The 30-hour week has no realistic chance of returning unless many others things change simultaneously. When a 40-hour workweek at minimum wage puts a worker under the poverty level, who is seriously going to advocate for fewer hours without a simultaneous change to a $9.67 minimum? Even if that’s achieved, look at all the other laws that would have to replaced, like the 35-hour minimum for health care.
The effort to gain those changes only makes sense if the change if worth something. It isn’t. There might have been a time in the past with a sufficiently of semi-skilled factory jobs that might have allowed more workers in the door with a 30-hour week. Those times no longer exist. You can’t swap out high-wage workers in the new economy as easily, and producing even more minimum-wage workers without advancement opportunities is self-defeating.
Unquestionably. I wasn’t refuting that, just mentioning an almost forgotten bit about demand for the 30-hour workweek that developed out of earlier agitation for the 48- and 40-hour workweeks. The notion that in the future there would be the two-hour workday that George Jetson enjoyed starts around that time too.
Cuomo’s divorced from Kerry Kennedy (one of RFK’s daughters). He’s currently dating/living with Sandra Lee, the Food Network host of “Semi Homemade Cooking”, which is all about cooking by using all premade stuff and not actually cooking anything. It’s a bizarre show, really, and was responsible for the infamous “Kwanzaa Cake” incident.
Yes, adjustments will have to be made. But look at what you GET: leisure time. Time to be with the people you care about, and have fun. Or start your own business on the side, if that’s what you WANT to do. Dammit, it’s a goal worth striving for!
Of COURSE you will have to raise hourly wages … or perhaps move towards a resource based economy rather than our current rather insane system.
It IS. Clearly, you don’t care about your family or your ability to realize your own dreams rather than someone else’s. A pity … you probably did at one time. What happened to you?
I’m not getting your point here. Could you elucidate?
We already have a job crisis because we’re in the middle of a muddled transition to a service economy. The majority of new jobs are low-pay, low-advancement, low-creativity ones. Too many people currently have to work more than one job to earn a livable wage and can do so because most of these low-end jobs can be worked part-time with minimal skills and training. Turnover often reaches a nominal 100% per year but the costs associated with that are so low that they can be absorbed. Cutting hours in such an environment makes no sense, and is counterproductive to your goals.
How do we change this? It’s not clear, except that the change has to be structural, meaning finding ways to create jobs of value. Merely changing the wage or hour structure with current jobs is a needed bandaid but not viable long-term (and realistically have strict limitations). Creative people in creative jobs already work more than 40 hours/week. Those work weeks tend to increase rather than decrease as value rises. So do work weeks in skilled labor - gaining extra money through overtime historically tends to be valued higher than extra time off for leisure. Shorter work weeks were a necessary goal of the labor movement but they seemed to have hit a limit at around 40 hours: much less than that is too expensive for businesses to subsidize and doesn’t provide sufficient pay for employees at reasonable wages. And that was in a - very short - era of lifelong guaranteed factory work that doesn’t exist any more. What industries are you imagining will pay more for less work by unskilled employees without job security? They have never existed, and I don’t expect them to magically appear. Everything else is just fantasy.
Right, because one outlier election makes meaningless the huge number of triumphs by Establishment Republicans in every other state. And one endorsement by a party that could not exist if it ran its own candidates means… heck, I can’t figure out what that’s supposed to mean even to snark on it.
Why would you waste your time reading someone who says stuff that actively insane, much less quote it approvingly somewhere else? Shouldn’t you be telling that blogger that the sky on this planet is blue?
Do you dispute that the Tea Party has more power than the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and has claimed a lot more scalps?
Sure the establishment is winning. And being co-opted at the same time. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party still treats liberals like stepchildren. And it’s only going to get worse, because the same demographic changes that are making life more difficult for Republicans are also making ideological liberals irrelevant.
OK, I have you. You see things pretty much as I do but are trapped in traditional economic paradigms. I don’t think we’re transitioning to a service economy, I think we are transitioning to a post-scarcity economy, where most people will not be needed to produce the food, clothing and household goods that people need and want, as automation will eventually turn factories into three or four man (or woman) operations. (How will goods reach people? Driverless cars.) I’m talking 90+ percent unemployment here. If that’s a fantasy, it’s a dark one, I think we can both agree.
