A 32-hour week? It could work for Congress, staff say

Progressive staffers want bosses to ‘give it a shot’

By Jim Saksa1/2Overpaid shitheads want lower hours for themselves.

The Congressional Progressive Staff Association thinks Hill aides should be working smarter, not harder. So, in a letter to congressional leadership Thursday, the group is asking members to consider 32-hour workweeks in their offices.“By establishing a rotating 32-hour workweek for District and D.C. staff, you can help increase retention, boost productivity, and improve the quality of life for your team,” the group wrote.

The CPSA has no expectations for a sweeping policy change on the Hill; they just want a few members to experiment with a shortened workweek in their offices or committees. “We’re urging members to give it a shot, to pilot it for a six-month period,” CPSA spokesman Michael Suchecki said. “If it doesn’t work 100 percent, bring it back to the way it was.”

“I don’t expect John Thune or Hakeem Jeffries coming out tomorrow and endorsing this proposal. … Frankly, I’d be happy if they did it in five years,” Suchecki added. “Fundamentally, what we’re hoping for is that we have openness to it.”

The CPSA, which calls itself the largest Hill staff organization at roughly 1,500 members, suggests a 32-hour workweek for Hill staff when Congress is out of session, and a 32-hour workweek for district staff when members are in Washington,without any reduction in pay or benefits.

The idea of working less while still accomplishing the same as before isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound. The CPSA points to the experience of companies in the United Kingdom that trialed shortened work weeks in 2022, finding that revenue remained stable while employee burnout and stress dropped. The vast majority decided to continue the reduced schedules after the study ended.

Some Hill offices already dabble with shorter hours during slow periods. Aides for Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., enjoy “August Summer Fridays,” said spokesperson Sydney Simon. “We’re proud to have a culture in our office that offers some flexibility for our staff — and that’s rooted in trust and accountability,” she said.

Last Congress, Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and Barry Moore, R-Ala., won awards from the Congressional Management Foundation for workplace culture, thanks in part to flexible schedules.

The letter also cites a bill, introduced last session by Vermont independent Bernie Sanders in the Senate and California Democrat Mark Takanoin the House, that would reduce the workweek under federal law from 40 hours to 32 hours, with overtime for workdays longer than eight hours.

By trying it themselves, Congress could demonstrate how unobtrusive a 32-hour workweek is to employers. “Members of Congress can help to advance the discussion around a more sustainable workweek as a national priority and model how it can work for private and public employers,” the letter reads.

Neither Sanders’ nor Takano’s office responded to a request for comment.

The CPSA’s push for more flexible work arrangements on Capitol Hill comes as Republicans, now in full control of Congress and about to take the White House, are preparing to restrict work-from-home policies for the rest of the federal government.

At a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing Wednesday, Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., promised that “President Trump is going to change the way Washington works and will bring accountability to the unelected federal bureaucracy.” “This includes ensuring the federal workforce is held accountable to the American people and ensuring they show up to the office for work,” he added.

(They are only asking this is because they know Congress and Senate politicians, never even work 20+ hours most of the time)

https://rollcall.com/2025/01/16/32-hour-week-could-work-for-congress-staff-say

>>22370143

2/2

The CPSA acknowledged the awkward timing. “I’ll be honest here: This initiative had more optimism behind it when the election was undecided,” Suchecki said. “This is something the [CPSA] board had been discussing for a long time, as something we heard calls for, both from members as well as from the left.”

Democrats have countered thatRepublicans’ focus on workforce policies have little to do with government efficiency or efficacy, but are instead just an excuse to take an ax indiscriminately to the federal workforce, pointing to Project 2025 and statements by Vivek Ramaswamy, a co-head of an informal taskforce called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Ramaswamy told Fox News in November that requiring federal workers to return to the office full time would lead to “many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way,” which would be “a good side effect of those policies as well.”

