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The Almighty Buck IT

Amazon Is Testing a 30-Hour, 75% Salary Workweek (washingtonpost.com) 193

Posted by msmash from the work-life dept.
Amazon is planning a pilot program in which a select group of workers will need to work for 30 hours a week, instead of the usual 40 to 70 hours, and make 75 percent of the salary + benefits (alternate source). From the report:Currently, the pilot program will be small, consisting of a few dozen people. These teams will work on tech products within the human resources division of the company, working Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with additional flex hours. Their salaries will be lower than 40-hour workers, but they will have the option to transition to full-time if they choose. Team members will be hired from inside and outside the company. As of now, Amazon does not have plans to alter the 40-hour workweek on a companywide level, the spokesman said.
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Amazon Is Testing a 30-Hour, 75% Salary Workweek More

Amazon Is Testing a 30-Hour, 75% Salary Workweek

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  • This is the wrong answer (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    They should be trying out "30 hours a week, 100% of the salary and benefits."

    I thought Bezos idolized the sci fi future when no one would have to work?

    • They are. As soon at they determine that 40 hour workweeks are unproductive/not required, they will phase those out and everyone working 30 hours will be at 100% salary and benefits. It's merely coincidental that 100% salary happens to have the same value at 75% of what 40 hour workers used to get paid.

      • Amazon exec looks at people working 70 hours a week and getting paid for 40..... twirls his Snidely Whiplash mustache, and says "I wonder how I can save even more....... AH-HA! I'll reduce their "hours" to 30!!!"

    • No no, he ideolizes the future where Bezos doesn't have to work, and where he's the rule of a Metropolis like dystopia.

    • Apparently Bezos idolized that other future, where people work part time and get part benefits.

    • Or do what is common in Europe, 35 hour work week with 100% salary and benefits and six weeks paid vacation.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jrumney ( 197329 )
      If they can get away with paying 75%, why wouldn't they? My wife negotiated reduced hours after our first child was born, and found that she was doing about the same amount of work, as she had more energy for work overall and felt social pressure to demonstrate that she wasn't a slacker for working part time. The company got a good deal out of, as no doubt will Amazon with this experiment. Probably they'll see the good results and roll this out to everybody, at which point the social pressure aspect will
  • I was the head IT manager at a 200 person company and for budget and workload reasons I worked salary 25 hours for 50% pay. I also own a computer repair store that's open for 26 hours so that worked nicely but if I was married with kids or had a side job like ebay resale, it'd be great. I'd say it worked perfectly and if I had to go in when I wasn't scheduled to work, it wasn't midnight, it was more like 3:00 PM.
    • You managed to get full benefits working 25 hours a week? That's a pretty sweet deal. I was just going to comment something very similar, if you're doing something like trying to go slowly into business for yourself, this option would be soooo helpful.

  • Well this is an interesting spin.... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Alternative title: Amazon offers 30-hr/week employees benefits. Cause, reducing them to 30 hrs and paying less isn't some kind of amazing benevolent thing. The only mildly special thing is offering benefits.

  • 40 hour week is a myth (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Art Challenor ( 2621733 ) on Friday August 26, 2016 @03:28PM (#52776973)
    I'd go for this in a heartbeat, except that the 40 hour work week is a myth at Amazon (and most large US companies for exempt employees). I suspect that 30hrs would become just a couple of hours less than the full time (60-80 hour) employees for 75% salary. If it was really 30 hours, you could work 30 at Amazon, 30 at Microsoft and get 150% of your salary for working the same number of hours as "full time".

    • You know, it's not a myth. It just requires discipline, and working for a company that doesn't suck. I've managed it for the 28 years since my first child was born. I just decided to start working normal hours. Since I got as much done as when I worked 60+ hours, no one seemed to care.

      Is this is really true for most large US companies? What's your definition of large? I've worked for companies with several $100 million in annual revenue, is that too small too count? Maybe you should avoid really large

      • Re:40 hour week is a myth (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Art Challenor ( 2621733 ) on Friday August 26, 2016 @04:35PM (#52777379)

        Since I got as much done as when I worked 60+ hours, no one seemed to care.

        All these comments are valid. I suspect that people would get as much done in a solid 30 hours of working than the do in 80 hours of burnout. There was time (70's 80's) where, because of striking coal miners causing power shortages, UK industries were forced to a 3-day work week. IIRC productivity in those 3 days was about 90% of the 5-day week. Whether that would have been sustainable we'll never know because once the strike was settled the week went back to 5 days.

