[Newfie]

In the USA you are a slave not because you can't survive on 35 hours pay, you can't afford the health insurance.

I took a sabbatical last summer, had to pay health insurance out of pocket,

$2,450/month. No per existing conditions, me, wife, and daughter.

That is slavery in the USA.

[Keith_McClary]

when enough people are dumped from employer provided plans, and paying their fine, they will demand the government provide "real" insurance.

lol

Wow...you are way more cynical then I am. Are you suggesting the democrats intentionally designed Obamacare to be so crappy that it will (a) destroy existing employer-funded healthcare and (b) people stuck with Obamacare will then demand a decent healthcare system and force the goverment to insititute a NHS?

In Canada there is widespread suspicion that right wing governments are trying to destroy public healthcare by cuts, mismanagement and outsourcing to private clinics.

[Lore]

In the USA you are a slave not because you can't survive on 35 hours pay, you can't afford the health insurance.

I took a sabbatical last summer, had to pay health insurance out of pocket,

$2,450/month. No per existing conditions, me, wife, and daughter.

That is slavery in the USA.

Or slave to the company store.

All those WalMart employees that have to work this Thanksgiving in a parttime sales associate job, no insurance, with the only benefit for abandoning their families a 10% discount coupon for purchases at the store. Good only for Dec 6-7, excluding groceries. No overtime allowed and subject to dismissal for working a minute beyond your scheduled time.

[cephalotus]

In the USA you are a slave not because you can't survive on 35 hours pay, you can't afford the health insurance.

I took a sabbatical last summer, had to pay health insurance out of pocket,

$2,450/month. No per existing conditions, me, wife, and daughter.

That is slavery in the USA.

I wouldn't be able to pay that much over an extended period.

I pay a lot into the system now (more than 300€/month myself and more than 300€/month from my employer and I have not been sick for years), but the advantage is that with just a little work and little payments the whole family would still be insured. Even the long term unemployed that get benefits would have health insurance...
You have to play to the rules of your system, what does work here will not work over there and vice versa.

You can also buy into the "private" health care system, if you are not employed or earn lots of money. They offer you very low rates if you are young and healthy, but this can quickly get super expensive, especially when you start to need it.

best regards.

[Newfie]

Then, in the USA, you would be challenged with giving up your high pay full time job.

Many folks here take lesser jobs simply because they provide benefits.

[Tanada]

As a long term unemployed person I can tell you that around here, in the Great Lake States, very few positions are being offered that exceed the 30 hour cut off for mandatory health insurance. Nearly all jobs posted are 28 hours per week with no hope of ever being 40 hour per week jobs. The few 40 hour per week jobs I see posted are one way or another Government jobs and unless you are a veteran or some other special classification it is hard to get one of those. I fully support the idea of Veterans who voluntarily risked life and limb for my freedom getting first dibs on government jobs, but in Ohio double dipping is rampant in the Toledo area. They mention it every election cycle on the radio, the Mayor of Toledo is a retired Fire Chief drawing his full retirement benefit plus his full benefit as Mayor. The same thing goes on in many departments of city and local government, a senior executive 'retires' and starts drawing benefits, then is hired back in to replace themselves on the payroll by other senior executives who have already managed the same maneuver. This not only gives them a double income draining government coffers, it keeps them in their job for life preventing anyone from moving up in the ranks and making openings at the bottom for younger employees to get into Government service. For what a double dipper gets paid for getting their old job back while retired you could hire two fresh faced and eager young fire fighters, police officers or paramedics. This system is broken in a very bad way. If you drive around the country roads off of the main drag you will discover closed or missing bridges due to infrastructure decay all over Michigan and Ohio. I really thought a lot of this stuff would get fixed under the big stimulus spending that was dumped into projects for the last five years, but instead of repairing or replacing bridges on tertiary roads they spent it all to put up big electronic display boards on I-75 to tell you if you were in a traffic jam or not. All those so called Improvements soak up a lot of money for retrofitting into the highways with new infrastructure including traffic camera's and display boards and computer networks to operate them, power supplies to operate them and maintenance crews to keep them in working order. But they are flashy and politically desirable because massive numbers of commuters see them every day and people living further from the express ways learn routes to avoid the missing or closed infrastructure segments. A few years of avoiding a certain route and you don't even realize after a while that you are traveling a round about fashion because of bad infrastructure.

