sweden moves to 6-hour workday! :D

Post Reply New Topic

Thats not a very good thing for people who make an hourly wage and depend on 40 hours plus a week. That would cut over $100 a week from my husbands pay check. Lots of guys already take all the overtime they can get because it's good money. Cutting it way back like this can make it impossible to make ends meet for people. You also couldn't just pay people more to make up for it because the company would lose money.

It's not going to give them much relief at all if they are sitting home in the dark because they can't pay the power bill and starving because they can't buy food because their paycheck was cut back to give them more family time.

Yeah, until you get into that situation, you can't imagine how much it sucks. And also, I remember reading about how when the French capped the the number of hours people could work at 40, one guy stated that he wanted to work more hours so he could provide a better life for his family. Maybe it would work for you, but for many people it wouldn't.

I know he had mentioned before that he was for the idea of limiting the work week and not allowing overtime. That would be horrible not only for my husbands company and lots of construction workers but also for our own income. The idea was that if work weeks weren't limited to 40 hours then employers would force people to work overtime and they could do nothing about it. While that may happen very, very rarely, it's probably not that common. You may have to work overtime at times because it's needed but it's not going to be some straw boss out there with a whip coming after you if you leave after 8 hours are up.

I worked as a straw boss for a number years doing tree surgery. Guess what? It's the straw boss ( and the boss) who end working the longest hours. The average worker gets paid for overtime, and while as a foreman your base pay is higher, sometimes you can end up making less than a journeyman.

Yes, salaried positions are different, but in my husbands field they usually come with paid benefits and a company vehicle and quite a few other perks to make up for not being paid overtime. It sort of evens out there. Guys who work for the hourly wage need the overtime and many times lots of projects require overtime to be finished on time and not make the company go in the red. Construction especially since everything has to be coordinated between the carpenters and block masons and sheetrockers and electricians and plumbers and glass guys and hvac guys and floor guys etc etc etc. Today my husband is working about 8 hours OT to get his company's stuff caught up with the Mexicans. Of course it evens out because sometimes there will be a few weeks without work when they are waiting to start new jobs or bidding stuff. I'm talking about people who go paycheck to paycheck and are broke before payday. That's us.