Amazon recently got some ink for its plan to roll out trial 30-hour workweeks for select technical teams. The details of these teams were described in several articles as “full benefits, 75% of the pay,” which actually makes these workers more expensive to the company than their 40-hour counterparts. What that statement I just made doesn’t take into account is the lives of these 30-hour workers and their impact on the economy at large.
First, a flashback: for four years, I worked for Amazon Local. I worked anywhere between 45 and 50 hours a week. I was a writer, endlessly cranking out descriptions of deals for local merchants. I was good at it and highly efficient. I also had time to attend weekly Toastmasters meetings, crunch numbers (I was a team leader for part of that time, responsible for reporting metrics that rolled up to my manager), and could flex my start and end times to suit my social life and gym schedule. I know that isn’t everyone’s experience of working at Amazon (or indeed, that most people’s experiences are wildly different, as a spate of articles a year or so ago made abundantly clear), but it was mine, and for the most part, it was good.
One thing I could have done without, though, was the culture of presenteeism. You were expected to be at your desk for a baseline of 45-50 hours a week, though there was nothing stipulated on paper anywhere. The operative thinking throughout the company was to give people more work than they could do in 40 hours and let them figure it out. You were also supposed to “innovate yourself out of a job,” by by figuring out how to automate or eliminate simple tasks and free up your creative human brain and other skills to solve bigger problems. This is actually a challenging issue when writing is involved, because there’s definitely an upper limit in terms of how quickly a decent piece of copy can be churned out, edited, uploaded, etc. That being said, the team did come up with a variety of ways to quicken turnaround time and eliminate errors. It’s also worth pointing out that I don’t necessarily have a problem with anyone innovating themself (or anyone else for that matter) out of a job…
…as long as everyone still has jobs at the end of the day, which admittedly, everyone won’t. I’ll even argue in another piece to be written later, that everyone doesn’t even NEED a job anymore, but like I said, that’s a piece for another day (spoiler alert: minimum income!).
Back to this 30-hour workweek thing: I like it and I think it’s pretty good. I mentioned all that stuff about my time at Amazon so that I could also mention this: when I worked there, it was an open secret/joke that I would have taken a 25% reduction in pay to work 20% less per week (pro-rated, I would have gone on to say, to reflect that I didn’t want my benefits reduced, so my salary would probably have diminished by more than 25%, because I understand that benefits are fixed costs, etc.). I say it was an open secret/joke because I said it to friends, coworkers, etc. but never to my bosses because I didn’t legitimately think it would ever get off the ground and furthermore that it might cast my loyalty or dedication (or whatever other nebulous, thoughtcrime-esque conditions for perfect worker-hood a person at Amazon might have for other Amazonians) into question. I was already outspoken enough about how much I thought capitalizm sucked (still do, for the record) to make not wanting concrete black marks against me a legitimate priority.
So imagine my surprise when, mere days after a spirited debate with a coworker at my new job about the merits of MORE time off (sparked by a radio conversation that I and my partners were forced to endure during jiu jitsu), the aforementioned Amazon articles came across my desk.
I’m not all rose-colored glasses on this 30-hour workweek thing, either. When I posited my hypothetical “25% less pay, 20% less hours” thing, I also postulated that the amount of output required for the team would remain constant. So, my argument went, if you get three other writers to each take a 25% pay cut and work 20% fewer hours, you have 4 workers each working 20% less, but with a 25% pay reduction per person. Assuming they all get paid about the same amount, this reduction would be equivalent to one FULL salary, but leaving only 80% of an actual workload to get done. Who would do that work? Well, in my simplest version of events, ONE full-time worker with benefits (though I’m sure very sensible arguments could be made that this could be a contract worker, an hourly wage worker with no benefits, outsourced, etc., but for purposed of my idea, it assumes that full-time-with-benefits workers are a desirable thing, because the capitalizt system we exist in has tied [more-or-less affordable] health insurance mainly to full-time jobs, even with Obama Care).
Going back to my hypothetical situation after that long aside: if ONE full-time-with-benefits worker were hired to do the remaining 80% job (4 days of work), you’d only need to pay them the same 75% salary that you’re paying the other 4 writers, resulting in all the same work getting done, but at a 25% salary savings.
Clearly, this is not a perfect system or solution. There are issues around the increased cost of administering these extra bodies. There’s also the question of extra desks (sort of solved by working from home and/or sharing/”hoteling” desks). Also, I know that this doesn’t work for all jobs, but for a wide variety of technical, and quota-/project-based jobs, all of these are more or less deal-with-able. The reason they’re worth dealing with is simple: jobs.
Politicians talk about job creation. The ways in which a government or company goes about creating those jobs are hotly contested and I won’t go into them here, but this plan opens the door for more workers with benefits, working towards whatever kind of lives they want to try to live and having the security that a full-time job with benefits provides. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that benefits are tied to jobs in this country and we’re in a jobless recession where large amounts of possible workers aren’t even looking for work, but if some of these 40+ hour jobs were partially freed up, we could have more people back to work, earning real wages, with a safety net, saving for retirement, and maybe feeling better and happier about their lives. And I think that’s worth money.
The Worthwhile Struggle 