Slashdot Mirror
Amazon Is Testing a 30-Hour, 75% Salary Workweek (washingtonpost.com)
Amazon is planning a pilot program in which a select group of workers will need to work for 30 hours a week, instead of the usual 40 to 70 hours, and make 75 percent of the salary + benefits (alternate source). From the report:Currently, the pilot program will be small, consisting of a few dozen people. These teams will work on tech products within the human resources division of the company, working Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with additional flex hours. Their salaries will be lower than 40-hour workers, but they will have the option to transition to full-time if they choose. Team members will be hired from inside and outside the company. As of now, Amazon does not have plans to alter the 40-hour workweek on a companywide level, the spokesman said.
They should be trying out "30 hours a week, 100% of the salary and benefits."
I thought Bezos idolized the sci fi future when no one would have to work?
I was the head IT manager at a 200 person company and for budget and workload reasons I worked salary 25 hours for 50% pay. I also own a computer repair store that's open for 26 hours so that worked nicely but if I was married with kids or had a side job like ebay resale, it'd be great. I'd say it worked perfectly and if I had to go in when I wasn't scheduled to work, it wasn't midnight, it was more like 3:00 PM.
Alternative title: Amazon offers 30-hr/week employees benefits. Cause, reducing them to 30 hrs and paying less isn't some kind of amazing benevolent thing. The only mildly special thing is offering benefits.
I'd go for this in a heartbeat, except that the 40 hour work week is a myth at Amazon (and most large US companies for exempt employees). I suspect that 30hrs would become just a couple of hours less than the full time (60-80 hour) employees for 75% salary. If it was really 30 hours, you could work 30 at Amazon, 30 at Microsoft and get 150% of your salary for working the same number of hours as "full time".
I've heard that Amazon.com is a sweatshop.
If "40 hours/week" workers work much more than that, wouldn't we expect the same for "30 hours/week" workers?
This was already posted last week:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/...
In all the FTE positions I've had, if the contract stipulates 40 hours a week you can forget about ever being promoted if you're working less than 60.
I don't believe that the workload would be reduced in the same proportion as the salary. There will be as much as work as before, and in a big company there will be countless people who don't respect that you're working fewer hours.
This is a country with very limited labor laws. At-will employment, no federally mandated vacation time and zero Dept of Labor oversight on unpaid overtime.
I regularly don't show up 2 days of the week, take that!
Any employee taking this option is a fool. They would be voluntarily giving up the (sometimes meager) benefits of being defined as a full time employee under US law. Great for Amazon, terrible for the employee.
I plan to do this once I have kids. I am a software engineer in a low cost of living area. Even at 75%, my salary would be still be twice the median income in my county.
Once our new robot overlords do all the jobs, we better hope this is a common arrangement. Otherwise we will be in for difficult times.
Maybe they figure they can get by with 75% of the hours if they avoid having people do the same thing over and over again. You know, since they aren't a tech-news aggregator, where that sort of thing is apparently necessary.
ADP threatened some staff with this about a decade ago or face layoffs. We took the layoffs because fuck working for 75% of our already meager wages
How about making it 32 hours a week for 80% pay, and have them work Mon-Thu? Four 8-hour workdays a week would be much better than five 6-hour workdays....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
i have neighbors who go to work early and come home late and leave their kids in after school and have a babysitter to drop them off at school and pick them up from after school
if this is really 10-2 without any unofficial over time it's a great deal for parents of school age kids before they are old enough to walk by themselves
Here in Sweden it's very common for people to work 80% weeks, but usually not in exclusive teams, most people choose to work every day of the week.
One of my previous employer did something like this, and I loved the idea, initially. Then I realized I was getting the same amount of work done, but being paid less for it and having less time to do it (unless I wanted to work on my own time, for free). .
I'm unconvinced this is a bad idea for the worker. It's a good deal for the employer certainly, in that you likely lose some slack in your working day when you are there. It still seems worth it for an extra day off to me although YMMV. I am unhappy because my productivity has gone up seems rather odd to me.
All my employment contracts for IT support prohibits me from working 40 hours per week. I haven't worked overtime in over a decade.
