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Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

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Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#61
post #9

Most people don't get to choose how many hours they work. Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table. (I'm not an employer.) It's good for an employer if you work overtime, all he has to pay is time, or time and a half, or nothing if you're salaried. He doesn't have to pay more benefits, as he would with an additional employee. Of course an…

> or nothing if you're salaried

It doesn't work that way. Many people in the US believe so, though, making companies get away with paying too little.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#62
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has been constant for almost half a century for the middle class, yet everyone is working more for the same not less. How exactly can you live better than your parents, assuming they had a house, a car or two, phones, TV, computers, access to supermarkets of all kinds, enough money for living expenses and a hobby or yearly vacation...

It's not that simple. Back in the 1950s, an 850 square foot home for a family of 4 was respectable middle class housing; today that wouldn't even be legal in some states, let alone socially considered "middle class". Standards of living are just incomparably higher today than 50 years ago

I'm not sure you're comparing apples-to-apples here. My grandfather drove trucks for the city, and my grandmother worked part-time in a factory. They didn't reach high-school. They had 3 kids, always owned their own homes, in a major metro, owned two cars, and always had "modern" appliances and electronics for their time. They felt little or no economic insecurity, and never expressed that they felt they were lacking anything. They retired very comfortably, without any special planning. Which socio-economic class of today would you compare them to?

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#63
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, an enlightened society. As a US resident, I hope to live in one of those someday. Here I'm just a resource like any farm animal.

Germany has maintained a strict no wage growth policy for decades now however to push exports, potentially contributing to the stagnation of the euro zone.

Not sure why the parent post is being downvoted: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21724810-country-save...

> Underlying Germany’s surplus is a decades-old accord between business and unions in favour of wage restraint to keep export industries competitive. Such moderation served Germany’s export-led economy well through its postwar recovery and beyond. It is an instinct that helps explain Germany’s transformation since the late 1990s from Europe’s sick man to today’s muscle-bound champion.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#64
post #9

Most people don't get to choose how many hours they work. Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table. (I'm not an employer.) It's good for an employer if you work overtime, all he has to pay is time, or time and a half, or nothing if you're salaried. He doesn't have to pay more benefits, as he would with an additional employee. Of course an…

Better public education (especially for adults) would reduce supply/demand discrepancies, giving the average American employee more bargaining power.

Higher wages may also support more smaller/domestically owned businesses, which tend to treat their employees more humanely than huge corporations.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#65
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Germany has maintained a strict no wage growth policy for decades now however to push exports, potentially contributing to the stagnation of the euro zone.

Not sure why the parent post is being downvoted: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21724810-country-save... > Underlying Germany’s surplus is a decades-old accord between business and unions in favour of wage restraint to keep export industries competitive. Such moderation served Germany’s export-led economy well through its postwar recovery and beyond. It is an instinct that helps explain Germany’s transformati…

Likely because i pegged the euro issue on Germany rather than the PIIGS.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#66
post #61
post #9

Most people don't get to choose how many hours they work. Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table. (I'm not an employer.) It's good for an employer if you work overtime, all he has to pay is time, or time and a half, or nothing if you're salaried. He doesn't have to pay more benefits, as he would with an additional employee. Of course an…

> or nothing if you're salaried It doesn't work that way. Many people in the US believe so, though, making companies get away with paying too little.

Honestly it did work that way in certain states until recent legislation.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#67
post #34
post #9

Most people don't get to choose how many hours they work. Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table. (I'm not an employer.) It's good for an employer if you work overtime, all he has to pay is time, or time and a half, or nothing if you're salaried. He doesn't have to pay more benefits, as he would with an additional employee. Of course an…

> Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table. That’s exactly Marx’s point when he discusses his theory of Surplus Value. I know that that theory has been “debunked” and “proven” to be false, but I’m just reading now about it in its “Grundrisse” (I had read its Capital I some years ago) and it’s frightening about how right he was about subje…

Marx's writings around the working day are built on the assumption that wages will be set at the level necessary for the worker to survive long enough to turn up to work the following day rather than according to the perceived value of their labour time by the highest bidder, and that because of this near-universal day rate for undifferentiated "labour power", employers' main route to improving profitability would be extending the working day, with no meaningful proportion of the workforce having the ability to change this arrangement, not because they might dislike the status impacts of having to choose a different position, industry, location or smaller house/car/pension but because no capitalist will be willing to pay them enough to eat for a shorter working day. He even devotes a footnote to ridiculing "vulgar economists" for suggesting that labour rates could be set by supply and demand. In this respect, he's far more wrong about future developed economies than Keynes' (later) wrong assumption of a tendency towards a 15 hour week.

Marx's microeconomic theory is even more wobbly than many of his more capitalistic contemporaries at the best of times, but his writings on the lengthening of working days at mills is particularly irrelevant to modern service-based Western societies and even wealthy programmers and lawyers still working more hours a week than they would prefer. There's a kernel of truth in the idea that employers will tend to profit from people working longer than they're contracted to work, but you don't need to read Kapital to understand people like getting more than they originally asked for.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#68
Because there are fewer jobs than people that want them. For every twenty dogs there are only 19 bones. That's how economic theory is designed to work. If there is a risk of too many jobs, policy is altered to restore 'order'.

Do that and competition inevitably creates what we have - long hours miles from home for a pittance.

Re: Why hasn't economic progress lowered work hours more? (2016) [video]

#70
post #9

Most people don't get to choose how many hours they work. Employers, especially those that pay benefits, want you working as much as possible. Anything less is money on the table. (I'm not an employer.) It's good for an employer if you work overtime, all he has to pay is time, or time and a half, or nothing if you're salaried. He doesn't have to pay more benefits, as he would with an additional employee. Of course an…

Not quite. People don't get to choose work hours per week, but they can choose work hours per lifetime. I worked about 16,000 hours and retired.
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