Of course people want a four-day workweek. That part is obvious and frankly irrelevant.
The real question is: who actually benefits without losing income? The answer is: a minority. Roughly 25–35% of workers, mostly salaried, white-collar, outcome-based roles, can compress or rearrange work without taking a pay hit. For them, four days is mostly a scheduling change.
The other 65–70% of workers, trades, service, healthcare, retail, logistics, commission, flat-rate, piece-work, are paid by volume, not vibes. Fewer days means fewer billable units, fewer closes, fewer shifts, or longer days just to break even.
I work flat-rate. I close work orders. If I work four days, I make less money. There is no efficiency fairy that replaces raw volume.
The four-day workweek isn’t a universal labor reform. It’s a white-collar benefit marketed as moral progress, and it collapses the moment you apply it to people who actually produce, fix, transport, or serve things.
This is not true at all. No one calling for the reduced hours is calling for reduced pay.
Of course no one is doing that. I work on throughput, not salary. A lot of people are in the same position, whether they are flat-rate or hourly. If I cut my schedule down to four days, I simply will not make enough money to sustain myself. There is a hard limit to how much work I can complete in a single day, and I cannot compress six days of output into four. That is the point I was making, a four-day workweek does not benefit workers whose income is tied to throughput or hours worked. It primarily benefits salaried employees whose pay is disconnected from daily output
Did you actually read what I wrote?
The real question is: who actually benefits without losing income? The answer is: a minority. Roughly 25-35% of workers, mostly salaried, white-collar, outcome-based roles, can compress or rearrange work without taking a pay hit. For them, four days is mostly a scheduling change.
Want to fix all this?
Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes
Nobody has some inherent right to be rich or powerful. Nobody got extremely rich by themselves or through hard work, it’s just sheer fucking luck and standing on the backs of others
Nobody should have to be poor either
So without changing and overhauling the entire world, just set a hard cap on personal wealth.
May e also company sizes. Any networth over 1 billion? 100% to tax. Companies shouldn’t be able to have over, say 1000 employees either.
I don’t want a trillion dollar company with 200.000 employees. Give me 10.000 companies worth 100 million dollar companies that each employ a hundred or so workers.
Two simple rules that would change the world. Nobody would be sicher more powerful than anyone else.
All it requires is that everyone in the world says ENOUGH. Enough with the abuses from the rich and powerful
Alright, let’s run a quick model.
Let’s say the upper cap is $1000k.
You are a CEO and you get a salary of, say, $10k, plus 1000 shares, each worth $1. So, in total, that year your worth is $120k + $1000 = $121k.
Now, you’re incredibly successful as a CEO, you make your shareholders drool for your company’s shares. Which makes their price skyrocket. Each share is now worth $1000! Such success!
But wait! No! Catastrophe!
Your worth has just gone up to $120k + $1000k! The share’s value on their own hits the upper limit of wealth!
They’re not your money, mind you, you can’t do anything with them unless you cash them in, sell them.
So, you have two choices - you stop getting any salary and have $0 for spending (hopefully the office cafeteria is well stocked!), or you sell some shares, give the money to charity, and pray the stock price doesn’t go up. And if it does, you have to sell again, lose the money, and… oh, but now you no longer hold a controlling interest in your own company - some three dudes who work together bought up the shares, spread them around evenly (so neither of them goes above the $1000k), and they effectively control your own company, telling you what to do with it.
Companies shouldn’t be able to have over, say 1000 employees either.
So, instead of having some large companies, you end up with chains of “totally not the same” companies that just work together. “Oh, we’ve outsourced our HR to company X, which is Totally Not The Same as our company, they just don’t work with anybody else and we have full data transparency with them.”
There are several countries that have a wealth tax and they still have rich CEOs, so there is a way to address the problems that you’re describing.
Huey Long campaigned on a wealth cap back in the 30’s on his ‘Share our wealth’ platform. The excess wealth taxed at 100% was to be used for essentially a universal basic income (Each person to receive the equivalent of $38k yearly).
He was assassinated. The rich elite of Louisiana and the Oil companies he massively increased state taxes on to fund his public programs rejoiced.
