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…
In order for people to work less hours at their job there would have to be strong local communities and a kind of socio-economic framework to support constructive, productive and satisfying activities outside of their day job. Things like improving or fixing up the neighborhood or your own household, political activism, caregiving, teaching, citizen science are all examples of things that one could do not for money but for the benefit of the community or the betterment of society. But due to the capitalist mode of production people are alienated from each other and the product of their labor so much that they think of work as a commodity to be traded for money only. And rather than doing these things as a way of finding fulfillment and building communities, people contract others to do it for them for money.