Bernie Sanders Says If AI Makes Us So Productive, We Should Get a 4-Day Work Week (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0178181276
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/25/194207/bernie-sanders-says-if-ai-makes-us-so-productive-we-should-get-a-4-day-work-week
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/25/bernie-sanders-says-that-if-ai-makes-us-so-productive-we-should-get-a-4-day-work-week/
"Technology is gonna work to improve us, not just the people who own the technology and the CEOs of large corporations," Sanders said. "You are a worker, your productivity is increasing because we give you AI, right? Instead of throwing you out on the street, I'm gonna reduce your work week to 32 hours."
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/25/bernie-sanders-says-that-if-ai-makes-us-so-productive-we-should-get-a-4-day-work-week/
Who is going to give me a 4 day work week? (Score:1, Informative)
I work for myself, I have 3 companies to run, who is going to give me a 4 day work week and what would that look like? Also if I could have a 4 day work week today, I would start another company and would run out of the week days anyway. Actually I have people working for me 4 days a week, this is because we run around the clock, 24x7x52 and some shifts are less attractive to the hires, especially the weekends, so we have to compensate with flexibility, but everyone is on the clock anyway, it is up to the
Re: Who is going to give me a 4 day work week? (Score:2)
That's all your personal choice
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> I work for myself, I have 3 companies to run, who is going to give me a 4 day work week and what would that look like?
You own your own companies and you make your own choices. If you want to give yourself a 4 day work week, knock yourself out. Full stop.
That being said, you totally misstate Bernie's point. Bernie is pointing out a logical inconsistency and what he considers to be an inequity. He is suggesting that the benefits of improvements to technology should be more equitable, not unilaterally granted to the owners of the business while only the detrimental affects on labor, wages and employment fall to the work
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> Meaning 32 hours = the baseline for salaried pay.
Which is throwing everyone who works hourly under the bus. But that's been on-brand for Bernie for awhile now, he's not really sure who he's pandering to anymore.
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Are you sure that's his base?
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and that means the OT clock starts at 32 hours and not at 40 hours.
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> and that means the OT clock starts at 32 hours and not at 40 hours.
Yup, and what that changes is that it will be at 32 hours instead of 40, when the boss comes to you and says: "You're about to hit OT, which isn't approved, go home."
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Inflation is also driven by labor costs. Period.
This is expected, and not a reason to avoid doing so.
It's a complex system with many toggles.
A 4 week work week necessitates a reduction of productivity from today's 5 day work week.
This will require higher labor costs to overcome to maintain the same productivity.
Again- this isn't a reason not to do so. You just don't get to handwave that shit away.
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4 week work week.... lol. Bezos just creamed his pants
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You don't think salaried workers would see their wages go down if they worked 20% less?
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> if they worked 20% less?
That is assuming that being in an office less = working less, which IMO is baseless because it requires the amount of unproductive moments that absolutely exist in an office every day.
Re: But I dont want to only get paid for 32 hours/ (Score:2)
But if you can do the same job in 32 hours while before needed 40 hours, doesn't that mean you were slacking off? Why should your employer pay you more if you do exactly the same as before but in less hours.... It just doesn't make any sense. And if did it in 40 hours before, and now in 32, maybe you can even do it in 24 hours.... Where do you draw the line?
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> But if you can do the same job in 32 hours while before needed 40 hours, doesn't that mean you were slacking off?
Oh, I don't know.
If you're digging a giant fucking hole with a shovel, but someone brings you a backhoe were you slacking off before?
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How about you work 32 hours but get paid for 40? Will anything bad happen? We used to work 7 days a week until the labor movement fought for the 5 day week. Did anything bad happen because of that change?
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> How about you work 32 hours but get paid for 40?
Sooo... Everybody working hourly is legally required to get a 20% raise? How do you propose actually implementing that? While we're at it, let's throw in a free album download, too (just not U2).
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That's easy, set the overtime limit at 32 hours. Since the chemical plants, power plants, and the mines have to run around the clock overtime hours will go up at time and a half rates. Alternatively, they could bring on five shifts instead of four and still only have eight hours of overtime pay to fill out the week.
A rotating shift schedule with five shifts would be an interesting exercise especially if the operators wanted to stay on 12 hour rotations to cut down on travel time.
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Ya, U2 is a deal breaker. I'm out. I don't need a raise that bad.
