"How dare kids today want more time off. They're just lazy" - Debbie, 68, retired.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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We're not going to get it while there are enough stupid Americans to get distracted by culture war bullshit presented to us by the ultra-wealthy and political elite.
America is a corporate captured state, and its only captured more and more since Citizens United.
and you think they're going to suddenly turn around and stop using you as indentured servants?
do you forget what the Republicans think of Europeans? they're libruhl socialist cucks, remember?!
Germany has it figured it out. Come on America, copy the good things not the historically appalling.
No but you see having to do a bullshit job all day almost every day is when life has meaning. How would life have meaning if I wasn't doing a bullshit job all day almost every day?? That's when life has meaning!!!
We deserve way, way, way more dead politicians and ceos to enjoy our time off.
If we could stop arguing about literally everything else, no matter how important you think the issue is, we could really, really spread this message and have it stick across America broadly. At least the idea that we deserve more back for the amount of money we have cut from our work and lives to pay for the government, and the obscenely wealthy are the real enemies.
I encourage Lemmy readers who aren't completely stuck up their own ass, to make THIS the driving message we take into the next decade and beyond, because it will take that long to shift this from an identity/ideology war back to the class war it really should be. If we can drive even SOME of the money out of politics and start demanding things like union protections, fair wages and guaranteed benefits, we could restore a lot of American might and start pushing the needle left again.
We don't get to the finish line without circling the track, no matter how tiring it is. Nobody is coming. No charismatic leader is going to appear and suddenly lead everyone in a revolution and change everything overnight. We HAVE to stop feeling entitled to the perfect outcome, we have to work for that.
At this point, accounting for productivity gains not fairly compensated since the 1970s:
We should be working half the hours, or be making twice the pay. Otherwise, capital owners should face the alternative of an organized general strike until these simple demands are met.
If our elected officials refuse to represent us to bring about equity, we must take it for ourselves.
Americans certainly do,its fucking shocking how little time you guys get off
Yes, but it evens out when you look at our healthca... shit.
Yeah, but don't forget how the police protect us from mass shoo... fuck.
well at least your tax money is being used to fund nice places to hang out and not just car-centric infrastructure..
Yeah my German friend tells me of his coworker that he hasn’t seen since early this year, out sick. Can’t be fired, and no replacement. Or take a week off and be sick the following week. It’s not without its drawbacks but significantly better than what we have here.
Here, we tend to be afraid to take sick days.
Idk how it works in Germany, but here only the first 3 days of sick leave are paid by the employer, after that it's the national welfare agency that pays.
You get 6 weeks full pay from your employer and after that you get 70% pay from your health insurance for up to 72 weeks.
I've been with the same company almost 20 years, and I'm that time have taken so little time off, I have accumulated 75 days. But I just had a child a couple years ago, and this year I took 8 days off throughout the year, since she brought home so many sicknesses. One of those required 3 days off, and I actually got a doctor's note because it was 3 consecutive days and that's the policy.
It still came up in my review. I basically got a "barely passing" score with "needs to be more reliable".
Fuck them
The thing is, it's not that Americans don't have time off, it's that we don't have GUARANTEED time off.
It all depends on who you work for.
The only guaranteed days, generally, are New Years Day, July 4th, Thanksgiving and Christmas Day. Some employers, but not all, make exceptions for New Years Eve, the day after Thanksgiving, and Christmas eve.
But again, it depends on who you work for. The banking and financials industry get President's Day, Memorial Day, and Labor Day. "Bank holidays".
In the end, nothing is guaranteed, employers are allowed to do what they want. Service industry? Fuck you, you're working.
Technically, today is Labor Day and I could have had it off, but I volunteered to work so I could take tomorrow off for doctor stuff.
Technically, today is Labor Day and I could have had it off, but I volunteered to work so I could take tomorrow off for doctor stuff.
So here in Italy you get 168 hours of holidays, which you have to schedule in agreement with your employer; then you also have 104 hours of leave, which you can take whenever you need to, and your employer cannot refuse them. At a previous job we also had, as a second level agreement over the national collective contracts, 10 hours of medical leave, which you could use for... doctor stuff.
edit: you don't HAVE to take your holidays, but most employers FORCE you to, because it's costly for them if you don't, they pay more taxes and may get fined
Yeah, I had 40 hours of medical and I burned that already with surgery last month. :(
Surgery is sick leave, that's unlimited, wtf
i got fired for taking too much sick leave in statesia
See, my current employer leaves that up to our managers. Some managers consider all sick leave PTO, some consider it “do whatever you need to do” and it’s kinda insane.
The most obvious indication that "representatives" only represent capital... They never talk about 4-day work week. NEVER.
Frankly we should be starting the negotiations at 2 days and let them talk us up to 3.
“We’ll talk about it, it’s on the list. Right after ending daylight savings and rounding up all the brown people”
*daylight saving. No “s” at the end.
That's the neat part about language, people change it over time. Most people I know use the "s" at the end.
Interestingly our society as it is with "standardized" versions of the language seem to slow down natural changes. Every person could call something Xs but the official documents will always just say X.
I've been to towns where everyone living there calls it a shortened version, but all the legal documents call it by the full name. Including all maps and postal addresses. No one that actually lives there would call the town that. In the past eventually the maps would just change.
