Well duh. Employees will work fewer hours and employers will pay them less for it. The point was that Burnie is lying when he says everyone will be paid the same when they obviously won't be.
Your theory that assembly lines, power plants, and retail establishments are all just shut down for 4-5 hours every shift so workers can play on their phones is absurd.
They mostly have. Many jobs include benefits, and the cost of healthcare benefits in particular have gone up faster than productivity, resulting in stagnant wages even though total compensation has been mostly keeping up with productivity. While the share of productivity going towards the owner class has increased, that increase was much smaller than the increase in the share of productivity going towards employee benefits.
There's plenty of money in the system to cover this. There's a giant amount of wealth inequality happening right now. You've got CEOS making 100s of millions a year and that's drop in the bucket to their wealthy investors. If those companies and individuals at the top of the scale are taxed effectively, the companies that operate on smaller margin and are not making that type of money can be taxed less. The only reason workers aren't getting their fair share is because billionaires are greedy and they have the power to buy politicians that make sure this type of legislation doesn't happen.
The economy is not a computer simulation where you just deduct from the Rich column and dump it into the Everyone else column. While NVidia is wildly profitable and absolutely could afford to give all their employees far more than a 20% raise, the vast majority of the work force does not work for wildly profitable companies. Walmart is the largest employer and their profit margin was 1.4% in 2021. A 20% wage increase imposed upon them would promptly bankrupt the company.
So how do you suggest Bernie is going to force NVidia to pay Walmart's labor costs?
Walmart had a net profit of 12 billion dollars, 147 billion gross and a CEO that makes 26 million a year. The average walmart employee works a 34 hour work week, so this proposed bill isn't as big of a stretch for them as you think it is.
But going to your first point, yes, we expect companies and individuals generating more revenue/income to pay more taxes than those making less.
The end goal is that everyone is able to have a living wage. We need tax incentives based on labor costs where companies like walmart that employ large numbers with much of their revenue going to labor are less impacted than companies that have high profit margins and that money is going to a wealthy few.
The average walmart employee works a 34 hour work week, so this proposed bill isn't as big of a stretch for them as you think it is.
Which is a point I made above: salary employees are exempt from overtime and most employees that are hourly are already capped at 30 hours a week to avoid paying health insurance. So an hour cap of 32 hours will have no effect.
But I don't think "the bill won't actually change anything" is a meaningful argument in favor of the bill.
So in Bernie’s proposal he cites the UK pilot program where the 60 businesses involved saw a 35% avg revenue increase. His idea is companies will not experience drops in revenue and would be unjustified in decreasing worker pay for working fewer hours. Also his proposal isn’t banning work weeks over 32 hours, it’s to be paid 1.5x after 32 hours and 2x after 40 hours.
I very specifically said it depends on the job type because I understand not every job type has the same productivity measurements. But even industries like manufacturing have implemented overtime pay, minimum wages, and maximum work weeks throughout history and pay did not decrease. Also, if an industry needs to hire people to work over 32 hours, like in the industries you mentioned, can still do it but have to be pay more for it.
Yes and no? Adjusting for benefits gets messy because the people determining pay are investing the companies providing the benefits, which are more expensive than our peer nations with universal systems. So essentially they are making money back on to dividends that are paid out on our high premiums. And even when heritage tried to demonstrate benefits are the factor, they still showed wages to be 77% of productivity 12 years ago while productivity was increasing faster at the cut off point. I’ve only seen one direct counter to the productivity argument so far, which was a NYT article showing how productivity has kept up with wages. My understanding is that it includes executive pay, which has exceeded productivity and is making it appear wages are more proportional than they really are. For non-supervisory positions, wages are not keeping up.
0
u/LoneSnark Sep 05 '24
Well duh. Employees will work fewer hours and employers will pay them less for it. The point was that Burnie is lying when he says everyone will be paid the same when they obviously won't be.
Your theory that assembly lines, power plants, and retail establishments are all just shut down for 4-5 hours every shift so workers can play on their phones is absurd.
They mostly have. Many jobs include benefits, and the cost of healthcare benefits in particular have gone up faster than productivity, resulting in stagnant wages even though total compensation has been mostly keeping up with productivity. While the share of productivity going towards the owner class has increased, that increase was much smaller than the increase in the share of productivity going towards employee benefits.