wisconsin to force workers to work 7 days without a break

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http://www.thenation.com/article/201817 ... ail_nation

like killing the unions wasn't enough for them, now they want to work us to death. bloodsucking robberbarons. and they will claim it's "voluntary" - how dumb do they think we are?

That's mighty Christian of them (sarcasm since most of them probably proudly boast of being Christian).

More like how powerless do they think we are.

by dint of themselves being voted into office despite plentiful evidence of their perfidy in progress, they know we [the sheeple] are always subject to their race and class-based red herrings and dog whistles, and are largely powerless against them. only when they push too hard too fast do they risk the pitchfork brigades against them, so they slip it to us in measured doses until we find ourselves cooked in oil. the sneaky sanctimonious blood-sucking hypocrites.

Oh, from the title I thought that Wisconsin was actually going to, you know, force government workers to work all days of the week. But they aren't, are they.

What is so wrong with people being allowed to work seven days a week?

Of course it's voluntary unless it's something like they are finishing up a project and on a tight time schedule. My husband has worked 7 days a week for over two months before when he was trying to finish up a job by the date needed. He was tired and could have taken a day off but he wanted the overtime.

Most blue collar guys will gladly take overtime and are eager to get it. Companies aren't going to force anyone to work every single day like that because they will have to pay overtime and that cuts into profits.

As for the unions, I don't like them and neither does my husband. He's an electrician and there is an electrician's union here and my uncle was in it way back in the day and the only thing he liked about it was the wage scale. DH has looked into the union here and I've talked to them as well. It's not what you think. He would have to join the union and pay the dues and then drive over 50 miles from our house to there every day to see if they had work for him. Once they found him a job he would go to that job until he finished but if they didn't have anything for him he couldn't work anywhere else in the meantime. Alabama is a right to work state but we do have some things unionized although not everybody wants to work for them.

Also when the union goes on strike you are at home and you are out of luck. You can't go work for a nonunion company just to get by. It's very restrictive. In states where it's all union there is more union work but they can also insist that you go work out of town and not give you a choice in the matter. Yes they put you up in a hotel and give you a per diem and pay you a higher wage for working out of town but if you have a wife and young kids at home and she has nobody else to help her, it's not going to make things go very well when they send you to Hilton Head NC for 3 months to build a hotel and you see her every few weeks. You can't refuse the job and then get the next one available in town. You are at their beck and call.

My uncle loved the money he got from it and he was an electrician also. Same union, IBEW. He was really frugal and saved everything and so he could get by when there wasn't work for him and that gave him time for his true callings which were Irish whiskey and the Scottish Rite Lodge stuff he did. A lot of people don't care for the way unions completely own their workers.

My oldest son just took a job that is going to be from about 4pm to 4am 6 days a week and sometimes 7. It's at a car factory on an assembly line. He said he's looking forward to that overtime. When he worked for the glass company he would work 16 hours a day 7 days a week for a few months when it was available. Overtime is a major thing to a lot of these guys. But, you can only get so much before taxes eat you up and employers will always work with you about not getting more than a certain amount. It depends on how many dependents and all you claim, but they will work with the guys unless it's a deadline situation and then everybody knows that the deadline is important.


Jobs where the company can force it's workers to work 7 days a week and make a better profit while paying all that overtime are very few and far between. Places that run 24/7 have shift workers and they have more on payroll than they absolutely need so they can call someone in when somebody isn't at work, etc. They would turn a better profit by limiting guys hours to 40 and calling in part timers than they would having one group work 56 hours or more a week. Overtime is time and a half and some places pay double time after 60 hours or on Sundays. I can't think of anybody who wouldn't volunteer for that.

They aren't going to be forcing the poor working man to give up his cold beer and ESPN and the few precious hours he has to rest his weary body by standing over him with a whip and threatening him with unemployment if he doesn't give up his day of rest to go back to the salt mines. They are going to be using that whip for crowd control when all the guys come in at once to be the first to ask for overtime. For blue collar guys, overtime is a celebration not a burden. It's hard work but it's worth it come Friday when you can not only pay the power bill and buy groceries that week but you can also put 50 toward the gas bill AND EVEN get a couple pizzas from Pizza Hut (pretty expensive when you get three). DH comes home and actually says "Woohoo! I got overtime this week. I'll be there till 6 or 7 all week and all day Saturday and hopefully I can even get a half day Sunday!"

ETA I sent that before I meant to but only had one more thing to say. Everywhere I've ever worked, when you were asked to work overtime if you didn't want it there was somebody else happy to take it.