Lets be clear here, who works 40 hours a week? all emails outside work hours, etc ....
So this mean get paid less for a fulltime job?
I know someone who was in line for a ~20% raise and, instead of taking it, changed to a 4-day week at the same pay (and with the samebenefits), effectively working at the same hourly rate as they would have gotten with the raise. I'd do that in a second if I could.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
So I'm wondering if this is 30 hours full time + 138 hours where you're expected to be "on call" (which, at Amazon, seems to mean you should expect to be regularly doing an extra 20-30 hours each week without additional compensation).
#DeleteChrome
The article said it's piloting it for a "few teams of technical workers". The question is: are they salaried? If they are hourly workers it sounds fine. Otherwise, pretty sure they are going to end up doing close to the same amount of work for less pay.
I notice that there are quite a few comments posted already. :)
It's currently the middle of the work day in the US, and we're spending our time on Slashdot.
I posted about this in the duplicate story from last week - the only difference is now the pay is 75% with full benefits.
This would be a good option for a narrow set of working parents like me. My wife and I both work; she has an awful commute and a workplace that pays well but has no flexible hours (even for professional positions.) I have a flexible job, but not enough so I can work from home. So when my oldest kid starts kindergarten this fall, I'm still home when he's ready to get on the bus for school, but I have to arrange for someone to be there when he gets home. Something like this would be a great deal if:
- Both parents worked reasonably well-paying, stable jobs. (A layoff while the other guy is working 3/4 time would be a serious mess.)
- The family needs enough discipline to stay out of debt and have a lot of savings, for the reason mentioned above.
- They also need to learn to live with less free cash flow in exchange for more time at home/elimination of some child care expenses.
- Ideally, they would own their house or have a reasonable mortgage payment they could cover out of savings if a disaster happens.
The problems I see with it are this -- the average family in a high cost of living area is just barely hanging on by their fingernails, has no savings, more than one mortgage, and a huge appetite for stuff. That, and Amazon is known for being a sweatshop that works people ungodly hours and does the stack ranking Hunger Games-style performance evaluations. I suspect something like this will lead to more age-based discrimination. Already we have 28-year-old employees with no kids willing to work 100 hour weeks while the more established family guys get the job done in 40, but appear to be slackers because they're not in the office at 11 PM on a Friday night. Amazon is already a Logan's Run kind of workplace and this could just amplify that and cement the "oh, you're done in IT if you're over 30" mindset.
Honestly it's a great idea if implemented properly. I hate the feeling of getting into work and immediately the clock starts ticking -- trying to get the maximum amount I can do done in the time i have at work. If an employer can help reduce that stress level with a mutually agreeable program I'd be willing to try it.
Speaking as a former Amazonian, you are clearly not an Amazonian. That New York Times article was right on the nose. Posting anonymously because I'm pretty sure that my "this severance is contingent on not speaking negatively about the company" contract has already timed out, but they might go after me anyway. Yes, that was a real thing they made me sign. Yes, I sold out, because the alternative is that they'd take a pro-rated chunk of my signing bonus back. My team had a revolving door with a period of 11 months, so I think a lot of other people were in the same boat.
I have a very strong sense that this is so that they can hire more "family oriented people" (to get their count of women up), still make them work 50 hours a week, and still pay them less, but for not working 80 hours a week.
# make clean sig
"We need to move some of staff to part time to save money"
"Let's brand it as a new pilot program."
"fucking brilliant"
Provided we still get full-time benefits, I like this idea a lot. A lot lot. I would want to work 3 ten hour 2nd shift days, that would give me 4 days off and also I would have the daytimes to do whatever I want. It would be a great schedule for advancing your schooling with a postgraduate degree.
So how does that work? All the "40" hour people get lumped being on-call more often?
"Sir, everyone took the guaranteed 30 hour offer. We have no one that can take the on-call phones anymore."
Someone already posted that this was a dupe story. Would you please stop dupe posting about dupe stories.
All the reports I've seen suggest employees are no more productive working those extra 10 hours. This is great for amazon if it catches on. Employees will produce the same and amazon will pay them a lot less.
