No to a mandated 32-hour workweek - OCRegister

sekirta.blogspot.com

One of the hoary cliches of the businessperson-turned-politico on the hustings is that she or he “has met a payroll” and thus is more prepared to meet the fiscal challenges of an organization than the pale, dweeby, permanently elected opponent over there.

And, you know what? It’s one of those truisms that’s really true.

Meeting a payroll certainly changed my way of looking at the way the world really works.

I was 28, a year out of graduate school with a degree in international management, and suddenly finding myself the business manager of a start-up company.

A weekly newspaper, if you must know. Terrible thing to be starting. Even then, when it wasn’t entirely crazy to imagine that one could make money in the print dodge, there were only two categories of start-ups the Small Business Administration had an absolute rule against loaning money to: restaurants, and newspapers.

Much-diminished, sold four or five times over the decades, the thing is still extant, so I guess it wasn’t absolutely nuts to start it up. Lots of bi-weekly payrolls met over those years.

I came to the job a few weeks after the company had been set up. Quickly found out, for instance, that while paychecks were indeed going out to a couple of dozen employees, the other founders had neglected to tell the IRS, and no income tax was being withheld from those checks. Little things like that. Had to go hat (and company checkbook) in hand down to talk to the unhappy feds and make amends.

We needed to have over $20,000 in the bank every second Friday in order to meet payroll. Our cash flow was an order of magnitude below that. By the Wednesday before I would report to the main owner our predicament.

“Where are you going to get the money?” he’d ask.

“No idea, boss.”

“Make some collections calls to our advertisers?”

“Will do, but that’s not going to cover it.”

Then he’d have to write a check at the last minute to make us whole.

Still, we were often on the brink. In the past, paychecks were just things I’d take to the bank for deposit. But it struck me that if I just didn’t cash my own check, then those few hundred bucks would still be available to help pay the rent. More times than I could really afford to, I waited weeks before I would cash my own check. You do what you have to do.

I lasted a year in that job before going back to the journalism side of journalism. But I never forgot that lesson: that paychecks don’t grow on trees. That businesses large and small can lose money just the same as they can make money. That it’s a precarious thing, being a job-creator.

So, to this day, progressive though some of my other views may be, whenever I see a politician fixing to push through a law that regulates how a business operates, I try to imagine how that’s going to really work.

And, having “met” a payroll, when I hear of new proposals — one on the California level, one nationwide — to change the workweek from the old 40 hours to a newfangled 32 hours — I’m naturally skeptical.

It’s very simple. Many employees are going to continue working 40 or more hours. But, under these proposals, the businesses are going to have to pay overtime for that fifth working day rather than for a sixth and seventh.

Certainly some such big and biggish companies will be able to “afford” the change. Certainly, in the past, government-mandated changes in the private workplace have been beneficial and even necessary for workers. But it’s not true, as some backers of the 32-hour week claim, that 40 hours has been the standard “since the Industrial Revolution.” In the mid-19th century, and even into the 20th, it was common to work six days a week, not five. Social Security, the minimum wage, workplace-safety standards after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in which 146 people died in Manhattan — all of these were crucial, politician-brokered steps away from the bad old days.

But right now — as people are just going back to work, as inflation soars, as companies deal with vexing supply-chain issues — is just not the time to force them to pay everyone overtime all day every Friday.

That’s a payroll I couldn’t meet.

Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.

Adblock test (Why?)

"Hour" - Google News
April 17, 2022 at 07:00PM
https://ift.tt/VZEM7DF

No to a mandated 32-hour workweek - OCRegister
"Hour" - Google News
https://ift.tt/KE2fbsN
https://ift.tt/tTPoAfk

Bagikan Berita Ini