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Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

blogs.reuters.com

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Re: Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

#31

Post by qwr23qwer »

emodendroket wrote: post #26
qwr23qwer wrote: post #24

"Leisure" might not mean exactly what we think it means today. I think it'll be obvious to anyone who's worked in a manual labour job e.g. construction, farming, etc, even with today's tools, you can't physically do these at anything but a "leisurely pace" and a limited amount of hours a day, with breaks for rest, food etc. Specially in warmer climates. Claiming that this means that life was easy is a little bit dish…

Yeah, sure, but how many construction workers work only 150 days a year and have mid-day naps?

Work on oil rigs, fishing (Deadliest Catch guys?), underwater welding etc. are usually done for a couple months a year and taking the rest off, (at least from anecdotal data from folks I know).

Construction work can be similar in places where harsh winters make it impossible to build anything during winter (frozen ground and all that).

Farming can be similar.

Re: Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

#32

Post by comment123456 »

emodendroket wrote: post #25
comment123456 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really dont understand the term productivity. Productivity is produced value / hours of work. So usually people that work the hardest will have lower productivity that does not mean less value produced. Something can have very bad productivity but be very profitable and generate a lot more value than something else with bigger productivity.

If the returns diminish rapidly then perhaps it doesn't make sense to waste so much time at the office.

It never makes sense for the worker. But most of the time is more profitable for the one squishing the work out of the people if people are cheap enough.

[edit] Parasites are always the most productive if you don't measure in absolute terms. The same happens among countries.

Re: Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

#33

Post by TeMPOraL »

emodendroket wrote: post #16
ptero wrote: post #9

> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze. I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores. Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explo…

I don't know that I see the relevancy of the chores, though. Do they go away if you work longer hours? Medieval peasants, as far as I know, did drink a lot of beer.

> I don't know that I see the relevancy of the chores, though. Do they go away if you work longer hours?

Yes, because you exchange work for money, and exchange that money for machines that do the chores for you. That's what the last 300 years have given us.

Re: Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

#35

Post by JoeAltmaier »

emodendroket wrote: post #16
ptero wrote: post #9

> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze. I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores. Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explo…

I don't know that I see the relevancy of the chores, though. Do they go away if you work longer hours? Medieval peasants, as far as I know, did drink a lot of beer.

Standard of living == hours available for chores. So the hardest-working lowest peasant on poor land wore rags. Because they 'couldn't afford' to make any better with the time and energy they had left over.

The single most significant living improvement in rural America in the 20th Century was - rural electrification. Because the housekeeper got almost their entire Wednesday back, no longer spent out on the washing porch scrubbing at the washtub, cranking the wringer and hanging/gathering wet clothes at the line. My Mom for instance.

Re: Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

#36

Post by comment123456 »

tomcooks wrote: post #30
Hendrikto wrote: post #6

The USA are abolishing themselves... > In Germany, an economic powerhouse, workers rank second to last in number of hours worked. Despite more time off, German workers are the eighth most productive in Europe, while the long-toiling Greeks rank 24 out of 25 in productivity. Work smart, not hard.

One begins to wonder why Greece works so hard and still has a terrible economy, together with the other PIIGS. MUST BE BECAUSE THEY ARE LAZY! /s (disclosure: I'm a piig)

The sad thing is that this kind of propagandistic sentences are crafted to make people believe that. Usually people don't understand producitvity so they understand what you said from the sentence. A German reading that will think "Ha we work less and produce more" but that is NOT what productivity means.

Productivity is the ratio between man work and output. So if someone works only 1 min a month and earns for that minute $30 you could say of that person that he is extremely productive. Compared to that person someone who works 24h a day and earns a million would have very bad productivity.

[edit]

So countries who find their competitive advantage in labour intensive industries and processes will by definition have lower productivity compared to industrialized economies. Germany being a very industrialized economy will have higher productivity by the nature of their business.

Re: Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

#37

Post by stult »

emodendroket wrote: post #27
Spooky23 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah there is definately an issue with understanding about what constitutes a vacation. The 14th century equivalent of unpaid vacation drinking malt liquor in a trailer isn’t my vision of a life of leisure.

In the Middle Ages nobody was taking a "vacation" in the sense we mean it; that's really a more Victorian idea. But enough people today can't actually afford to go away when they have time off.

Actually that's not quite true either. Pilgrimages were quite common, and although not necessarily a vacation as we would consider it, many even fairly poor people traveled quite far distances just for the spiritual pleasure of it.

Re: Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

#38

Post by crusso »

ptero wrote: post #9

> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze. I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores. Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explo…

I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant

I'd go further than that. I would not want to swap positions with a 14th century monarch.

Re: Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

#39

Post by andrepd »

ptero wrote: post #9

> In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze. I have serious doubts about this. Maybe someone could provide additional insight. I doubt all time not working the fields was "relaxing during long holidays". It would likely be spent on other chores. Food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explo…

>Bottom line: I would not want to swap positions with the 14th century peasant and I suspect the author would not want to, either.

But is that the issue here? What does that sentence even mean, or add to the discussion?

The article quotes the historian as finding that peasants in 14th century England put in at most 150 days of work per year. This was, according to them, an abnormal period of especially large wages. That tangent in preen-day America bears little relevance. Also when you say "food was likely not plentiful (when it is, population explodes)", you're making a big oversimplification. There are other factors at work: diseases, warfare, etc.

Re: Medieval peasants got more vacation time than modern workers (2013)

#40

Post by lucozade »

Right. So that'll be the vast amounts of unpaid vacation that they were all enjoying.

And I'm sure they were enjoying the extended vacations because of the strong contractual obligations that the landowners had to their serfs.

The US do have an issue with the amount of vacation time that they have but it's close to infantile to compare it so naively to the Middle Ages.

If you're going to compare it to Europe (which this is doing), how about comparing it to Europe in, say, the 21C?

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