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Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

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Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#211

Post by marvin »

BurningFrog wrote: post #49
atoav wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poverty is usually measured relatively to the perceived average of your environment’s wealth because that is how poverty affects your life. You can be 100 times as rich as some poor soul in a third world country and still be so poor in your own society that you are constantly struggling, fighting for survival, skipping meals and inheriting that struggle to your kids who are born into them without much chances of gett…

> Poverty is usually measured relatively to the perceived average of your environment’s wealth because that is how poverty affects your life. No, that is how it affects your status . In every society, half the people are at or below average status, because math. That can never change. But 95+% of the people in the richest country have better material standard than the average people in the poorest. And even those in…

We’re arguing semantics, but if a working poor in the US has to work 50 hour weeks and 3 jobs (due to low status maybe —- livable income but high costs for transport, rent, debt and healthcare ect) to get food and shelter, that’s still poverty. A farmer in Eastern Europe could have much more freedom over their life while still earning less in absolute terms.

There’s no inherent reason why relative low status has to turn into slavery in practice, that’s a choice made by society.

The question of absolute material wealth is still relevant and interesting, but it is mostly a different question.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#212

Post by pgreenwood »

dannyw wrote: post #104
lmilcin wrote: post #95

I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate. How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their hou…

The commute may influence this. The average American commute is about 30 minutes each way. That's 1 hour round trip. Commute as a portion of work time.... 4 hrs work: 25% 5 hrs work: 20% 6 hrs work: 16.7% 7 hrs work: 14.3% 8 hrs work: 12.5% Considering you don't get paid for your commute, there is a natural incentive to work more hours.

If you cycle to work you can change this equation, because, your commute becomes one of the best parts of your day.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#213

Post by adrianN »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #139
ido wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Germany, both my kids go to public kindergarten/daycare (there is no distinction between the 2 here, it starts when the child is 1 year old) & the kindergarten teachers are mostly German themselves. They don't earn great wages but they are not indentured servants either.

Right. So there's a large group of mostly women who accept low wages to store children so more privileged people can go earn higher wages.

In Germany almost everybody sends their children to Kindergarten, so the parents on average earn an average wage.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#214

Post by lostjohnny »

vfc1 wrote: post #114

The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification. This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time. The servant was not expected to leave it…

> The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification.

Citation needed

It really come from workers rights to have a life outside the workplace AND a salary even when they could not work (what we call safety).

In medieval servitude there was no life outside the workplace, nor safety.

Pre-induistrial workers worked less, on the average, because they were surviving

They were working when they needed money and not working (AKA doing some other job for the house or the family, like farming or breeding cows and pigs) when they had enough to go on for maybe a week or so.

Life was on the edge back then.

You had an accident, any kind of accident, you were ruined.

There was no safety net, of any kind.

> it's a game of face time, who sends most emails past midnight, and who is willing to sell more of their personal life and squeeze other people out of theirs

It's not in Europe, for example, where we don't think that socialism is a curse word, we think it is necessary for the progress of society as a whole.

I will quote one of my favourite computer scientist ever, Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, that unfortunately recently passed away.

> Yes - happy days. At the time I was working a 6 hour day due to the enlightened Swedish child care policies. Parents of young children are entitled to work 80% of full time - good for creativity and family life. Result 2 kids and a new programming language.

source: https://twitter.com/joeerl/status/1067720315151810560

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#215

Post by lostjohnny »

lmilcin wrote: post #95

I think there is absolutely no need every adult person needs to work 8 hours a day for 5 days a week. We might just as well work 4 hours a day or 3 days a week. It seems to me, this is just a matter of how the market pressures people to spend as much time as possible at work vs how much work most people can tolerate. How do I know? There are countries where it is normal that both parents work to provide for their hou…

it is because most jobs are payed by the hour and that's how salary is calculated at the end of the month

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#217

Post by Digit-Al »

ken wrote: post #47
hairytrog wrote: post #36

Sure, many spend 8 hours at the office. But do they do 8 hours of work? Probably not. There are diminishing returns on time spent working, and it probably starts around the third hour. https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/oso/978019087... Many industries would probably suffer negligible losses (and maybe gains) by transitioning to 20 hour work weeks.

This article isn't about office workers. It's about workers. Laborers are doing 8+ hour days, too, and they would not be equally productive in half the time. There's a reason it tends to pay by the hour. Let's compare apples to apples. Office jobs didn't exist in the medieval period, but labor jobs still exist today.

I humbly disagree. Even in medieval times there were clerics, scribes, book-keepers, and so on.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#218

Post by jdavis703 »

H8crilA wrote: post #195
vfc1 wrote: post #114

The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification. This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time. The servant was not expected to leave it…

Simple rules that work for me: a) don't take my work laptop home, no corp provided phone (if they insist I'd keep the phone at my work desk, where it belongs). b) work 40 hours on average per week. Just go home already! Helps if you're a late sleeper (like me), you can simply arrive later at work to compensate for the hours you've recently donated to your employer. This works very well for me, although I'm based in E…

Not taking your laptop home is poor information security practice. We had a break-in where dozens of laptops were stolen. We had to do key rolling, password resets, etc for the whole organization. Many people couldn't even work until new computers were shipped in. Of course me and the people who took our laptops home were fine.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#219

Post by ivanhoe »

It's comparing apples and oranges to compare medieval peasants life and modern office work. Even today in rural areas people work around the clock in and around the house to keep everything afloat and barely survive. Sitting on your butt for 10h a day and doing intellectual work seems hard only until you try to do some farming for a while - and modern farming is nothing compared to how hard it was back then, when you had to do everything manually, no running water, no electricity, no farming machinery, no supermarkets. They even had to make their own cloths as textile was extremely expensive, and I've read that weaving was one of the activities that was taking any free moment to medieval women, it was extremely time consuming. The pace of life was slower, that for sure, and perhaps the average working hours were indeed shorter (in winter especially because of shorter daylight), but they worked way harder than most people have to today.

Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)

#220

Post by HSO »

vfc1 wrote: post #114

The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification. This explains the system of values that revolve around it, such as for example the notion that it's somewhat something to be ashamed of for an employee to leave its employer, while it's perfectly OK for the employer to terminate the employee at any time. The servant was not expected to leave it…

> The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification.

Well, in Europe it is more the estate system and urban manufactures, I think, that have influenced the culture of work. In the US, you have something much worse even. I found this recent article eye-opening for me:

[1] M. Desmond. In order to understand the brutality of american capitalism, you have to start on the plantation. New York Times Magazine, Aug 18 2019.

web: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/slav...

> a desperate need for people to continuously prove the need for their own role, as automation and informatization eat away more an more jobs.

While I agree with this (go @AndrewYang! ;), I don't think it is the only (or even the biggest) factor. It is the long shadow of WWII and the resulting demographic imbalance coupled with a self-serving but fundamentally wrong narrative around "economic growth". This has led to what some have called "the big institutional lie" where throughout society you have institutions that rely on promises of advancement or necessity to lure the fresh blood but that can not keep these promises to all of them. It's basically a pyramid scheme. Peter Turchin pointed to this as a contributing factor to polarization as the educated "elite" of such countries/societies must increasingly fight among itself for the increasingly rare places or resources (relatively speaking). → revolutionary potential

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