Ken Burn’s first documentary was on Huey Long, highly worth a watch.
Putting a hard cap on the ratio between the highest and the lowest paid workers in any organisation would help as well.
THIS might be a better solution, although it still doesn’t fix the “CEO is only earning $1 a year” situations like with Bezos or Zuckerberg.
Agreed. Fixing our issues has nothing to do with invading Greenland and Venezuela, but is entirely to do with the redistribution of wealth.
Make one simple change to capitalism: put in. A constitutional hard cap on personal wealth. Anything income or gift or whatever over 1 million goes 100% to taxes
You don’t understand where the vast majority of the wealthiest’s wealth comes from. There’s no “income” or “gift” at that level, it’s just the fact that they own things that are becoming more valuable over time. The vast majority of the increase in these people’s wealth over time is newly-created; it’s value that literally didn’t exist before, not an amount of cash money taken away from anyone else.
Speaking of value: net worth is just a valuation, a price tag. It’s the market saying “I would pay you $X for a share of this if you sold it”. If I buy a rookie baseball card for $5 and the player becomes famous for whatever reason and my card is now worth $100 because the demand significantly increased, my net worth increased by $95, but no one was deprived of $95 to make that so.
A hard cap on wealth is effectively legislating that if something you already own becomes too valuable, you’re not allowed to continue owning it anymore. And any sensible person should understand why that makes zero sense.
A hard cap on wealth is effectively legislating that if something you already own becomes too valuable, you’re not allowed to continue owning it anymore
I don’t know how else it would work. Do you? The alternative is that a handful of people are permitted own and control most of society’s resources while everyone else subsists on scraps. No one person should control the same amount of resources as a small or medium-sized government, except without the checks and balances that governments (should) have. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
The way I imagine it working is that if you own stock in a company that now went up in value and now pushes your net worth above the cap, this puts you in a position where you now have more control than society permits you to have. In this case, some of your stock is sold off for taxes or parts of the company are split off and sold for taxes. You can of course proactively structure your business with the understanding that you’ll give up business unit x and y while keeping z if you do get close to the cap rather than waiting and having the government force your hand. Either way, the end result is that you have less control, the government gets tax money to fund social programs, and others take on some of the control you previously enjoyed by buying up your stock or business units (e.g., a worker collective pools their savings to buy it).
Not sure how well all that would work in practice, or all of the detailed policies that would be required to make it fair and avoid major disruptions to the market. All I know is what we have now is definitely not working.
I don’t know how else it would work.
That’s my point, actually. It doesn’t work in practice. Given that ultimately, it’s third parties that determine the value of things you own that are on the open market, placing hard limits like that would open the door to massive gaming of those systems. It’d also be practically impossible to enforce in any real way, as that would require an actual full audit (net worth figures you see in the media are educated guesses, not enough certainty for the application of law), during which the valuation of the assets in question can be manipulated downward in myriad ways.
The alternative is that a handful of people are permitted own and control most of society’s resources while everyone else subsists on scraps.
The poor aren’t poor because the wealthy are wealthy. Like I said, the vast majority of the wealthiest people’s wealth is not cash money, it’s a theoretical price tag going up over time. Over the past hundred years, the number of billionaires per capita has increased 7x, but a hundred years ago, poverty was MUCH more prevalent than it is today.
The two simply aren’t connected the way you assume they are, because wealth isn’t the zero-sum game you assume it is.
The way I imagine it working is that if you own stock in a company that now went up in value and now pushes your net worth above the cap, this puts you in a position where you now have more control than society permits you to have.
Really take a moment to think about this concept. You own a thing that’s valuable to others. If it becomes too valuable (a threshold defined completely arbitrarily, by the way) to others, “society” no longer “permits” you to continue owning it?
In this case, some of your stock is sold off for taxes or parts of the company are split off and sold for taxes.
