As part of his Labor Day message to workers in the United States, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday re-upped his call for the establishment of a 20% cut to the workweek with no loss in pay—an idea he said is “not radical” given the enormous productivity gains over recent decades that have resulted in massive profits for corporations but scraps for employees and the working class.
“It’s time for a 32-hour workweek with no loss in pay,” Sanders wrote in a Guardian op-ed as he cited a 480% increase in worker productivity since the 40-hour workweek was first established in 1940.
“It’s time,” he continued, “that working families were able to take advantage of the increased productivity that new technologies provide so that they can enjoy more leisure time, family time, educational and cultural opportunities—and less stress.”
What about people that work in education? This is not possible to attain if kids go to school for the amount of time they currently do. Teachers, paras, custodians, IT people etc have no choice in this unless kids have less time in the classroom as well. So unless all those people get paid more to keep doing 40 while the rest gets more life back you’ll be hard pressed to find people that want to work education…like anyone wants to work education these days anyways.
Good question you raise. For elementary school make it 4 days a week, parents should have another day with their kids. For highschool, many teachers do one or two subjects which don’t necessarily have to cover all five days, they can swap out.
Even a 32-hour week won’t guarantee you’ll be off the same day as your kids. Subsidized daycare should also be a thing.
If you’re talking about the children of teachers, they’re almost assuredly going to have the same days off.
No, I’m talking about everyone else’s children. Just because they get Fridays (for example) off doesn’t mean their parents do too. They could work Tuesday-Friday.
Hire more teachers and roster them.
Next question
Your answer is so incredibly stupid it’s hilarious. Where you gonna get the magic money from? You obviously never have worked in education…some teachers are making 35k a year in America you think they wanna add more teachers? Youre fighting against a government that doesn’t help our public education system enough at all. “next question”
Your answer isn’t constructive, and your “next question” line is unnecessarily glib.
Finding good teachers is hard enough as It is.
I work in education, my district is very well funded and had over 1,400 applicants with a smidge over 800 being considered qualified and quality. We only had 82 spots to fill.
There are plenty of good teachers, shortages are due to pay and treatment.
Your last sentence supports my point though. I’m not suggesting that there’s a shortage of good teachers, just stating the fact that it’s difficult to find and retain good teachers.
I come from a family full of teachers and educators and even a superintendent. I’ve witnessed firsthand how public education can chew up and spit out even the most dedicated teachers.
Couldn’t you just hire several more teachers and staff to switch out certain days subjects/coverage to achieve full 5 day coverage while also cross training people to better fill gaps. Also the education system is mostly just there to turn us all into workers of some sort, so as the regular work week shortens, perhaps the school week should as well. Especially if we’re trying to maximize that extra family time.
I think part of the point of a less taxing work week/environment is part of the draw that could bring people back into these sorts of jobs.
A lot of places are switching to a four day school week already.
Not true, we could hire more school staff if needed, if we paid them a livable and decent amount… It really would be that simple of a fix