The Cost Of The United States

The United States Department of Labor (DOL) has a mission to protect the welfare of wage earners, job seekers, and retirees. They also improve working conditions and ensure work-related benefits and rights. The DOL has many laws and reregulation’s protecting workers that range from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets standards for wages and overtime pay, to the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which focuses on workplace safety and health. With the wide range that the DOL has employees can feel that they have standards in place to ensure fair pay, fair treatment, and a safe environment to work in. Without the enforcement of the DOL corporations are left to establish pay and safety standards internally. In a business atmosphere where the importance of profit is often placed before the employees, an environment without laws and regulations can be dangerous. An example can be seen in other countries where labor laws are not in place compassion and common sense also seem to be absent. In these areas workers, many times children often works long hours for little pay. Sadly it has been shown that when corporations are unregulated the importance for the fair treatment of employees takes a less important role.

The reading states that the conversion from 5-day workweek to 4-day workweek offers numerous benefits to both businesses and employees and should be seriously considered and provides three reasons of support. However, the professor states that the benefits do not justify this dramatic change and refutes each of the authors' reasons.

     Slowly, however, this system began to fade. As unions grew, working immigrants became acquainted with a new idea: leisure time. As work hours were slashed from 12 to 10 even down to a reasonable 8, the newcomers were slowly becoming allowed to take some time to evaluate what they had been working so hard for.

The American soldiers fighting in foreign lands create a high cost of war. The multiple factors related to the high cost of maintaining America’s vast military bases in foreign lands is not sustainable, but the human cost of families coping with injuries suffered in war by home coming vets from foreign wars is not acceptable either. The foreign and political sides are the cost of maintaining a large military presence here and abroad is not feasible. Whereas, the concerns of war over domestic issues must be a balance between military spending and infrastructure was in America’s best interest. The main focus on key issues like causalities, political, foreign, and lobbyist and much more topics

Lowering the retirement age may be a good way for those to exit the labor force opening up more jobs and reducing unemployment. However, it will have the opposite impact, due to the ratio of working age population to the retirees. This puts more cost of retirements on the GDP, increasing the taxes levied to pay for items like social security. In turn, this increase in the costs of labor will have the opposite effect and would have negative impacts to employment. In France another method to increase more people in a job was the 35 hour work week law. Studies in Germany and France have shown that reducing the work week has little impact on employment though. People in Germany did work less, but additional position creation did not happen. In France those who were impacted by the reduction actually were more likely to lose their job and had no positive impact in the level of employment. The reason shortening the work week does not increase the level of employment is the same as migration. There are not a fixed number of jobs or hours to be

Personally, I believe that there should be changes in employment laws to give Americans more time to relax. That is why it is important to provide a solution to the problem that is affecting the lives of many Americans. The first thing to do to provide more free time to employees is to establish a law that makes it mandatory for employees to not work past 40 hours a week. Another, way to fix the problem is to increase the income of employee workers that way they can work 40 hours a week. That way workers’ productivity can improve while, not having a negative on the workers’ physically and

The Populists claim that the workday is way too long and creates a system where people cannot find time for their own ambitions. However, it is through the long work days that the millionaires of our era learned the value of hard work and the fruits which hard work bears. If these self-made men worked for just eight hours a day, a belief would be instilled that work ethic is not directly related to result, thus resulting in a belief that work is not related to gain. Aside from devaluing hard work, the regulation of work day would impact our economy in huge ways. By reducing the amount that US factories create, the shorter work days would pose a financial problem for our government as with less manufacturing, the government earns less tax dollars while still being required to pay for roads and postal service as well as the armies protecting our

I think that the United States could go to the six hour work day. People in the past have done it and it was a huge success. During the Industrial Revolution people had to work 11-12 hours each day with little pay. Later on in the 1900s, Henry Ford changed the work hours for his employees and they showed great amounts of success. Ford doubled their pay and they did the work 2 times faster and more efficiently.

