Abolish the overtime exemption for computer systems analysts, computer programmers, and software engineers. Make it unprofitable to extract labor until someone dies. All other actions are impotent.
* Folks working more can have direct immediate compensation for it, vs handwavy promises of maybe future promotions or stock option rewards
* Creates jobs by lowering incentives to just over-work the people you already have
* Spreads out the income tax load by creating more paid labor out of thin air to get the same amount of total work done - better to have that marginal change in the average person's pocketbooks and income tax than tax-sheltered locations for corporations or the highly-wealthy
Most western countries are democracies because people got fed up of being exploited by dictators (sometimes called "kings"), removed them and setup a system in which they elect who makes the decisions. This system has issues but is less bad than dictatorship.
Yet, companies kept their hierarchical power structures.
Workers should decide who makes the decisions. If they don't wanna invest time into selling their product, they hire a salesman. If they want somebody to make long term projections, plan what gets worked on and communicates with other teams, they hire an assistant. And they decide how much he gets paid according to how much value he actually brings them.
Managers should be assistants.
Let's have MORE companies, not fewer.
Put in strong escalating taxes to incentivize cooperation between small companies instead of bowing to the math that encourages consolidation otherwise.
But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
Not to mention that even if timesheets were used, they provide no guarantees. We always had to get management permission to put overtime in, but no one really knew how much time we worked - especially with a possibility of remote work.
This can only be fixed by pervasive monitoring, and IMHO this leads to a very unpleasant workspace.
Don't let a bad implementation ruin a good idea. Instead, look at what specific ways the implementation fails to learn for next time.
The more interesting question is: Can communalism work without the community having a deep attachment to the idea? The Hutterites achieve that through religion, but if you threw a group of random people together into a similar economic situation without some kind of strong belief system would they endure or would it quickly devolve back to what we see in the broader economy?
It's not (just) about a bad boss. It's about somebody being in a position of power who captures the entire value you produce (sales, IP, patents) and decided what fraction out of it you deserve.
> But if there's no private ownership, how would the different companies in the market get created and exist?
I don't see the problem. Every company starts with just a few people, maybe some machines, maybe some real estate. The issue starts when these people call themselves "founders" and everybody else becomes an "employee"[0].
Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).
And yes:
1) the founders took some risk in starting the business. They should get rewarded based on the amount of risk and their investment. Not in perpetuity.
2) some companies need a large up-front investment. Similarly, the investory should get rewarded based on invested amount and risk, not by owning a large chunk of the company in perpetuity.
Key point: as time goes on, the amount of work done by regular "working class" people completely outstrips the initial investment. The reward should go to people doing the actual work.
[0]: literally meaning "person being used"
Sure, the difference if whether the hierarchy is determined from the top or bottom. Top leads to unfair benefits for the top layer. This is called exploitation.
> wide variety of reasons
Can you give me examples?
Did you notice I specifically said decisions should be made democratically?
Are those two not in direct conflict?
Please, stop pattern matching, and actually consider what I wrote.
RMS said whenever he promoted software freedom in the US, everybody pattern matched on communism and he had to explain the difference between voluntary and compulsory. This is the same problem.
This is related: https://habitatchronicles.com/2004/04/you-cant-tell-people-a...
I don't know if it's right or wrong (and to what extent, most natural systems are complex with a multitude of factors influencing them) but I can easily imagine a similar principle applying to companies.
If you wanna expand by starting an office in the next town over, you need a way to communicate with it, otherwise it's just a separate business with a cash injection to start.
So you have a point.
But the core issue stands - the power hire/fire people, determine their salary and also capture their entire economic output leads to a power imbalance.
- A bunch of examples here: https://old.reddit.com/r/cooperatives/comments/p23rxr/what_a...
- Some more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ownership
- Oxide computer company - idk how exactly the ownership works but AFAIK all workers except sales have the same salary.