In other words, the government will literally steal your stuff if the public decides it’s more valuable than the amount the government arbitrarily decided is too much?
the government gets tax money to fund social programs
Extremely wishful thinking. You’re actually more likely to net a loss of tax revenue overall attempting this, as people nearing the cap will rearrange their assets to avoid going over the cap, so no new revenue will be coming in, meanwhile the logistic cost of even determining whether someone is over the cap is certainly going to cost much more taxpayer money than what is brought in (which, again, is most likely to be literally zero or very close to it).
There is a reason that every country that’s previously attempted a policy like this aimed at the wealthiest has either since repealed it, or changed it such that it no longer targets the wealthiest (i.e. a ‘wealth tax’ that the middle class is made to pay as well). I’m interested in learning from their mistakes, not repeating them.
Not sure how well all that would work in practice
That’s for sure.
deleted by creator
8 malignant narcissist pedofiles who we’ve allowed to destroy the world.
8 really rich guys who, collectively, work 2-3 days a week? 🤔
Hi
Also more economically productive. But the ultra-wealthy are aristocrats cosplaying as managers, and reducing the workweek of the filthy poors reduces how entertaining their cosplay is to them.
It also gives people more time to organize, work a side gig to pull themselves out of poverty, or go to school for the same reason. Can’t have any of that
Gotta have your wage slaves and debt slaves.
work a side gig
so you want to make the work week shorter so the work week can become longer? pls explain
I want people to have more flexibility in their lives to make choices for themselves rather than having it dictated to them by their employer, that’s all. If someone wants to make the choice that they want another gig with their additional free time this change would give them then I don’t see an issue with that.
As the world evolves (supposedly), productivity rockets skywards.
And we have gone from a…
- 3 hour work day… to a…
- 6 hour work day… to a…
- 12 hour work day… to a…
- 7 hour work day… (or 8 or 9 or more if you’re in the US or China or a factory- or fascist country)
And of course this is pitiful. We should be working a couple days a week at most.
The very idea that we have to work when we have so much automation is ludicrous. Why do we have to make our owners richer? Why can’t we turn them into fertiliser instead? And why can’t we make them really, and I mean really aware of the possibility.That cartoon “there’s so many of them, why don’t they just eat the lesser class?” (ok, I don’t remember how it was formulated), is something the billionaires (and politicians) ought to have pinned in each of their rooms.
Still, right now we should be at two days or 2 hour work days.
But thanks to AI, work days ought to be longer. You’ll have to catch up for all the people that got laid off/
cant have well rested workers with more time to think, question, and organise.
I’ve got a job where I work 4 one week and 3 the other. It’s 12 hour shifts though.
Unfortunately I still need a part time job to cover bills… But if I didn’t it would be amazing
I have a 35-hour week with flexible hours so I could put it in 3 days if I wished. That seems awful to me though, I can’t really focus on my work anymore after 6 hours. All a matter of perspective I guess.
I can’t really focus on my work anymore after 6 hours.
Who cares, that’s the company’s problem. Do what works for YOU. The company made this policy, you should exploit the shit out of it. That’s what any corporation would do.
I’d get my hours in during the first three days of the week, then spend my free time making MY life better.
Well, you do you, but I prefer to actually get work done when I’m at work. If I don’t like my work anymore (well, it’s not my hobby, but still not that bad), I’ll go work somewhere else.
Valid.
Same thing with that proposed billionaire tax in CA.
Bunch of assholes.
policy favors money always always will
Wondering how much would 8 guillotine cost
They are reusable.
But you never know where the really rich guys might go. We may have to camp out beside a number of bunkers across the world. Like a spare key, it’s better to have an extra one and not use it than to not have one when you need it.
If they’re hiding in bunkers, you can just seal it up from the outside.
Yeah. I guess I’m just partial to the imagery of waiting until they’re all together and having an angry mob… Give them all a haircut… At the same time.
You don’t really need a device. If the guillotine breaks down, you can do just as effective a job with a random rock.
You only need one. Make them wait in line and watch their colleagues go before them.
And give it a dull blade, so it takes 3 or 4 chops to finish the job.
They are more like 8 little kings
I suppose that’s also the reason their account is suspended.
You’ll never get it when the ones in charge want 8/28 workhours.