    • > (and most large US companies for exempt employees).

      Most??

      1. Citation
      2. Your sample size is too small.

      Currently I work for a Fortune 50 company (we have over 100,00 employees) doing WebGL / UI work and the 40 hour week is definitely adhered to.

      As I've climbed the "corporate ladder" it really varies from company to company. Some worked you to the bone with ~70 hours whiles others only worked you 35+ hours.

      The only trend I've noticed is the East coast vs West coast thing. East coast definitely tries no

    • If it was really 30 hours, you could work 30 at Amazon, 30 at Microsoft and get 150% of your salary for working the same number of hours as "full time".

      You could, OR you could work 30 hours per week, get 75% of your salary and enjoy your free time!

  • Sticking to the caps? (Score:3)

    by DoofusOfDeath ( 636671 ) on Friday August 26, 2016 @03:28PM (#52776975)

    I've heard that Amazon.com is a sweatshop.

    If "40 hours/week" workers work much more than that, wouldn't we expect the same for "30 hours/week" workers?

    • workers will need to work for 30 hours a week, instead of the usual 40 to 70 hours,

      It's right there in the first sentence. They acknowledge that people work more than 40 hours a week, and this program aims to experiment what happens if they only make people work 30 hours a week. Of course, if you usually work 60 hours a week, you're probably used to doing 10+ hour days, and you could easily complete the 30 hours of working in 3 days. 3 Days on and 4 days off would be a pretty nice schedule. I would probab

  • We Know (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26, 2016 @03:28PM (#52776979)

    This was already posted last week:

    https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]

    • This was already posted last week:

      https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]

      Slashdot is a news duplication service for people like me who are usually too busy to look at the news every single day and miss important stories like this. Once I start my 30 hour workweek, I can stop subscribing to Slashdot's news duplication service.

  • Any employee taking this option is a fool. They would be voluntarily giving up the (sometimes meager) benefits of being defined as a full time employee under US law. Great for Amazon, terrible for the employee.

    • Re:Not until the laws are changed (Score:5, Informative)

      by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Friday August 26, 2016 @03:37PM (#52777055) Homepage Journal

      Any employee taking this option is a fool. They would be voluntarily giving up the (sometimes meager) benefits of being defined as a full time employee under US law. Great for Amazon, terrible for the employee.

      Under 32 hours and the law would say no benefits are required. Amazon is actually giving them a straight ratio of benefits instead of dropping them to part-time. It's the opposite of a dickish move, as far as the law is concerned (and Amazon is showing that the law need not dictate when businesses are competing for employees).

      There are probably many parents who will jump at this kind of opportunity (plus others who want to start a business, do more volunteering, or just have more leisure time).

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Hylandr ( 813770 )

        Amazon is actually giving them a straight ratio of benefits instead of dropping them to part-time.

        For now.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Under 32 hours and the law would say no benefits are required.

        That's not true. You're required to pay for health insurance for anyone working 30 hours or more. Similarly, you're not allowed to restrict 401k for any employer working more than 1,000 hours per year (a little over 19 hours per week).

        They could cut the number of sick days or vacation days offered, but that's probably roughly the maximum extent to which they could reduce benefits other than salary.

        • They could cut the number of sick days or vacation days offered, but that's probably roughly the maximum extent to which they could reduce benefits other than salary.

          That would make the entire thing incredibly pointless, though, because then they'd be offering the same amount of work for less money.

  • Maybe they figure they can get by with 75% of the hours if they avoid having people do the same thing over and over again [slashdot.org]. You know, since they aren't a tech-news aggregator, where that sort of thing is apparently necessary.

  • ADP threatened some staff with this about a decade ago or face layoffs. We took the layoffs because fuck working for 75% of our already meager wages

  • If they're going to do this... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Friday August 26, 2016 @03:39PM (#52777065)
    How about making it 32 hours a week for 80% pay, and have them work Mon-Thu? Four 8-hour workdays a week would be much better than five 6-hour workdays....

    • Here in Sweden it's very common for people to work 80% weeks, but usually not in exclusive teams, most people choose to work every day of the week.

    • From the summary...

      working Monday through Thursday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., with additional flex hours.

      • Unfortunately the summary describes a 16 hour week + "additional flexible hours". Beyond that, the only clue is "30 hours per week", which is evenly divisible by five days (or six), but not four.