[Timo]

As a long term unemployed person I can tell you that around here, in the Great Lake States, very few positions are being offered that exceed the 30 hour cut off for mandatory health insurance. Nearly all jobs posted are 28 hours per week with no hope of ever being 40 hour per week jobs. The few 40 hour per week jobs I see posted are one way or another Government jobs and unless you are a veteran or some other special classification it is hard to get one of those. I fully support the idea of Veterans who voluntarily risked life and limb for my freedom getting first dibs on government jobs, but in Ohio double dipping is rampant in the Toledo area. They mention it every election cycle on the radio, the Mayor of Toledo is a retired Fire Chief drawing his full retirement benefit plus his full benefit as Mayor. The same thing goes on in many departments of city and local government, a senior executive 'retires' and starts drawing benefits, then is hired back in to replace themselves on the payroll by other senior executives who have already managed the same maneuver. This not only gives them a double income draining government coffers, it keeps them in their job for life preventing anyone from moving up in the ranks and making openings at the bottom for younger employees to get into Government service. For what a double dipper gets paid for getting their old job back while retired you could hire two fresh faced and eager young fire fighters, police officers or paramedics. This system is broken in a very bad way. If you drive around the country roads off of the main drag you will discover closed or missing bridges due to infrastructure decay all over Michigan and Ohio. I really thought a lot of this stuff would get fixed under the big stimulus spending that was dumped into projects for the last five years, but instead of repairing or replacing bridges on tertiary roads they spent it all to put up big electronic display boards on I-75 to tell you if you were in a traffic jam or not. All those so called Improvements soak up a lot of money for retrofitting into the highways with new infrastructure including traffic camera's and display boards and computer networks to operate them, power supplies to operate them and maintenance crews to keep them in working order. But they are flashy and politically desirable because massive numbers of commuters see them every day and people living further from the express ways learn routes to avoid the missing or closed infrastructure segments. A few years of avoiding a certain route and you don't even realize after a while that you are traveling a round about fashion because of bad infrastructure.

Tanada, you nailed it! I work in a capacity to witness federal transportation dollars being divied out to the States to be further divied out to the major metro areas to be further divied out amongst individual road improvement projects. The most frustrating thing is witnessing the total disconnect between engineers and regular human beings. Engineers think verry differently than regular people, and what makes sense to ordinary folk is sacriledge to an engineer because it either makes too much sense, or it's not in their federally mandated professional book of standards. As an example, for some reason, it costs less to build a seperate bridge to accomodate pedestrians over our interstate highway than it costs to replace that bridge with a wider span to accomodate a sidewalk along either side. The vehicle bridge is being replaced, anyway, but designing it to include non-motorized traffic is heresy, and therefore it shall not be done! In some perverse sense, i actually consider engineers to be a collective of overshoot predators. They mandate parking lots to accomodate the 1000 year shopping event, which causes runoff of water, which includes the drips of antifreeze from cracked radiators, which flows into our rivers and streams, which raises the level of the flood plain, which forces the need to build higher levees, which further disconnects us from the natural world. But, that's all just the engineering requirement, and the only way to do it, so se la vie.

[Tanada]

I try not to be too hard on the Engineers, after all they are designing at the demands of their employers just like the rest of us do our jobs. In their case that employer is almost always a government at some level when were are talking about road and bridge styles of engineering. They probably have so many layers of rules that navigating the rules takes more work than the actual design process itself. It could be something as simple as a road bridge with a pedestrian path has to have extremely strong barriers between the two paths making it cheaper to just build a separate structure for the pedestrians.

[Tanada]

When one can only use the straw man is means you have no argument or no refuting the logic. It is like the person who says raise the minimum wage to $1 million every time the workers dare to ask for 50 cents. It is mindless rytoric and nothing more.