Federal employee unions have also pushed back, noting that the Office of Management and Budget (under Bidan Admin, not under Trump Admin) released a report in August finding that telework-eligible workers spent 61 percent of their time working in-person, and that federal employees in general, excluding fully remote workers who don’t have an office, were in person 79 percent of the time.

Writing in 1930, the famed economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advances would reduce the average working week down to 15 hours by 2030. And while weekly working hours for U.S. full-time nonfarm workers may have dropped from over 60 to around 40 in Keynes’ lifetime, there it has remained. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, weekly hours for all private nonfarm workers — including part-time employees — averaged just above 34 in 2024. At the same time, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown from $260 billion in 1947 to $29 trillion today, and per capita GDP from $15,000 to $69,000. Rather than work less, we simply produce and consume more.

The length of the average workweek fell in large part thanks to the adoption of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the workweek at 40 hours starting in 1940.

https://rollcall.com/2025/01/16/32-hour-week-could-work-for-congress-staff-say/

>>22370143

2/2

The CPSA acknowledged the awkward timing. “I’ll be honest here: This initiative had more optimism behind it when the election was undecided,” Suchecki said. “This is something the [CPSA] board had been discussing for a long time, as something we heard calls for, both from members as well as from the left.”

Democrats have countered thatRepublicans’ focus on workforce policies have little to do with government efficiency or efficacy, but are instead just an excuse to take an ax indiscriminately to the federal workforce, pointing to Project 2025 and statements by Vivek Ramaswamy, a co-head of an informal taskforce called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. Ramaswamy told Fox News in November that requiring federal workers to return to the office full time would lead to “many voluntary reductions in force of the workforce in the federal government along the way,” which would be “a good side effect of those policies as well.”

Federal employee unions have also pushed back, noting that the Office of Management and Budget (under Bidan Admin, not under Trump Admin) released a report in August finding that telework-eligible workers spent 61 percent of their time working in-person, and that federal employees in general, excluding fully remote workers who don’t have an office, were in person 79 percent of the time.

Writing in 1930, the famed economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that technological advances would reduce the average working week down to 15 hours by 2030. And while weekly working hours for U.S. full-time nonfarm workers may have dropped from over 60 to around 40 in Keynes’ lifetime, there it has remained. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, weekly hours for all private nonfarm workers — including part-time employees — averaged just above 34 in 2024. At the same time, the U.S. gross domestic product has grown from $260 billion in 1947 to $29 trillion today, and per capita GDP from $15,000 to $69,000. Rather than work less, we simply produce and consume more.

The length of the average workweek fell in large part thanks to the adoption of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which set the workweek at 40 hours starting in 1940.

https://rollcall.com/2025/01/16/32-hour-week-could-work-for-congress-staff-say/

Germany’s ‘Dexit’ party is becoming a serious threat to the European project

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Fri, January 17, 2025 at 2:00 AM EST1/2

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is pushing a headymix of Prussian imperial nostalgia and a shrewd form of Euroscepticismthat catches the mood of post-globalist German voters.

Theinsurgent Right-wing party of Alice Weidel– a gay, Hayekian, Mandarin-speaking Goldman Sachs alumna, who worked for the Bank of China and wrote a paper on the Chinese pension system – is flying high as elections approach next month, reaching 22pc in the latest INSA poll.

The German media fears that the “shy voter syndrome” may understate the strength of the AfD support. If the final tally reaches the mid-20s, it could leave Germany in much the same state of political paralysis as France, unable to form a stable government on the broken rubble of the old party system.

Foreign investors have persuaded themselves that Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat leader, is going to win a landslide on a manifesto of free-market reform, fiscal stimulus and a blitz of investment. Germany is more likely to end up with the immobilism of another grand coalition, unable to rid itself of a social democrat dinosaur wedded to rust bowl industries and the obsolete model of the last century.

Merz is in much the same position as the Tories, trying to staunch a loss of voters on his right flank, calling for a total stop to illegal migration and mimicking the AfD’s language on the failings of Europe and the wickedness of wind mills – erected at a rate of six a day, adding 14 gigawatts of capacity last year.