- The early idSoftware AFAIK worked similarly with all 4 core gamedevs getting paid the same
Note that nothing says everyone has to get paid the same, it just ends up happening in some examples.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not advocating for time sheets. I'm advocating against overtime exemption.
Even so, all other things being equal, if the tedium of timesheets is on one side of the equation and all of the exploitation of unpaid labor is on the other, I'd still rather not be exploited. Working for free, which is what unpaid overtime is, is unsupportable.
There are many examples of non-exempt professionals who deal with this without resorting to spyware or coercion. IT support specialists, paralegals, and lab technicians all have systems that work: simple start/stop time logs or weekly attestations, plus manager pre-approval for overtime. No one is tracking keystrokes and no one is forced into surveillance. It's about accountability. You attest to your hours, managers approve exceptions, and overtime gets paid. That's the balance.
Companies love timesheets because, even though you're salary, they want to know what you're doing at all times.
They want all the control of an hourly paid employee, with all the money stealing of a salary position.
Also you're already being tracked, they already know exactly how long you're online. I don't know what to tell you.
You can tell we're not talking about communism because the previous commenter said "economic system", whereas the whole concept of an economic system vanishes with communism. It does not imagine an economic system would serve a purpose when scarcity is no longer a constraint. Hence the whole no state, money, or class thing.
You, yourself, literally wrote the original description of what we are talking about. How did you manage to end up so confused?
> Did you notice how communism was always about central control with only superficial or absolutely no elections?
And no. That sounds like you are thinking of a dictatorship. Probably a dictatorship at the hands of a political party that includes "Communist" in the name, granted, but thinking of that as communism is like thinking the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
Communism is science fiction that is imagined on the same basic premise as Star Trek. It is not about central control. As before, it rejects the idea that a central control (the state) would even remain. Marx and Engels hypothesized that the proletariat would have to temporarily seize control from the capitalist elite in order to usher in communism, but even if you somehow managed to confuse communism with their work, that isn't really central control either. What they pictured is still closer to being a democracy, except one that that excludes the bourgeoisie, similar to how women were historically excluded from democracy.
In a current world, manager says: "We have great work-life balance, feel free to work as much or as little as you want! Also, here is an assignment, if this is not done by Friday I'll PIP you, then fire you and you'll get deported. Wink wink, you might want to work more."
In a timesheet world, a manager tells the employee: "Sorry, I cannot approve overtime for you, because I care about you! Also, here is an assignment, if this is not done by Friday I'll PIP you, then fire you and you'll get deported. So make sure you don't record more than 40 hours, but remember we don't really know how much you spend working (wink wink)"
This law might eliminate those insane AI startups which openly advertise 996 schedules, but most requirements of overtime are not that overt.
Option 1: you do as told and leave home at 5pm. You spend 40 hours per week exactly, but work is not getting done, so people are complaining about your performance. Your manager is putting more pressure on you, you are worried about getting fired.
Option 2: you record 40 hours per week, but actually work for 80. Sure your home life suffers but at least the manager is off your back. You are getting compliments about performance and vague promises about raise sometimes in the future maybe.
Which option do you think people will choose?
Timesheets arent fun, but they're not the end of the world either. Other skilled professions (IT support, paralegals, lab techs) use simple weekly logs or start/stop tracking without surveillance. They get paid for their overtime. We don't.
If the choice is between tedious record keeping or doing more work for the same pay, the latter is far more exploitative and soul crushing. We can fix the mechanics without ignoring the principle: work more, get paid more.
Honest question: is filling out a timesheet really worse, to you, than working extra hours for free?
If your boss is bad, you are still going to be working extra hours. Timesheets DO NOT PREVENT extra hours for computer programmers (unless there is also pervasive surveillance, like in the worst consulting shops).
Look, I've worked in a few places with timesheets before. In one place, there was a "no overtime" policy. All this means you always put 38 hours on your timesheets, no matter how much time you actually work. Worked 57 hours? Well, you put down 1 hour in your timesheet for every 1.5 hours actually working.