        Hence my comment....

        Personally, I've been looking forward to the four day work-week for a long time. Last time we shortened the workweek (from six days per to five) was before my father was born....

    • Re:If they're going to do this... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by bluefoxlucid ( 723572 ) on Friday August 26, 2016 @04:11PM (#52777257) Homepage Journal

      Interesting (to me): One of the side-effects of my Universal Social Security proposal is excess demand--a labor shortage. The fix is re-defining full-time working hours as 26-32 hours per week, meaning everyone gets dropped to 4-day work weeks. This happens because it's a trillion dollars cheaper than current strategy.

      In theory, with or without salary adjustment, dropping everyone's work time by 20% decreases their share of labor pay. That is to say: to make 1,000 things takes 4 people, or it takes 5 people each working 80% as much. As long as your entire economy changes at this ratio and wages don't change relative to each other (they can increase, decrease, or stay the same, but all by the same percentage), whatever salary you end up with is suddenly only capable of buying 80% as much.

      In practice, I'm pretty sure we have a lot of part-time workers (I've looked this up before) and a lot of slack time. On one hand, part-time workers would experience no change, so neither their income nor the influence they have on price would change: the stuff they make wouldn't become any more expensive. On the other, many people would work the same amount and spend their work slack-time as leisure-in-earnest instead of non-productive office hours: instead of being restricted by the facade of office hours, you'd be outside work enjoying the time you're spending doing nothing useful.

      That's actually a bigger problem. It means cutting hours without a salary cut raises the price of certain goods for part-time workers, but not for office workers; while cutting hours with a salary cut raises the price of certain goods for full-time workers, but not part-timers. The first case is regressive onto the poorer, and benefits the middle-classes; the second is harder on the middle-classes, and doesn't directly-benefit the poor. The second case is arguably better, since cutting working time in this way definitely cuts buying power in total, so someone has to get poorer, and you've restricted how much that happens and to who; but it has obvious undesirable issues.

      On the other hand, the end result would probably be about break-even for the middle classes in total (when you include the Universal Social Security benefit), plus a 3-day weekend every week, so ... eh?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by NotAPK ( 4529127 )

        Stop worrying about the middle class, the USA doesn't have one any more [cbsnews.com]!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by khallow ( 566160 )

        Interesting (to me): One of the side-effects of my Universal Social Security proposal is excess demand--a labor shortage. The fix is re-defining full-time working hours as 26-32 hours per week, meaning everyone gets dropped to 4-day work weeks. This happens because it's a trillion dollars cheaper than current strategy.

        Because creating further artificial labor scarcity via work week restrictions will fix a labor scarcity problem. I have an alternative solution here. Get rid of the work week restrictions altogether as well as many other regulatory encumbrances on the labor market. Then the people who want to work 80 hours a week or whatever can do so and your labor shortage can be fixed as well as it'll ever be.

        • Because creating further artificial labor scarcity via work week restrictions will fix a labor scarcity problem.

          Labor restrictions restrict productivity, raising prices and reducing what people buy, thus reducing employment. In short: you have less to barter with, therefor there is less you can barter for, therefor somebody who produces something will find nobody can pay them for the product, and so he becomes unemployed.

          Imagine you spend 10% of your income on food, 4% on clothing, 2% on personal care, 30% on housing, 18% on transportation, and 36% on entertainment and other non-essential spending. Call it by d

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by khallow ( 566160 )

            That's the point. You create a situation where people have more money to spend than there are workers to supply, and then you boost the labor expense of anything they want to buy by restricting labor hours. Suddenly everything becomes more expensive, but nobody has any more money; the capacity to buy products beyond what our labor force can supply goes away, because we're suddenly all poorer.

            And that leads to an obvious question. Why would we want to make everyone poorer?

            The whole point of any sort of universal basic income is to make most people less poor. Yet here, you state your fix makes all people poorer. So that sounds to me like we should do the opposite of work week restrictions and restrict them less rather than more.

            • Why would we want to make everyone poorer?

              Because a market with negative unemployment can't sustain itself, and rapidly destabilizes and then collapses. It's the same question as "why do we vaccinate against a fatal disease if the vaccine makes you ill for a day or two?"

              The whole point of any sort of universal basic income is to make most people less poor. Yet here, you state your fix makes all people poorer.