The AfD is the beneficiaryof an economy that has shrunk for the last two years in a row and has seen no net growth since 2018.Above all, it is surfing the Kulturkampf sweeping Germany, Europe and Christendom.

Elon Musk took 90 minutes from his busy schedule reordering humanity and the stars for a tête-à-tête on X with Weidel, giving her the full blessing of the Austro-libertarian ideological movement, alongside Javier Milei in Argentina (the relegated Nigel Farage is too woke). “Only the AfD can save Germany”, said Musk.

Weidel told him thatAdolf Hitler came out of the anti-capitalist political Left, as did Mussolini in Italy, and Oswald Mosley in Britain. “He wasn’t a conservative. He wasn’t a libertarian.He was a communist socialist guy. And we are exactly the opposite,” she said, with poetic licence. Hitler was never a Bolshevik.

Markus Söder, Bavaria’s premier and key ally of the Christian Democrats,has a different reading of those interwar years, warning that Germany is sleepwalking into another Weimar crisisas the two great Volksparteien of modern times lose their grip and the political system splinters towardsthe radical Left and Right. (It’s really funny, that all the politicians that created a liberal, radical party, doesn’t take blame themselves for their deadly, stupid ideas)

“AfD thrives on the fact that the democratic establishment has no strength left, and no solutions. It reminds me in a way of Weimar,” he said, though he also accused it of stoking Prussian revivalism, the worst sin for a Bavarian.

It is a political catechism in Germany that the Nazis were able to gain a foothold because the conservatives let them into coalition in 1933. “It must never be allowed to happen again,” said Söder.

The imperative today, therefore, is that the Brandmauer (firewall) must be maintained today to quarantine the AfD. A less credible variant of this argument is made in France to keep Marine Le Pen from power. A bogus “Republican Front” manipulated this doctrine in the last French election to save their own electoral skins. Like her or loathe her, Le Pen is no Hitler.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/germany-dexit-party-becoming-serious-070000322.html

A NEW GEXIT ON THE HORIZON, GERMANY EXIT THE EU

Germany’s ‘Dexit’ party is becoming a serious threat to the European project

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard Fri, January 17, 2025 at 2:00 AM EST1/2

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is pushing a headymix of Prussian imperial nostalgia and a shrewd form of Euroscepticismthat catches the mood of post-globalist German voters.

Theinsurgent Right-wing party of Alice Weidel– a gay, Hayekian, Mandarin-speaking Goldman Sachs alumna, who worked for the Bank of China and wrote a paper on the Chinese pension system – is flying high as elections approach next month, reaching 22pc in the latest INSA poll.

The German media fears that the “shy voter syndrome” may understate the strength of the AfD support. If the final tally reaches the mid-20s, it could leave Germany in much the same state of political paralysis as France, unable to form a stable government on the broken rubble of the old party system.

Foreign investors have persuaded themselves that Friedrich Merz, the Christian Democrat leader, is going to win a landslide on a manifesto of free-market reform, fiscal stimulus and a blitz of investment. Germany is more likely to end up with the immobilism of another grand coalition, unable to rid itself of a social democrat dinosaur wedded to rust bowl industries and the obsolete model of the last century.

Merz is in much the same position as the Tories, trying to staunch a loss of voters on his right flank, calling for a total stop to illegal migration and mimicking the AfD’s language on the failings of Europe and the wickedness of wind mills – erected at a rate of six a day, adding 14 gigawatts of capacity last year.

The AfD is the beneficiaryof an economy that has shrunk for the last two years in a row and has seen no net growth since 2018.Above all, it is surfing the Kulturkampf sweeping Germany, Europe and Christendom.

Elon Musk took 90 minutes from his busy schedule reordering humanity and the stars for a tête-à-tête on X with Weidel, giving her the full blessing of the Austro-libertarian ideological movement, alongside Javier Milei in Argentina (the relegated Nigel Farage is too woke). “Only the AfD can save Germany”, said Musk.

