They promised us the four-day workweek. Time with the kids. A life. Then the bill arrived.
Bernie Sanders proposes overtime after 32 hours. That’s it. Pay time-and-a-half after the first eight hours per day. It sounds great until the business owner picks up his calculator.
A 50-person company would face an extra $267,500 a year in overtime. Gene Marks, writing in the Guardian, tells us that same business would ‘gladly spend $100,000 on an AI project to save $267,500 per year.’ That’s the quiet part, spoken right out loud for everyone to hear.
They’d rather buy a goddamn robot than pay a worker the overtime they already earned.
Marks offers ‘incentives’ for giving workers paid time off, as if the whole problem isn’t that the 40-hour week doesn’t leave enough hours for a human life. He says workers want ‘balance’ and ‘flexibility.’ Then he shows exactly how much it’s worth to the owner: not the cost of a single employee’s annual salary.
You know who loves that math? The CEOs of Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI. They get to sell the robot. The worker gets the pink slip. And the worker who stays gets to work 40 hours for 32 hours’ base pay, because the business ‘can’t afford’ to pay overtime.
Don’t call it a compromise. Call it what it is.
Take the fucking profit off the table before you start talking about ‘incentives.’
Source story: Sanders proposes 32-hour workweek with overtime mandate.