Those with no solutions can spout nonsense all they want but the Math doesn't lie.

30 million 40 hour jobs becomes 34.28 million 35 hour jobs. That is a gain 4,280,000 jobs just by changing this one law.


The MATH doesn't lie.

Let us look at the math from a different point of view. Each employee has a fixed administrative cost to employ, even if they only work 1 hour a week. There is the human resources paperwork to do, the payroll calculations to do, taxes to be deducted and sent to the different levels of government and so on. For easy math let us say all of your employees are perfect at attending to their work and you pay them $20.00 per hour for their labor. At 40 hours per week each employee grosses $800.00. Now make the law change putting the work week at 35 hours instead. The Employees each now gross $700.00 per week and as a result they have less take home pay and pay less in taxes and other deductions to different levels of the Government. Assuming they were all angelic employees who did useful work for all 40 hours per week you now need to hire 1 new employee for every 7 existing employees. Sounds great except the employees you already have are unhappy about the income cut so they might not be working as hard as they were before. At the same time all those new employees mean your human resource expenses just went up a chunk, 13% being about what your increase in administrative costs for your employee pool will go up. Also around here many employees accrue vacation time based on the number of hours they work, 2 hours vacation for every 40 worked is fairly common. That mean you also just cut the employees vacation time by 13% per year.

This same argument actually took place in the USA in the 1930's. In 1932 Senator Hugo Black introduced the 30 hour work week bill and got it passed in the Senate in April 1933. It died in the House but eventually a form of it passed in 1938 setting the regular work week at 40 hours instead of 30. Now today we are living under the Affordable Care Act that sets the threshold for companies to supply health insurance at 30 hours per week. In response many 40 hour per week positions have been converted to 28 hour per week positions. Those of us who based our futures on 40 hours per week are not particularly happy about this effect.

[Newfie]

Timo,

Your suffering from an over exposure to CIVIL engineers, who are (after all) just guys who wanted to be Electrical but couldn't pass muster!

As an Electrical, in transit, I'll bet you and I could spend more than a few hours swapping horror stories.

One of my favorite quips, which has gained some steam around the office is, "We don't deal in logic, we deal in transit."

[Newfie]

Tanda,

Just a quickie as I'm at work. And I am a blessed person, part time with full time benefits! Still I bitch.

Anyway, this all presumes that we are actually doing something useful. My strong argument is that the vast majority of us (self included - as you note almost all Engineers are on the government dole - workfare) are NOT doing useful work.

My favorite targets are medical insurance clerks and TSA (Thousands Standing Around) but you can expand the list to include nearly all of us.

Almost our entire "service' industry is made of folks doing no useful work. Most of our military, not useful. Government employment: city, state, federal - 80% waste.

A few years ago I did some productivity studies using an industrial questionnaire. I got paid to do it. What I found was that the internal organizations were so weakly organized that the 'maintenance forces' would have gotten as much work done if they had NO management what-so-ever. I see this time and again.

In 1982 (?) I took over a maintenance organization with 5 workers. It was tough, but we got through. Last week I met a guy who I hired back then. They now have 17 folks, doing the same work, just getting by.

This whole employment thing is a scam. It is really just a way of dispersing out money that is created by a very few individuals.

We would all really be a lot better off, in the long run, if we could learn to just be OK with ourselves as we are, and not mucking things up by "doing something."

[Timo]

I feel compelled to make note of two words in one of Tanada's reply, just a couple posts above, and that is the words "human resource." Every government and sizeable company has a full-fledged department to deal with human resources. Think about that. OIl is a resource that is traded as a commodity. Gold, ditto. Silver, dirt, sulphur, water, beef, corn, basically anything that can be mined, grown or sold is considered a resource. Humans have become a resource just like any other physical resource, and the thing about human resources, along with everry other resource you can think of, is that a human resource is disposable and replaceable. If your oil isn't light enough, you replace it with an upgrade to sweet light crude. If your clerk isn't productive enough, that clerk can be replaced for a more productive model, just like he was a cog in a machine. As employees of Government or Company X, we're institutionally considered and treated as a replaceable commodity, and it's in everyone's best economic interests to do more with less, so humans get the squeeze for the sake of someone else's dollar. I know this is just a rant, and i have no alternatives to suggest as an improvement, but still, it pisses me off to be categorically denied any sense of human dignity by my employer, just like i was a widget.

