when the boy took office i worked 40hrs minimum with 5-8 OT, now with this wonderful economy, i work 35hrs minimum with 3-4 extra hrs as needed who knows, at the rate the economy is going, i might be down to 30hrs before the boy is out of office...
Posted on 06/01/2013 6:27:18 AM PDT by IbJensen
Is it a backdoor move towards a drastic nationwide work-week reduction?
ne summer during the early 1970s, I was given a document distributed by a protest group which came from the Students for a Democratic Society or one of its radical affiliates. The item pretended to present a comprehensive platform for reshaping a “just” society.
One of its key economic positions was something which recently, thanks to the passage and clumsy implementation thus far of the statist “train wreck” known as ObamaCare, has become a very hot topic: the idea of a 30-hour work week.
The radicals wanted to make it the law of the land. Since I had recently worked 48-hour weeks at a minimum-wage summer job washing dishes, I found their proposal interesting but completely unappealing. Why, after considering overtime, would I have wanted to take a 42 percent pay cut? Their simplistic answer was to make the minimum wage about twice its then-current level of $1.60 per hour, and to force employers to pay the same amount of money for only 30 hours of work. Even as a teenager, I was smart enough to know that as the person most recently hired, I would have been the first person fired if they had gotten their way.
It turns out that the idea of a 30-hour work week in the U.S. is at least nearly a century old. Its lineage ultimately goes back to Karl Marx’s long-discredited idea of “surplus labor.”
In 1919, the 30-hour week was a central but ultimately abandoned demand in nationwide negotiations between unionized coal companies and their United Mine Workers members. A measure mandating it passed the U.S. Senate during the early months of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first term in 1933, but somehow failed to get through the Democrat-dominated “rubber stamp” House. Though that’s much further than the idea should have advanced, modern leftists are probably dreaming when they assert that such legislation “almost” become law. Master politician FDR publicly supported it, but insisted on so many conditions before he would consider it acceptable that he effectively killed the measure without the messiness of a veto.
The 30-hour week, with hourly wages raised by one-third so that no worker’s pay would suffer, often accompanied by a requirement to pay double-time instead of time-and-a-half for additional hours, remained a favorite goal of Big Labor during much of the 1960s, championed at different times by railway workers, the United Auto Workers, and others. The UAW’s Walter Reuther supported the idea while claiming, as interpreted by the Associated Press, that:
… he sees no end in sight for organized Labor’s demands for more pay and improved working conditions so long as the American economy keeps expanding.
… He said unions will never let up so long as they feel their demands are “economically just and economically necessary” and while science and technology continue to create more abundance.
The 30-hour work week became doomed in the late-1960s and early 1970s, thanks to two recessions and firms in other countries becoming legitimate industrial competitors. But it wasn’t forgotten, and is still considered an important goal in many leftist quarters.
As to ObamaCare, the law dictates the following: “The term ‘full-time employee’ means, with respect to any month, an employee who is employed on average at least 30 hours of service per week.” It also “requires any business with 50 or more full-time employees to provide at least the minimum level of government-defined health coverage to those employees.”
That new definition and its related requirement have given rise to a new guideline for small business survival. Known as “49 and 29,” it suggests that small firms would be very unwise to expand their operations beyond 49 full-time employees as defined by ObamaCare, or to allow part-timers to ever work more than 29 hours in a given week, lest they accidentally move into the law’s full-time category. Large companies also have an incentive to keep as many employees as possible below the 30-hour threshold.
Last Friday’s employment report – especially because the administration expressed pleasure with its results — makes you wonder if ObamaCare, among other things, wasn’t deliberately designed to force the country over the long-term to accept a work week of just under 30 hours, something we’ve always seen as part-time employment, as the “new normal” definition of a full-time worker.
Seasonally adjusted government figures for April show that the private sector added 176,000 jobs, while average total weekly hours worked dropped from 3.926 billion to 3.909 billion, a fall-off of almost 16.6 million hours. That difference, the largest since October 2009 when the economy was still losing jobs, caused the number of “full-time equivalent” jobs (i.e., total weekly hours divided by 40) to fall by a stunning 416,000.
Other evidence abounds that an already existing trend toward hiring part-time help has accelerated, while full-time work is stagnating. The economy is still almost 2.6 million jobs short of where it was at its January 2008 peak, but one area of employment has just fully recovered while reaching a seasonally adjusted all-time high of 2.66 million workers. That category would be workers at temporary help services, many (probably most) of whom are either part-timers or usually don’t put in consecutive months of full-time work. Since the recession as officially defined ended in June 2009, the economy has added 913,000 temps, a stunning 17 percent of all employment growth during that time.
Anecdotally, here are just a few of the employers who have officially or unofficially taken concrete steps to keep part-timers’ hours below 30, busted full-timers down to part-time, or both: Kroger; Circle K Southeast; Regal Entertainment; the city of Long Beach, California; and the state of Virginia. Many others are taking their actions quietly to avoid leftist protests and intimidation.
At the rate things are going, it shouldn’t be too many more months before everyone will have to admit that ObamaCare’s 30-hour full-time employment definition is on track to permanently alter the nature of work and employment in America — and not for the better. Last week, even the Associated Press referred to a well-known economist who cited it as “a reason some employers are holding back” on hiring.
Is all of this really, as Democrats and their press apparatchiks want to claim, an “unintended consequence” of ObamaCare? Well, Obama himself said in 2008 that his presidential campaign was all about ”fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” Why should we automatically assume that this isn’t a deliberate part of that transformation, leading to a slow but sure adoption of the radical left’s and Big Labor’s long-time dream?
We should all recall Obama's 2008 promise to fundamentally transform America. Pseudo conservative types rarely refer to that evil pledge.