              Make all people poorer AFTER IMPLEMENTING A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME. That means richer than X, less-rich than X+n. You've slipped in a sneaky logical proposition to suggest poorer than X (the starting condition), which is a deceptive argument (lying).

              Besides that, the whole p

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by khallow ( 566160 )

                Because a market with negative unemployment can't sustain itself, and rapidly destabilizes and then collapses.

                Ok, what is a real world example of this? Because I find it hard to believe that it can even happen much have such a negative effect.

                • In the real world, it's been noted that employment above a certain threshold is unstable. In the United States, Full Employment is usually defined as 95%, meaning our current 4.9% unemployment is higher than full employment; some people speculate we'd be okay as low as 4%, and the 4.9% thing is incorrect anyway (UE4 is 5.6%, which includes people who would work but have given up because they think there aren't jobs for them; UE5 and UE6 include people who would like to work, but can't because their situat

                  • Re: (Score:2)

                    by khallow ( 566160 )

                    In the real world, it's been noted that employment above a certain threshold is unstable. In the United States, Full Employment is usually defined as 95%, meaning our current 4.9% unemployment is higher than full employment; some people speculate we'd be okay as low as 4%, and the 4.9% thing is incorrect anyway (UE4 is 5.6%, which includes people who would work but have given up because they think there aren't jobs for them; UE5 and UE6 include people who would like to work, but can't because their situation precludes employment on its own).

                    In the real world, we can look at this instability. One thing that is quickly noticed is that it just isn't that unstable. Moving on:

                    To be fair, economists speculate low unemployment causes inflation. That is to say: at low unemployment rates, a business's strategic advantage for hiring an employee exceeds the cost of market wages, and so businesses pay more. If you cause high employment by providing a ton of extra spendable income, then businesses can raise prices, capture that income, and pay it as higher wages. The benefit vanishes, debts shrink, and savings go away. Such inflation also has all of the other destabilizing effects of inflation; and with a lot of people's savings held in 401(k) markets (which inflate right along with inflation) and increased income allowing further increased spending, you can easily get a hyperinflation effect, followed by a money shortage, followed by extreme unemployment.

                    We have never seen this hyperinflation effect from low unemployment. We have seen plenty of cases of hyperinflation from the currency issuer printing vast amounts of money often to support extravagant entitlement programs.

                    Remember when Zimbabwe issued a 100-trillion-dollar bill?

                    Case in point. Zimbabwe prints a ton of money and gets hyperinflation. This is despite having an insane unemployment rate somewhere in the high double digits

                    • We have never seen this hyperinflation effect from low unemployment

                      When have you seen low unemployment? Have you ever seen 1% unemployment or a labor shortage in full?

                      This is probably the worst misattribution I've ever heard for the real estate crisis of 2007-2008. There wasn't a recession because employment was a little high.

                      Your response here is like responding to the claim that cyanide will kill you as quickly as a stopped heart by pointing out that people who die from heart attacks aren't poisoned by cyanide.

                      I said you get a minor recession, like in 2008. There would be a recession. It would look like the one in 2008. It would have a different cause. What the hell is wrong with you?

                      Why the people who work, of course. In a sane world, there would be more employment followed by immigration, global trade, and automation to leverage the people who are already working.

                      Immigration is a form of localized p

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      How about 32 hours a week for 100% pay and a nice productivity boost? Every hour beyond about 35 max is offset by reduced productivity in most clerical positions.

    • I'm not sure I agree.. though it would be good if it were up to the employee how to do it (with input from the manager to make sure their whole team was staffed enough at any time). Though I'd probably toggle between the two sporadically. I already often take a day off in the middle of the week instead of making it a 3 day weekend. It seems more of an actual vacation day to me somehow.

  • i have neighbors who go to work early and come home late and leave their kids in after school and have a babysitter to drop them off at school and pick them up from after school

    if this is really 10-2 without any unofficial over time it's a great deal for parents of school age kids before they are old enough to walk by themselves

    • What's with the whole "great for parents" thing---it's come up a lot? Its great for adults with no kids too. You work less, still earn plenty and have more time to have a life and actually derive enjoyment from the money you earn. You don't need kids to enjoy working less.

  • All my employment contracts for IT support prohibits me from working 40 hours per week. I haven't worked overtime in over a decade.

    • I decided to take a walk on the wild side and stayed one minute over 40 hours on a Friday. It was amazing how productive those 60 seconds were.

