to something less.
So would this not be worse for, for example, people on partial disability benefits who are allowed to retain benefits while working part time but not full time employment?
If nothing changes for them but they are now registered as full time employees, they lose their benefits for nothing in return. Who would this help?
I don’t think the work requirements for disability work that way, or are tied to the same legislation.
It would help people who work full-time. People who work hourly already don’t work M-F 8-5 most of the time.
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Interesting. I was under the belief that disability benefit requiments basically meant "unable obtain and maintain full time employment due to a disability". After some research it seems it's more about how much money you earn than how many hours you work.
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Are you not conflating Part Time/Hourly and Full time/Salary?
70% of Americans work full time and just under 60% of American workers are paid hourly wage.
For example, every factory I've worked in has been Full Time hours with hourly wage pay.
It's mostly Managerial/corporate positions that are salaried afaik.
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my favorite part of this comment is framing 50 hours like a standard work week
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I think the plan is to lay us off altogether.
And support their lives through robust social programs, right? 
To save the working man you've got to put him out to pasture.
Soup is Good Food - Dead Kennedys
that’s nice marketing for bernie but we all know that won’t happen. not without the kind of revolutionary action that inspired our 8 hour working day, and the original “labor day.”
Something you should understand about the 4-day workweek.
From the studies conducted so far we know it seems to increase overall productivity. Which means companies, or at least some, would make more money if they implemented a 4-day workweek. So then you may ask yourself: why haven't they? Don't they want to make more money?
Not necessarily. It all comes down to relative wealth. A 4-day workweek would benefit them, but it would benefit regular people more. And so the divide in wealth/power/quality of life would shrink. So technically they'd be richer, but they'd feel poorer, because we'd get closer to their level, even if by just a bit.
Thw American workers productivity has gone astronomically high without AI. We should have 4 day week yes but we need the money from all this productivity first.
We as a species could have arranged any kind of leisure society when we started using fossil fuels. The energy bonanza that allowed us to reach 8 billion people with chemically-boosted and machine-harvested food allows it.
Of course, this means a flattening of the lifestyle, no more McMansions but also no more squalor.
Improved efficiencies should mean we all benefit across all sectors and ways of life.
But improved efficiencies actually mean none of us benefit except those at the top. We should all of us be paid more, have more time off, and have more excess - but at a high level we are all paid no extra, we get no extra time off, we get no excess - that all gets enjoyed by those at the top.
This is one of many reasons this should be a class war, not a culture war.
Sounds like what unions are for.
My local union is working six 10 hour days and then bragging how well they are taken care of. That's not out of the norm either.
I recall one of the ways to enforce a 4 day workweek was to enforce OT starting at 32 hours.
You could keep working 40+ hrs a week but it would hit the owners wallets.
Combine that with raising minimum wage and you're getting closer to UBI.
Neither one would help me I think being salary and around medium working class.
They don't even enforce OT over 40 for salaried positions.
That's my point...
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I don't disagree. Few people are better positioned to help make that a reality, however.
He doesn't get it at all. AI making people more productive means they can work more and you don't have to pay them as much.
Sincerely, billionaires
😒
*20 hour work week.
But who's going to make my fart and Trump dancing with Musk videos!??
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and if extruded proof of work was meaningful work, something interesting would have happened by now
if their little genies were real there'd be a good novel by now
If I had to guess, the approach by corporate would be (if forced to give a 4 day work week) to drop hours to just below what is required for benefits. So, they would only agree if it meant they could get out of paying for healthcare and whatnot while at the same time having more authority for non compete agreements. I would absolutely trust whatever plan Bernie comes up with but I think there are very few additional politicians that have our best interests at heart.
If the government would skim a little off the top of its absurd military budget, corporate would have no hold over the healthcare aspect. Their heads would explode if that ever came to fruition. It won’t, but the US government never fully prioritizes the best interest for its citizens.
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Keynes: work hours will diminish as production scale up
Bitcoiner: mining will be environmental friendly as we transition to green.
Bernie SSander: AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day workweek
Based Bernie
The replacement of human workers begins with bipartisan support.
All the productivity gains in the past have helped us reduced the work load so much, there's no reason AI shouldn't...
Wait, that never happened, only people forcefully getting reductions in work time have ever gotten results.
Also it's still not clear whether AI makes any sense or not. Yes, I know it is useful to some, but once you consider all the externalities (which nobody ever does, because "not my problem"), it might not be such a great deal.
they’ll all just convince us we need to purchase more, thereby lowering “productivity”
Just like the industrial revolution and introduction of computers, right?
Corporate will do anything but. Part time pay, no full time benefits, no pay raise, and now you need a second job.
Been having a 4 day workweek for a decade now, can heavily recommend it. (Work 4x9 hours, every Wednesday of)
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