I agree, virtually the only way words are allowed to be created in modern english other than through extremely viral pop culture is by making acronymns and I am getting really tired of it (g.r.t.o.i. for short).
I honestly think the prevalence of autocorrect and word suggestion/replacement is harmful to the evolution of language, it severs words from the past and future and keeps them suspended in a snapshot of time. I mean sure these tools are great but especially because text emojis became popularized as a system where emojis present differently depending on what kind of chat app you are using (iphone vs android chat apps) I think it has really damaged the ability to convey context in brief text messages.
This isn't a hypothetical worry, I find it a very common shared experience with others that texting and interpreting texts can be exhausting because the rigid autocorrect way of communicating dissects the nuance of written language into hermetically sealed and frozen pieces that can only attempt a fascimile of life. This isn't anywhere near as much a problem with longer written language as nuance naturally develops in the broader scope.
I don't know, I grew up with Aol Instant Messenger and texting on phones without prevalent autocorrect, without even keyboards it was all t9 texting and there was a rich language of shorthand that most language people hated from the start and it saddened me even back then. For me it was exciting to be a part of the written english language developing shorthand slang to imbue short brief text communications with more context and to indicate formality or lack of it for the benefit of the reader.
I am not some purist, I don't advocate for anything radical like everyone should stop using autocorrect/word suggestion. I don't use autocorrect at all myself but that is just a personal thing because I find it especially annoying when computers try to guess what I am thinking, but I do think it is worth considering how we can breathe more life back into the medium of brief text messages as despite how people often claim it is fundamentally inhuman, nothing could be farther from the truth.
We let the medium of short written english language become inhuman by applying rigid conceptions of language to an evolving thing, we tried to police the creativity instead of listen to it and these are the natural consequences.
I think one very effective solution is emojis but again there is the insane choice to structure emojis as a communication system where you have no idea what the symbol you are sending will look like to the person seeing the symbol on the other end. It is insane, and it undermines the ability to enrich short bits of text with emojis to convey emotion and nuance unless everybody in a conversation is part of the same corporate silo (and what invisible distorting impact does that then have on us...?).
4 day week. 6 hours a day. Including paid 1 hour lunch as productive as we are now vs when 9-5x5 was first established.
Given how much efficiencies we have gained, shouldn't we all be working much, much less? Like maybe one or two days a week, and just a few hours? Where did all the efficiency gains go, other than into the pockets of billionaires?
We are in a cult of scarcity, the foundations of the globalized late stage capitalist world rely on there never being enough for everyone.
When there is enough for everyone, that is considered a fail state of capitalism and unless violence successfully forces scarcity back into the system capitalism must move on to a new realm of scarcity or risk extinction.
The thing is, our captains of industry and finance are so fucking hard for infinite growth that we’ll never see a reduction of work hours due to the efficiency, because the efficiency gains are going to be dumped straight into increasing profit.
The only way we’re getting paid the same to work less hours is if we start hunting those people down.
They don't talk about the Epstein Files enough, either.
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Yeah, considering how much more efficiency we've gained, we should all be working much, much, much less.
And not just the obscenely rich parasitic class of billionaires like fElon who supposedly do "work" running/ruining companies like xitter and Tesla, etc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
In economics, the Jevons paradox(/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological advancementsmake a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application); however, as the cost of using the resource drops, if demand is highly price elastic, this results in overall demand increasing, causing total resource consumption to rise.[1][2][3][4] Governments have typically expected efficiency gains to lower resource consumption, rather than anticipating possible increases due to the Jevons paradox.[5]
But how does line keep going up then???
Too many people are class traitors and useful idiots
When I was a kid, America was often contrasted against Britain in that they were aristocrats and nobles who would run roughshod over their people, but American democracy would lead people to the light.
Obviously that is a steaming pile of poopaganda, but as things develop I start to realize that it's actually correct, it just only applies to one side, in that the "running roughshod" part has always been the case, and any laws made that supported the rights of workers were in place only as long as it took the capitalistocrats to lobby them back to nothingness, sometimes even worse than before.
I often think of that when conversations are held about logical, productive changes to the current way work is done.
Wherever there is talk of a 25-hour week, or a four day week, or any other measure that would improve quality of life while allowing work to get done as well - or sometimes better - this conversation quickly turns to how much less money these people would have to make and how the total number of hours of work per week would have to be delivered anyway.
It feels like somewhere there is an American capitalist with an uncut ruby the size of a cherry on their pinky and a freshly laundered wig of tight white curls raging at the perception that somehow they are being robbed of their due by this subhuman mass of parasites who are unwilling to meet the expectations of someone who could never meet those expectations themselves, and fully believe that obscene wealth and power are their right.
Anywho, I believe that the benefit that would come from normalizing 5-hour work days with a minimum wage of $20/hr is vastly underrated, and the resistance to that comes only from people at the absolute pinnacle of wealth, who are petrified that their influence and power might erode even a little bit, because they have not only seen what happens to people whose influence and power erodes, they have destroyed those people for their own gain. /rant
Today is Labor Day and I volunteered to work so I can take tomorrow off for doctor stuff.
I probably don't need the WHOLE day, but if I'm going to get poked and stuff, might as well.
Jacobin writers must have the nice life of not being a debt slave.
Ok, crab in bucket. Way to completely miss the point.
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