Long work hours don’t just wear out workers’ bodies—they take a toll on the environment, too. We need a shorter work week if we’re serious about saving the planet.
A t midnight on Sept. 14, the United Auto Workers’ contract with the Big Three automakers—Stellantis, Ford, and General Motors—expired. As promised by UAW President Shawn Fain, stand-up strikes began promptly at midnight. The first three plants called to strike were the General Motors Assembly Center in Wentzville, Missouri, the Stellantis Assembly Complex in Toledo, Ohio, and the final assembly and paint departments at the Ford Michigan Assembly Plant in Wayne, Michigan. Videos and photos of autoworkers pouring out of the plants and joining their union siblings on the picket line hit social media like labor’s version of the Super Bowl. On Sept. 22, stand-up strikes expanded to an additional 38 GM and Stellantis assembly plants across 20 states.
Throughout the highly publicized contract negotiations between UAW’s 146,000 autoworker members and their employers at the Big Three automakers, newly elected Fain has been calling for a 32-hour work week—a goal stated by UAW as far back as the 1930s.
“Right now, Stellantis has put its plants on critical status, forcing our members to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day in many cases, week after week, for 90 straight days. That’s not a life,” Fain said on a livestream on Aug. 25. “Critical status, it’s named right because working that much can put anyone in critical condition. It’s terrible for our bodies, it’s terrible for our mental health, and it’s terrible for our family life.”
read more: https://therealnews.com/uaws-demand-for-a-32-hour-work-week-would-be-a-win-for-the-planet
archive: https://archive.ph/jSu2n
God what I wouldn’t do to work 28 hours less than I do now with no loss of pay
Or at least get paid overtime fuck. I’m hourly but it’s not illegal in my industry to not pay overtime. 60 hours just straight time.
I’m salaried and have no pay after 40 hours 😢. Luckily I rarely work overtime.
Hello fellow truck driver. There are companies out there that pay OT in our industry.
Yeah, this account gets me home every night though.
Probably going to find something else in a year or so.
Yeah my last company was home every night and OT after 40. Current company does it depending on the job and I got bumped to salary with “OT” after 45 hrs and a separate OT for the hours that code as OT depending on the job. It’s a cluster fuck but pays well and I’m home every night unless the job is out of town or something. Would say I sleep in my own bed 98% of the time.
Unsere If this would translate 1:1 in the real world, but U would at least have more time to buy locally, cook stuff myself, and repair things. Which would really be a great Thing.
The demand for no pension, no retirement, no benefits and multiple “side hustles” for every worker that techbros can reach is an indicator of the opposite consequences for what those techbros want: a loss for the planet. No wonder they have so many escapist fantasies like fleeing to Mars or bowing to the robot god of the future in VR heaven.
Don’t these plants run 24/7? Even if each worker worked on 32 hours a week, they’d hire more workers so that the plant would be staffed 24/7, right? In that case, I don’t see how that would lead to environmental benefit.
Depends if that makes financial sense. Hiring an additional crew doesn’t just mean paying the labor, each employee will need an insurance and benefits package as well. If the deal says those packages can’t be significantly reduced and the company can’t find another way to cut costs they may be less inclined to stick to a 24/7 schedule. For example… Of course there’s a lot more to it than just that.
There’s a lot of time and money involved in shutting down plants of this size. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they just added more people to keep the plant running. Which like the other person said would probably turn out to be a net negative environmentally since it would be a whole shift basically of extra people driving to and from work every week.