Weidel told him thatAdolf Hitler came out of the anti-capitalist political Left, as did Mussolini in Italy, and Oswald Mosley in Britain. “He wasn’t a conservative. He wasn’t a libertarian.He was a communist socialist guy. And we are exactly the opposite,” she said, with poetic licence. Hitler was never a Bolshevik.

Markus Söder, Bavaria’s premier and key ally of the Christian Democrats,has a different reading of those interwar years, warning that Germany is sleepwalking into another Weimar crisisas the two great Volksparteien of modern times lose their grip and the political system splinters towardsthe radical Left and Right. (It’s really funny, that all the politicians that created a liberal, radical party, doesn’t take blame themselves for their deadly, stupid ideas)

“AfD thrives on the fact that the democratic establishment has no strength left, and no solutions. It reminds me in a way of Weimar,” he said, though he also accused it of stoking Prussian revivalism, the worst sin for a Bavarian.

It is a political catechism in Germany that the Nazis were able to gain a foothold because the conservatives let them into coalition in 1933. “It must never be allowed to happen again,” said Söder.

The imperative today, therefore, is that the Brandmauer (firewall) must be maintained today to quarantine the AfD. A less credible variant of this argument is made in France to keep Marine Le Pen from power. A bogus “Republican Front” manipulated this doctrine in the last French election to save their own electoral skins. Like her or loathe her, Le Pen is no Hitler.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/germany-dexit-party-becoming-serious-070000322.html

A NEW GEXIT ON THE HORIZON, GERMANY EXIT THE EU

>>22370248

2/2

The trouble with shutting out the AfD altogether is that Germany will end up with a slightly reshuffled blocof the same stale incumbent parties, denying German voters the political shake-up so clearly desired.

The AfD becomes the only authentic opposition by default. Might it not be wiser to co-opt them the Italian way?

That said,one can see why Germany’s pro-European elites are scared of Weidel– and why France’s ex-Commissioner Thierry Bretonthinks the EU should override the German elections if the AfD does too well, citing the recent Supreme Court putsch in Romania as a good precedent.

The AfD dropped its explicit call for German withdrawal from the EU and the euro at the party’s pre-electoral conference last weekend. It instead designed a covert “Dexit” that is less unsettling to voters but ultimately poses a greater threat to the EU project.

It wants a “Europe of fatherlands” to restore the nation state and roll back the “illegitimate, anti-democratic, centralising, over-regulated planned economy pushed by Brussels”. One of the authors told the Frankfurter Allgemeine that the party had sought a “more elegant formula” to deflect attacks by the economic elites. The objectives of Dexit remain the same.

Project Fear has already been in overdrive for months. The German Economic Institute (IW) has issued a report called “Brexit – no role model for Germany” , relying on the usual (disputed) claims about the loss of British GDP since the Referendum to infer that Dexit would cost 2.5m jobs, cost €690bn, and shave 5.6pc off German GDP after five years.

Leaving aside the fact that the UK has not lost net jobs since Brexit, the British experience has zero relevance for Dexit.

The UK never joined the euro.Germany is the anchor of the euro, the EU debt market and the EU’s spending machinery. The ___European project would collapse overnight if it pulled out__. France, Italy and Spain might try to hold on to a Latin currency but the geopolitical order of Europe would be unrecognisable, for better or worse depending on your view of what ails the EU today.

A recent article in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung argued thatGermany has been the victim of the euro and the insidious addiction of an undervalued currency. German industrial output has fallen by 5pc since 2011, while Swiss industrial output has risen by 40pc. The Swiss franc has appreciated by 25pc against the euro, greatly revaluing the savings of the Swiss people. Swiss interest rates peaked at 1.75pc.

The Swiss economy largely avoided the inflation episode of the last five years, which has done so much damage to German society, enriching the half that owns property and stocks while pauperising the half that rents homes and has no wealth beyond bank savings.