There are a number of employment practices which ‘Fair Labor Standard Act” does not regulate. They are vacation, holiday, severance, or sick pay; meal or rest periods, holidays off, or vacations; premium pay for weekend or holiday work; pay raises or fringe benefits; or a discharge notice, reason for discharge, or immediate payment of final wages to terminated employees. The standard work week in 1938 was reduced to 44 hours per week, and if employees were to work over that they would be paid over time at a rate of their wages plus one-half wages for the additional time worked. By 1940 the standard work week was reduced to 40 hours per week (www.dol.gov/dol/oasam/programs/history/flsa1938.htm). Despite this law in 2006 a class action law suit was brought against Wal-Mart for not paying its employees for their overtime and forcing them to work through their breaks. Wal-Mart lost the law suit and the workers won $78.4 million (Worth 2008 p 12).

Bending the cost curve. The Triple Aim is part of health care delivery reform, as part of the ACA, all derived with the ultimate goal of reducing healthcare spending in the United States. The government and organizations are still waiting for evidence on the effectiveness of Triple Aim models in improving population health, controlling costs, and improving patients’ experience of care. As of 2010, concerns regarding balanced attention to the three overarching aims, indicate that healthcare organizations may increase quality at the expense of cost, or alternatively, they may decrease cost while creating a dissatisfying experience for patients (McCarthy and Klein, 2010, p. 1).

The current value that America holds on to the closest is individualism. According to a study conducted by Pew Global, “nearly six-in-ten (58%) Americans believe it is more important for everyone to be free to pursue their life’s goals without interference from the state” (“The American-Western European”, 21). This number is quite high compared to other countries, such as Britain with 38% and Germany with 26%, and attributes to our nation’s ideology. America was founded to be independent and free from a controlling monarchy. The first settlers left Britain due to a lack of freedom to practice their ideals that were not considered “acceptable” and were often persecuted for their religious beliefs. Erik Khzmalyan claims that “the settlers

The total budget of the United States is $4.1 trillion. This accrues for two-thirds of the total spending budget. $1.14 trillion (33%) is spent on institutions such as Social Security, Labor, and Unemployment. $1.03 trillion (27%) is spent on Medicare and Health. $586.6 billion (16%) is spent on military. Veterans benefits, food and agriculture, transportation, housing, education make up the remaining 44% of the total budget. The discretionary budget is the portion of the the federal budget that congress must determine annually; it is targeted* at $1.23 trillion. An overwhelmingly $625.2 billion (54%) goes towards military and defense, $74.1 (6%) billion goes towards education. $72,2 billion (6%) goes towards veteran benefits, $66.2 billion (6%) towards government, $60.6 billion (5%) towards Medicare and health, $41.6 billion (4%) towards energy and environment, $41.6 billion (4%) towards international affairs, $31.4 billion (3%) towards Social Security, $31 billion (3%) towards science, $27.4 billion (2%) towards transportation, and $13.3 billion (1%) towards food and agriculture. As a comparison, in 1900 the total budget of the United States was $1,608 million. $331.6 million (21%) went towards defense, $228 million (14%) went towards education and the remaining 55% was spent under the discretion of the president. From these numbers, it is clear to see that spending on military increased greatly, while education lost percentage points. However, it may not be as cut and

The amount of people working more than 50 hours has increased since the 1980’s. Anna Burger, researcher and provider of charts in this article, believes there are two important things that contribute to less increase in work hours. One being “‘labour-market regulation.’” It is, in her words, “comprised of things like how difficult it is to fire people and how rigid working-hour rules are.” This is saying that giving employees fewer rights, allows their bosses to pressure them into staying later. The second being the amount of part-time employment. The more part-time employees there are, the less hours for one person to work. Burgers work attempted to explain why people begin working extreme hours, but she didn’t discuss the "Veblenian” explanation.

According to the article, even though French workers are just as productive as US workers, they tend to have “a lower workforce participation rate and when they work, they work fewer hours” (Krugman). This is mostly due to government mandated vacation time.

Substandard working conditions in the less developed world are usually described as terrible places where employees are subjected to both mental and physical abuse, near impossible quotas, long hours, extremely low wages, and unsafe working conditions compared to western standards. All of this within an uninhabitable environment that corporations knowingly force the world’s impoverished people to submit to. Through pure ignorance, complete disregard, or lack of moral direction, many corporations have taken the concept of