So I am sorry, but your idea is super naive. It's not going to work. It will make life worse, but will not provide benefits.
Help me connect the dots: how do you get from "I had a bad boss who broke the rules" to "therefore we should remove the legal framework that makes rule-breaking punishable"? Because without that framework, exploitation isn't just a possibility, it's legal.
That’s like saying "people will speed, so speed limits don’t work." Sure, some people speed, but the world without those limits and the legal weight behind them is objectively worse.
I can’t imagine a scenario where the company creates an abusive OT environment but timesheets foil that.
Some employees will see these situations as an opportunity to show they go the extra mile. Some managers will be more than happy to allow it to reap the benefits. Everyone wins until one of them doesn’t, and that’s usually the overworked person.
P.S. In the speeding analogy the relationship between parties and the conflict of interest are very different. You’re not expected to speed to impress the police, and the police wants to catch you and make money from your mistake.
All that said, co-op businesses have seen slow but steady growth for decades now.
Wrong on many levels. They don't capture your entire value. They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides.
>Even though they are all doing the same work, employees get paid per unit of work, founders capture the remaining value produced. And then they hire "managers" who should be there to help workers be more productive but instead end up serving their own goals (see the Gervais principle).
False, they don't all do the same work. Some people do more valuable work than others.
Don't try to apply rules from one area into another without considering that areas nuances.
Give people who want it a legal foundation for getting paid for the work they do and people who find themselves in the situation you describe can chart their own path out.
If you want to fudge numbers and be complicit in your own exploitation, you do you. But please, don't undermine everyone else's legal infrastructure to get paid for the work they do.
Explain.
> They don't decide what fraction you deserve - that's what the market decides.
No, they decide based on what they can get away with given the market situation. Do they pay the maximum the company can afford? No, they pay based on a negotiation in which they have more power and more information.
> False, they don't all do the same work.
You open a shop, you do the restocking, you man the cash register. Then you hire your first employee. He does the same thing. You own the entire company, he doesn't even a fraction.
You start a software company with a few friends. You write code, do marketing, talk to customers. You hire your first employee. He does one or more of those things. You own 100% of the company, he owns 0%.
> Some people do more valuable work than others.
Yeah, sure, how many times more productive can one person be than others doing the same job? Jobs doing real positive-sum productive work are typically within low multiples, maybe one order of magnitude. Jobs of people who are in positions of power which allow them to capture a percentage of their "underlings" output pay orders of magnitude more.
Bosses don't just say "you need to work 12 hours today". They say: "You need to get this done by Friday or I'll put you on PIP. Also, you are not authorized for the overtime on this project."
Did this boss break any rules? If yes, which ones? Because I don't see anything how your proposed law will make it this better.
And that should also explain what's special about software engineering:
IT support people get scheduled by an hour, and it's easy to see how much they worked. Boss cannot say "work for 10am to 10pm", _that_ would be clear and obvious rule breaking any judge will understand. And vehicle speed is very simple and unambiguous, so the rules are very simple (even if they are not enforced much).
Software engineers get tasks assigned, and no one can tell how long the task will take - Is "Fix bug 12345 by Friday" a reasonable request or not? Was this engineer put on PIP because they refused to do overtime, or was this because they were genuinely not a good fit for the position? No one can tell.
Which would you choose? Based on "be complicit in your own exploitation", I am guessing you'd choose option 1, work exactly 40 hours, don't get things done on time, and make your boss unhappy? Well, good news: you can do this today, even if you are exempt, no need to ask for a law.
(I suspect you are hoping for option 3, "get my boss to approve overtime so I can work extra hours, get all the stuff done, and get extra $$$". This won't happen. If the boss is evil, they really see no upside in this so they won't approve the overtime. If the boss is nice, they won't give you too many tasks to begin with.)