[Newfie]

MOYERS: What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate?

ASIMOV: It's going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person
believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on.

And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.

[dsula]

"human resource."

I believe the politically correct way is to call it "human talent", nowadays.

[AgentR11]

Timo... if you don't want to be a widget, don't be. But there is a price to be paid for not being a widget.

The widget can be replaced of course. The widget can also leave and do something else without hard feelings or harm to those left behind.

A non-widget with no ethics of course could reap the benefits without the cost, but that is not something I could be.

[Newfie]

Wasn't that the meta plot of the first Matrix?

[Loki]

That mean you also just cut the employees vacation time by 13% per year.

It also means you added 5 hours to their week to do with as they please. Unpaid, of course. But I think a lot of folks would be fine with this, especially if combined with a 4 day work week.

Vacation time and employer-sponsored health insurance are likely to go the way of the pension and the passenger pigeon. Ditto for the concept of "retirement," the privilege of a small minority of the human population for a small minority of human history, not likely to be repeated.

Where I work, there is no overtime (ag exempt). There are no vacation benefits. There are no sick days. There is no health insurance. The work is seasonal, and your hours can be cut on a day's notice, or you can be laid off entirely for months at a time. And good luck with that unemployment claim (not a chance). As for unions?

A model for future America.

[vision-master]

I feel compelled to make note of two words in one of Tanada's reply, just a couple posts above, and that is the words "human resource." Every government and sizeable company has a full-fledged department to deal with human resources. Think about that. OIl is a resource that is traded as a commodity. Gold, ditto. Silver, dirt, sulphur, water, beef, corn, basically anything that can be mined, grown or sold is considered a resource. Humans have become a resource just like any other physical resource, and the thing about human resources, along with everry other resource you can think of, is that a human resource is disposable and replaceable. If your oil isn't light enough, you replace it with an upgrade to sweet light crude. If your clerk isn't productive enough, that clerk can be replaced for a more productive model, just like he was a cog in a machine. As employees of Government or Company X, we're institutionally considered and treated as a replaceable commodity, and it's in everyone's best economic interests to do more with less, so humans get the squeeze for the sake of someone else's dollar. I know this is just a rant, and i have no alternatives to suggest as an improvement, but still, it pisses me off to be categorically denied any sense of human dignity by my employer, just like i was a widget.

Human resources is one blood sucking department that needs to go.

[vision-master]

That mean you also just cut the employees vacation time by 13% per year.

It also means you added 5 hours to their week to do with as they please. Unpaid, of course. But I think a lot of folks would be fine with this, especially if combined with a 4 day work week.

Vacation time and employer-sponsored health insurance are likely to go the way of the pension and the passenger pigeon. Ditto for the concept of "retirement," the privilege of a small minority of the human population for a small minority of human history, not likely to be repeated.

Where I work, there is no overtime (ag exempt). There are no vacation benefits. There are no sick days. There is no health insurance. The work is seasonal, and your hours can be cut on a day's notice, or you can be laid off entirely for months at a time. And good luck with that unemployment claim (not a chance). As for unions?

A model for future America.

You have no future, the time will come when you will be unable to do your present work, you will have nothing. Reality will hit hard.

[AgentR11]

You have no future, the time will come when you will be unable to do your present work, you will have nothing. Reality will hit hard.

My grandfather did similar work till he was ~78. Then had a couple heart attacks, and died a couple years later relatively peacefully with no regrets.

I would account that a good, decent life and a reasonable end. Though, he didn't really like being dependent upon others for care that last year.

VM, we all enter, and leave with nothing. Its ok.