Posted on 09/08/2014 7:09:22 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Amid all the focus on boosting the minimum wage and legislating living wages, virtually no one seems to have noticed what is happening to the workweek in low-wage industries.
Since December 2012, private industries paying up to about $14.50 an hour have added, on net, 972,000 nonsupervisory jobs with an average workweek of a mere 17.7 hours, an IBD analysis finds.
That doesn't mean new employees are being hired for such few hours. Rather, it reflects a combination of reduced hours in existing jobs and short workweeks for newly created jobs.
Overall, in these low-wage industries which employ 30 million rank-and-file workers, the average workweek shrank to 27.3 hours per week in July, an IBD analysis shows. That's the shortest workweek on record, except for this past February, when mid-month blizzards wreaked havoc during the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey week.
The conventional wisdom among economists is that there's been no apparent shift to part-time work and that ObamaCare's employer mandate hasn't led to shorter workweeks.
But shorter hours clocked by nonmanagers in low-wage industries are being obscured because the rest of the workforce is now clocking a longer average workweek than even before the recession started.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
I haven’t worked under 50 hours a week in years. 40 hour work weeks are a myth!
Nope. Not true. MSNBC told me everything is fine. They wouldn’t lie.
I am coming to believe that there is something really wrong with that. We criticize Northern Europe for quite a few things (and rightfully so), but in the area of average work week and vacation time, I think they have the right idea.
One could argue that the economies of France, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries are as sound (or as shaky) as ours, but people in those countries get a decent benefit package, a living wage, 35 or 36 hour work week and 20-30 paid days off every year. The screwing of people at the low end of the wage/skill spectrum, while expecting experienced/skilled and highly paid workers to sacrifice their family life and leisure to chip in another cent or two to quarterly EPS is part and parcel of the screw job from corporate America we are all getting daily.
Work ethic is one thing and that is fine. Acquiescing to your own reaming is quite another thing. The government setting up the carve out for part timers, which corporations gleefully embrace to get around ERISSA and Obamacare needs to looked at closely. The alternative is what we are seeing now — people working multiple part time jobs just to keep themselves fed and housed at the bottom of this economy.
Lucky for her, the second part-time job she had to get to make ends meet decided they liked her well enough to offer full-time and she was able to leave the first job.
Most of her other friends and former co-workers are now juggling two or more jobs for less money than their former full-time job.
This is the dirty little secret of ObaMao's job growth.
The left wants people screaming so they can implement their policies to “help.” Business as a whole has lost any sense of regard for employees, it’s all just a race to the bottom for a few cents on the bottom line this quarter. No thought of the future. They’re killing their largest market. But, never mind, there’s always China. Not everybody is cut out for entrepreneurship or commission sales. Unions are going to start getting traction again.
I’m a systems engineer/architect and much of that is self-imposed. Between on-call and working, on average, 10 hours a day, I’m very lucky to work less than 50 hours a week.
This is very high-level, highly-compensated work. People lambast corporate executives for high pay without realizing that many of them do not live a life of leisure in any way. My CIO, for example, is in the office every morning at 6 AM and seldom leaves before 7 PM.
That’s not to say that we don’t suffer from it. While I have a very understanding wife, I suffer from obesity, stress-related anxiety issues, bouts of insomnia, and alcoholism. Such is the life of an IT professional these days, though.
Subtract all of the Federal and State Gov’t jobs added since Jan. 2009 and you’ll truly be depressed.
Those positions are uniformly NON-VALUE ADDED, especially when you look at the Regulatory and Tax interference with REAL job creation in the Private Sector (you know...where they actually produce something).
You can do it.....eat healthy and exercise.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.