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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.
This was already posted last week:
https://it.slashdot.org/story/...
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.
Under 32 hours and the law would say no benefits are required. Amazon is actually giving them a straight ratio of benefits instead of dropping them to part-time. It's the opposite of a dickish move, as far as the law is concerned (and Amazon is showing that the law need not dictate when businesses are competing for employees).
There are probably many parents who will jump at this kind of opportunity (plus others who want to start a business, do more volunteering, or just have more leisure time).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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"
What makes you think people working 30 hours are doing any less work than people working 40? Most people only do 5-10 hours of real, actual, work in a week. the rest is fluff.
Since I got as much done as when I worked 60+ hours, no one seemed to care.
All these comments are valid. I suspect that people would get as much done in a solid 30 hours of working than the do in 80 hours of burnout. There was time (70's 80's) where, because of striking coal miners causing power shortages, UK industries were forced to a 3-day work week. IIRC productivity in those 3 days was about 90% of the 5-day week. Whether that would have been sustainable we'll never know because once the strike was settled the week went back to 5 days.
As a dev who works 50-60 hours a week, I'm not sure I really agree. My working day tends to be mornings drinking coffee, meetings, fiddling about with code and discussing options with other developers. After about 3pm I tend to get into the zone. I finish around 7 and sometimes work weekends if there's a problem I'm particularly keen to solve.
The guy sitting at the next desk to me is a different story though. He seems to alternate between Facebook and Chrome, with brief 5 minute coding sessions. I'm not a snitch but it does fucking annoy me. I suppose it's like that in many places. A few key staff shoulder most of the burden and the rest blag a pay cheque.
clearly you've never worked a manufacturing job.
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...