      I heard the company's stock price doubled on Monday. I may do it again sometime. It felt invigorating.

      • It was amazing how productive those 60 seconds were.

        Under the rules of my employment contracts, you would have been terminated.

  • I know someone who was in line for a ~20% raise and, instead of taking it, changed to a 4-day week at the same pay (and with the samebenefits), effectively working at the same hourly rate as they would have gotten with the raise. I'd do that in a second if I could.

  • So I'm wondering if this is 30 hours full time + 138 hours where you're expected to be "on call" (which, at Amazon, seems to mean you should expect to be regularly doing an extra 20-30 hours each week without additional compensation).

  • I posted about this in the duplicate story from last week - the only difference is now the pay is 75% with full benefits.

    This would be a good option for a narrow set of working parents like me. My wife and I both work; she has an awful commute and a workplace that pays well but has no flexible hours (even for professional positions.) I have a flexible job, but not enough so I can work from home. So when my oldest kid starts kindergarten this fall, I'm still home when he's ready to get on the bus for school,

  • I have a very strong sense that this is so that they can hire more "family oriented people" (to get their count of women up), still make them work 50 hours a week, and still pay them less, but for not working 80 hours a week.

  • "We need to move some of staff to part time to save money"

    "Let's brand it as a new pilot program."

    "fucking brilliant"

  • Provided we still get full-time benefits, I like this idea a lot. A lot lot. I would want to work 3 ten hour 2nd shift days, that would give me 4 days off and also I would have the daytimes to do whatever I want. It would be a great schedule for advancing your schooling with a postgraduate degree.

  • So how does that work? All the "40" hour people get lumped being on-call more often?

    "Sir, everyone took the guaranteed 30 hour offer. We have no one that can take the on-call phones anymore."

  • Kellogg had a 30-hour work week in 1930s (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RichPowers ( 998637 ) on Friday August 26, 2016 @05:05PM (#52777537)

    There's an interesting book called Kellogg's Six Hour Day by Hunnicutt. Here's the synopsis:

    "Kellogg's six-hour day was the pinnacle of a hundred-year process that cut working time virtually in half. Kellogg Management, propelled by a vision of Liberation Capitalism, insisted that six hours would revolutionize society by shifting the balance of time from work to leisure--from economic concerns to the challenge of freedom."

    The employees grandfathered into the 30-hour week stayed on it until they retired in the 1980s. A 30-hour week gave employees more time for clubs, gardening, sports, family, etc. When you think about how wealthy we are in, say, energetic terms (useful work extracted from an ox vs cubic meter of natural gas), it's amazing how much time and capital we spend on destructive bullshit like sitting in traffic or paying people to do our taxes because the system is too complicated (we're paying a tax on paying taxes ffs). Just unbelievable how needlessly dumb the world is in light of automation, nuclear power, blah, blah, blah.

    The ancient Greeks viewed labor as a necessary evil that got in the way of more enlightened pursuits [1]. This is not to say they condoned laziness, but TPS reports, patent lawsuits, and $ModernBullshit are not the highest forms of civilization. Why we focus on metrics like GDP -- which in no way accounts for quality, or whether the "work" should even be done -- is absolutely beyond me. In the end, complex, industrial civilization is still relatively new compared to the species' time on the planet, so we're still trying to figure this out.

    [1] = https://www.jstor.org/stable/6... [jstor.org]

    • Re:Kellogg had a 30-hour work week in 1930s (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Beorytis ( 1014777 ) on Friday August 26, 2016 @05:21PM (#52777609)

      A few years later, there was even a bill to establish a 30-hour workweek that made it through Congress: http://www.alternet.org/labor/... [alternet.org]

      • Thanks for sharing. Just from reading about that era, I picked up vibes that shortening the work week was taken seriously by a lot of eminent people, but had no idea about that bill.

        One of the reasons I enjoy studying history is that you see lots of sensible ideas and movements that were somehow lost or abandoned along the way. For example, Colonial America was probably the most literate society in history up to that point, and without a massive education bureaucracy. That's interesting to me -- how can we

  • Google does something like this, on a selective basis.

    I think it started as something done only for special cases, but I know a few people who arranged it. One woman I know works three days per week instead of five, for 60% of her normal salary. She has also taken a large chunk of her 18-week maternity leave and uses it one day per week, so she actually works two days per week but gets paid for three, until the maternity leave runs out. Her husband has arranged a similar structure with his employer (not G

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