That's about right, based on this article (and related study). Work hours for peak cognition was 22-27 for women, and 25-30 for men, after that, working hours have a negative impact on cognitive functioning.
Three-day workweek is the most productive for employees, study says
There's an interesting book called Kellogg's Six Hour Day by Hunnicutt. Here's the synopsis:
"Kellogg's six-hour day was the pinnacle of a hundred-year process that cut working time virtually in half. Kellogg Management, propelled by a vision of Liberation Capitalism, insisted that six hours would revolutionize society by shifting the balance of time from work to leisure--from economic concerns to the challenge of freedom."
The employees grandfathered into the 30-hour week stayed on it until they retired in the 1980s. A 30-hour week gave employees more time for clubs, gardening, sports, family, etc. When you think about how wealthy we are in, say, energetic terms (useful work extracted from an ox vs cubic meter of natural gas), it's amazing how much time and capital we spend on destructive bullshit like sitting in traffic or paying people to do our taxes because the system is too complicated (we're paying a tax on paying taxes ffs). Just unbelievable how needlessly dumb the world is in light of automation, nuclear power, blah, blah, blah.
The ancient Greeks viewed labor as a necessary evil that got in the way of more enlightened pursuits [1]. This is not to say they condoned laziness, but TPS reports, patent lawsuits, and $ModernBullshit are not the highest forms of civilization. Why we focus on metrics like GDP -- which in no way accounts for quality, or whether the "work" should even be done -- is absolutely beyond me. In the end, complex, industrial civilization is still relatively new compared to the species' time on the planet, so we're still trying to figure this out.
[1] = https://www.jstor.org/stable/6...
Brilliant. So others slave on 70 hours a week as the story says (as I understand, your regular Amazon working week), and get 100% pay, while you work for 30h and get 75% pay. Sounds like a deal everyone should take. Or maybe it won't really work like that.. ?
Like the single mother of six kids whose hiring warms the hearts of everyone reading the story in the lifestyle section of the Seattle newspaper.
(Don't laugh. Saw it in my CS program.)
My butt....5 will get you 10, that it will be 30 hours "on the clock", but, required to be at their beck & call, the other 10 hours of "the week".
I suppose it depends on the job. My productivity increases throughout the day. I'm not so good in the mornings but after about 2pm things start to pick up. It's probably the accumulation of caffeine.
Google does something like this, on a selective basis.
I think it started as something done only for special cases, but I know a few people who arranged it. One woman I know works three days per week instead of five, for 60% of her normal salary. She has also taken a large chunk of her 18-week maternity leave and uses it one day per week, so she actually works two days per week but gets paid for three, until the maternity leave runs out. Her husband has arranged a similar structure with his employer (not Google), working three days per week so one of them is always home with the kids. She's a fairly special case, though, because she's a freakishly brilliant software engineer who any smart company would bend over backwards to accommodate.
However, it's now been expanded to be made generally available to full-time employees. It requires management approval, but the descriptions I've seen make it clear that management is expected to agree unless there are specific reasons why it can't work. Salary, bonuses and stock are pro-rated based on the percentage of a normal schedule that is worked. Most commonly, people work 60% or 80% schedules (i.e. three or four days per week instead of five). Other benefits, such as health care, etc., are not pro-rated, but either provided or not, depending on the percentage of normal hours worked.
I could see myself going to a 60% work week in a few years, having a four-day weekend every week in exchange for a 40% pay cut.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
-the PHB
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
if your pay hourly then they must pay OT.
Apparently Bezos idolized that other future, where people work part time and get part benefits.
so how do they get 30 hours from 4 days 10am - 2pm with 14 flex hours
good for parents who can't add up and have to get their kids to school.
Go well
Um, by adding 14 to 16?
Sounds like you've put in too many hours already this week. You should take some time off.
Your day: "coffeee" not working "meetings" everyday? How much is socializing, eating donuts, headnodd, etc. and how much is keeping everyone on same page. "fiddling about with code and discussing options with other developers" work After about 3pm I tend to get into the zone. I finish around 7 so most of your real actual work is 4 hours? subtract bathroom breaks and lucnh/dinner breaks.