No, no, no (Score:3)
I didn't mean AI makes us productive; I meant it makes this company more productive. The good news is that you don't just get one day off per week, but all five!
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> The good news is that you don't just get one day off per week, but all five!
And the best part is, [1]you don't need a million dollars to do nothing. [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QCBBDDd3AM
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So long as that company gets taxed at 99%, sounds good to me.
also need to pay OT / not allow exempt workers to (Score:2)
also need to pay OT / not allow exempt workers to be pulling 35-80 hour weeks for only 32-40 hours of pay.
Populists love to oversimply things (Score:5, Insightful)
A 32 hour workweek sounds great, unless:
You're paid hourly, rather than by a salary. Then it amounts to an 20% pay cut. Whoops.
You work in a field that isn't seeing efficiency gains due to AI and increased automation, such as the trade industry. Does your boss now expect you to have 40 hours worth of wires run in only 32? "Labor faster, pleb!"
You actually realize that jobs which truly do require the full 40 hours of labor each week, will simply hire additional 32-hour employees and play games with scheduling, rather than pay the 8 hours of OT.
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He's implying you would get the same money and only work four days. That is, of course, not what would happen.
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It would in more civilized places.
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Probably better phased as "It would be more likely in more civilized places.". For example you would raise the minimum wage by 20%, but that assume you live in a country civilised enough to not think tips are a core income source.
The reality is it would make the decent employers stand out because they would honor the spirit of such a change where and the profit above all else companies would maintain their bottom line by ensure employees saw none of the benefit.
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I don't know a single place on earth where you can get paid the same amount for 20% less work, so I don't know what you mean by "more civilized places". Work is a contract between the employer and the employee; what's in it for the other side of the equation where they pay the same but get 20% less work out of you?
Because even countries with more worker protections or policies a little closer to the socialist spectrum do not do this. Belgium is experimenting with a 4 day work week but with a commensur
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> He's implying you would get the same money and only work four days.
If you're salaried, yeah. But we already have enough division in politics between white collar and blue collar workers and this just isn't going to hit the same to people who aren't going to see any of these supposed productivity gains. It just comes across as "Why does someone in an air conditioned office get a full week's worth of pay in 4 days, while I've still gotta bust my ass on this construction site and lose a day's income every week for my trouble?"
I'm sure in Bernie's addled mind, our fellow in
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> amounts to an 20% pay cut. Whoops.
Hard to take this comment as anything but disingenuous, when worker wages is such a large part of his platform. Of course, he isn't advocating for worker pay cuts.
> will simply hire additional 32-hour employees and play games with scheduling, rather than pay the 8 hours of OT.
And here, the whole socialist part his belief system is stricter regulations on a capitalism. So when you take context out, you can construct a pretty nice strawman....
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> Hard to take this comment as anything but disingenuous, when worker wages is such a large part of his platform. Of course, he isn't advocating for worker pay cuts.
Bernie wants to raise the minimum wage, which certainly is overdue, but that does nothing for someone who is already earning above whatever magic number he's got in mind (Google says presently, he's advocating for $17/hr). Let's say you're an entry-level HVAC tech in Florida. That pays somewhere between $22-$28/hr (yeah, Florida wages suck, but that's a separate issue). In our hypothetical 32 hour workweek scenario, how does our worker make up the shortfall?
Hope and vibes aren't going to give everybody i
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In case anyone else is as ignorant as I: [1]WITCH [ycombinator.com]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707
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He's been a busy guy. Hell, he won his office by personally meeting almost everyone in the State.
But as for why he hates the idea of anyone else working, I've no idea.
I think he's a damn fool. The sort who would join a Socialist revolution and then get executed by his comrades in the first round of purges. But that's 90% of Socialists.
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Capitalism is responsible for everything I own, everything I've owned in the past, and anything I will own in the future.
Thank the gods for capitalism!
Oh, Bernie. He forgets what society he's in. (Score:3)
This is America. Productivity gains are not about helping everyone. They're about helping the owners. Any argument, no matter how rational and well intentioned, against that is going to be met by anger to the point of blood rage. And not just by the owners, but also by a large portion of the population who have believed the propaganda that if anything looks to be helpful to the working class, it must absolutely be fought against because it will destroy the very fabric of society and civilization. We have been flooded with messaging to this effect our entire lives. Healthcare becoming affordable and accessible will destroy the country. Better pay .pharma more for less care. Good pay for the general worker will destroy the entire business sector, better pay the C-Suite more for daring to have the thought. And we all know that giving people a little bit extra time not serving the corporate masters will absolutely lead to nothing but more drug use and video gaming, and our purpose in life is to serve the corporations that employ us, not to find life outside of work and purpose beyond work. We should probably switch back to six day work weeks, because we've really let this whole work-life balance thing get out of hand. Why, some people have started to believe that they were born for more than servitude. How dare they!