In your paradigm, what these excess people should do is find new kinds of services to make up for the lack of income from goods and agriculture. But are we going to give each others back rubs, pedicures and zoomba lessons as the basis for an economy? As you say, low-paying, low-skill jobs.
I think what will happen instead is that a lot of people will be unemployable … not that there’s anything WRONG with them, their skills just won’t be NEEDED by anyone. The market for ceramics, doodads, geegaws and doolallies (think Espy) has its limits.
Everybody is going to be on what traditional economics people think of as “the dole,” or else they will die. I think there is a good chance that millions WILL die, accompanied by massive civil unrest, as it will take the ruling classes a while to figure this out. But they will, as their lives will become untenable due to all the civic unrest. They will be loathe to leave an economic system that has rewarded them. Think of those Third World countries where kidnapping rich people and their family members for money is a bit of an industry. Now crank that up by an order of magnitude.
I agree with your diagnosis of the future, but not it’s outcome. To be clearer, I do think we may get to 90% unemployment someday through technology replacing most workers, but I don’t think we’ll see mass starvation. Our government panics and raises benefits when we have 8% unemployment. Assuming that this technology driven unemployment comes with vastly increased prosperity, it shouldn’t be too demanding on those few with skills that are still needed to support those who are not in the workforce.
I think what we’ll end up with is a situation where 10% of the country are millionaires(with 1% being billionaires and the top .01% being trillionaires), while everyone else gets by with an income we’d find enviable today.
The government will only get PANICKY when middle class voters are hit hard by unemployment. Fortunately, in an unfortunate sort of way, that’s going to happen rather quickly, if trends continue as is, and I see nothing to stop trends from continuing as is, and plenty of things that will accelerate those trends.
In any event, I was speaking of the world as a whole. Many third world elites have little or no interest in the welfare of the people in their societies, they will let them die with perfect equanimity. Places with a strong tradition of social cohesion like the Scandanavian countries will come out of it pretty much unscathed, I suspect.
I don’t know about income, I think access to the really nice stuff and the really nice places will remain scarce. Regular folks are going to be able to watch all the TV and play on the Internet all they want, but vacations to Aspen and Cancun and seats at the table in the nicest restaurants are not in the cards for them.
Of course, some techno fix like widespread 3D printers that can make most anything from dirt and air might change the game entirely. That’s the thing about the future, it does tend to change in unexpected ways.
I’ve been studying the history of “post-scarcity” predictions. I can find worries about the mass of workers being replaced by machines going back more than a century, and they are remarkably consistent. Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, is as dark a vision as EC’s and definitely worth seeking out if you haven’t read it. He wrote it in 1952, at what would be the height of the “Golden Age.”
Just because he and the others were wrong then doesn’t mean they will be wrong in the future. It’s the classic, “this time for sure.” No question that this time it’s much harder to come up with a picture of a positive full-employment future.
The only reason I balk at such a future - and remember, I’m a natural pessimist - is that people *like *to work. They like being active. They like making and creating. They get obsessive about leisure and turn hobbies into professions. Vonnegut and the others were creating warnings, not giving solutions or trying to make a fair case. They had to overlook this.
I’m defining service work more broadly than most, essentially everything that is not part of the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. Much of the current Internet is service work. You can mock zumba lessons, but they’re a first stage step not necessarily an end point. People create niches wherever they spot them: seven billion people with varying educations, experiences, and expertizes will spot opportunities that ostensible experts will miss. That’s a subset of the discussion we’ve been having in threads about why we didn’t predict the correct Future. The Future is an emergent property; it can’t be predicted even in theory.
We’re also talking as if the future must be an educated, middle-class future. Perhaps it won’t. A servant class could reappear, and I don’t mean help for billionaires’ mansions but to tend to the ever-longer living elderly and families with young children and professionals who hate housework. Gerontology is the largest predictable employment sector; I guarantee it will multiply by several times. With population falling below replacement rate in a variety of countries, immigration barriers will be lowered no matter how much panic that sets off. It will be worse in Europe and Japan than here, but it will happen. People won’t die unattended if cheap help can be made available and they won’t live for decades in neglect and need either.
All I can say is that the Future will not be a straight line off today, either positive or negative. People will create and adapt. We oldsters may not like the coming Future but those living in it will accept it as normal, so normal they will project it into their future and be as equally wrong about that.
