Preindustrial workers also had organic food and clean air. And no commute
If you liked eating only oatmeal all winter. Poach the lord's forest, get your hand cut off. Not all organic peaches and funtimes.
Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
291–300 of 523 posts
Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a tough question that we have struggled with with both our kids. At the end we've reached the conclusion that we need to balance between the needs of the child and the needs of the parent. The first 2 months after the birth we were both home, then my wife stayed for another 9 months & finally I took 1 more month of parental leave (so in total it was 1 year before starting to acclimate him to daycare). After almo…
> there is a real lack of intellectual stimulation despite there constantly being work to do My wife is taking more of a leading role with our 1 year old (maybe 70/30 between her and me ... also in Germany) and she gets her mental stimulation through voraciously reading about changing dietary requirements of children as they age along with general child developmental research. In fact it is leading us to a discussion…
Im glad it works for you & it's great you were able to fit the situation to your advantage & interests. But different people have different wants and needs.
Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd argue it's actually easier to cope when what you need is repetitive hard physical labor. You don't go to sleep thinking about that big problem you still haven't solved. You actually get the satisfaction of doing the physical activity. You know with certainty that you've done your job (you can actually see it) and you know when to stop because your body will tell you to. Finally, you might be exhausted physically…
> Having said all that, I've never had the opportunity to work with physical labor so my views are likely biased. Very strong opinion to end up saying everything could be just false because it is a mere gut feeling. Everyone has worries and problems, if it is not the weather which is about to damage the harvest it will be the expensive providers or the fruits imported from cheaper countries or the workers who try to…
You're confounding affluence with the difference between physical/mental labour. I've done both hard physical labour and hard mental labour, and what OP says is totally spot on. Hard physical work, even when excruciatingly tough, is most often more bearable than hard mental work. There's nothing like beig 'done' after a hard day of work. After a hard day of mental work you just feel miserable until you fall asleep. If only manual laborers were appreciated (i.e. compensated) as much as mental laborers...
Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have a look a low wage/low skill jobs. There is no such thing as security, employees are subject to their employer's benevolence. They even have to accept circumstances that might violate laws. They can't fight it because they need the job, even if they hate it. I'm too busy to do the research for you, but Amazon warehouse workers are the first examples that come to my mind.
I've worked those jobs when I was younger - none of those people would feel any shame quitting for a better job so I'm not sure what your argument is.
Why should they? They're typically underpaid and in not so great conditions, but even if they aren't, why should they feel shape for quitting for a better job? If you fulfill your contractual obligations, you don't owe your employer anything and leaving any job for a better one is totally not something to be ashamed about. If anything, shame on the employer for doing a bad job in retaining their employees.
Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
#295It'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…
Sure we might not work as 'hard' but at what cost? Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more. It's not unfounded nor is it even surprising that people are complaining and comparing their lives to the past.
> Mentally people are suffering about as much if not more.
Physically too. Watch people when they get their first office job, a lot will start packing on the weight because they are sitting and grazing on junk food all day, walk considerably less, more stress "just got an email, argh my phone is ringing, ugh what does my team lead one that is instant messaging me, ugh I'm not meeting production, do I have time to go pee before the half hour meeting?" etc.
Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The 40h a day week and modern-day work contracts come as a direct evolution of medieval servitude, with little modification. Where can i read more about this assertion? I was not aware that serfdom would specify such details as the number of hours. I guess that serfdom would be a very different institution in each country, or even within each province; (I guess corvée service might have been a more detailed contrac…
>I was not aware that serfdom would specify such details as the number of hours. I'm not sure they did, but your work day was effectively limited to when the sun was up. Candles were quite expensive well through the middle ages as they were mostly made from beeswax, lower class persons would use fires or candles made from soaking things like rushes in animal fat - neither of which provided light conducive to any sort…
the landlord still had to allow his serfs to work their own plot/cottage on occasion; so they had to agree on some form of time management, even without clocks or candles.
Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your boss cannot measure that, I would argue, because he's incompetent (assessing progress of subordinate is a primary management function) As a boss myself, if my developers finish early, they are free to go. I can read their code and pull requests, I know who is pulling their weight. When I worked at Google, all of my bosses (including project managers) could read code at a superficial level, and accurately assess…
I may have been too simplistic 1. The work is never finished. As such no matter how productive you are or not there is more to do. So when do you say "Ok go home early?" 2. My view of productive may differ from my boss - and that gets further afield as the hierarchy goes up - so let's say you were working on Google+ (insert corporate white elephant) - no matter how productive you were in the small, it was ultimately…
I also think measuring by value is particularly difficult. How do you compare complicated solutions against elegant solutions when the elegant solution is so nice it makes the problem look trivial?
Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
#298The 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.
Not really, they come as rather significant modifications of early capitalist servitude, won at a substantial cost in lives.
Early capitalist servitude did itself evolve directly from feudal servitude, but it got much worse, in economic terms, in the process. It usually came with at least notional political freedom, though.
Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Common usage indicates that "than us" is just fine. Remember English grammar doesn't come from a grammar book - grammar books are merely imperfect attempts to describe common English usage.
More than that, "Than We" sounds archaic to me, 19th C at best, i.e. wrong. Who talks like that?
Carl Sagan did, I recall a quote of his talking about the composition of the brain and he says something along the lines of "to consider that we live in a universe which permits the construction of biological machines as intricate and as subtle as we"
Re: Preindustrial workers worked fewer hours than today's (2009)
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who is taking care of the children? Who works in the daycares?
They who work in the daycares are not a "serf class", they are paid professionals, and they don't need to have "terrible wages" in a civilized country.
>They who work in the daycares are not a "serf class", they are paid professionals
I wouldn't say 'professionals', in the United States daycare workers can expect to make a little more than minimum wage to start and might get up to 10-11$ an hour for dealing with the maximum number of kids allowed by law all day.
And unless you're talking some elite, gotta get on a waiting list and pay 30 grand a year to send one kid, anyone that passes a background check can get a job in daycare.