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Such a narrow and cynical way to look at life! Why did you bother to get out of bed this morning?
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Cynical doesn't necessarily mean inaccurate.
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Not necessarily, but frequently enough. Cynicism is a narrow worldview that precludes nuance. It's hard to be accurate that way. It's also hard to produce positive results that way, which is why it is an irrational worldview.
Re: Oh, Bernie. He forgets what society he's in. (Score:2)
A cynic is what an idealist calls a realist.
Bernie is a freaking genius (Score:2, Interesting)
Bernie is a freaking genius. He's a rich politician able to sell tickets to his "fight the rich" rallies. Amazing
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Depends on how you define rich, his wealth (~$3 Million) is 10x lower than the average wealth of the top 1%. And his platform isn't even against those people, but the ultra-wealthy. The belief that someone should be able to own a comfortable family home in a high-cost of living area and pay their own fair share of taxes on their wealth is far from hypocritical.
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Bernie has a lower net worth than I do, and I'm definitely not fucking "rich". I've seen teh rich peoples houses.
In before... (Score:2)
In before some retards 2ho don't know ho2bthe words "socialist" or "communist" flap their gums about this idea being one of those things, despite thoseb3ing economic systems, the length of a work day being something that operates under an economic system and isn't one itself, and thus are not IMO directly comparable.
So ... (Score:2)
... tractors gave farmhands a one hour work week? What?
Hurry up then (Score:2)
When in school in the 1970s I had a teach explain to the class how soon the 4 day week would be how we all work. I'm 2 years away from retirement age so they better hurry up with bring it in.
Burnie would know (Score:1)
he's never worked a day in his life.
Nope: You'll work 6-7 days a week and like it (Score:2)
Given how authoritarian the US government seems to be lately, I think they have been planning for what's coming.
After AI eliminates most jobs, and the government refuses to tax AI as virtual employees, people will have to work 10-12 hour days, 6-7 days per week in mostly menial jobs which can't yet be done with AI. Anybody remember working time in the 19th century?
At 80% unemployment, the world will be an oyster to employers needing employees. The government won't be able to support programs like unemployme
I agree with Bernie but (Score:2)
None of the CEOs want to play by Bernie's rules. The CEOs believe that if they give in to workers and let them work less hours, the competition will do the opposite and eat them for lunch. They'll be laughed at. Workers should be disgusted with people like Shopify's CEO, who are making AI utilization part of the performance evaluation process, and basically saying to all workers "tell me why AI can't do your job" - our executives are starting to see people like him "winning" and they feel like they have to
Oh we can do much better! (Score:1)
AI is so productive, many programmers now are getting a 0-day work week!
Re: They're going to charge for AI (Score:2)
Workers do have that power when they work together in solidarity.
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We deserved a 4 day workweek long, long ago. Since the 5 day workweek was established, other technological innovations have greatly enhanced worker productivity across the board. We should have a two-day workweek already, and that's still splitting the difference.
Legislation is the only way we will get a shorter workweek. And we don't need "AI" to justify it.
A major consequence, though, will be even more interest in offshoring and outsourcing. Employers will naturally prefer to utilize workforces that
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> They're going to be charging for AI and raise the rates as companies become dependent anyway.
This week Github Copilot set a limit on how many requests you can make to the reasoning models on the paid subscription. You can conveniently purchase more usage if needed.
Expect more of this.
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Yea, I see three ways that plays out:
1. Vendor lock in so vendors can charge as much as they think the customer can bear.
2. An open enough ecosystem where customers can pick and chose a supplier where you have a race to the bottom based on the cost of the data center.
3. A truly open system where customers can invest in on premise solutions to control costs if they want to put in some effort and investment.
It is likely to be all three depending on the customer's attitude to getting stuff done.
Re:They're going to charge for AI (Score:5, Insightful)
AI might increase productivity - but if you are more productive producing junk instead of quality products then you'll figure out that AI isn't the golden goose but a liability.