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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)

#181

Post by Fjolsvith »

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…

Well, if you're not paying for health and dental, and you don't have any corporate training programs, and there aren't OSHA requirements and other costly regulations, you really have to give something up as an employer to retain good help.

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

#182

Post by watwut »

sparrish wrote: post #137
watwut wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In winter you still need to care about animals, repair stuff, sew, chop wood, cook, etc. Peasants had to create a lot of things that we buy nowdays. They did not slacked whole winter.

I agree, they worked in the winter, as modern farmer do as well, but not nearly as hard as the spring, summer, fall. I was just going with the "up to 1/2 the year vacation" from the article.

From what I read, it really was no slacking. For instance, all sewing was done by hand - that includes stuff to put on bed and cover your self with. That is huge amount of time consuming work. If you had daughter you had to prepare things she will need after marriage - so even if you are fixed, you are preparing things for that. Anything from wood is done by hand too.

And insulation is not nearly as good as today, so you need to sleep more for the cold.

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

#183

Post by notahacker »

emodendroket wrote: post #177
notahacker wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I said as much in the previous post. They weren't wage labourers because local landlords and churches could call upon their labour for free, besides which when they were actually permitted to to sell their labour (and early Middle Ages European peasants often weren't) they had few skills to sell and little to buy with the proceeds. Thus those periods of downtime between agricultural seasons are a lot closer to t…

The salient fact about unemployment is that anyone who stays in that state faces destitution and is likely seeking some other work (we rarely talk about wealthy heirs being "unemployed"). For someone in a premodern agricultural lifestyle there wasn't really anything calamitous about this regular period of not-working.

Nothing calamitous other than the inability to compensate for crop failures which periodically left families starving. They didn't have to worry about repossessions of course, on the basis they were closer to being property than owning property. The salient fact about modern unemployment in developed countries is that unemployed people (and especially seasonally un[der]employed people) generally receive more through even the meanest form of state assistance or unemployment insurance than peasants ever did, they just have much higher expectations of a bare minimum standard of living to fail to meet.

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

#184

Post by emodendroket »

bluGill wrote: post #132
emodendroket wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you are paid by the hour (as most low wage jobs are) time in the "office" does translate into more returns. There are many people (mostly immigrants) working long hard hours so they can afford to send their children to better schools. The returns don't make sense in any short term sense, but their ~grandchildren tend to get rich as we know from history.

People in hourly jobs are the people least likely to be doing overtime.

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

#185

Post by macspoofing »

emodendroket wrote: post #158
macspoofing wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And working your field doesn't provide for your life? Under communism, all surplus (or even the full total) is appropriated by the state. So working more and harder nets no extra benefit on the peasant. The incentive then is to exert as little effort as you can. NPR's Planet Money had a really good podcast on this recently [1] I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as…

The subject of this discussion is feudalism, so I'm not sure why you've launched into a rebuttal talking about China and the USSR in the 1960s. It isn't true that "everything that [peasants] produced belonged to the local lord."

I literally just wrote: "I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord."

You're the one who launched into some weird capitalist whataboutism.

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

#186

Post by aanxiety »

The problem with so many of the comments here: Of course you would sacrifice your vacation time to avoid the pains of the middle ages and to gain the advantages of today. But those advantages are not the mere consequence of us working more. They are the consequence of centuries of technological advancement. If we started working as little as medieval peasants our standards of living would not just suddenly drop to their levels but they would stay much higher.

We can have our cake and eat it too. And in passing, we would likely save planet earth doing so.

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

#187

Post by emodendroket »

notahacker wrote: post #183
emodendroket wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The salient fact about unemployment is that anyone who stays in that state faces destitution and is likely seeking some other work (we rarely talk about wealthy heirs being "unemployed"). For someone in a premodern agricultural lifestyle there wasn't really anything calamitous about this regular period of not-working.

Nothing calamitous other than the inability to compensate for crop failures which periodically left families starving. They didn't have to worry about repossessions of course, on the basis they were closer to being property than owning property. The salient fact about modern unemployment in developed countries is that unemployed people (and especially seasonally un[der]employed people) generally receive more through…

Crop failures can just as easily happen under a capitalist mode of production; this seems somewhat orthogonal to the question of whether people not working in the off-season are "unemployed." Yes, I agree that the government is more effective at providing social welfare programs than it was in the past, although probably some of that was compensated for by the greater connection to neighbors and kin that someone would have had, as compared to today. I'm not trying to cast the Middle Ages as an idyll we've fallen from.

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

#188

Post by emodendroket »

macspoofing wrote: post #185
emodendroket wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The subject of this discussion is feudalism, so I'm not sure why you've launched into a rebuttal talking about China and the USSR in the 1960s. It isn't true that "everything that [peasants] produced belonged to the local lord."

I literally just wrote: "I speculated that feudal peasant may have been subject to the same kinds of incentives as everything they produced belonged to the local Lord." You're the one who launched into some weird capitalist whataboutism.

Right, but that speculation is based on a misconception of the nature of feudal production. The capitalist comparison is relevant since it's the system we live under today and your original post strongly implied, although it did not outright state it, that the problem you were describing is unique to societies which aren't capitalist (in fact I can remember hearing in middle school the exact same argument as an explanation of the eventual triumph of the First World over the Second, which I think is at best a wild oversimplification).

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

#189

Post by macspoofing »

emodendroket wrote: post #159
macspoofing wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This correlation isn't all that direct in my experience. What do you mean? That's certainly the case for hourly jobs where more hours equals more money.

The relationship between hours worked and work done is not direct and, more importantly, the route to advancement into better-paying work is rarely just being really efficient at your job.

>The relationship between hours worked and work done is not direct

Whose arguing that? All I argued: If you work 60 hours @ $10/hr you make more money than if you work 40 hours @ $10/hr. That is a fundamental difference between a market-based economy and a marxist one. In the latter, that equation does not hold.

>the route to advancement into better-paying work is rarely just being really efficient at your job.

Again, whose arguing that? I made a simple, shallow observation. You're trying to tie in some fuzzy nebulous concepts of 'better-paying work' and 'efficiency' and 'career advancement'. It has nothing to do with anything. Yes, some people work 80 hours and make less than other people who work 1 hour. Not the point here.

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

#190

Post by emodendroket »

macspoofing wrote: post #189
emodendroket wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relationship between hours worked and work done is not direct and, more importantly, the route to advancement into better-paying work is rarely just being really efficient at your job.

>The relationship between hours worked and work done is not direct Whose arguing that? All I argued: If you work 60 hours @ $10/hr you make more money than if you work 40 hours @ $10/hr. That is a fundamental difference between a market-based economy and a marxist one. In the latter, that equation does not hold. >the route to advancement into better-paying work is rarely just being really efficient at your job. Again…

People not working "enough" hours isn't a structural problem if they're producing enough. If your argument is just that "people will spend more hours at work if their incentives are aligned exactly to making them do that," then I don't disagree, but I also don't find it revelatory.
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