Obama's promise to transform America has so many nooks and crannies we haven't thought about. The 30-hour work week is one of them, and that's one way to turn the middle class into the lower class. Communism did that in Russia. It created two classes: the super rich bourgeoisie and the real poor schmucks. It looks like this country is heading in that direction to achieve his goal of everyone being dependent on the federal government for their existence.
Yes I’ve heard that when they move into the new stadium in 2014, the SF football team will be renamed the “29ers” in honor of the Baraqqi “new normal”.
when the boy took office i worked 40hrs minimum with 5-8 OT, now with this wonderful economy, i work 35hrs minimum with 3-4 extra hrs as needed who knows, at the rate the economy is going, i might be down to 30hrs before the boy is out of office...
We are becoming France.
Liberal utopia is reality’s dystopia.
Yeah, we got the 30 hour work week all right, TWO of them. With NO overtime pay.
America's founding principles were carefully designed by the Founders to expose, rebut, rebuke, and avoid the tyranny of any "class warfare" or "redistribution" ideas which tyrants might use to enslave individuals.
In their overwhelming desire for accumulation of power of government over people, how many have noticed that Democrats, under Obama, now acknowledge the taxing power as useful for restraining motivation toward what they deem to be undesirable behavior.
On the other hand, they deny the certain fact that "taking," or taxing productive citizens also discourages and restrains motivation toward productivity and plenty.
They now have endangered the liberty of millions yet unborn with their illogical arguments on behalf of "taking" and "redistributing" the earnings of hard-working Americans. They claim they are "taking care" of those who elected them. Their "taking care" amounts to enslaving every citizen, born and unborn, for generations to come.
Their claims would fall on deaf ears, if most citizens understood their Constitution's limits on the powers of government. Hear what some of the Founders said about the policies of today's so-called "progressive" Democrats.
"To preserve [the] independence [of the people,] we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses, and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account, but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:39
"I deem [this one of] the essential principles of our government and consequently [one] which ought to shape its administration:... The honest payment of our debts and sacred preservation of the public faith." --Thomas Jefferson: 1st Inaugural, 1801. ME 3:322
"I sincerely believe... that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity under the name of funding is but swindling futurity on a large scale." --Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 1816. ME 15:23
"[With the decline of society] begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia [war of all against all], which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man. And the fore horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression." --Thomas Jefferson to Samuel Kercheval, 1816. ME 15:40
"Is it now high time for the people of this country to explicitly declare whether they will be free men or slaves. It is an important question which ought to be decided. It concerns more than anything in this life. The salvation of our souls is interested in this event. For wherever tyranny is established, immorality of every kind comes in like a torrent, it is in the interest of tyrants to reduce the people to ignorance and vice.” - Samuel Adams
And:
“The utopian schemes of leveling and a community of goods, are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government unconstitutional.” - Samuel Adams
All who claim to be conservatives need to publicize and "conserve" (preserve) these ideas on behalf of future generations.
Those who speak for conservatism must be able to use founding principles intelligently against the "chief redistributionist" and "leveler" of today.
A de facto 30 hour (or less) work week already exists in the federal government. The only exception to this is in the IRS for employees involved in processing tax status applications and audits for conservative organizations and individuals. Those special people are required to put in a 40 hour work week, at a minimum. LOL
Well, a required part three is already largely in place in France - companies will not be allowed to fire anyone. As partners with government in the search for full employment, you would need Cabinet-level approvals for any terminations.
The left wants us poor, weak, unarmed and dependent upon their view of what a government should be. The left wants to decide who shall be born, who shall be educated, what they will study, what they will be allowed to do, where they can live and when they will die. Personal freedom and personal power are anathema to the leftist agenda.
Im still working 80-90 hour weeks. Unfortunately Obama has decreased my income and increased my taxes to the point I cant wait to get out. As soon as the kids are out of college, I’m done.
I heard they would be the SF Queers in deference to their city that is only one earthquake away from oblivion.
Entirely possible. After all, this is a policy designed by the same people who thought the solution to low prices for farm-produced commodities was to have the government buy up the surplus grain and milk and destroy it, and the solution to low-quality housing for low-income people was to have the government buy up old houses and apartment buildings and level them. No doubt they'll eventually decide the solution to inflation is to confiscate cash and burn it.
After all, they've done such a wonderful job already with reducing the surplus population by killing it before it's born.
The seat of evil is in hell... earth is only its footstool so to speak. I wouldn’t spend too much time looking for people choosing to conspire. There’s a conspiracy but it’s not what you think.
This is called "spread the work" by libtards, union leaders, and consumptionist economists, who believe that the total amount of work in a country is fixed, and by shortening the work week to 30 hours, more people will be needed to perform the fixed amount of work, and the employment rate will improve.
But, if wage rates are increased to compensate for the reduction in hours worked, the result will be that those who already had jobs would lose them outright in order to make room for the unemployed.This is because the rise in hourly pay to compensate for the shortening of hours totally nullifies any ability of shorter hours to serve as the basis for spreading the work.
You folks are looking at this all wrong.
What did you all expect from a president that works 10 hours per week?
Besides, how do you expect him to get the jobs numbers up? If folks only work 30 hours, that means a whole lot of positions will open up to get the jobs done.
Simply brilliant in the mind of a man like Obambi.
rats, I was about to post a vanity on my theory that the Democrats are using Obamacare to put in a European 30 hour work week (their flawed theory on how to get more people working) when I looked for referenced. I found the article you posted, then searched and you posted it. ;-)
Good job my FRiend.
I doubt he averages 10 hours. He is a lazy party mutt.
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