56. Thirty-Five Hour Work Week – Reducing the forty hour work week to thirty-five or even thirty hours a week will increase available jobs, thus reducing unemployment. The key part of this adjustment is that of overtime, presently if you work in excess of forty hours in a week, you are paid overtime or time and a half. Reducing overtime laws to thirty-five hours would force employers to add more shifts and hire more employees.
57. Thirty Hour Work Week and Health Benefits – If you work thirty hours a week you are eligible for employer funded health benefits. The national trend now is for employers to hire or design employment for under the forty hour work week to avoid paying health benefit programs for employees. Hawaii has a thirty hour a week with paid health benefits. It is a slight burden on employers but once passed it was accepted and has not reduced employer demand for workers.
58. Retirement Incentives – In an effort to increase the numbers of citizens who choose retirement at age sixty-five, institute a law stating that if you do not accept retirement at this age, your retirement benefits shall decrease later on. Retirement increases the numbers of jobs available. Right now we have monthly increasing unemployment numbers. Retirement incentives or mandatory retirement age can increase the numbers of jobs available on the market.
Comments (6)
Well if you do this! Would you mandate that all companies reduce their prices
kdtroxel is surely a reader of Karl Marx
These proposals are not nearly generous enough, especially given the state of our economy, which clearly is a crisis of overproduction. For example there are about 4 million homeless people in America and 19 million empty homes. We clearly don't need more homes or more homes built. We need to put the homeless in the homes that are already there and empty.
The maximum hours law should be pegged to unemployment. If unemployment goes up a certain amount then the maximum hours should come down to compensate for it.
The minimum wage standard should be changed to a living wage standard, which today, on average is about $20
Did you see in the news a few weeks ago, that some of the banks in California are demolishing homes that they cannot sell. Many of these homes are newly constructed and a few of them only need a bit more work to be livable. It is a horrible shame to destory housing because it makes their books look bad.
Are you trying to deprive me of the right to earn a living???? I have the right to pick and choose which work (and company) to contract with.
Just because you're lazy doesn't mean the rest of us have to be!
Most people really don't like their jobs. This is true even of professionals who claim to. Why else would everyone so look forward to retirement? Who doesn't retire? Supreme Court judges. Actors. Musicians. Artists. Now it can truely be said that those are good jobs. Those are people who would never consider retiring. They are having far too much fun earning a living doing what they are doing. As Duke Ellington said, "Retire to what?"
Given the wealth that our culture is capable of producing, it seems reasonable that that is the sort of society that we can aspire to. One in which no one would think of retiring because they were having far too much fun doing what they were doing.
Obviously as society that has 19 million empty homes and 4 million homeless isn't particularly well organized in terms of the wealth that it is clearly able to produce.