That time America almost had a 30-hour workweek

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

The nature of work has undergone a lot of changes during the coronavirus pandemic. Millions of office workers began working from home; the service industry has struggled to get workers to come back, and some businesses, like Kickstarter, are now experimenting with four-day workweeks — without reducing salaries. In Congress, Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) has introduced legislation to make a 32-hour workweek standard.

This “great reassessment” of labor feels revolutionary. But we have been here before. In 1933, the Senate passed, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt supported, a bill to reduce the standard workweek to only 30 hours.

Americans have worked hard, perhaps too hard, since the Colonial era. English and other European colonists often had to work longer and harder on farms here than in the Old World, and a philosophy of working from sunrise to sunset prevailed, according to the Economic History Association. The Massachusetts colony even passed a law requiring a 10-hour minimum workday.

Enslaved people, whose labor profits were stolen, generally worked 10-16 hours a day, six days a week. Some studies estimate that when slavery ended, the hours African Americans spent working fell by 26 to 35 percent.

-more-

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/that-time-america-almost-had-a-30-hour-workweek/ar-AAO9mpM

[DBoon]

1. for many people, working sunrise to sunset would be an improvement

at least during winter

[ret5hd]

2. Yeah, but what about those Alaskan summers?

[DBoon]

3. We went on a tour of Iceland in the 1990s

Native Icelandic tour guide. They *do* in fact work around the clock during the long Summer days.

[rownesheck]

4. Reduce the work week

to twenty hours at most. Also, no classifying people as salary. That's bullshit. Humans should not spend the majority of their lives working. Work sucks the enjoyment out of life and probably contributes to most suicides. CEOs need about an 80% cut in pay. That extra money can be used to hire people to cover the need for extra workers.

And, if too many workers call out making a retail store short handed, it can close for the day or be open limited hours. Trust me, the economy won't collapse. We'll be fine. Quit worrying about shareholders. When you buy stock, you understand there may be risk involved.

Plus, we have robots that can do the work of most humans. Let's get that shit going. Robots don't care how hard they work. Time for we humans to start actually living, not working.