Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Wednesday introduced a bill to establish a standard four-day workweek in the United States without any reduction in pay.
The bill, over a four-year period, would lower the threshold required for overtime pay, from 40 hours to 32 hours. It would require overtime pay at a rate of 1.5 times a worker’s regular salary for workdays longer than 8 hours, and it would require overtime pay at double a worker’s regular salary for workdays longer than 12 hours.
The Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act would also protect workers’ pay and benefits to ensure there’s no loss in pay, according to a press release.
How, are we actually going to punish the employers who will inevitably retaliate by cutting all of their employees hours? I’ll believe that when I see it happen.
Without strong protections, major employers (i.e. retail/food service/manufacturing) will just evade this the same way they already evade current benefits and overtime laws: by purposefully having zero full time employees on the payroll and instead hiring twice as many people but not scheduling any employee with enough hours to ever come close to hitting overtime, obtaining benefits, or being able to make enough money to live. Hitting overtime at 32 hours is great on paper, but that’ll never help the Wal Mart employee whose schedule is six four hour shifts randomly scattered across the week.
We ought to start by making those types of big corporation schedule fuckery illegal. With the exception of nurses and truckers, practically no one in a “blue collar” position has the problem of too many hours in a work day. It’s rather the opposite.
Eventually, the quality of service drops to a point where they lose enough customers to revert some of their changes.
Or they close their business and blame it on theft.
That would be nice if it were true, and in an ideal world maybe it would be. But this is already exactly how all the major retail chains you shop at do it: Wal Mart, Target, Home Depot, CVS, Walgreen’s, Best Buy, Dollar General, etc., etc., etc. None of them have gone out of business yet, quality of service or not. Everyone knows they’re crap and mistreat their workers, and yet there are no real competing alternatives, or if there are the competitors are exactly like them anyway, so here we are.
And everyone knows this is how big retailers do it, too. It’s an openly known that they over-hire and under-schedule and have nothing but part time employees so they don’t have to pay anyone overtime or provide health benefits. But nobody does anything about it.
Like, breaking up a big cash deposit to your bank into a bunch of little ones so you don’t have to report to the IRS is illegal, right? So why the fuck is structuring your hiring and scheduling to evade overtime laws also not illegal for exactly the same reason?
We already know the answer, of course. Without oversight, these big corporations will do anything and everything to cheat and shortchange anyone they can to pocket the difference.
Exactly. I read the bill and it only protects currently employed workers. Its basically a grandfather clause. New employees will be offered 32 hour schedules at 32 hours of pay and it will greatly disincentivise job hoping. Don’t get me wrong, I love Bernie and every single thing he stands for. I’m just too exposed to C Suite mentality to be hopeful.