Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) today announced that this Thursday he will introduce legislation to establish a standard 32-hour workweek in America with no loss in pay – an important step toward ensuring that workers share in the massive increase in productivity driven by artificial intelligence, automation, and new technology. Sanders is joined on the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act in the Senate by Sen. Laphonza Butler (D-Calif.) and in the House of Representatives by Rep. Mark Takano (D-Calif.) who introduced companion legislation.
Read the bill summary, here. [PDF]
Read the bill text, here. [PDF]
The Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act would:
- Reduce the standard workweek from 40 to 32 hours over four years by lowering the maximum hours threshold for overtime compensation for non-exempt employees.
- Require overtime pay at time and a half for workdays longer than eight hours, and overtime pay at double a worker’s regular pay for workdays longer than 12 hours.
- Protect workers’ pay and benefits to ensure that a reduction in the workweek does not cause a loss in pay.
https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/1be2bg5/bernie_is_fighting_for_the_4day_workweek_in_the/
Starts at Federal level agencies where both regular Federal employees and something like “Qualified Contractors” (not sure if that’s technically a thing, but covering my ass here) can’t easily get around the change.
Probably pushes State level agencies to try to comply just to make things easier for scheduling purposes.
But only the largest private corps will have enough employees to fall into a category that this would apply to. Not a revolution but half a sandwich is better than no sandwich when you’re hungry.
They did something like this with a minimum wage increase in like 2018 I wanna say. It hasn’t trickled down yet lol
Vermont already ignores existing federal overtime laws for state workers. When a state worker sued them over it, the state’s initial attempt to claim that all hourly employees are actually salaried was so flimsy that the federal judge just told the state to invoke sovereign immunity so they could keep breaking federal law with impunity.
TFW: A Federal Judge decides to copy/paste some soverign citizen wall of text into their decision and hit the golf course early.