"Us"? "We"? Do you live in Wisconsin? I thought you lived in the U.K.

Your thread title is a bit misleading. At first I thought it meant there was already a law passed that would make it mandatory for employees to work seven days (which would be completely ridiculous).

I was not aware that there were laws in any states guaranteeing at least one day off for employees in specific industries.
Interesting that it is only for employees in a “factory or mercantile establishment”. That's rather selective, and "unfair".

I know people outside of those industries who've worked seven days a week, but most of the time hourly workers don't complain too much about working extra days.

At my job, during extremely busy times of the year (i.e. Indy 500 and Brickyard 400), it's not unusual for my boss to schedule most of us for six or even seven days, especially if we're a bit short-staffed.
It's not like my boss likes scheduling people for extra days though. The company hates paying overtime, and he can get in trouble with his boss if we (collectively) work too many extra hours.

Also, what is the name of this bill? I'm having a hard time finding it.
I prefer to read them myself rather than trusting what people with an obvious bias have to say about it.

I did want to add that while I very much disagree with auntblabbys opinion on this, I do know that he feels this way about it because he cares very much about people and wants the best for everybody and hates for people to be treated unfairly. I know he's coming from a good place on this and isn't people working like that if they want or need to. So let's not be harsh to him about this.

I suppose if y'all think it's fine to force workers to work 7 days without a break, that is your business. you KNOW it is headed in that direction, employers will be able to FORCE workers to work without days off. and they WON'T pay them overtime. isn't anybody paying attention to wage theft running rampant in this country? ALL the worker protections that unions enabled for us working class are slowly slipping out of our grasp because WE LET THEM GO.

Without a living wage, workers will work long hours to live in poverty.

and WE are letting those bloodsucking capitalists get away with robbing us working class blind. they have too many of us convinced that we deserve little else than to be slaves.

As to whom to blame for this (and many, many other unconstitutional and illegal abuses), look to those who are still smiling at the end of the day. When everyone else is complaining and sullen, and the smilers are smiling, guess who is at fault.

I see it all the time. Big bankers smiling. Big government smiling. Big pharma, big food, big agri, big police-state ... all smiling. It isn't the unionists or the anti-unionists. None of them are smiling; they're angry. It isn't the workers. They're angry, too. Puppets are serious; puppet-masters smile.

Like the movie They Live, it is quite easy to see those who are doing evil. You don't need the glasses, though. Because they smile.

I am reminded of the old joke about the multinational CEO and worker and unionist who walk into a room, and upon a table is a plate of cookies, and the capitalist snarfs up all of the cookies and leaving only one behind, then says to the worker, "psst- that unionist over there- he wants a piece of your cookie."

Nobody is going to stop paying overtime. Trust me, if they were to make it legal to not pay overtime or to give comp time instead then I'd say about 60% at least of blue collar workers would either refuse to work it or downright quit when they started firing people for it. They aren't going to be forcing anything. I don't see anything that is being let go for workers. The only thing unions would give that companies won't give is benefits and plenty of big companies give them. Small ones can't afford to pay insurance etc, so thats why we have Obamacare now, and my husband who works for a small company and I have insurance for $100 a month and it's good BC'/BS and the same as we used to pay several hundred a month for as our part of it when he worked for a big company that provided it.

People on salary may work overtime without compensation but salaried positions have different requirements and it's based on results and not hours, and people who take those jobs know it. It's a good deal sometimes and othertimes it can suck. My son was superintendent of a job and was salaried and he worked his ass off but he didn't mind not getting the overtime because he got experience, he got the superintendent job on his resume and he was paid very well and given insurance.

What exactly do you think is being taken away from us, and why do you think they are going to force them to work 7 days a week without overtime? It's been legal to work 7 days a week in Alabama since Christ was a Corporal but I've never seen anybody being forced to or not paid overtime for it. As I said the only time you have to do it is when there is a deadline and everybody has to then.

Where did you get the idea that they will stop paying overtime?

... University graduates ...

"assistant managers" at mickey-Ds do not get over time, and they make a pittance. I have worked "mcjobs" that did not pay overtime, they were DBAs and if they got in trouble they'd close up and reopen elsewhere under another name. there are many ways for employers to evade the law. the law is porous at best. you can be declared "a salaried employee" strictly at the employer's discretion, no matter what you do, and thus lose overtime protection. and jobs are so hard to get for even college graduates that they are a largely captive audience, in most areas. IOW most folk do NOT have the luxury to tell their thievin' boss to shove it and seek work elsewhere because there is no work elsewhere to be had.