Of course, it is one thing to say Germany should have kept the D-mark, it is another to say it should now unleash chaos by trying to turn the clock back. And Switzerland is sui generis.Even so, the diverging fortunes of the two sister economies is shocking.

One thing is certain.The rise of AfD makes it even less likely that Germany will ever agree to fiscal union and an EU treasury. Without that, monetary union will be chronically unstable, unable to launch the Draghi plan of economic resurrection, and lurching from crisis to crisis in acrimony.

The AfD’s Europe of the fatherlands is a concept of wide appeal, in the Netherlands of Geert Wilders, in the Italy of Giorgia Meloni, in Le Pen’s France profonde, in Scandinavia, and in much of Eastern Europe, as well as in Prussia and Bavaria. It is Dexit by means of subversion from within.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/germany-dexit-party-becoming-serious-070000322.html

>>22370248

2/2

The trouble with shutting out the AfD altogether is that Germany will end up with a slightly reshuffled blocof the same stale incumbent parties, denying German voters the political shake-up so clearly desired.

The AfD becomes the only authentic opposition by default. Might it not be wiser to co-opt them the Italian way?

That said,one can see why Germany’s pro-European elites are scared of Weidel– and why France’s ex-Commissioner Thierry Bretonthinks the EU should override the German elections if the AfD does too well, citing the recent Supreme Court putsch in Romania as a good precedent.

The AfD dropped its explicit call for German withdrawal from the EU and the euro at the party’s pre-electoral conference last weekend. It instead designed a covert “Dexit” that is less unsettling to voters but ultimately poses a greater threat to the EU project.

It wants a “Europe of fatherlands” to restore the nation state and roll back the “illegitimate, anti-democratic, centralising, over-regulated planned economy pushed by Brussels”. One of the authors told the Frankfurter Allgemeine that the party had sought a “more elegant formula” to deflect attacks by the economic elites. The objectives of Dexit remain the same.

Project Fear has already been in overdrive for months. The German Economic Institute (IW) has issued a report called “Brexit – no role model for Germany” , relying on the usual (disputed) claims about the loss of British GDP since the Referendum to infer that Dexit would cost 2.5m jobs, cost €690bn, and shave 5.6pc off German GDP after five years.

Leaving aside the fact that the UK has not lost net jobs since Brexit, the British experience has zero relevance for Dexit.

The UK never joined the euro.Germany is the anchor of the euro, the EU debt market and the EU’s spending machinery. The ___European project would collapse overnight if it pulled out__. France, Italy and Spain might try to hold on to a Latin currency but the geopolitical order of Europe would be unrecognisable, for better or worse depending on your view of what ails the EU today.

A recent article in Switzerland’s Neue Zürcher Zeitung argued thatGermany has been the victim of the euro and the insidious addiction of an undervalued currency. German industrial output has fallen by 5pc since 2011, while Swiss industrial output has risen by 40pc. The Swiss franc has appreciated by 25pc against the euro, greatly revaluing the savings of the Swiss people. Swiss interest rates peaked at 1.75pc.

The Swiss economy largely avoided the inflation episode of the last five years, which has done so much damage to German society, enriching the half that owns property and stocks while pauperising the half that rents homes and has no wealth beyond bank savings.

Of course, it is one thing to say Germany should have kept the D-mark, it is another to say it should now unleash chaos by trying to turn the clock back. And Switzerland is sui generis.Even so, the diverging fortunes of the two sister economies is shocking.

One thing is certain.The rise of AfD makes it even less likely that Germany will ever agree to fiscal union and an EU treasury. Without that, monetary union will be chronically unstable, unable to launch the Draghi plan of economic resurrection, and lurching from crisis to crisis in acrimony.

The AfD’s Europe of the fatherlands is a concept of wide appeal, in the Netherlands of Geert Wilders, in the Italy of Giorgia Meloni, in Le Pen’s France profonde, in Scandinavia, and in much of Eastern Europe, as well as in Prussia and Bavaria. It is Dexit by means of subversion from within.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/germany-dexit-party-becoming-serious-070000322.html