My next update has to do with something Karl Marx taught us about early on in the first volume of
Capital. He has a long discussion of the length of the working day. And in that he says... and
remember this is written back in the middle of the 19th Century. He says that in capitalism,
there's an endless struggle between the employer and the employee. The employer wants the employee
to work for the longest number of hours possible for the lowest pay that the employer can get away
with giving out as a wage. The employer is always pressing down the wage or
lengthening the working day or both. If you know something about the history of capitalism
everywhere in the world, it is always this. When it first comes to a country or a region,
the working day is 14-16 hours long. Struggle, usually lasting decades, is needed by working
people to reduce the length of the working day down to what's the convention in the world today:
40 hours a week, eight hours each of five days. But it took long time to get it down to that.
But the struggle never stops. That was Marx's point, and so here's what happened. Very quickly,
employers responded, 'Okay, if the working day is eight hours, let me tell you John (the employee).
We need you to stick around for an extra half hour, and believe me, you better do as we ask you
to. Otherwise, you know we might have to let you go for somebody who won't object if we tell them
hey we need you today or maybe even tomorrow for an extra half hour, an extra hour or something.'
Well, to make a long story short, that was done until workers pushed back, and in the
Great Depression (in 1938 to be precise), they passed the Fair Labor Standards Act
under President Roosevelt and that specified something interesting:
you cannot make a worker work beyond 40 hours. And if you can
get the worker to agree to work beyond 40 hours, you must pay that worker time and a half,
50 percent more, for every hour after 40 compared to whatever the going rate is
for the first 40. And that had a lot to do with creating the so-called middle class in the United
States in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Workers who were required to work longer
had to be paid time and a half. And there were two ideas behind that. Not only do you pay workers
more if you ask more of them, but there's a bit of a penalty for the employer. If you're
going to hire a worker and make him or her work beyond 40, you're going to pay 50 percent more
than if you don't do that and hire another worker. In other words, time and a half doesn't only help
the worker who does over time, but it creates more jobs as employers prefer often to hire someone
at regular pay rather than make someone work overtime at regular play plus 50 percent.
But then, of course, the employers never gave up, just like Marx told us. So, starting already in
the post-war period, they began to say, 'Well, there should be some exemptions,
some workers do specialized work: administrative work, executive work, professional work, and they
shouldn't be because we need them extra.' And this was one the business community got together,
bought enough Republicans and Democrats mostly for sale most of the time and got the law changed to
the point where today more than half of full-time workers in this country work more than 40 hours
and don't get paid time and a half because they use the exemptions as they've been worked out
over the years. There's a wonderful article by one of those capitalists who is not afraid
of talking about how the system really works: Nick Hanauer by name in Time Magazine of April 21. He
talks about the scandal of the overtime struggle and here's an irony you ought to think about.
The Department of Labor could change the rules. It's only a matter of the rules.
You don't need the Congress. You don't need the Senate. Mr. Biden could tomorrow
reinstate time and a half for everybody over 40 no matter what work he or she does. That would be
reasonable. A good program to create better jobs. A good program to pay workers what they ought to
be paid if they work extra, but Mr. Biden and his labor department aren't even talking about it,
let alone doing it. So the struggle. It's called the class struggle. That's what Marx called it.
Sounds like a good idea. That class struggle never stops. Pay as little as possible. Get as many
hours out of those workers as you can squeeze. Not the health of the worker mental or physical,
not the well-being of the communities those workers are part of. That's not the issue.
It's squeezing the extra profit. That's the name of the game. That's how the system works.